Bad dog!! Greyhound bus lines=highway robbers

Today I discovered it'll cost ya to give someone a bus ticket. And not just the price of the fare.

There will be an extra fee for your generosity, if you charge someone else's ticket on your credit card.

The Gift Ticket Fee.* If the traveler is NOT the card holder, the card holder gets to pay that fee too, on top of the fare.

My round trip = 250 miles each way.

Total cost $58, advance purchase.

Except for that Gift Fee. That'll be ANOTHER $18, please.

My witty friend Lynn says it's highway robbery. Whoa! Yes, exactly where the stick-up happens.

People who take the bus are largely poor, rural, or otherwise disadvantaged. Perhaps they have no alternative but travel by bus, no other way to get from here to there.

Bad dog, Greyhound! For sticking it to your captive customers.

*From the link to the fine-print details:

A non-refundable gift ticket fee is applied to each Will Call transaction where the credit card holder purchasing tickets is not traveling on that trip.

we got one of those panel chingalingas already in Texas

Quitter Barbie, Nanookie of the North

Ex-guvvie, bless her, she keeps harping on that death thingy.
Lord, the stuff they keep making up about health-care reform!

Here's our death panel in Huntsville.
Lie down on it, and we will make you dead. I don't think we should do this.
Everybody we put down on this panel is a child of god.
Seems wrong for humans to get in the way of god working in a person to redeem her, to redeem him. No matter what he did or she did.
When we kill people here, we interrupt god's work in them.

Before this we used a chair to deliver death.
Looks like this. Take a good long look at how we kill people. In Florida this time.
(Picture from a website where execution is explored in detail.)

Death is real. It will happen to you. Me. All of us.
Be prepared for it, make plans for your death.
Seems like a good idea to discuss it with your family, your god, your faith community, your doctor, friends, neighbors, anybody who will listen to you. As you make your choices.
Some of us don't get a choice. I watched my 55-year-old husband die of sudden cardiac arrest six days short of getting health-care coverage at his new job.
I want EVERYBODY to have HEALTH CARE.
No exceptions. Just do it.

Gates's real offense

"contempt of cop"
That's the explanation I heard from a commentator on NPR. The offense is offending a cop. Hurting his or her feelings by not being nice. But since that one's not on the books as a real crime, the cops have to arrest the perp for something else, like disorderly conduct.

Here it is from the police blotter:
http://www.cambridgema.gov/cpd/News/newsDetail.cfm?story_id=2247

Disorderly Conduct

09-05127

On 7/16/09 at 12:44 PM, 58-year-old Henry Gates of 17 Ware St. Cambridge, MA was arrested for Disorderly conduct after exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior.

I guess it's good to know that the police these days are so sensitive that things like talking back to them in Massachusetts and oooops, maybe even making gestures, scary scary gestures like at the Rainbow Lounge incident, yes, that things like that are so hurtful to the big tough cops, they just have to arrest somebody.

OK, I blame the moms of today. They must not have taught their children well. They must have left out "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."

Hmmm. Maybe that could be in the remedial sensitivity training curricula for cops.

*image from this blog:
BRAINPAN LEAKAGE
From the warped mind of paranormal thriller author M. R. Sellars