Picture Of The Day

A Pac-Man-shaped eye hemorrhage. This was one of the first video games I ever played on my Atari 2600 as a kid. Looking back on it now the blocky graphics and annoying sound effects were so laughable by today's video game system standards, yet I played it for hours at a time. The sad thing is that I was never really very good at it. Those ghosts got really fast after a few levels.

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American Power And "Epic Fail!": An Observation

I've noticed a somewhat amusing trend lately over at my conservative counterpart Donald Douglas' site American Power: The extreme overuse of the term "Epic Fail" to describe anything and everything he disagrees with, particularly in the exclamatory sense. I've addressed his use of the term before but recently the problem has gotten much worse. You know that uncomfortable feeling you get when an older female relative tries to dress as if she's still in her 20's and she just ends up looking sadly pathetic and tragically unhip? That's how I feel watching an uptight, fifty year old neoconservative repeatedly beat that Internet slang term into the virtual ground.

I also find it somewhat reminiscent of everyone I knew as a kid during the 1980's calling everything under the sun "Awesome!" or of Sean Hannity declaring everything the Democrats do or say "Unbelievable!". You pretty much sap these terms of all their rhetorical strength and meaning when you overuse them to the point of becoming a catchphrase. Or to quote The Princess Bride:

Vizzini: HE DIDN'T FALL? INCONCEIVABLE!

Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

For now I'll overlook the linguistic irony of failing to use the term "Fail" correctly and offer some free advice: Stick with "Get bent" or "Jinkies" or "Keep on truckin" or whatever else you guys used to say back in the day Don, and leave the use of Internet slang terms to younger generations. You'll sound somewhat smarter when you write and hopefully your kids might be a little less embarrassed about going out into public with you. Can you dig it, jive turkey?

[Update: On an extremely tangential note, while unsuccessfully searching for a quality clip of the movie lines I quoted above I came across this Star Wars-ified reimagining of one of the best sword fights in movie history. Enjoy:
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Something Ignorant Someone Else Said

“People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.” -Investor's Business Daily

Stephen Hawking is a British citizen and has resided within the United Kingdom his entire life. He is 67 years old and has lived with Lou Gehrig's disease for almost fifty years under the care of the National Health Service. The meme of Palin's "death panels" is apparently alive and well across the pond.

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Congress Wants More Private Jets

This is one of many reasons the American Congress consistently has such low approval ratings:

Several Republicans and some Democrats are coming out against the recent padding of an order for planes that would ferry members of Congress.

The Wall Street Journal said Monday that the $550 million plan would purchase eight Boeing and Gulfstream jets to replace aging planes currently in use.

The newspaper said the Obama administration had planned to buy four planes at a cost of $220 million; however some House lawmakers bumped the order up to eight planes even though the Pentagon contends it doesn't need that many...

"It is evidence that some of the cynicism about Washington is well placed," said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., "People get out of touch and they spend money like it is Monopoly money."

This is obviously a bipartisan problem endemic to both sides of the political aisle. These people do not live in the same reality as you and I. Governance has become so much about the free perks and fringe benefits these self-important individuals can manage to wrangle for themselves from the system, it's no wonder they can't come together on a viable health care reform plan. Letting them vote on giving themselves raises is bad enough but nonchalantly doubling the number of private jets they can have is absolutely beyond the pale. If the Democrats lose ground in 2010 it will be because of irresponsible bullshit like this.

The World Of Seinfeld

As a huge Seinfeld fan I felt compelled to post this relationship graphic if only to depict the vastness of the web made up of unique and entertaining characters that show created over the years but I have to admit that without photos of the faces to go with the names I find it fairly useless as any kind of reference tool (click image to enlarge). A chart about nothing, as it were. Giddyup.

The Effects Of Rationing Health Care

A Daily Dish reader relates a recent bout with the insurance industry:

Our twins are preemies - born at 34 weeks. While there were no complications, it was cold-and-flu season when we brought them home. Their health was a very precarious affair. We were under strict orders to keep them in the house, to limit visitors, to always wash hands after coming back into the house, etc. When we went to the pediatrician, she scheduled us on on a Saturday afternoon when the office was empty in order to minimize potential contact with other sick children.

At our first visit, she recommended a vaccination for a common virus. This is a virus that everybody gets, and is generally mild. With preemies, however, it can be quite severe and commonly results in hospitalization and even death. It should have been done in the NICU, but it had been missed. She scheduled us for the following week. She had to order the vax since it was quite expensive (a total of about $16K.) Two days beforehand, she notified us that our insurance company had denied the coverage as too expensive.

We then proceeded to try to get the insurance company to cover the vax. Our doctor called. The NICU doctor called. We had conference calls with them and the insurance company. We worked up the chain of command at the insurance company. We had it done and paid out of pocket. What choice did we have? Finally, we pulled in a specialist and managed to get high enough up the chain to get it approved. By this point, it had become something of a crusade for the various doctors involved. Two weeks later, my company's health insurance premiums went up 30%.

Coincidence? Who knows. But when people talk about rationing under socialized medicine, I always think, "You know, we have rationing now, it just hasn't effected you. Yet." And mine was one of those highly-vaunted "gold-plated" private health insurance policies.

I personally am very fortunate in that I barely ever get sick and take no prescription medications so I rarely have cause to visit any kind of doctor. Subsequently, I've never had to go toe-to-toe with an insurance company in a situation wherein the very nature of the battle stacks the odds squarely against the patient but I nevertheless empathize with people in situations like this one. Their story is neither remarkable nor uncommon yet this is the manner in which the current health insurance system has been structured to operate since the introduction of the HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) Act 0f 1973 by then President Richard Nixon.

I don't know about you but having to come up with $16,000 without warning to ensure the safety of my (nonexistent) children's lives would be a fairly large yet obviously unavoidable speed bump in my life. Before the housing collapse and current economic downturn of the last couple years illness and/or medical bills contributed to nearly two thirds of all bankruptcies in this country. If something like this can so easily happen to someone with a "gold-plated" private health insurance policy then what can we expect for those 45 million of us without health care of any type whatsoever? As I always say, I don't know enough about this issue to claim to have all the answers but I do know that something definitely has to change. The lives of millions of Americans are depending on it.

Picture Of The Day

Bill Clinton, International Man of McDonald's. I know that I'm a few days late on this but congrats just the same to the former president on his recent successful mission to bring back the two American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling who were being held by Nutball-in-Chief Kim Jong-il in North Korea. Now while it's pretty safe to say that almost everyone in our country would agree that this is a good thing, as usual FOX News knows that during a Democratic administration everything has its negative side (which they will focus on almost exclusively). Jon Stewart recaps the event with "William Jefferson Airplane":

Good call, FOX. If we'd just let these two Americans languish in their North Korean prison it would have made Kim Jong-il look like a real asshole. Hopefully, he might have even decided to starve or torture them as well. Think of what a great public relations coup we would have had against him then! America. Fuck yeah, I guess...

Something Someone Else Said

"What he has achieved in his 48 years is simply astounding. Consider the odds. The United States is a nation of more than 300 million citizens. Only one person is currently the Commander in Chief. That man had no fatherly guidance, is of mixed race, and had no family connections to guide him into the world of national politics. That adds up to one simple truth that every American child should be told: 'If Barack Obama can become the President of the United States, then whatever dream you may have can happen in your life." -Bill O'Reilly, sounding surprisingly fair and balanced. I'm speechless.

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Palin Uses Trig As A Political Prop...Again

Why is the liberal media always making Sarah Palin's family an issue when discussing politics? Oh wait, they're not the ones doing it. Again:

Sarah Palin is accusing President Obama’s health care plan of looking to create a “death panel” that would weigh whether her parents or son Trig were “worthy of health care.”

"Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!" the former Alaska governor said in a post on her Facebook page late Friday.

In one of her first public policy statements since leaving office late last month, Palin discounted the administration’s view that the president’s plan would cut health care costs. The only path to lower costs, she said, was less treatment.

"And who will suffer the most when they ration care?" she wrote. "The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

Man, that kid just can't catch a break, can he? But she's absolutely correct: A system that forces the elderly and the handicapped to stand before a "death panel" and prove their worth to society in order to prevent their own demise at the hands of the state would indeed be downright evil, fascist even. So it's a good thing that Obama is not proposing anything even remotely similar to this dubious Logan's Run fantasy, and the fact that Palin and so many others on the right are claiming that he is indicates their level of respect for the intelligence of the average American (read: seemingly nonexistent). Of course there are organizations in this country that have such panels and their singular purpose is to decide who is deserving of health care coverage and who is not: They're called insurance companies.

Now many on the right have been complaining that their objections and cries of dissent against Obama's health care plan have been marginalized and even dismissed outright as illegitimate and they do have a point. There are several aspects of the plan which are rather vague and even some which are ill conceived and each of these aspects should be openly debated and discussed in order to arrive at the best solution for all Americans. But it has been their near unanimous tactic of also closely aligning themselves with the purveyors of this type of over the top hyperbole along with the increasingly erratic town hall shouters that has caused them to be portrayed in this manner. I don't mind listening to a rational argument that I disagree with but when the extremists are the ones driving your side of the debate you will inevitably lose respect and legitimacy:


Now before anyone says anything, no: I 'm not trying to equate health care opponents with the KKK or saying that they're all racists (although it's a fairly good bet that a small proportion of them probably are, because of age, geography, political affiliation or all three). My point is that all of this seemingly exaggerated and misplaced rage on the part of several real crazies is only hurting their cause with mainstream America.

Here's some video from a Patients First bus tour event in Pueblo, CO. Patients First is a project of Americans for Prosperity, one of the key conservative interest groups helping to organize the recent town hall protests:


Of course end of life counseling isn't going to make you attend a counseling session with "some federal airhead" or make you draw up a living will, it will only give you the option of doing those things if you so choose and it will even pay the tab for that service. In fact, the smartest thing that guy said was not to believe anything he said (which I find is good advice even when you're not dealing with wingnuts). But the most telling thing he said was, "Adolf Hitler issued six million end of life orders--he called his program the final solution. I kind of wonder what we're going to call ours." Godwin called, guy: You just lost the debate. As did these people:
One of the most predictable conservative responses to posting pictures like these is, "Well a bunch of liberals called Bush a Nazi all the time during most of the Iraq war..." They're right, and every one of those liberals was/is just as stupid and unworthy of respect as these people are today. That law applies to everyone equally. So continue to teabag each other and shout down your congressmen with obviously transparent fear mongering and lies, Republicans. You're only making our points for us and it gives me some free time to take my Grandma to the recycling cen...I mean, the retirement home. I'm sure gonna miss her.

Busy, Busy, Busy

No time for blogging today. I speculatively bought some clunkers that I'm going to turn in for cash, and then I'm going to do the same thing with my old, useless grandmother. I'm going to use the cash I make to buy a new iPhone. Thank you President Obama, for a health care plan that finally makes sense: euthanizing the elderly involuntarily. That's pretty much the entire plan, right? Obama! Nihilism! Wooo!