Dear (Georgia) Republicans
PostPosted:Sat Aug 17, 2013 4:50 am
Since I was recuperating for basically all of 2011 and 2012 and being lazy for basically all of 2013, I've gotten to reading about local shit going down in GA and I just need to stream of consciousness this shit out through my fingers since it's been building up and I don't feel tired enough to go to bed yet. I don't really expect any of you to read this. Let the around one thousand words of whining commence:
Going to hit up the ol' healthcare fiasco first since obviously that's going to hit home for me the most right now. So my parents, God bless them, had jobs that got me insured, and part of what Obama has passed got me insured for a couple more years.. that ended basically the second I actually needed healthcare. So my parents got me into Cobra. Long story short, that shit costs something crazy like $7000 a year for me. Even though I already got the surgery that makes me uninsureable in the first place. They can't really put MORE metal into my feet and expect me to walk, really, the next step is growing my ass new feet on the back of a rat or just lopping the damned things off. But that's getting decades ahead of myself, basically everything is fine on that front.
So, any way, like you would expect out of a narrow election, Georgia expected Romney to win. So they didn't bother doing jack shit with Obamacare before the election, in the hope that Romney would just get it overturned. Well, he lost, and Georgia, despite being ran by Republicans, decided to cede all responsibility for building an insurance exchange to the federal government. Now people are complaining about them doing a potentially shitty job. Well, that's what happens when you pass the buck to the federal government and get swallowed up with all the other lazy states.
In any case, whatever the federal government comes up with basically HAS to be better for me in every way than Cobra. But, yeah, screw you Georgia, it's bad enough I have to put up with having a pre-existing condition hanging over my head for literally the rest of my life, but now I have to be judged for getting helped by a program that's basically thought of as free healthcare, even though I'm willing/able/going to pay for my end of it. Hell, even Mitt Romney wanted to keep the bit of Obamacare that got people with pre-existing conditions insured.. not that he would have kept that wish.
Guns
We've already talked this to death, so I'm just going to be specific. You may have read about Nelson, GA mandating heads of households having to own guns. These laws have been part of Kennesaw, GA for a while now but no one enforces them, they're just quaint. Hell, I'm okay with that. I read an article in the paper a couple months back about some guy getting pressured into dropping something like $750 for a gun and the assorted accoutrements to avoid a $1000 fine in Nelson. This is just craziness. I'm not sure there's much else to be said about the topic. Suffice to say I would be a much nastier person in a place in Canada because here I just assume everyone is carrying a cannon capable of blowing off my limbs.
Education
Okay so Georgia is a pretty terrible state for education. We're not Mississippi bad, but we're.. top five bad? I think we're ranked somewhere in the 43rd-47th. Now, since I went through all of grade school here, I've seen why this is for the most part. A lot of it, actually, because of god damned terrible ESOL programs. I sat in on some of these classes and the teachers seem to give less of a shit than the students. Hell, I'm not even sure the teacher on duty on of these days SPOKE Spanish or Portuguese. They get to actually blame minorities coming in and having a different culture. This should be factored in somewhere, you can't really expect a sixteen year old South American immigrant to get a god damned high school diploma. Even the children of immigrants who move here and have enough time to acclimate and get their diplomas don't move onto college. Hell, they didn't even really seem to want to.
I saw a councilman at my high school graduation go down to the front row where I was (a first name that starts with two a's and a last name with 'be' gets you in the front row of basically everything ever when it's alphabetical) surrounded by Benitez's and whatnot who were just destroying the guy's optimism. He literally asked six people in my row what college they were going to before he got to someone who was actually matriculating. But, hey, this isn't even what I meant to talk about. I should erase it since it's all somewhat racist but meh these are the conclusions to be drawn in this singular situation in my region.
So some or all of you probably remember Atlanta having that gigantic cheating scandal that surrounded standardized testing, that they're actually still prosecuting down here. So there's more attention than usual, even in outlying areas, to standardized testing scores. Besides the usual rhetoric, the Tea Party is blocking the purchase of new books for a new federally-created standardized testing regimen called Common Core. Based on how we, as a state, should both be loose from federal control and also on just plain dicking over the middle and working classes who attend public schools in the first place - they have successfully spent the last couple months blocking Common Core. Turns out, not that anyone mentioned this earlier in the debate, that Common Core would cost the state twenty-seven million dollars to actually evaluate the students, let alone purchase books. To get more specific, Common Core is very secular and obviously the Georgian right is just shitting themselves over it. That's right. Republicans down here have politicized grade school math.
So, yeah, Tea Party wins, these classes in select districts literally don't have books. The teachers have to build their lessons from the internet. Fine if you've got motivated teachers (is that even 10% of teachers? I feel like out of the ~8 or so teachers I had a semester maybe 1-2 of them were what I would describe as motivated and in middle school that number would be far, far lower), but, yeah, fuck it, let's throw several million dollars into a new stadium, street-cars, and a ferris wheel. No, I'm not being facetious. Those things are coming to Atlanta despite budget cuts on kids needing books.
That's all that really comes to mind for now. Oh, and for some reason the local paper feels the need to CONSTANTLY SHIT ALL OVER JIMMY CARTER.
Seriously, FUCK YOU, Atlanta Journal Constitution. He's probably the greatest living president. In theory. Let the man do good works in fucking peace. You don't need to jump down the man's god damned throat every time he makes a statement that skews statistics in the favor of his argument. He isn't running a country here, he's running a non-profit humanitarian organization. Seriously, of all the people to fucking target. God, what a shitty paper. I heard a story where he rode a public airline and went up and down some of the aisles shaking everyone's hand that was interested. It really doesn't get nicer than that for a former president. The man should be honored.
Going to hit up the ol' healthcare fiasco first since obviously that's going to hit home for me the most right now. So my parents, God bless them, had jobs that got me insured, and part of what Obama has passed got me insured for a couple more years.. that ended basically the second I actually needed healthcare. So my parents got me into Cobra. Long story short, that shit costs something crazy like $7000 a year for me. Even though I already got the surgery that makes me uninsureable in the first place. They can't really put MORE metal into my feet and expect me to walk, really, the next step is growing my ass new feet on the back of a rat or just lopping the damned things off. But that's getting decades ahead of myself, basically everything is fine on that front.
So, any way, like you would expect out of a narrow election, Georgia expected Romney to win. So they didn't bother doing jack shit with Obamacare before the election, in the hope that Romney would just get it overturned. Well, he lost, and Georgia, despite being ran by Republicans, decided to cede all responsibility for building an insurance exchange to the federal government. Now people are complaining about them doing a potentially shitty job. Well, that's what happens when you pass the buck to the federal government and get swallowed up with all the other lazy states.
In any case, whatever the federal government comes up with basically HAS to be better for me in every way than Cobra. But, yeah, screw you Georgia, it's bad enough I have to put up with having a pre-existing condition hanging over my head for literally the rest of my life, but now I have to be judged for getting helped by a program that's basically thought of as free healthcare, even though I'm willing/able/going to pay for my end of it. Hell, even Mitt Romney wanted to keep the bit of Obamacare that got people with pre-existing conditions insured.. not that he would have kept that wish.
Guns
We've already talked this to death, so I'm just going to be specific. You may have read about Nelson, GA mandating heads of households having to own guns. These laws have been part of Kennesaw, GA for a while now but no one enforces them, they're just quaint. Hell, I'm okay with that. I read an article in the paper a couple months back about some guy getting pressured into dropping something like $750 for a gun and the assorted accoutrements to avoid a $1000 fine in Nelson. This is just craziness. I'm not sure there's much else to be said about the topic. Suffice to say I would be a much nastier person in a place in Canada because here I just assume everyone is carrying a cannon capable of blowing off my limbs.
Education
Okay so Georgia is a pretty terrible state for education. We're not Mississippi bad, but we're.. top five bad? I think we're ranked somewhere in the 43rd-47th. Now, since I went through all of grade school here, I've seen why this is for the most part. A lot of it, actually, because of god damned terrible ESOL programs. I sat in on some of these classes and the teachers seem to give less of a shit than the students. Hell, I'm not even sure the teacher on duty on of these days SPOKE Spanish or Portuguese. They get to actually blame minorities coming in and having a different culture. This should be factored in somewhere, you can't really expect a sixteen year old South American immigrant to get a god damned high school diploma. Even the children of immigrants who move here and have enough time to acclimate and get their diplomas don't move onto college. Hell, they didn't even really seem to want to.
I saw a councilman at my high school graduation go down to the front row where I was (a first name that starts with two a's and a last name with 'be' gets you in the front row of basically everything ever when it's alphabetical) surrounded by Benitez's and whatnot who were just destroying the guy's optimism. He literally asked six people in my row what college they were going to before he got to someone who was actually matriculating. But, hey, this isn't even what I meant to talk about. I should erase it since it's all somewhat racist but meh these are the conclusions to be drawn in this singular situation in my region.
So some or all of you probably remember Atlanta having that gigantic cheating scandal that surrounded standardized testing, that they're actually still prosecuting down here. So there's more attention than usual, even in outlying areas, to standardized testing scores. Besides the usual rhetoric, the Tea Party is blocking the purchase of new books for a new federally-created standardized testing regimen called Common Core. Based on how we, as a state, should both be loose from federal control and also on just plain dicking over the middle and working classes who attend public schools in the first place - they have successfully spent the last couple months blocking Common Core. Turns out, not that anyone mentioned this earlier in the debate, that Common Core would cost the state twenty-seven million dollars to actually evaluate the students, let alone purchase books. To get more specific, Common Core is very secular and obviously the Georgian right is just shitting themselves over it. That's right. Republicans down here have politicized grade school math.
So, yeah, Tea Party wins, these classes in select districts literally don't have books. The teachers have to build their lessons from the internet. Fine if you've got motivated teachers (is that even 10% of teachers? I feel like out of the ~8 or so teachers I had a semester maybe 1-2 of them were what I would describe as motivated and in middle school that number would be far, far lower), but, yeah, fuck it, let's throw several million dollars into a new stadium, street-cars, and a ferris wheel. No, I'm not being facetious. Those things are coming to Atlanta despite budget cuts on kids needing books.
That's all that really comes to mind for now. Oh, and for some reason the local paper feels the need to CONSTANTLY SHIT ALL OVER JIMMY CARTER.
Seriously, FUCK YOU, Atlanta Journal Constitution. He's probably the greatest living president. In theory. Let the man do good works in fucking peace. You don't need to jump down the man's god damned throat every time he makes a statement that skews statistics in the favor of his argument. He isn't running a country here, he's running a non-profit humanitarian organization. Seriously, of all the people to fucking target. God, what a shitty paper. I heard a story where he rode a public airline and went up and down some of the aisles shaking everyone's hand that was interested. It really doesn't get nicer than that for a former president. The man should be honored.