eejits

no zen for Joe Lieberman

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I think it’s fair to say that no one yanks my political chain quite like Joe Lieberman. I don’t know why, if I’m being honest. If I were more enlightened, I might be able to find it in myself to be more compassionate and accepting of Joe. Even if I’m not there yet, there are plenty of other smarmy lying position-shifting power-hungry old white dudes in Congress that I could be hating on. Except.

Except none of them are quite like Joe. Back when he was just a Republican in Democrat clothing, I gave him the same derision I shared with the other panderers to the right who remained Democrats because that’s what their home states and regions demanded in order to continue to be elected. That was, generally speaking, the problem for Democrat true believers, not so much a problem for me. The Democrats in general, and Joe in particular, really started to get my goat when he was selected as the Democrat candidate for vice-president. Surely they could have found an actual Democrat for that position? Bygones, water under the bridge, et cetera. Let’s move on.

Having been the millstone around the Democrats neck — why vote for a Republican in Democrat clothing when we can just vote for an actual Republican? being what any thinking person would say — Joe just carried on voting with the other party. Until, you know, the Democrats back in his home state got tired of that and he lost his party primary as an incumbent. Oops. Not to be deterred, Joe left the party.

That’s right, Joe. It sounds like you need to be reminded of this: you LEFT THE PARTY, which makes you NOT A DEMOCRAT. Now, if you had joined the Republican party, in accord with both your stated politics and your voting record, I might have a little more respect for you (it would be hard to have less). But you didn’t. Because that would be career-ending for you, a Senator from a state in the Northeast, and you know it. Instead you just vote with them, shuck and jive for them, and lie about your party affiliation on national TV. Way to stand by your convictions, Joe! Not.

Of course, it would be a little harder for Joe to lie about his party affiliation with a straight face if the Democrats hadn’t rewarded his defection from the party and his Republican voting record by making him a committee chair. That’s right: Joe Lieberman, the Democrat incumbent that his party didn’t want, who is no longer a Democrat at all, holds a committee chair position of the majority. Please tell me you knew that already. This right here is why I leave the Democrat-praising to the true believers. When the party stops rewarding Republicans in Independent clothing with chair positions — positions they only have to dole out because a lot of people worked their arses off two years ago to get actual Democrats elected to office — that’s when I might consider supporting the party as a whole.

Of course, by the time that unlikely scenario happens we’ll likely have a whole new actual opposition party on the left for me to get behind.

no zen for Joe Lieberman

‘George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People’

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It’s hard not to be thinking about Katrina, the flooding, and the breach of the neglected levees, with the Republicans doing their lying jiving schtick in Minnesota this week and the Louisiana gulf coast being evacuated ahead of flooding rains. It’s not easy to forget the outpouring of support and help, the way people across the country opened their homes to refugees, some of my neighbors among them, and others traveled to the region to help clean up and begin to rebuild, some of my students among them. It’s also not easy to forget the ensuing messes such as the toxic FEMA trailers and the embezzlement of funds from the Red Cross.

Not that we should be forgetting this stuff. We absolutely should not, and further, we should apply these lessons to the future. This was not an anomaly. This is the way Republicans run things in the new world order. This is the kind of thing John McCain will do, because this is what John McCain did do. Don’t be fooled by the appearance of a person with a uterus — but not one who believes in exercising her legally protected right to make her own choices about what to do with it — on the ticket or a former Democrat — but not one who is willing to take the career-ending step of becoming an actual Republican — at the convention. What we saw three years ago was the real deal, and to all of us who said on the morning of November 8th, 2000 — right after ‘dude, wtf happened while I was asleep?!’ — oh, how bad can it actually be, I want to say: a whole lot worse than it is already.

This wasn’t meant to be a political post per se. It was just to say, lest we forget: you can’t polish a turd. I know that, the Legendary K.O. knows that, and I hope that you all know that, too.

‘George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People’

trials and tribulations : resolved!

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This calendar year has been a bit one-thing-after-another and when-it-rains-it-pours, which has led despite my best intentions to quite a bit of kvetching and moaning around our household. I’m happy to report that our various unfortunate developments have all been resolved quite nicely.

Most recently, Carefirst has correctly reprocessed the remainder of my claims and sent me a letter clarifying that there is not and should not have been a waiting period on my account. It required the intervention of the Better Business Bureau: while Carefirst wouldn’t discuss my actual medical coverage with them, filing a claim led to contact with a real live person at Carefirst with the authority to just make things happen correctly. I appreciated that, was (I hope) very polite to her on the phone, while being grateful that she was very polite back to me. That’s all taken care of, without me needing to file a claim with the Maryland Insurance Administration as well, and I’m now established with Kaiser. Let’s hope I never have to return to the BlueCross network again.

Just before that came through, we successfully challenged the charges Speakeasy levied against our credit card for the failed installation of our DSL service. Thanks to my partner’s compulsive saving of webpages via the CutePDF Writer, we had access to the trouble logs after our account and its attendant access to Speakeasy’s website was discontinued. When we formally disputed the charges we could therefore submit some 60 pages documenting our communications with the company (wherein we explicitly decline to accept the service as satisfactorily installed no less than four times over the course of six weeks). Not surprisingly, the credit card company found in our favor there.

And, some months ago now, we did manage to successfully install the EasyCloset system to convert our small hall closet into a pantry of sorts. It still wasn’t easy, and I don’t recommend the system for plaster walls unless you have a large closet such that you can’t just get a standard bookshelf and plunk it in there (which is effectively what we ended up doing, with a lot of cutting and remounting to fit the shelves in around the mouldings). The company did, however, exchange the uprights for longer ones that would sit on the floor at no extra cost to us, for which we are very appreciative.

While all that was going on, I arranged to have my grandmother’s dining room furniture shipped internationally, with much help from my aunt and uncle up north. The furniture arrived safely this past week, so that’s one less worry outstanding. For the last few weeks of summer I’ll work on wrapping up my remaining tasks in progress: mailing out marriage announcements, writing thank you cards for the receptions, submitting newspaper notices, and ordering and installing new toilets commodes for all three bathrooms. Good times.

trials and tribulations : resolved!

trials and tribulations: BlueCross

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I never thought I would reach the point where I would be telling people to run the other way from BlueCross. Yet here I am: after 6 years as a BlueCross subscriber, I recommend getting any other coverage available to you. Which is saying a lot, given that they have one of the largest networks of health care providers and offer some of the most extensive PPO plans around. To be fair to BlueCross, the first two years were great. The customer service people were helpful, the prescription coverage was excellent, and claims were approved and paid in about two weeks.

About three years ago something changed, and everything positive about the company disappeared into the ether. Customer service became just like every other company: a complete crap shoot. The prescription coverage became worse and worse, until my out-of-pocket cost for my daily medication had eventually increased twenty-fold. And, most frustrating of all, BlueCross began to make errors on every single claim I submitted. The process for being reimbursed for covered services became a nightmare of calling again and again, providing the same information over and over (provider name, diagnostic, medical license and tax identification numbers), and endless resubmitting.

Honestly, I would have continued to live with all of that had BlueCross not started, in November of last year, to deny me coverage based on an internal BlueCross employee error. In October, I switched from my COBRA coverage to paying as an individual subscriber for the same plan. At the time, I had to demonstrate that I’d had continuous coverage for the previous 4 years in order to remove the standard waiting period for coverage of preexisting conditions, which I did. Hunky dory, everything’s fine, we truck along with the same frustrations already enumerated above. In November, someone at BlueCross did something — trust me, if I could get a clearer or more specific explanation out of them, I’d share it — that changed my starting date of coverage and activated a waiting period. I promptly received a nonsensical bill from them and my claims starting being denied. I called, they told me I needed to get a statement from them and fax it back to them — major errors resulting in the wrongful denial of service can apparently be made but not corrected internally at BlueCross — and then they would remove it. I did so, they did so, hunky dory, right? WRONG. Despite being assured over the past six months by a half dozen customer service agents and managers that the waiting period has been removed, it is in fact still active, and my claims are still being wrongfully denied. As of today, I’ve been waiting two weeks for a return call confirming that it’s been corrected. I’m not holding my breath.

I, of course, have done what any sane person would do in this situation: changed my insurance company and filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. Next up: the Maryland Insurance Administration. I’ll keep you posted.

trials and tribulations: BlueCross

trials and tribulations : wet basement

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Rivers running through our basement.

The least pleasant discovery about our house has been the amount of water that comes into our basement during heavy rains. Least pleasant both because it makes the basement a dirty dank mold-growing hovel, as well as because it makes it hard to let go of our anger at the previous owner for his fraudulent misrepresentation of the house during the sale. As much as we repeat to ourselves, It’s our home now, nothing to be done, move forward from here, we are not in actual fact the Buddha and our chains are righteously yanked when this happens.

After the flooding last spring, when we devised our super high tech move-the-lintel-and-let-the-water-flow-under-the-door-to-the-drain solution, we were hopeful both that only fluke high rains would bring the river inside and that we wouldn’t get those rains too often. This turned out to be a pipe dream, as we live in an area that gets ‘fluke’ high rains every spring and floods easily. Add to the equation last year’s drought, and it becomes apparent that we’ll need to address the problem sooner rather than later if we hope to use the basement in the future. Everything we’ve read and all the people we’ve consulted agree that an interior drain system connected to a crazy strong sump pump will keep the water seeping through our porous walls from coming up over the foot of the foundation and out onto our floors. This should also relieve the amount of water under the house, and diminish the chance that cracks reform in the floor once we repair them. Completely reasonable in the abstract; godawful expensive and disruptive in practice to jackhammer up the floor and trench a pipe to the alley for the sump to drain.

Another factor is, of course, the amount of water around the exterior of the house. We have been lax in cleaning the gutters on the original house, as they are really high up in the air and we have yet to invest in a 20-foot ladder. Plus, I’m a chicken about heights like that, so it’s not clear I would be able to actually make myself use the 20-foot ladder even if we had one. So we need to hire someone to do that. We suspect that the buried drainpipes are also clogged and/or broken; they drain water but not the volume that we think they should. Finally, we also have no grading around the house foundation, and water flows downhill from our uphill neighbor directly to our house. We’ve always known we need to grade, but there are a lot of foundation plantings and I have been loathe to either kill them or go to extreme efforts to lift and move them; I’m thinking in particular of the 50+ year old azaleas which have shallow root systems. It’s not clear that will even be possible for the trees, which might just have to go. So, yes, I concede: sentimental attachment to plants is keeping me from doing everything I can to keep water out of my house. I’m working on getting over that and just sucking up the potential loss of the plants.

Knowing that it will be at least several more months before the work is done, I am doing my best to relate to the house as a metaphor for what I need to learn in my life. Creating a strong foundation, clearly defining boundaries, clearing out old junk that’s just been sitting around for years: these are all things we’re physically doing in the house that we are also intangibly doing in our lives. It can be hard to see water and mold as an opportunity, but I know that it’s forcing us to undertake other projects we might have put off indefinitely. In order to relocate our belongings from the basement we’re cleaning out the attic: removing the 50+ year old insulation from the rafters of the roof and cleaning out the assorted bits and pieces of trash left up there. Since our belongings will be moving into a nice empty new space literally hanging over our heads, I’m working to be selective about what we keep and transport upstairs, which means pitching out a whole bunch of stuff that we just stuck in the basement to be faced later. Later is now, and I hope that we — and our house — will be the better for it.

In the meantime, boxes of my childhood belongings are once again stacked in my study and the many suitcases we’ve acquired during our years of international travel are piled in the living room with our artificial Christmas tree. I just keep repeating, it’s a process. We’ll get there.

trials and tribulations : wet basement