Assurant Solutions Call Center in Lawton (Oklahoma) Will Close, 175 Laid Off

There have been a awful lot of call center closings lately. Guess people don't need help with stuff anymore, or something. Here is NewsOK with the story:

The Assurant Solutions call center in Lawton says it will phase out operations over the next few months and close the facility next year, leaving about 175 people out of work.

President Craig Lemasters tells a local newspaper that work will be transferred to company centers in Miami, Fla., and Albany, Ore.

The Lawton center handles calls in the insurance and warranty industries. The center opened in 2001 and at one point had more than 400 workers.

And so it goes.

Hey, Senator Inhofe, It Was 67 Degrees Fahrenheit in DC Yesterday

Back on August 19th of last year, I posted a Friday Rant called, "Hey, Senator Inhofe, It's HOT Outside," in which I called out the senior Senator from Oklahoma for his family's dumbass publicity stunt of building an igloo during one of the blizzards that struck DC two winters ago in order to mock Al Gore and others who are concerned about climate change. Specifically, I blasted the global warming denying Inhofe for not subsequently acknowledging this past summer's record breaking heat wave in The Sooner State:

So to recap, Okalahoma's record for the highest monthly temperature ever recorded was just smashed by an astonishing one full degree Fahrenheit. And yet, there was nary a peep about it from the esteemed Senator Inhofe and his merry band of inbreds.

All of this almost makes me wish I lived in Oklahoma. During July I would have had this very strong desire to go find Senator Inhofe's house, wait until about four o'clock in the afternoon, and then break open a couple of eggs and fry them right on his front walk. Then I would have held up my own sign for all passersby to see: "Pray for Cooler Weather...Maybe that Will Help."

Well, guess what? After Oklahoma suffered through a summer season right out of Dante's Inferno, the locale where the "Honorable" Senator Inhofe spends the lion's share of his time is literally going through a year without a winter. We've had exactly one truly cold night so far here in the DC area during this non-winter of 2011-2012, just this past week when the temps dipped into the teens. Other than that we've had maybe three or four nights when it has been below 30 degrees, and the current 10-day forecast is for more of the same through mid-January.

Yesterday, the mercury soared all the way to 67 degrees, and it felt more like early May than January. Even more pertinent is a factoid I read just this past week that DC has not experienced a temperature reading below zero degrees Fahrenheit since 1994, which is astonishing since before that time it was not all that uncommon an occurrence during the coldest months of the year.

So what I want to know is what does Senator Inhofe's family have to say about this run of extremely warm weather we are now experiencing? The silence on that front has been deafening. If you're going to be assholes whenever there is a snowstorm, you're setting yourself up for this kind of criticism. Even at the time their little publicity stunt was monumentally stupid because despite the fact that DC experienced three major winter storms two years ago, each time the temperatures rebounded into the 30s and 40s almost immediately afterward rather than going into a deep freeze, which used to be the norm.

I guess it's true what Stephen Colbert told George Bush the Lesser years ago at the White House Correspondent's Dinner: reality does have a well known liberal bias.


Bonus: John Fogerty knows what's going on

What's the Matter with Oklahoma?

Damn near everything, as it turns out. This list of record breaking meteorological and geologic events is pretty eye-opening:

State records set this year have ranged from the lowest temperature (31 degrees below zero in Nowata in northeast Oklahoma) to snowfall in a 24-hour period (27 inches, also in Nowata) to the largest hail stone (a spiky, six-inch piece recovered in Gotebo, in southwest Oklahoma).

This year also produced the state's highest-ever-recorded surface wind speed (151 miles per hour near El Reno, outside of Oklahoma City) and biggest known earthquake (5.6 magnitude, breaking the 1956 record).

On Wednesday, Governor Mary Fallin declared a state of emergency for 20 counties because of earthquakes, tornadoes and severe storms.

The article could also have mentioned that this year was the hottest summer on record for the state.

The weather events, of course, are likely being exacerbated by climate change. But what about the earthquake?

The reason behind last week's earthquake in Oklahoma is still eluding scientists though they think it might have been connected to the growing use of hydraulic fracturing.

The process, commonly called 'fracking', pumps water into the earth in an effort to release natural gas and oil.

Scientists first noticed that small earthquakes in Oklahoma- with magnitudes between 1 and 2.8- near a fracking site in August, though they did nothing to stop its usage.

It sounds to me like Oklahoma has become ground zero of a perfect storm of natural events resulting from mankind's insatiable thirst for fossil fuels. But that's okay, ma. People who worry about shit like this are just a bunch of damn hippie socialists. Fire up the Suburban, we're goin' to the mall.


Bonus: They really need to change the lyrics of this song.

Friday Rant: Hey, Senator Inhofe, It's HOT Outside

There are a lot of cretinous scumbags running around in Washington these days, which is pretty obvious given just how fucked up things are. Few, however, are in a league with the utterly contemptible U.S. Senator from the great state of Oklahoma, James Inhofe, who is perhaps the leading voice of Climate Change denial in Congress. Here's a little tidbit from Wikipedia to give you an idea of what this alleged human being is all about:

In a 2006 interview with the Tulsa World newspaper, Inhofe said regarding the environmentalist movement, "It kind of reminds... I could use the Third Reich, the Big Lie... You say something over and over and over and over again, and people will believe it, and that's their [the environmentalists'] strategy... A hot summer has nothing to do with global warming.

In addition:

Inhofe had previously compared the United States Environmental Protection Agency to the Gestapo and he compared EPA Administrator Carol Browner to Tokyo Rose.

There he goes again with those completely inappropriate Nazi comparisons. Can we please, once and for all, put to rest the comparing of anything in modern American life to Hitler, the Nazis and/or the Holocaust? Because it is often painfully obvious that people who invoke such comparisons have little actual understanding of Nazi Germany beyond what they may have seen once on the History Channel.

Since Senator Inhofe clearly falls into this category, let me take a moment if I may to 'splain a little something to him. "The Big Lie" was in fact told in Nazi Germany by Josef Goebbles and his minions in the Propaganda Ministry, who had a total MONOPOLY on the entire German media. There was no ability to dissent from The Big Lie, and if you were foolish enough to try they hauled your ass away and threw you into a concentration camp. Just the fact that you, Senator Inhofe, are free to open your big fat ignorant yap about there supposedly being a "Big Lie," in connection to global warming without being bundled up and sent off to Guantanamo proves rather conclusively that IT DOESN'T EXIST.

(Deep breath) Sorry, I was getting a little hot under the collar there, if you'll pardon the pun. Back to the topic at hand.

So, according to the above quote by the "Honorable" Senator Inhofe, Global Warming doesn't cause a hot summer. Hmmm...I guess that would also mean that a cold or snowy winter wouldn't necessarily prove that Global Warming DOESN'T exist, either. Am I right? Only seems fair, doesn't it? So maybe Senator Inhofe would care to explain this little item that was published by CNSNews.com on February 10, 2010:

The family of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) had some fun at former Vice President and global warming spokesman Al Gore’s expense over the weekend after record snowfall blanketed the nation’s capital.

The family spent Saturday and Sunday building an igloo near the U.S. Capitol building, and the Oklahoma senator posted photos of their handiwork on his Facebook page. They added signs to the snow dwelling that read, “AL GORE’S NEW HOME!” and “HONK IF YOU (LOVE) GLOBAL WARMING.”

The Inhofe family, including the senator’s daughter and grandchildren, built the igloo after a large storm system dumped more than two feet of snow on the Washington, D.C. metro area on Friday and Saturday. The National Weather Service measured a record 32.4 inches at Dulles International Airport. Another 6 to 16 inches are predicted to fall on the capital on Tuesday and Wednesday.

HaHaHaHaHaHaHa - what a card that Senator Inhofe and his bunch of over privileged, snot-nose little progeny are. Don't they just sound like the kind of people it would be great fun to hang out and get an ice cream cone with?

Pay no attention to the fact that more moisture in the atmosphere, causing greater and more powerful storms, is one of the key indicators of Global Warming--nor to the fact that after each of those mammoth snowstorms, the temperatures in the DC-area rebounded into the 30s rather than plunging down into the teens and single digits like they used to do after such storms. Irrelevant trivia, all of that noise.

But hey, the troglodytes had their fun a year-and-a-half ago, and goody for them. Now it's time for me to have mine. This past week, I happened to run across a news item from the website The Extinction Protocol with this little quote:

Sweltering may have reached a new record last month, as Oklahoma racked up the country’s highest monthly average temperature ever. That’s the highest average temperature, for any month, for any state, associate Oklahoma state climatologist Gary McManus said. According to automated weather recording instruments, the state’s average for July was 89.1 degrees. That tops an average of 88.1 set in July 1954, McManus said.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Monday reported that last month was the fourth hottest July on record for the U.S. and that Texas and Oklahoma had their warmest months on record. “We’ve been beating temperature records left and right, from the 1930s Dust Bowl drought and the 1950s drought,” said McManus, who admitted that’s not the kind of record you put on a Chamber of Commerce promotion.

So to recap, Okalahoma's record for the highest monthly temperature ever recorded was just smashed by an astonishing one full degree Fahrenheit. And yet, there was nary a peep about it from the esteemed Senator Inhofe and his merry band of inbreds.

All of this almost makes me wish I lived in Oklahoma. During July I would have had this very strong desire to go find Senator Inhofe's house, wait until about four o'clock in the afternoon, and then break open a couple of eggs and fry them right on his front walk. Then I would have held up my own sign for all passersby to see: "Pray for Cooler Weather...Maybe that Will Help."