Stringent new banking regulations — aimed both at curbing tax evasion and, under the Patriot Act, preventing money from flowing to terrorist groups — have inadvertently made it harder for some expats to keep bank accounts in the United States and in some cases abroad.

Hopefully something is done about this in our government, but I’m certainly not holding my breath. It makes me rather happy I earned so little money (relatively speaking) when I was in Prague; they can’t come after me for tax evasion!

He is a socialist (40%)
He wants to take away Americans’ right to own guns (38%)
He is a Muslim (32%)
He wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one world government (29%)
He has done many things that are unconstitutional (29%)
He resents America’s heritage (27%)
He does what Wall Street and the bankers tell him to do (27%)
He was not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president (25%)
He is a domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitutions speaks of (25%)
He is a racist (23%)
He is anti-American (23%)
He wants to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers (23%)
He is doing many of the things that Hitler did (20%)
He may be the Anti-Christ (14%)
He wants the terrorists to win (13%)

Unsurprisingly, the percentages for Republican are much higher than these averages, as are the percentages for the less educated.

I’ll refrain from extensive editorializing aside to say: What a freaking pack of idiots we have in this country.

COLORADO SPRINGS — This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.

Yet the more I thought about it, the more I came to appreciate what was happening, especially in places where people are averse to taxes. “You don’t want to pay taxes, then here are the consequences.” I think this is pretty much what the state of California needs to do. You don’t want to repeal Prop 13? You want to keep heaping on voter initiatives that cost the state money? Then you will have to deal with the consequences and, like Colorado Springs, it will be painful.

When I was kid growing up in the military we had a sort of universal health care. I say “sort of” because it only applied to military families. It was, within the context of the military, completely universal.

Whenever I would get sick, there was a hospital my parents would take me to and that would take care of me. We would go in and my parents would show their ID and that was it. Later, when I had an ID of my own, I could do all of this myself.

Military doctors, as I recall, aren’t necessarily the best doctors in the world. They aren’t called in to Harvard or Stanford to perform surgery on world leaders, for example. However, they are smart, efficient, concerned about your actual welfare as just an ordinary person. I hate hospitals. I have in innate fear of medicine. It’s completely irrational and based on a nurse who couldn’t find a vein in my arm to get a blood sample and took a few too many tries. Aside from that, though, military hospitals were the best. They take care of you. They help you because that’s their job and they can focus on that instead of insurance paperwork.

The United States military medical system is the greatest socialized health care system in the world.

When I finally got out into the civilian working world and had to face the civilian health care system I was completely overwhelmed. PPOs, HMOs, each from different providers with different kinds of coverage (and no coverage) based on the chance that you might get sick or injured. Worse, if anything goes even slightly wrong with the piles of paperwork you’re screwed because your health care insurance provider may cut the amount it pays or simply not pay. $5,000 may not seem like much to have to cover on your own for major cancer surgery, but you’re just as likely to have to pay $5,000 for a simple blood test if you’re not careful. Meanwhile the insurance company pockets your money. Cha-ching for them and bankruptcy for you!

Personally I live in fear of our civilian medical health care system. I know we have excellent doctors and nurses but what’s the use if the insurance, that I and my employer have been paying into regardless of having needed to use it, won’t cover my needs? Universal health care alleviates this problem. I walk into the hospital, I show them my ID, and I’m taken care of. That’s it. How much more simple could they make it?

I’d also like to repeat a previous proposition that by law we should simply ban marriage and institute civil unions. If people of faith want to preserve the symbolic meaning of marriage they can but their marriage will not be recognized by the government in any sense. Maybe that’s just me, though. Honestly, I don’t understand what those folks are defending. They treat the word marriage like a trademark. I would remind them of what happened to words like Kleenex or, I believe, Xerox and is in the process of happening to. Marriage is now a generic term and nothing people of faith can do will ever change its impending genericide.

At one point the discussion lit a fire under the Admiral, and the talk of human rights turned personal for Edward James Olmos. The “Old Man” launched into a passionate speech about casting off the idea of race as a cultural determinant, and said we were one race, the human race. His voice echoed throughout the chamber growing louder until – I kid you not – he was yelling, “So Say We All,” and the crowd answered right back. Hell, even I yelled it, I was in the fraking United Nations with Adama, the gods themselves could not have stopped this moment.

Video of this event is available from the UN (in RealMedia? Really?), but here’s the So Say We All moment. If anyone finds or converts the whole video shebang into something a little more open please post a link in the comments!

All via Slashdot.

But what I really wanted to find was the national map that showed a simple red/blue of America and I found that, and more, here.

What I love about this map is that it seems to show that there is no way Obama could have won by as much as he did over McCain. But what this map doesn’t take into account is that the population of each state varies. So the site provides two other maps that change the size of the states based on it’s population or it’s number of electoral votes. Here’s the one based on population.

What is immediately obvious is that the center of America, which voted generally for McCain, is not very populated while as the coasts, which voted primarily for Obama, have quite large populations. The electoral college map is very similar with a slight bias towards small states.

The same software was used for the Worldmapper project, which takes data of all sorts and increases or decreases the size of the country based on that data. For example the world population cartograph looks like this.

It’s kind of scary to see so clearly how huge China and India are, but it’s pretty cool stuff regardless. Interestingly, the software that created these maps is free.

Yet this morning I woke up to check the CA and San Francisco results and WTF?!? Proposition 8, which would create a CA constitutional amendment to ban the rights of same-sex couples to marry, rent a car bulgariapassed. Unbelievable. I am very disappointed that this passed and yet a proposition to protect the “rights” of food stock animals passed. I feel like we just went back to the era when inter-racial marriage was illegal. California, you just disappointed me in a way I’m having a hard time expressing.

Still, most of the election this year was phenomenally positive. And on January 20th, 2009 we will have a new president. Alas that Obama has to fix, clean up and repair the mountain of crap that Bush and the Republicans have left behind. I hope he can do it.

“Yes we can.”

For once I’m rather excited about the election, too. Regardless of who wins the presidential election, the Bush era will soon be over and both candidates will be an improvement (though I prefer Obama in this one). For a Tuesday night there are tons of people out on the streets. Will they be celebrating here in San Francisco an Obama victory or if McCain wins will there be rioting in parts of the country?

I don’t know, but I do know I’m watching websites trying to keep up because this is going to be a big year. I’m worked up. My friend J. at work is going to an election party. If Obama wins they will break out the really good wine. If McCain wins they’ll break out the whiskey to drown their sorrow and put aspirin on the nightstand. Either way, it sounds like there will be a lot of drinking tonight.

If you’re in California and haven’t voted, you have one more hour. Don’t miss this opportunity to make history.

1: Broadband Everywhere.
2: Universal Healthcare.
3: No Federal Taxes on Internet Purchases.
4: Renew a Commitment to Education.
5: Renew a Commitment to Science.
6: Real Changes to Transportation.
7: Allow Early Voting by Mail.
8: Revamp Copyright/IP Law.
9: Fund the Patent Office So It Can Do a Better Job.
10: Open Government.

The only thing missing from the list is to make me absolute ruler of humanity.