| So who's selling the "I'm NOT with Stupak" t-shirts? |
[Nov. 11th, 2009|09:32 pm] |
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Anyone who didn't see reproductive choice rights as the last roadblock to health care reform coming months ago wasn't paying attention, and learned nothing from the previous "administration's" existence. |
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| Oral sex in health care |
[Oct. 14th, 2009|04:19 am] |
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So the Baucus committee approves a bill that is nothing more and nothing less than a blowjob to the insurance industry, and the insurance industry comes out in response with a paid "research" report that says: "You're still not SUCKING hard ENOUGH! But don't worry, with this bill, we'll be able to keep a secure enough grasp on your ears to make you take us deeper."
If you can't recognize extortion on a universal scale when you see it, you simply don't deserve to hold any elected office. You might not even deserve to be allowed to vote for them.
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| An O... M... F... G...! moment on Aerolith... |
[Aug. 29th, 2009|08:18 am] |
... or why Bill O'Reilly should never thumb thru the early pages of the "Official Tournament and Club Word List."
Please excuse this rare Scrabble-related post, but it wouldn't be appropriate to mention this in the way I will mention it in another forum, namely, c-g-p.
I've been doing the nines in the daily challenges at Aerolith for some time now. And for a few weeks, I've also started doing the tens. Not as part of any effort to actually learn them the way ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) drbing has, but just to try to tighten my mental ability to hold the rack in my head accurately enough to shuffle it mentally and find answers, which I have noted is declining severely the last 3 to 5 years or so, since I have not been playing live Anagrams games with good players for about that same length of time the way I used to before.
So this past Wednesday, one of the racks I came across in the Daily 10's was ABCCCKKLOS. It was interesting to me that I had not yet seen this rack in the much longer time I've been doing the Daily 9's sans the S; I guess with 4 intermediate value tiles, only 2 vowels, and both blanks required, it desperately needed the S to raise its probability high enough to be worthwhile as a quiz item. And the obvious answer struck me as being unlikely to be one word, so before trying it, I assumed it had to be something I was even less confident of, and tried typing CLOCKBACKS*, BACKCLOCKS* and COCKBLACKS* first. Wrong. The obvious answer is Rush Limbaugh's most feared and hated image, and it's the right answer. Those with better grounding in English etymology than Limbaugh could possibly possess would rightly guess at the definition, yes, it's a bird, the black grouse. WHITECOCK* is not in the dickshunary, and in fact, this one is the only compound single word that combines COCK with any individual color. Who knew? Probably only drbing and Nigel Richards.
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| "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" |
[Aug. 20th, 2009|08:11 am] |
When Barney Frank compared this nitwit to a dining room table, he earned whatever last drop of admiration I didn't already have for him. If I had been there, and if I was gay, I'd have offered him sexual gratification on the spot.
The clips that were played on "Hardball", "Countdown" and "Rachel Maddow" all focused on the longer context of the woman's question and snipped parts of Frank's answer. Larry King instead snipped most of the question, but I'm glad he played the unedited version of the answer, at this TinyURLed YouTube link:
http://tinyurl.com/m2bzth
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| As seen on TV |
[Aug. 11th, 2009|10:28 pm] |
I hope/am afraid I'm having hallucinations. I'd swear I just saw a commercial on MSNBC for ... wait for it...
new and improved name badges, by Post-It! Next they'll be making commercials for those self-stick personalized return address snail labels that we all get for free by opening our charitable solicitation snail spam. |
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| Let's not skip Gates |
[Jul. 29th, 2009|05:13 am] |
Okay, everyone knows Glenn Beck is a jerk, so when he labels Pres. Obama a racist, we shouldn't be at all surprised.
Obama did speak too quickly when he said the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He was swept up by his personal connection to the gravity of the issue that Professor Gates attempted to shine a light on, and he quickly realized his error, and revised his position to be less inflammatory.
What shocked and appalled me was Lawrence O'Donnell's guest host stint on "Countdown" Monday night, when he accused Sgt. Crowley of false arrest. He either missed or dismissed a very pertinent detail of the story in order to draw the conclusion which he ranted for 10 or 15 minutes. I don't recall exactly where I read or heard it, but part of Crowley's account of the incident was that he heard Gates making a phone call that was intended to use his prominence in the community to exert influence over the actions or employment status of the officer. Threatening behavior does not have to be physical in nature, it can also be psychologically coercive. If I was Sgt. Crowley, I would have found a good deal more serious crime to charge Gates with than "disorderly conduct." If the alleged phone call did indeed take place, Prof. Gates definitely committed a crime.
It's fine to give people the benefit of the doubt, but that's a two-way street -- if Prof. Gates is entitled to it, so is Sgt. Crowley. O'Donnell claimed that the tapes police released of the complaining neighbor's call and Sgt. Crowley's communications with dispatch from the scene demonstrated that Crowley was wrong. On the contrary, they demonstrated clearly that Gates' behavior was inappropriate. The tapes confirmed that he assumed racial profiling was the excuse for a cop appearing at his door where none occurred, either on the part of the neighbor or the police. Gates is too smart a guy to be randomly or even unintentionally uncooperative with a public servant who has the responsibility of protecting his property. He knew exactly what he was doing, but he misjudged what everyone else's motivations were. Gates saw an opportunity for his pet issue to be aired and acted in a way designed to draw the officer into a confrontation that he could publicize, in a situation where his issue was not actually relevant. Even the black officer who accompanied Sgt. Crowley confirmed that Crowley acted appropriately and professionally. Gates should have known better, and I expect sounder journalism from O'Donnell. [Maybe the "Countdown" set just brings out the oral foam in everyone who sits there; tho surprisingly enough, Howard Dean was fairly sedate there Tuesday night, but that could have just been caused by concentrating too hard on reading the teleprompter, as
opposed to the freewheeling responses he can give when he's the interviewee.]
Finally, arresting Gates was not stupid. It was clear that Gates was intending to accuse the officer of a wrong that might negatively impact the officer's job. In the moment, Gates' lack of cooperation passively, and his phone call aggressively undermined the authority of a law enforcement agent. Under those circumstances, the officer has to make an arrest for his own protection, because the arrest ensures that as much evidence as possible will become part of the public record. The arrest is a form of counter-complaint, which says "I'm not going to stand back with a guilty look on my face for doing my job; I'm not going to be cowed, and I will have the record to support me if you're arrogant enough to hit me with a civil suit or a criminal charge of civil rights violation." *Not* arresting Gates would be an admission of guilt, and an opening to a charge of harassment. If the police department does not wish to pursue the charge against Gates, that's its prerogative; but at the same time that it's bending over backwards to maintain "community relations" it sets a bad precedent -- it says the department is willing to admit guilt on behalf of the officer, and it's willing to cave in to people with some sort of elevated social status behaving badly. In the long run, that will make it harder for the department to do its job effectively.
So there are a lot of people who have been wrong in this case to one degree or another, Gates, the Cambridge Police Department, Obama, O'Donnell, many other "liberal" TV commentators, everyone except Sgt. Crowley!
[Edited 7-29-09 8:10pm: corrected "disturbing the peace" to "disorderly conduct"; corrected "Officer" to "Sgt."] |
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| Facebook |
[Jul. 22nd, 2009|11:20 pm] |
I am *not* a Facebook kind of animal. It's just more noise than I need in my life.
If you've tried to add me as a friend there in the few days since I finally gave in and got an account, and I ignored your request, don't be insulted. I'm ignoring nearly everyone there. I have no intent of posting any content there, ever. I don't even own a cellphone or a stand-alone digital camera or a webcam. I only signed up so I could see pictures posted by a very few people. It's no great dishonor if you're not one of them. Given that it's me, also don't assume any great honor if you are one of them. |
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| Defending Palin... |
[Jul. 22nd, 2009|02:24 am] |
... yes, *I* am going to do it.
So an independent ethics investigator finds that Sarah Palin has done something illegal, but it's only illegal because by some quirk, her own state has a law against it which doesn't seem to exist most other places. In all fairness, change the law, and leave the moron alone. This woman should only be in the news when she actually does something that *everyone* agrees is wrong, and evil, or at the least, dangerously stupid. Otherwise, the less we hear of her, the better. Altho, it looks like her trailer trash "cousin" is all over the "news" channels for interrupting a Delaware pol's town hall to shriek about Obama's birth certificate. So the Palin "mind"set is not going away just because she is. |
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| Steeleing health care |
[Jul. 21st, 2009|01:15 am] |
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/ns/msnbc_tv-hardball_with_chris_matthews#32014153
Chris Matthews interviewed RNC chairman Michael Steele about a variety of issues in a segment that lasted 10:54.
About 9:00 into it, they start to address the question of whether Steele considers Pres. Obama's health care plan socialism.
At 10:15 comes the big quote, it's: "...taking over the means of production with respect to the health care and this economy".
So what he'd rather do is continue to allow the insurance industry who produce nothing but paperwork, misery and death, to take over the means of production instead of have the government return it to those who actually provide health care.
I want just one elected official to step up to the plate and tell it straight: a "public option" is not acceptable, nothing less than "single payer" is going stop this handcart to hell; any "choice" that allows insurance companies to continue to have anything whatsoever to do with the distribution of health care in this or any other country will simply continue robbing and killing people. Single payer (the federal government) provides health care for everyone, greatly reduces paperwork, (because the only thing that needs to be determined by completing a form is whether care sought is necessary or elective, and those who are electing certain procedures damn well better be prepared to pay for it themselves instead of burdening taxpayers in real need with paying their bill as well), and pays for itself. The provider gets paid by a sane tax structure. The patient gets care they need, helping the patient to be a productive member of the work force, employment goes up, productivity goes up, government gets more taxes from wage earners, and from their employers who are more profitable from their productivity. It's a self-sustaining process instead of a drain on everyone. And it's literally insane to see it any other way. Obama's plan, shamefully, doesn't come close to doing all that, but maybe it's a start in that direction.
We've become a nation of people inured to throwing money down huge holes in the ground (Enron, AIG, Philip Morris, Halliburton), and thanking and lauding the holes for having the American inventiveness and entrepreneurial spirit to accept it. Enough!
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| Gnlsmo Franco epilogue |
[Jun. 26th, 2009|12:27 pm] |
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Alright, this is ridiculous and disgusting. ESPN2 in the middle of their daylong Wimbledon coverage has to talk about how the local newspaper headlines are all about Michael Jackson, and what the tennis players at the tournament had to say and Twitter about it and how many times Serena Williams met him! This is the absolute limit of stupidity, irrelevancy and bad taste. You're covering a tennis tournament, stick to the damn tennis! If I wanted to hear about MJ, I'd be watching the freakin' "news" channels, not the tennis. F**K! |
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| Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead and I'm getting a little sick and tired myself |
[Jun. 26th, 2009|07:09 am] |
Does nobody in the news/journalism industry have any respect for their profession anymore?
Ever since O.J. Simpson took a white SUV for a long ride with cops behind him, the assumption of news editors every-freakin'-where in America, and I suppose other countries as well, has been that the public desires to consume nonstop 24-hour coverage of hyped sensationalist irrelevancies in lieu of the various other events happening on the same day that actually affect our real lives and those of thousands and/or millions in direct ways, rather than as bemused but disconnected spectators.
If you want to suggest that many people will be inclined to dredge up memories of Michael Jackson when he was an entertainer upon hearing of his sudden "premature" death, and that that justifies reviewing his life for all of us, yeah, there's some validity to that. But it doesn't require nonstop 24-hour rehash. 20 minutes out of every 2 hours for half a day would be more than enough of an obituary to be spoken on the TV and radio. The stories will be available on our web browsers or in newspapers and magazines whenever we have a few minutes to spare to read them for a very long time, if we really feel a need to. And in the grand scheme of things, there are enough other things of genuine import still happening today and for the next days or weeks or months that affect real people in real ways that acknowledging that Michael will still be dead tomorrow and the next day and the day after that and letting the story subside until something new yet equally unimportant happens (like an autopsy report) is the right thing to do to leave time in broadcast schedules to report REAL freakin' NEWS.
Maybe I'm a little biased about this story because I only see the reality of the sad, physically and mentally decayed phantasm Mr. Jackson devolved into overwhelming the bright light that was his once immense talent. To try to remember him happily as the singing and dancing superstar is to buy a fantasy and ignore the dangerous freak that replaced it. It doesn't work -- not for his ex-wives, not for his children, and not for the children of other parents who were preyed upon by him. I don't want to keep thinking about him because it just makes me mad what he could have been instead of what he was, and it ought to do the same to the rest of us. His life is over; it was not a happy good life, he's better off dead, lay him to rest already. 40 million Iranians don't give a shit that Michael Jackson is dead, or that Farrah Fawcett is dead; the real story is that Neda Soltan is dead and democracy is being killed in Iran at the very moment that all this nonsense is the only stuff being reported, and those stories have a closer connection to more Americans! (not just Iranians) than Michael Jackson has had in close to two decades. Iranians can't spare the time that their news is shuttered from us by this "event".
News editors have no business letting Michael's death overshadow hypocrisy in Congress on health care reform, and hypocrisy among elected officials on aspects of family values that they trumpet as the foundation of their political platform, and continued domestic terrorism and media commentators' disingenuously barely veiled exhortation of same. We didn't have that whole day and counting to spare for nothing but Michael, that's just plain irresponsible. I expect crap like that to happen on Fox, or CNN or commercial broadcast networks, but when I tune in to MSNBC and it's there too, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna watch it anymore. Someone please let me know when they start talking about something relevant again. |
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| Public health care costs |
[Jun. 23rd, 2009|11:14 pm] |
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I'm really worried that the "Cialis option" is going to result in rising Texas and the rationing of erections to the rest of US. |
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| Specter vs. Smersh |
[Apr. 29th, 2009|03:03 am] |
So there's this sorta good, mostly almost earthshaking news that Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) will run for reelection as a Democrat next year, and caucus with the Democrats in the Senate from now on. And the talking heads are accusing him of being opportunistic, self-interested, self-promoting, disloyal, untrustworthy, you name it. I don't buy any of those labels.
The party whose standard he bore into office has already told him they will support someone else in a primary against him, so who the hell is being disloyal? Clearly, the Repugnican party has deserted Specter, not the other way around.
Untrustworthy? I don't think so. The man will continue to vote with his somewhat independent conscience as a Democrat, the same conscience that made him a more-acceptable-than-average Republican for three decades.
Opportunistic, self-interested, self-promoting? Senator Specter likes his job, and his state has made it clear they like how he does it for them. He doesn't need that particular job, he can take any job he wants at this point, he's earned a hell of a lot of respect; or he can enjoy a well-earned retirement. But he wants to keep it, not for himself, but because he honestly believes he's the best man to do it in his state, and I think he's probably right. Would any other Democrat beat Pat Toomey in a general election? In the current political climate, of course! But would any other Democrat be as qualified? Why should Specter desert the people of Pennsylvania just because a party that has dwindled to little more than its lunatic fringe has both alienated and virtually expelled him? He has some very important issues he'd like to address with his continued service, and he'd likely be a stronger force for getting action on them than some greenhorn but lifelong Dem. He *should* take the sure route to reelection instead of the sure route to the private sector, and both Pennsylvania and the nation need him to.
Welcome to the party that gives a shit about the real world, Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA). |
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| Rick Warren, Mike Huckabee, Mormons, Jeremiah Wright, John Hagee etc. |
[Dec. 19th, 2008|10:55 pm] |
Does there really have to be any invocation at all at a ceremony celebrating a secular government?
There's hardly a preacher out there these days who is not capable of saying something that somebody is going to find offensive, so why not stop inviting all of them? I mean, isn't it about time our leadership recognized and did the obvious? Just stop implying that our democratically-elected-by-Constitutional-mandate government is still willing to tolerate association on any level with any entity that espouses distrust, fear, hatred and exclusion to any degree, in any form. |
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| Unthreatening shoe throws |
[Dec. 15th, 2008|04:56 am] |
Okay, this is absolutely priceless footage.
http://video.ap.org/?t=By%20Section/U.S.&p=&f=MAQUI&g=1214dv_bush_shoe
Of course Bush didn't feel threatened, the guy had lousy aim, shoulda gotten Rothlisberger or Randy Johnson (of pigeon-exploding fame), or Imelda Marcos (probably knew shoes well enough to be intimate with their aerodynamic tendencies) to stand in for him.
This poor journalist probably got beaten up pretty badly for his effort -- anyone who tried that here would surely get shot several times. I'd like to shake his hand, give him a medal of valor, and kiss his hairy, smelly, unshod feet.
Keep an eye on Nouri al-Maliki in the video. Notice that altho he puts his hand out to try to block the second shoe, he barely moved a muscle when the first one came flying. Also worth noting that the journalists surrounding the thrower made no attempt to stop the second throw when they knew who threw the first one.
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| The cynic revisited |
[Nov. 16th, 2008|02:11 am] |
Stories like this are why I don't take anything enough for granted to celebrate prematurely: "Election spurs 'hundreds' of race threats, crimes"
And the sickest item cited is: "_Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted "assassinate Obama," a district official said."
Kids that young didn't learn that much hate in their school, this comes from parents who are so dangerously stupid they should have been sterilized.
The second sickest is that two of the items occurred in Maine, a state that Obama carried by a rather large margin, 58-41%!! OTOH, maybe it was predictable, in light of their U.S. Senate race being carried by a Republican by an even larger margin 61-39%. :-((
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