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I was talking with Mark and Charlie last night about how I keep backing away from the right-wing/left-wing sock puppets, because of various reasons... I didn't plan to write up those rants here and now.
But my annoyed-at-liberals button just got pushed again by an email from Wake Up Wal-Mart!
Again, I'm doing this on the fly, so I may feel like coming back and editing in links and quotes and all.
The letter was mad because Wal-Mart was lobbying against Congress making a law requiring 100% of all overseas shipments to be checked.
The letter was presenting this as a threat to national security.
I thought to myself, bitchily, that these are the same people (I don't know, you see, why I think they are the same people) who would be going, OMG, BUSH LIED, NO WMD!!! and therefore saying we had no business messing with people and are just using the "terrorist threat" to go out and bully people. But, since they hate Wal-Mart, then they are willing to believe that Wal-Mart is threatening national security, even the national security that they don't really believe is threatened.
But, like I said, that's just me being pissy.
What I think is THEM being pissy is the fact that this bill doesn't say, "Stop letting shipments slip through the cracks, get tougher about doing your job." It says, "Let's stop doing random checks and check Everything." That's an order of magnitude. That costs. Money, time, jobs. It's an incredibly expensive bill and I only say expensive because I'm using money as the ruler. You'll suddenly have either 10 times the amount of staff or 10 times the amount of back-up in the international shipping depots coming into the U.S. Most stores in this country run on just-in-time shipments and don't have back-up inventory for more than 1/2 a week. So a couple of days delay is not "boohoo, Wal-Mart lost some profits," it's "boohoo, stores are shutting down so that people don't riot over the last remaining toothbrush." The complete lack of analysis of the situation, and the willingness to bring people onto their bandwagon to fight against it in essentially complete ignorance just grates ground glass into my cerebral cortex.
But my annoyed-at-liberals button just got pushed again by an email from Wake Up Wal-Mart!
Again, I'm doing this on the fly, so I may feel like coming back and editing in links and quotes and all.
The letter was mad because Wal-Mart was lobbying against Congress making a law requiring 100% of all overseas shipments to be checked.
The letter was presenting this as a threat to national security.
I thought to myself, bitchily, that these are the same people (I don't know, you see, why I think they are the same people) who would be going, OMG, BUSH LIED, NO WMD!!! and therefore saying we had no business messing with people and are just using the "terrorist threat" to go out and bully people. But, since they hate Wal-Mart, then they are willing to believe that Wal-Mart is threatening national security, even the national security that they don't really believe is threatened.
But, like I said, that's just me being pissy.
What I think is THEM being pissy is the fact that this bill doesn't say, "Stop letting shipments slip through the cracks, get tougher about doing your job." It says, "Let's stop doing random checks and check Everything." That's an order of magnitude. That costs. Money, time, jobs. It's an incredibly expensive bill and I only say expensive because I'm using money as the ruler. You'll suddenly have either 10 times the amount of staff or 10 times the amount of back-up in the international shipping depots coming into the U.S. Most stores in this country run on just-in-time shipments and don't have back-up inventory for more than 1/2 a week. So a couple of days delay is not "boohoo, Wal-Mart lost some profits," it's "boohoo, stores are shutting down so that people don't riot over the last remaining toothbrush." The complete lack of analysis of the situation, and the willingness to bring people onto their bandwagon to fight against it in essentially complete ignorance just grates ground glass into my cerebral cortex.
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