Politician = decreased IQ

I'm not sure what the hell goes on with someone once they go into politics, whether it's the constant input from people who weren't smart enough to get elected in the first place or being forced to just smile and nod when some whackjob from some special interest tries to buy their favor. Constantly worrying about the next election rather than doing what is right is what has gotten this government into the shape they're in currently. And I'm not just talking about DC, although they're the epitome of this, state governments do the same thing. Michigan is a particularly nasty state for this. The idiots in our state government have the gall to think that closing down the state government would be second only to a nuclear explosion in the greater Detroit area in terms of catastrophe (actually the entire rest of the state would have to think a couple seconds before choosing between the two, but then we'd realize that we'd end up getting saddled with the costs of the cleanup anyway, so may as well go with #1).

Unfortunately the bozos in Lansing came up with a last second compromise and were able to avert a government shutdown. I was really cheering for the shutdown, to show people how little our government actually does for the people. To show how much of your billions of tax dollars are being pissed away on stuff we could do without. Stuff that we were prepared to do without for weeks, according to many political pundits, if the idiots in Lansing didn't work out a compromise.

Some compromise...raise taxes AND cut spending. Great. We pay more and get less. yeah, that seems about right for those idiots we put into office. Although remember, we're the ones that voted for them...so who's the real idiot?

Little Friday funny

A Japanese doctor says, "Medicine in my country is so advanced that we can take a kidney out of one man, put it in another, And have him out looking for work in six weeks."

A German doctor says, "That is nothing. We can takea lung out of one person, put it in another, and have him out looking for work in four weeks."

A British doctor says, "In my country medicine is so advanced that we can take half a heart out of one person, put it in Another , and have both of them out looking for work in two weeks."

The Canadian doctor, not to be outdone, interjected,"You guys are way behind. We took a woman with no brains, sent her to Michigan where she became Governor, and now half the state is out looking for work."

Hillary-care part 1

Matt Drudge has a link on his site to an article where Hillary states that she said she could envision a day when "you have to show proof to your employer that you're insured as a part of the job interview — like when your kid goes to school and has to show proof of vaccination," but said such details would be worked out through negotiations with Congress.

Funny how the Klintons can envision a day when you have to show proof that you have health insurance to get a job, but can't envision a day when you have to show proof that you're legally allowed in the country.

And people are eating it up....

Socialized medicine

For those of you who know me, or who have at least read a damn word in this blog, you know that I view socialized medicine as pretty much the end of the US as a leader in the world and the climactic point of the marginalization of this country as a free country.

Hillary-care was announced yesterday, and my wife, who is a physician and is about as disinterested in politics as any human being I know, lost her damn mind. The funny thing is, for someone who really doesn't like politics or the whole process, she had some spot-on observations. Her biggest point was 'freedom'. Whomever presented the plan said that it was not unlike requiring people to have car insurance, but that they were going to require people to have health insurance. I'm not a big fan of the prior, but I'll be damned if I'm going to have the government tell me I HAVE to have health insurance. If I wasn't old and decrepit, I'd drop my insurance just out of spite. And yet, the funny thing is that people just think that this will be 'free'. John Edwards says that his program will be paid for by rolling back all the tax cuts given to the rich. Except that it wasn't just the rich who got tax cuts during the Bush tax cuts. Additionally, they define 'rich' as making over $200k. While that is a good chunk of change, that's not rich. Rich is "I can go fly to Europe when I show up at the airport whenever I want". 200k is hard working, motivated upper middle class.

However, one thing I do know is that this is going to be a HUGE impact on the budget. Taxpayers think they have a burden now, just wait until Obama/Hillary/Barbieboy care gets implemented...jesus....

And don't get me started on why it is that medical costs are so high. Between Barbieboy and his fellow ambulance chasers and the ultimate bureaucracy that IS hospital administration, it may actually BE more efficient run by the government...and that's not sarcasm.

Deja Vu all over again

No, I'm not talking about the strip club, although that'd probably be a much more interesting post than this one, probably.
So I find myself in the strange, but repeated position of butting heads with management once again, after a transition. Perhaps I expect too much from people who get hired to leadership or C-level type positions and that puts them in position to fail my expectations immediately. Perhaps I have some sort of deep down feeling that I could do better and as a result start them off with a deficit. Either way, this is the third time in my professional life that I've had an issue with upper management where I've actually thought "man, I'm seriously going to get fired if I'm not careful with this email/comment/phone call". And the third time in my professional life when I've said "screw it, I gotta do what I think is the ethically/morally right thing"...

So if I post on Monday/Tuesday quoting that great philosopher Britney Spears, "oops I did it again", you'll have some sort of idea as to wtf happened.

I work for an IT outsourcing company in an unwinnable situation. They came into a hospital where the employees were happy and comfortable with their positions. They weren't pushing the envelope from a technical standpoint, nor were they in the stone-age. But this company came in and introduced tons of processes and administrative overhead that these people were not used to. Were they doing any sort of documentation or if they had any sort of actual processes in place, this wouldn't be so bad, but they didn't. Truly, even now, with the processes in place from the new company, they're either bypassed or completed minimally/begrudgingly.

They had a Watchguard firewall in place which had been advertised as having content filtering. However, it didn't. They had a Surf Control box in place at one time, but it was about as stable as Carrie on prom night, so it didn't do its job. A network engineer decided to bring in Bluecoat proxy/filtering to set up some stability and content filtering after having dealt with a number of porn issues. Funny thing with technology, the Watchguard melted down before we had an opportunity to fully test and implement the Bluecoat with a smooth transition. So we had a 9 month period where anyone could go anywhere on the Internet without any sort of authentication, and a four month period where they could do it without any filtering. Now we have a 12mb connection to the Internet, so just imagine the amount of porn I was getting calls about from managers.
So we finally implement authentication AGAIN (Watchguard required authentication) and people act like we've pissed in their eyes and called it lemonade. It's gone so far that our CIO wants to white-list the entire basic profile and allow anyone to go there without authentication. That would allow anyone to surf for hours without stop and keep HR/IT from being able to tell supervisors what they're doing...a huge thing for many supervisors, since I've gotten a lot of email asking "When are we going to be able to have reports again!?!?!" Additionally, the CIO seems to think that since no other hospitals in the parent hospital organization require authentication to the Internet, we shouldn't either. First of all, WRONG you frickin moron, lots of them do, I can list them for you, and second, didn't your momma ever teach you the whole 'if everyone is doing something it still may not be ok for you to do it' concept?

This is way longer than I wanted it to be, but suffice it to say, there's been some emails, ones where I've had to sit and re-read what I've written to ensure that I'm not insulting his mother too badly...

Should be an interesting day on Monday.