Million, Billion, Trillion

Everyone keeps complaining about the bailout bill, and I'll admit that I have my own doubts.  But today I realized that taking ANY action at all is more than what a Republican administration would do.  Stuff never gets done under Republicans.  Well, it does, but it usually takes a lot longer.  And the economy isn't getting any better on its own.

Okay, so we've got people being naughty on both sides of the aisle, recently.  Two of Obama's nominees for various offices turned out to have shady tax records, and they've decided to step down from his nomination.  Obama even said to the press that he "screwed up," which is something a lot of people have trouble with.  But at least the guy admits his mistakes and fixes them.  Bush never did that.

On the Republican side, we've got business owners using bail-out money to give themselves million-dollar bonuses, while their companies crash and burn at their feet, leaving many out of work and at the mercy of the tight job market.

FACTOID!  I found this at CNN's website: One trillion $1 bills stacked one on top of the other would reach nearly 68,000 miles into the sky.

Christine Romans wrote a pretty interesting tidbit about how people are becoming desensitized to numbers, and how people tend to lump the words "million," "billion," and "trillion" together.  She quotes this math professor guy, John Allen Paulos, of Temple University, who points out, "A million seconds is 11.5 days.  A billion seconds is 32 years, and a trillion seconds is 32,000 years."  I never really thought about it like that, but I guess there is a GIANT difference.  To think that our national debt is 10 trillion!  Yowza.

And this bailout - Which was supposed to be, what, 819 billion at first? - is now nearing one trillion dollars.  I'm skeptical, but Obama promises that the majority of the money goes STRAIGHT to the people, and the remaining money gets put into creating new jobs.  And I do trust his decisions.  He actually LISTENS to his advisors, anyway.  And at least he's taking immediate action.  Experts predict that just standing by for too much longer could make this situation grow exponentially worse.  Yuck.

Remember when a million bucks was a lot?  Well, me either, but then again I'm young.  At this rate, though, I'm willing to bet I'll one day be able to say, "When I was your age, a trillion dollars was a lot."  Ah, numbers, numbers...

To Andrew, my favourite commenter, I'd like to point out that slander means false OR malicious claims.  It's fairly illegal to publicly denounce someone with the intent of damaging their reputation.  And is what Savage said NOT malicious?  Even if the man was openly gay, the way in which Savage worded his ill-formed insults was deliberately harmful.

Sure, Andrew, "sodomite" is the dictionary word for homosexuality.  But remember what kind of connotations come along with the word.  It's derived from the Biblical place, Sodom, and depicted as "sinful," and later still, illegal.  No respectful person in this day and age calls a homosexual a sodomite without malicious intent, especially not in a public setting.  It's the same word that people used to condemn homosexuals, or execute them.  The dictionary may not define it as such, but everyone knows that if someone calls someone else a sodomite, it means they view the act as a crime.  And THAT is defamatory.

At any rate, even if it weren't slander, it is still obscene.  As was the time Savage called autistic children "brats."  If a man started yelling that on the street, he'd be arrested for public indecency.  Radio is public.