Dear Senator Hawley,

You're a pencil-necked, sanctimonious, viciously ambitious jackass.  I've disliked you since you were instrumental in getting rid of what would have been the best governor Missouri had had in decades, then used that to springboard yourself from Missouri AG to U.S. Senator.  Seriously disliked you, to the point of voting against you when you ran.*

That said, you spent your first few years in office doing things that I liked.  I started to like you in spite of myself.  However, I have never trusted you.  I have never forgotten your ambition, and I assumed it would have you turning on us, your constituents, the second you felt you had a better offer.  Or someone had something on you.  Or...you felt like it.   

Because you?  You're not an honest politician.**  You're a reform politician.  And recently, someone got to you.  

You came out and said that Medicaid must be expanded, not cut.  This is not just wrong, it's so wrong that I'm absolutely certain that you could probably give yourself a visual cardiac examination without having to use any equipment to do so, other than maybe a flashlight.

Senator, Medicaid is never in the people's best interests.  It is a shitty program that gives shitty service to people who don't have a choice between accepting being treated like shit and potentially dying.  Expanding Medicaid takes a limited amount of dollars and spreads it over more people, which means that they'll get shittier service, because there's less resources per person. 

Not only that, but it costs everyone more.  Including the poor people you're trying to help.

And I swear unto God that if you succeed in expanding Missouri Medicaid, I will never vote for you again.  If you vote for it, I won't vote for you.  Hell, if you continue to advocate for that, rather than beating back the ACA requirements that forced people into it that shouldn't be on it, I won't ever vote for you again.  Because you'll have proved yourself an utter moron that shouldn't be anywhere near the levers of power.

Most sincerely,

A disgusted voter

Update: Yeah, no.  With this he's lost my vote.  Period fucking dot.  I do not want him going in with a NY D on a "mental wellness" bill for first responders.  First, because I don't trust a D to have anyone's best interests in mind, and second, because fuck them, they lost, they can suck it, no mercy, no cooperation.  It is, after all, how they roll. 

*Senators should not be up for a popular vote.  The amendment that gave the people the vote for senators should be repealed.  There was a solid reason why the senate was made up of individuals appointed by the governors of the states for the six year terms: senators were to keep the state's interests in mind in their votes, not the popular interests.  

**Heinlein said it best: an honest politician, once he's bought stays bought.  A reform politician, though...all you have to do is convince him that what you want him to do is in the best interests of the people, even when it's patently not, and he'll turn on his constituents.  

Of all the elitistst, condescending bullshit...

I will admit, I have been ignoring national politics.  I can't afford the energy it takes to keep up with everything happening.*  I have too much other work to do as a housewife, stay-at-home-mom, and writer.**  So, I may very well be terribly late to the party, but I caught wind of a rumor.  

Apparently, there's a possibility of Robin Hood giving back some of our tax money that our illegitimate government entities have been stealing from us, via USAID and other vehicles: the DOGE dividend checks.  President Trump says that it could be coming; that it would be a $5K direct deposit, in a similar manner to the COVID stimulus checks.  

On the one hand, it's an utterly brilliant publicity stunt.  

On the other?  Well.  We're still riding out the inflation caused by the previous stupid move; the DOGE dividend would be more of the same, but worse because bigger checks.***

And then...then I saw the whining.  Of course the hard left is whining.  USAID was paying the media to denigrate us.  All of us.  Our tax dollars went to pay for anti-American propaganda to be sprayed thicker over Americans via the legacy media than shit on a field at fertilizing time.****   

The whining is always glorious, but so mouth-breathing, drooling stupid that I tune it out.  

And then something got past my filters: "DOGE dividends won't change anything! They're too small! What's $5K going to do for low income families, anyway?" 

Fucking what.  

Even if this just goes out to families that, y'know, fucking pay taxes, this is absolutely going to make a difference.  Most families are straining.  Between being underpaid because of the mass importation of next-to-slave-labor to keep paychecks and salaries artificially low, and inflation, and stupid fucking regulations laid on production by un-elected bureaucrats,***** most families are having to use credit cards to stay afloat.  We're not living paycheck to paycheck.  We're living hand-to-mouth. 

Would you like to know what our "betters" think we'll spend it on?  They think we'll spend it on groceries (whose fault would that be, fuckers?), or on alcohol, or on vacations, or on other things...and that it won't buy much.  Some admit that we might use it to pay down credit card or student debt--but again, it won't make much of a dent.  

They're right, on the student debt, by the way--but again, that's their fault.  

Besides.  Who are they to decide for us what's best for us?  

That dividend check, should it come, would be used for postponed household repairs, in this house.  Or on tuition, given the utter shit that is the public education system.  Or maybe used in part to set up so that they can't impact our grocery bill by PETArded regulations on animals they have no idea how to fucking care for.

The other bitch-and-moan I've heard from the left is that the checks won't help the American people more than once.  That it would not change things for us long term.

On that front...they're not wrong.  Even if reducing the amount of debt we're all carrying by that much would be helpful in both the short and long term, that's just a one-time help, not something that will change things for most households permanently.

Want to know what will?  

Having the slave labor deported.  All of it.  From the illegal aliens invading from the southern (and northern) borders to the H1B workers in tech and medicine, get rid of the slave labor.  Let wages come up to where they should be.  

Repeal the income tax amendment.  Cut all capital gains taxes to nothing more than the officially stated inflation rate.  Free our business sector to grow.  

Institute tariffs on goods coming in to match tariffs placed on our goods by nations importing from us.  Double the tariffs on goods produced by slave labor. (Yes, China, I'm aiming at you.). The money coming in from that funded the federal government's Constitutionally-required responsibilities for more than half of our existence.  It should be able to continue to do so without any issues...so long as the government remembers that it is limited by the Constitution to these responsibilities.   

That means no more money being taken from us to go out in the form of foreign aid to people who hate us (Europe, China, Korea, Middle East).  No more money laundering (as DOGE has found out, 90% of that money was being laundered, and paid to entities in the US working against our interests).  No more hostage puppies. 

No more gain-of-function research paid for by our taxes, but done in enemy nations because we have laws against it, and they don't. 

No more paying to prop up legacy media that has lost most of the American trust.  No more paying to prop up communism--it's a bad idea that should be taken off life support.  

In short?  I'm absolutely in favor of DOGE.  I'm in favor of everything the President is doing.   

Hell, I'm sitting back with a huge bowl of popcorn.  Want some? 

 

*There has been a lot happening.  I was paying attention for the first few days after President Trump took office, but there was so much I couldn't keep up, so I stopped trying.  

**Before everyone weighs in, as a HW/SAHM, I'm juggling four full-time jobs' worth of work.  And then add another part-time job writing for some income (and sanity)...it gets overwhelming.

***The COVID checks for my household were just over $3K.  The predicted DOGE check is $5K.  Not sure if that's per taxpayer or per household, but there it is.

****No farmer worth his salt would spray that much manure on any field--it would burn the plants.

*****Egg production.  Between the "cage free" requirements laid on factory farms by people who've never fucking seen a chicken in person, much less how they behave, and requirements that one bird in one barn testing positive for bird flu means that all chickens in all barns must be slaughtered, we simply do not have enough layers. 

Dear Amazon,

Yesterday, I got an email with a link to a survey over your search function.  I went to click on it...and it took me to a page that told me to get my mobile device.  That I would need to search on my phone.  And use that, and the results from it for the survey.  Like I would do if I were shopping.  

Y'all have made some assumptions, here.  You do know what they say about assumptions, right?  

I didn't take the survey, because I do not use my phone to shop.  I don't use it to browse the internet.  I don't use it to play games.  I don't use it for day-to-day anything.  My phone is a safety device, not a leash, and definitely not something I can't do without.  In fact, half the time, I forget to make sure the damn thing is charged.  

That said.  I have a lot of friends who have taken your survey.  And they, and I, have complaints about your search function.  

First, the haystack.  Sure, you've got an enormous haystack to search through.  Biggest in the world.  Most types of hay...only, you've got a problem.  We aren't looking for hay.  We're looking for a needle.  

That's right.  Your search dumps thousands upon thousands of results on us...mostly unrelated to that thing we're actually searching for.  

That tells me that a) your coders and other employees are utterly incompetent at the jobs you've hired them for, which is a waste of your time and money, or b) you're wasting my time, hoping to get more of my money.

That's...not the way it works.  You waste my time, you don't get any more of my money.  I'll take it and go somewhere that the search function isn't broken.  Or at least, not broken as badly.  

Which leads me to my next complaint: you done fucked up the Boolean searches.  I remember using them.  "And" narrowed the search down.  "Or" expanded it.  "Not" filtered out the things that were almost right, but not what I was looking for.  

I used those all the way through grad school, doing keyword searches through literally billions of words in articles, in millions of articles, in hundreds of thousands of subjects for the fifty or so journals that might have the dozen or so sources I needed for my research papers.  It worked there.  It should work in your shopping site.   

It should work especially well in doing searches for Kindle reading.  

But it doesn't.  I don't know why, but y'all done fucked that up long before you fucked up everything else.

Here's the thing: I already subscribe to Kindle Unlimited.  I buy a lot of books otherwise, too.  I have preferences, and those preferences do not include the kind of crap your searches show, and I can't narrow the searches down to find the things I do want to read.  

So, instead of reading new things, I re-read the old.  Even when I'd rather have something new, I simply can't find anything.  Because you fucked up the search functions for it.  I'd love to give you more money (I'd love to have more--I'm pretty sure my books would show up in more searches for people who'd enjoy reading what I write if your search wasn't broken), but I don't buy things just because you shove them in my face.  Hell, I won't even borrow things just because you shove them in my face.  I don't like the sort of things you shove in my face; I'm sure as fuck not wasting my limited time and money on them.  

Please.  Fix the search function.  Make it actually, y'know, functional.  

And then?  Then, we'll be spending a whole lot more of our disposable income.  We could even have more disposable income.  

 Thanks,

A dissatisfied customer