Always Late

getting my ornaments up.

Ah well.

Whether you believe in the time-honored story...

"But I didn't know until this day,

that it was...Judas...all along."

Or killer robot Santa Governors

from the future...

Schwarzenegger orders mass layoffs, unpaid furloughs

Union leaders for state employees vow to challenge the legality of the mandatory time off, which amounts to about a 9% pay cut according to the governor's finance department.

By Patrick McGreevy and Jordan Rau
December 20, 2008

Reporting from Sacramento -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday ordered mass layoffs and unpaid furloughs for state workers starting in February to address California's growing fiscal crisis.

Under his executive order, 238,000 employees will be forced to take off two unpaid days per month through June 30, 2010. Managers will receive either the furlough or an equivalent salary reduction during the same period.


H.D. Palmer, spokesman for Schwarzenegger's finance department, said the mandatory time off is the equivalent of about a 9% pay cut for affected workers. He said the furloughs would save the state more than $1.2 billion.

...
Schwarzenegger attempted a few months ago to unilaterally reduce the pay of state employees, but his order never took effect. State Controller John Chiang said the state's payroll system was incapable of carrying it out.
...

...who can only be stopped with an ancient and terrible weapon called COBOL.

Schwarzenegger pay plans thwarted by COBOL

By Iain Thomson
7 August 2008 07:39AM

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plans to reduce all state employees pay to the minimum wage are being blocked because the payroll system is run on COBOL.

Schwarzenegger signed an executive order last week to cut the salary of the state’s 200,000 employees to the minimum wage until the state budget, currently 36 days behind schedule, is passed.

But State Controller John Chiang told the Senate Committee on Governmental Organization that this was impossible as the payroll system was written 30 years ago in COBOL and there weren’t enough programmers to do the job.

Chiang estimated that with current resources it would take six months to make the change, and then nine to ten months to reverse them.

"Pragmatically, we just can't get the system to work in a timely manner for us to implement payment of minimum wage," Chiang said, according to the Sacramento Bee.
...

Whether you believe the War on Christmas is a traditional war to be fought in a traditional way...

I want you to remember that no bastard ever won
the War for Christmas by dying for his dogma.

He won it by making the other poor,
dumb bastard die for his dogma.

Or an insurgency with murkier rules and darker purposes.

"My mission is to make it up to the North Pole before the 25th.


There's a Jolly Old Elf up there who's gone insane.

I'm supposed to kill him."

Then, later...

Evil Liberal: "Who are all these people?"

Bill O’Reilly: "Yeah, well... They think you have come to take him
away. I hope that isn't true."

Evil Liberal: "Take who away ?"

Bill O’Reilly: "Him. Saint Nick. The Big Elf.
These are all his Helpers, as far as you can see."

Evil Liberal: "Could we, uh, talk to Saint Nick?"

Bill O’Reilly: "Hey, man, you don't talk to the Saint.
You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind.
He's an elf-toymaker in the classic sense.
I mean sometimes he'll, uh, well, you'll say hello to him, right?
And he'll just walk right by you, and he won't even notice you.

And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you
on his lap, and he'll say do you know that “ant”
is the middle word in Santa?
If you can know who has been naughty
and who as been nice when all about you
are getting shitty toys and socks and blaming it on you…
if you can trust your elves when all men doubt you --
I mean I'm no, I can't -- I'm a little elf,
I'm a little elf, he's, he's The Claus, man.

I should have been a bag of remaindered WalMart Barbies
being sold out the trunk of an El Dorado
on a dead-drunk Sunday Morning on Maxwell Street -- I mean --

And finally, the tragic denoument.

"The ho-ho-horror. The ho-ho-horror..."

Have a happy, safe and merry uprising.