It seems that New Jersey has decided its residents aren’t old enough to make decisions about personal grooming on their own.

I admit I first heard about this while watching “Weekend Update” on Saturday Night Live this past weekend, but my jaw dropped as I discovered it was a real story.  It seems that two women complained to the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs after they were injured by the Brazilian wax (example images of naked women at link) treatments they had received.  One of the two women had sued the salon involved, but the state still investigated the complaints.  They then decided that this was a process that should possibly be banned all together.  The decision will be made by the Board of Cosmetology of April 14th at a meeting.

According to Philly.com, it seems that under current New Jersey laws it only allows for the waxing of face, neck, arms, legs and abdomen, but it does not spell out that the waxing of genital areas is explicitly banned.  As this has gained some press coverage, some salons have ceased offering them, but the majority have not.

Philly.com spoke with Linda Orsuto, a salon owner in Cherry Hill, NJ who said that women would “go ballistic” if this passes.  She also said they would resort to waxing themselves, visiting unlicensed salons or even traveling to other states for the service.

So, essentially, it took exactly two people complaining to possibly get an entire service ended in a state?  This is another example of “the nanny state” going to an extreme.  I have no clue how many people get this procedure done, but I would imagine in the state of New Jersey alone the number must be in the tens of thousands, but because exactly two people complained, a Brazilian waxing underground movement may be set up.  Will this be like prohibition with waxing speakeasys being set up in back alleys?

Not only will they be passing a ban that makes absolutely no sense, they will be harming the revenue streams of salons in an already down economy.  As Ms. Orsuto said in the interview, people will find alternatives and legit salons in New Jersey will lose income and nothing will be truly gained by this move.  The only thing that will have been accomplished is salon owners may have to cut staff as there will be less work for them to do.

I am sorry two women got injured, but shall we look at all the other ways people are injured or even killed each day?  Shall we start banning everything in the world that someone at sometime has been injured doing?  How about we ban sports?  I mean, people get injured in sports every day, but yet no one bans those, but apparently if two people complain about a service in a salon, you can just get that completely banned.  Well, I’ve received some pretty bad haircuts in my day at salons, shall we ban those?

Yes, people should not be injured, but two isolated cases of waxings gone bad does not a state-wide terror make.  This is something that maybe should be monitored, make sure people have the proper certificates, but just banning in totality is heavy-handed and wrong.

The economy is hitting every one hard, and police budgets are not immune either.

In the past 24 hours I have heard two odd stories of how different police departments are handling budget problems.  The first came from the infamous “M”, famed around this blog for the World’s Longest Dark Knight Review, who is currently haunting the streets of Gotham New York City.  It seems that the police have increased patrols to seemingly focus on motor vehicle violations in an effort to issue more tickets.  She told me a tale of someone she knew who got pulled over for one thing, told to move over to a specific spot on the side and was issued a second ticket for parking in a no parking area.  This person will fight the second ticket as he was ordered to move there, but that still just shows how desperate they are for income.

The second story I learned about at lunch today as I dined with a friend of mine.  After he gave me my weekly ribbing about salad bar etiquette, I was telling him about what M had told me.  He informed me of a story from St. Louis about how much their police department was spending on badges for their top officers.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had broken a story about how the St. Louis police department had just spent $1,987 each on five badges.  The new badges were for a chief badge, two assistant chief badges and two lieutenant colonel badges.  These new works of art were purchased from Stange Co., of Maryland Heights which is known for making jewlery for third-world governments up to Queen Elizabeth II.  These new badges cost 100 times that of a rank-and-file patrol officer in St. Louis as their badges cost $19.75.

In all fairness to the new police chief, Daniel Isom, the badges were ordered before he took office, and he agrees the spending is outrageous.  Of course, these new badges are a bargain compared to the $5,900 his predecessor, Joe Mokwa, spent on solid gold badges.

The owner of the jewlery company tried to defend the cost saying that he was sure that the Police Chief of Los Angeles probably spends more.  The newspaper called the LA police chiefs office and found his badge cost $61.  The St. Louis jewler was concerned with how shabby his badge must be at that price.

We are hearing endless stories of how taxes will be raised in states all across this country to help with budget short falls, and then you see stories like this that make you wonder how long the common person will have to pay for the stupidity of those people who are partially responsible for the mess we’re in.  I am always reminded of the Kevin Kline movie Dave where a man impersonates the President after he has a stroke, and when the budget spins out of control, he calls in his best friend, an every day accountant, to look at the governments books and cut the budget to save some programs.

Where are the every day accountants?  You are needed more than ever.

Possibly one of the greatest heroes in American history has passed away.

W. Mark Felt was revealed to be the infamous Deep Throat of the Preseident Richard M. Nixon Watergate scandal back on May 31st,2005.  While some would say that Mr. Felt was nothing but a whistleblower, I don’t think any one would be hard pressed to convince me that Nixon didn’t need to be ousted from office as more and more information about his antics came to light.  Considering the tapes that have comes out in recent years, it is fairly obvious that Nixon was crazy as a loon bird.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein swore that they would not reveal Deep Throat’s identity until the person had passed away, but in 2005 Mr. Felt was suffering from progressively worsening Alzheimers, and when his family figured out who he was due to a visit by Mr. Woodward, they decided to reveal it to the world via Vanity Fair.  Luckily Woodward had The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat book ready to go, and it came out in short order.

The book revealed a man who became the snitch on the happenings of Watergate partially out of a sense of duty, but in large part due to bitterness over the fact he had been told he had little hope of ever heading the F.B.I., even after rising to the second-in-command spot after many long years of service to the agency.  While this revelation tarnished my opinion of Deep Throat some, he still had done what had to be done, and while it has never been addressed, no matter how he felt, I am sure it was not an easy decision for any one to reach that they should rat out their President for their actions.

Mr. Felt was 95-years-old, and I, for one, salute his memory.

Who knew Massachusetts was turning in to “the fun state”?

For a long time I have advocated the idea that small amounts of marijuana should be decriminalized.  While illegal, and not all together smart, throwing some college kid in jail for having a joint has just never made sense to me.

Prisoner #1: What you in for?
Prisoner #2: Stabbed my wife.  You?
Prisoner #1: I had a joint.
Prisoner #2: Take whatever bunk you want, man!

This past Tuesday, the voters of Massachusetts passed Question 2, which will replace the old penalty of a $500 fine, up to six months in jail and a Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) report.  The new law is:

• Replace criminal penalties with a US$100 fine of which the proceeds go to the city where the offense takes place.
• Eliminate collection of Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) reports for minor infractions.
• Maintain current penalties for selling, growing, and trafficking marijuana, as well as the prohibition against driving under the influence of marijuana.
• The law requires additional penalties for minors not in current law such as Parental notification, compulsory drug awareness program, 10 hours community service, and a larger fine of $1,000. In addition, possible delinquency proceedings for those under 17 if the requirements are not completed.

I like this. While I have always wanted the decriminalization to happen, I will admit I had never thought of keeping a fine in place, and the penalties for minors is also sensible.

Before I go any further with this, let me make one thing crystal clear: these are not the ramblings of a pot head.  Quite often when you see people going on about legalizing marijuana, you have to ignore their goofy grin and blood shot eyes, but, to date, I have never once smoked marijuana.  Yes, I did once get a “contact high” seeing as about 20 people behind me at an Guns N’ Roses/Aerosmith concert were smoking up, but oh well.  Otherwise I have never ventured past alcohol, cigarettes and too much Xbox 360.

So, why should a non-user give a hoot about the legalities of marijuana possession?  It’s a fairly simple answer in that I feel it is a horrible waste of civil resources.  Busting someone for small amounts of marijuana and jailing them takes up officer time, prosecuting attorney time, court time and resources of a jail.  In the end, we are all paying the price for someone smoking a plant, and that just is completely lost on me.

Our courts especially are already taxed beyond belief with backlogs of cases running into years, and this also adds to the workloads of our prosecuting attorneys.  According to an AP story, the new version of the law won’t take effect until sometime in December, but Hampden District Attorney William Bennett said he is already dropping all cases for possession of an ounce or less.

Opponents of the new law said that this was bad because pot serves as a gateway drug, which I have always found to be a weak argument.  I have known many people who have indulged in drugs over the years (hey, I said -I- was clean, nothing about people I’ve known), and not one of them ever said, “Oh, if I had just never smoked that first joint!”  In actuality, most of them had totally skipped marijuana and gone straight to cocaine or stronger.  (side note: Having seen someone in heroin withdrawal is probably what kept me from ever trying a drug -shudder-)

Is this going to be a perfect system? Probably not, but I certainly feel it is a step in the right direction for taking care of some of the load on courts and jails.  I also think it will save some people from having their lives destroyed due to a simple mistake that might keep them from getting into some schools and proffesions they may want to go into later in life.

In short, it’s not perfect, but I still think it’s better than what was there.

You know, I’m not naive, but talk of the 2012 election tonight even surprised me.

In a recent sketch on Saturday Night Live, Tina Fey as Sarah Palin made a joke about buying “Palin in 2012″ tshirts before this current election was even over.  At the end of the joke, she said you should wait until Wednesday to wear them.

Apparently no one got the hint.

I had to go by Walmart today, and I chuckled as I walked past the Christmas displays.  For several years now, Halloween has become the marker for businesses to go in to Christmas mode.  I still think it’s early, but oh well.  As I walked past a Christmas tree, I wondered how long it would be before we heard stratagies for the losing side in this election as they looked forward to 2012.

I started to hear the rumblings by 8 PM EST.  In other words, as the first polls closed.

I spent the evening watching Republicans throwing each other under the bus at an astounding rate, and by 1 AM EST I was hearing what sort of candidate the Republican party would need in four years as well as what they will need to do to their platform.  This was followed by, “Well, our job starts tomorrow.”

-cue me banging my head on my keyboard-

I am 100% sure we would have heard the same from the Democrats had the tables been turned, but what I am thinking is… I’m tired.  I am bone tired.  I can not take any more campaigning and politicing at this point.  I was almost angry at how I looked at tonight as a finish line more than anything else.  I felt no excitement, no emotions other than relief at this exhaustive campaign being over.  No more commercials.  No more debates.  No more press conferences.  Just completion.

Both parties need to learn that the American people can only take so much of this.  It is almost the equivalent of being held hostage by the political parties and the media.  I wish whomever the Republicans run in 2012 the best of luck, but I really don’t want to even hear their name until 2010 at the absolute earliest.  Let us rest, to catch our breath, have your one day of armchair quarterbacking, but let the American people rest… please.

It’s finally here: election day.

After what seems like the longest election cycle in history, it all comes down today.  All anyone can do at this point is to sit back and hope for the best.  No matter who wins the presidency, they have a long, hard road ahead of them due to this financial mess and fighting wars on two fronts.  While I obviously have cast my vote for one or the other (remember, I voted early), I wish both men the best of luck, and I hope they can accomplish everything they need to in office.

All of that being said… please, I don’t care if it is raining fire where you are, please make sure you go out and vote.  I would hope you vote with a well thought out process over going with your heart, or just who you like for some surface reason.  This is too important job to be decided on a whim.

Good luck to everyone out there… and prepare for the talk about the 2012 election to begin late Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning… groan.

As I noted several weeks ago, I voted early, but that doesn’t mean this day isn’t important to me.

I have said many times over the years that I don’t care who you vote for, just vote. Nothing irritates me more then when someone will complain about the state of the government (not just now, but dating back to when I started voting in 1989) and then you learn they never voted.  You know what?  You didn’t vote?  Then you have no right to complain.  Vote against me, cancel out my vote, I don’t care, but you have to exercise your right to vote.  Heck, I don’t care if you write a name in, knock yourself out, but just make sure you take advantage of your right to vote!

On July 20th, 1989, the very first thing I did when I got up, I went to register to vote.

It was my 18th birthday, and my first act as a legal adult was to go down to my local County Clerk’s office and fill out my voter registration card.  This was the single most important thing to me that day, everything else was secondary.

My mother had spent several years involved with the League of Women Voters, and a few years as the president of the local chapter.  One of her duties was at each major election, she would go down to an office on the Truman State University (then Northeast Missouri State University) campus, sit outside the office where the votes were counted, and as tallies were given to her, she would call them into the national ABC News office.  I was in my early teens and I would go and sit with her, but a few times, due to my excitement over the process, she would let me make the phone calls into the national office.  (She always stood next to me and would double check the numbers I gave to make sure I reported them correctly)

I learned very early on about the importance of being a voter.  I learned that no matter how much you thought only one vote didn’t matter, it really did.  Unfortunately, there is one thing I hate a lot in life, and that is standing in lines.  It never stopped me from doing my patriotic duty, I just grumbled about it a lot.  Luckily we can now vote up to six weeks before the election in my area, so today after lunch, I went down to the same County Clerk’s office I went to in 1989, walked in, got my ballot, voted, and walked out.  Yep, I have already cast my vote in the 2008 presidential election.  Even if my candidate doesn’t win, I will know I at least had my say.  If the opponent wins, I know I will at be able to say for the next four years, “Don’t look at me, I didn’t vote for him.”

If you aren’t registered to vote, why not? It just so happens that I did a list over at Mashable today called 10 Resources for Voter Registration.  It couldn’t be easier to register to vote nowadays, and if you need some motivation, watch the video below.

Come on folks, it’s time to make sure you take full advantage of your freedoms.

Even though I have been in business for over 22 years now, I will never claim to understand all the trappings of high finance. What I will say is that all of these people involved with some of the stupid mistakes made on behalf of companies like Lehman Brothers and AIG could do with going back to their most basic business classes.

I have sat back watching this whole debacle unfold, and I am just dumbfounded by some of the things I have learned were going on that led to this whole slide into oblivion for these companies.  Apparently there was some form of loan I had never heard of before named “No Income, No Job, (and) no Assets”, or N.I.N.J.A. loans, where, as the name implies, apparently you can get a loan without a blasted thing going for you in the positive corner.

…

What idiot came up with this idea?  How can anyone with a modicum of intelligence even begin to think that making loans to someone with no assets is a bright idea?

As I see it, you had companies who were already incredibly rich and just got greedier for even more money, and how do you make that money in an over saturated market?  Well, you just give money to anyone who walks in!

So, I honestly was just going to let this whole thing pass without much thought, but when I heard the news tonight that the government is loaning $85 billion dollars to bail out AIG, well, it kind of becomes the business of every US citizen doesn’t it?  Now it appears if you’re big enough, and run your company into an iceberg, the government will come and pick you up, dust you off, and say “now you behave”.  However, if you’re a small business, you’re screwed and too bad.

Remember that old saying about “the rich just get richer…”?  Yeah, seems to be true doesn’t it?

Again, I am no economic expert, but this current crisis feels to me like it was all brought on by greed of slap happy executives who thought that the mere fact they were loaning money would keep the good times rollin’, and basic business sense be damned.  Yes, these companies crashing is bad for economies, and I would say it would be worth to let them rot, but then no one ever seems to learn from any company falling apart, so why bother?

I guess I am writing this more out of a bewilderment than having my own conclusion because nothing about this whole mess makes the least bit of sense to me how any group of people could be collectively this stupid.

In a move that is sure to leave me scratching my head for days, Microsoft has partnered up the Xbox 360 gaming platform with Rock the Vote.

In a press release put out today, Microsoft revealed that as of today, users of Xbox Live will be able to take polls about the upcoming presidential election, participate in forums and… oh, how this scares me… register to vote.  Don’t get me wrong, I am all for people registering to vote, and I actually went and did it the day of my 18th birthday I was so anxious to have the right.  What scares me is, and I know I will catch flames for this, is the goofballs on Xbox Live messing this up.

I’ve written a couple times this year about the intellectual titans I run into playing some of the games online, and it worries me that some of these folks, for laughs, may try to register fake people or some other way gum up the works.  I have not looked at the process yet, but I am hopeful there are multiple safeguards in place.  I asked my mother for her feelings on this since she used to be the president of the local League of Women Voters chapter, responsible for many people being registered to vote, and her reply was simply, “this troubles me.”

Hopefully this will lead to legitimate sign-ups, and hopefully it will also lead to people actually going to the polls come election day, but it still makes me a bit nervous to see it done in this fashion.  Going to the gamers is a great idea, but why not set it up around the release of a major game?  Madden ‘09 just came out with a huge push for midnight releases, wouldn’t it have made sense to set up at some stores and do it there?  Yes, there is a certain convenience factor to doing it at home, but I worry about faked names, hacked accounts and any other number of potential problems.

In my heart, I hope it is successful because I think our freedom to vote is one of the greatest things in this country, it is just the method of registration that is worrisome to me.

It seems in Sweden you aren’t allowed to dislike any one for any reason, and if you do, someone will cry to the government about it.

Duncan Riley at The Inquisitr wrote up a story this weekend that is just jaw dropping in its oddness.  It seems that an 8-year-old in Sweden has set off a firestorm of controversy over his not inviting two of the kids in his class to his birthday party, while inviting the rest of the class.  The two kids were left out due to one not inviting the original boy to his birthday party, and the other because they had a falling out.

When the teacher saw that two students had been left out, she confiscated all of the invitations and informed him that since he did it during class time, it fell under Sweden’s non-discrimination laws.  According to the original BBC story, when the birthday boy’s father learned of this, he filed a complaint with the parliamentary ombudsman for a ruling, and that is expected to be handed down by September.

I can see where perhaps handing out the invitations during school was a poor choice, but what do you expect from an 8-year-old?  As for it being an act of discrimination, let’s look at the Dictionary.com definition of discrimination:

1. an act or instance of discriminating.
2. treatment or consideration of, or making a distinction in favor of or against, a person or thing based on the group, class, or category to which that person or thing belongs rather than on individual merit: racial and religious intolerance and discrimination.
3. the power of making fine distinctions; discriminating judgment: She chose the colors with great discrimination.
4. Archaic. something that serves to differentiate.

Okay, yes, they did belong to a class you could say: Kids This Other Kid Hates.  Again, I can see where it would have been better not to have been done in class, because I’m sure those two kids felt bad not getting invitations, but I think the teacher’s explanation was a bit much that this incident fell under this law.  How do they handle round robin picking of teams in gym class there?  “Okay, you can’t pick any one last because that would be discrimination, so whomever you were going to pick last, pick them first… wait that won’t work either… could someone call parliment to see how we should handle this?”

That is the other thing that amazes me about this whole incident: the parliament is actually going to rule in this. Why didn’t they say, “You know, this is silly, sort it out for yourselves at the school level.” No, the parliament of Sweden is going to actually rule in what boils down to who a child can and can not invite to their birthday party. I think Mr. Riley may have said it best in his article, “We now crown Sweden as the winner of the ultimate nanny state award for 2008…and possibly all time.”

When are people in the public eye going to learn? If you are a well-known person, someone in power, someone famous, there are always going to be those that enjoy watching your fall from grace. True, in the case of Governor Elliot Spitzer, the sting was set up to go after the call girls, and he got caught up in it, but it doesn’t matter, don’t be an idiot.

This seemingly never-ending stream of public officials that get caught up in sex scandals just amazes me. Do none of them pay attention to the stories of those that have gotten caught before them? What makes them think, “Well, sure, so-and-so got caught, but I’m too smart for that.” Newsflash: you’re not. I don’t care how smart you think you are, no matter what makes you think “oh, it won’t happen to me”, just don’t. Stop embarrassing yourself, your family, your staffers, and most importantly, the people who elected you.

Then comes the public “mea culpa” after the outing of your doings. Who wrote the law that the wife has to stand around as Silda Wall Spitzer did? What moron decided that every wife of a politician caught up in a sex scandal has to say the same, tired line about “standing by their man”? FORGET THAT! HE CHEATED ON YOU WITH A PROSTITUTE! Throw his clothes out on the mansion lawn like any self respecting woman should, and tell him he can go live with her if she’s so wonderful.

The other day I said I don’t trust anyone that chooses to run for President, but now I really think it stretches to anyone that runs for any political office. I just don’t get it, do they lose all common sense the moment they declare they are running for an elected seat? It’s all shameful and disgusting. Yes, I realize they are all just human, but, funny, somehow I’ve managed to get to 36-years-old without once considering hiring a prostitute, surely if I can do it, so can they.