Bits…
I was going to lead with a really stupid photo, but that looked awful sitting on top of 9/11 Atrocity Man. So I’ll go with this mildly stupid photo and three quick observations on the news.
First, that story about the oil tanker hijacked by the Taliban in Afghanistan. They hijacked the boat [ummm…tanker TRUCK, I’m told], ran it aground [got it stuck in the mud] accidentally (I guess) and then told the locals they could have the fuel. Meanwhile, NATO called in an airstrike and we blowed it up. Bingo, dead civilians and a huge stink.
Ummmm…isn’t “salvaging” oil off a stolen tanker what we call looting? And isn’t the traditional response to looters in time of war to shoot on sight? What exactly is NATO apologizing for? Surely the lesson is for Afghanis: don’t steal shit, even if your buds in the Taliban say it’s okay.
Next, the ACORN story. I was shocked to watch the undercover video shot by Giles and O’Keefe. I had no idea the pair were a couple of clean-cut young white persons. Heartwarming. We’re surely in a better place than we knew, vis-à-vis race relations, if our mostly-of-color urban community organizers will cheerfully help a couple of middle-class white kids set up their house of prostitution and illegal immigrant child sex ring. Colorblind society, here we come!
Finally, that terror raid over the weekend. Did you (like me) breathe the teeny-tiniest sigh of relief to read the words al Qaeda in the story? As in, thank Christ it wasn’t some dimwitted bubba from our side out to water him some Tree of Liberty.
September 14, 2009 — 6:38 pm
Comments: 22
Time for your medication, honey
I’ve been avoiding writing about the NHS. Health care, in all its ghastly detail, is so effing boring. And I’ve never been sick in either country. You never really know a system until you’ve depended on it.
But I’m the only one in my circle who has lived with no insurance, and under Blue Cross and under the NHS, so I feel obliged to weigh in. Even if much of my experience of anyone’s healthcare system is as an interested bystander.
First off, the NHS isn’t that bad. The horror stories you read in the Daily Mail — beloved of the Drudge Report — represent the worst failures of the worst doctors in the worst hospitals viewed through the jaundiced lens of a sensationalist media. If you took the worst failures of the worst doctors in the worst hospitals in the US, I’m certain we could match them wrong-kidney for missed-diagnosis. The truth isn’t in the outliers. The NHS is pretty good for most people most of the time. HOWEVER…
The NHS is pretty good, but it’s not quite good enough. The real picture isn’t in individual horror stories, but broader averages. As Theodore Dalrymple says, “Britain’s hospitals have vastly higher rates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (a measurement of the cleanliness of hospitals) than those of any other European country; and survival rates from cancer and cardiovascular disease are the lowest in the western world, and lower even than among the worst-off Americans.” (Incidentally, Theodore Dalrymple — AKA Anthony Daniels, MD — is a god. Google him and read all 92,500 hits. Do it now, Mister!).
They aren’t actually proposing an NHS, so comparisons aren’t all that meaningful. Not all government-run health systems are the same; some work better than others. The NHS was a bottom-up restructuring of public health, for better or worse. What Washington hopes to do is impose a bunch of new bureaucracy on an existing public system. It’s less “reform” than a controlled demolition. Like being nibbled to death by ducks.
The current US system is already a de facto universal solution. The old have Medicare, the poor have Medicaid, the rich live like kings amongst us and most of the rest have insurance through work. As armybrat and Bob touch on in the comments to the previous thread, nobody gets turned away for acute care, regardless of their ability to pay (which is one reason the system is so expensive).
So the main problem we have is middle class people who are uninsured (or underinsured) and have an unexpected or pre-existing serious, chronic medical problem. How many people are in that spot? I don’t know, but it sure as HELL isn’t 47 million. And fixing it sure as HELL isn’t worth completely shattering what we have now.
Because the US has the best medical care in the world. We get hammered all the time with how “broken” our system is. It isn’t. We have fabulous medical care — innovative, experimental, enthusiastic and scientific as shit. It’s just that not everyone has sufficient access to it. That’s a much narrower problem than the one Washington wants to “solve”.
Theres a lot more to public health care, of course. The cost of our existing programs, necessary taxes, more intrusion in our private lives, “death panels”, malpractice law, illegals in the system. But I’ve already bored myself stiff. And I’d really rather spend my time Photoshopping Obama’s head where no Obama’s head has gone before.
September 8, 2009 — 6:22 pm
Comments: 15
Where sloganeering trumps dialogue
Anyone encountered the latest Facebook meme about healthcare? If you believe this, you’re supposed to post it as your status:
No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick.
An unfortunate number of my contacts have done so. Now, I realize the left doesn’t have a lock on bumpersticker politics. God knows I proudly wore my “My President is Charlton Heston” sticker through two administrations, one of them Republican. But the health care debate lends itself especially badly to pithy one-liners.
I mean, let’s try: nobody should be forced to pay more to get less. Or…nobody should accept a lower standard of care in order to insure illegal aliens.
And if you’re thinking, “but Weasel — the bill doesn’t insure illegal aliens!” you don’t read the same sites I do. In which case you’re probably not even here, because god knows I mostly preach to the choir. Obama is still talking about “47 million uninsured” and thus he damn well IS intending to cover illegal aliens, because they’re wrapped into that number.
If you haven’t read the various analyses of who makes up the uninsured, you really should. Or cut to Michael Ramirez’ excellent take (I really, really owe that man a fan letter). By his math:
18 million could afford to buy their own insurance but choose not to
12.6 million are illegal aliens
9.4 million are between jobs and only temporarily uninsured
8.4 million are 18-25 and don’t think it’s worth the cost for them
8 million are kids who are covered but haven’t been signed up
3.5 are eligible but haven’t signed themselves up
(adds up to more than 47 because the groups overlap)
And for this you’re going to jettison the most robust, innovative healthcare system EVAH? Fuck off and die, I’m thinking.
Oh, and don’t even ask. I mostly use Facebook to keep an eye on those paste-eating nose-pickers from High School…mostly to make sure nobody publishes any snapshots of my glorious mullet.
September 7, 2009 — 7:12 pm
Comments: 19
How low can he go?
Soooo! Are you enjoying the presidential approval implosion as much as I am? Of course you are, you sadistic bastiches!
I knew Obama’s numbers would fall — to think otherwise is to believe that somehow, someway this time socialism is gonna work! — but I expected the hurting to come later, once the IOU’s started rolling in. Ponzi schemes always work GREAT in the beginning.
But I didn’t count on The One being such an appallingly bad tactician.
How low will he go? Well, I ain’t starting another pool. Tins of haggis don’t grow on trees over here, you know.
I’m guessing Obama never drops as low as Bush’s bottom (hee hee…Bush’s bottom!). Poor ol’ Dubya had the whole weight of the not-quite-dead-yet media screaming about him for eight years.
And they certainly never admitted how unpopular Bush was with us, his base, for being such a squish RINO centrist. Bush was never a conservative; we stuck by him because of the war and duty and shit. Then the last few years, he stopped giving us anything. Didn’t defend his ideas, didn’t try to explain anything. Just hunkered in the bunker waiting it out.
So I don’t really know who approved of Bush by the end. Nice Midwestern ladies who felt bad for him and thought he needed a hug, I guess.
But here’s the thing: even if Obama’s numbers never go as low, they’re going down hard. With the full cartoon-anvil weight of an utter Christmas-afternoon bummer sammich. He was elected as a new and magical politician made of happy pink unicorns and pure awesome. As long as he kept his mouth shut and voted ‘present’, the spell held. But once it’s broken, it’s broken forever. The moment he had to climb down with us mere mortals and do something…
…popcorn?
September 3, 2009 — 7:36 pm
Comments: 13
PleaseOHpleaseOHPLEASE rename the health care bill after Ted!!!
Ohhhh…that would keep me busy for WEEKS.
He liked a good Chappaquiddick joke, did he? Let’s send him out with some!
Slogans? Anyone?
August 28, 2009 — 10:51 am
Comments: 37
Rot in hell, monster
For once in my miserable life, I wasn’t going to go there. Though there are so very many things to dislike about Ted Kennedy, I knew other people would mention them all today, and I don’t need the karma. But nobody’s quite nailed the thing that bugs me.
It’s the way Mary Jo Kopechne died. I mean her literal, actual last moments on earth. She almost certainly lived for some time on air trapped in the car. Maybe hours. The diver who recovered her body found her kneeling with her hands against the seat and her head in an air pocket.
Hours. In the pitch dark and cold and wet, breathing up her last, stale, warming scraps of air. Waiting for help to come. Help would surely come, wouldn’t it?
Ach. Makes sweat prickle along my hairline. I got stuck under an overturned canoe once, trapped (ironically) by my life preserver. I had an air pocket, too. It started to taste very bad very fast. My breath sounded like it was blaring out of a PA system into a high school gymnasium. I was under there five minutes, max, and I still have dreams.
No, I doubt Kennedy left knowing she was trapped alive. But I don’t see any evidence that he was particularly troubled by the idea, then or ever. He walked away from the accident and never reported it. Pulled a few strings, observed a few formalities and got off with a six-month suspension of his driver’s license.
Not five years later, Kennedy was screaming “is there one system of justice for the average citizen and another system for the high and mighty?” over Richard Nixon’s pardon for…whatever it was Nixon was supposed to have done. Without, apparently, feeling the slightest twinge of irony or embarrassment. Or anguish. Or self-awareness.
He named his dog Splash and wrote a book about him. He didn’t seem to have any idea there were subjects he should avoid. Or remorse he ought to feel. And nobody around him saw fit to tell him. Not that you can order someone to feel shame.
To them, Chappaquiddick was an unfortunate accident that happened to Ted Kennedy’s presidential hopes.
That’s monstrous, and all the good-deed-doing in the world can’t make it anything else.
August 27, 2009 — 7:25 pm
Comments: 36
Don’t click the link. Seriously.
I love this picture of the president. It cracks me up every time Hot Air or somebody runs a story under it, because it reminds me so much of this guy.
So you know what I had to do, right? You know what’s coming, right? No, I’m going to make you click a link. You know what you’re going to see when you click the link, so don’t come crying to me if you click the link and then you’re all, like, “golly, Weasel, how could you be so rotten and horrible and mean?” Because all you have to do is not click the link and you won’t see the picture. Simple, really. Don’t do it. I’m begging you.
I mean it.
Srsly.
August 20, 2009 — 4:41 pm
Comments: 21
You gotta read the fine print…
We stopped at a tiny cafe for a burger last week and I picked up this flyer. Other than the name of the cafe (which is sponsoring this, I guess) and the address, this is the whole thing. High-larious.
Speaking of fine print, I was trying to do a graphic about Obamacare when I caught that bug on Friday. It was going to be the Hammer of Reform descending upon the Sore Toe of Health Care. I’d found a nice example of a hammer and I was browsing a selection of toes. When I clicked on one, all hell broke loose.
That’s right. I caught a computer virus on a picture of somebody’s big toe. You’d think for all the grief I went through, it could’ve been some hentai or a filthy limerick or something.
August 10, 2009 — 7:09 pm
Comments: 12
And that’s when Sgt Crowley began to suspect a setup…
A bit of graphical silliness to end the week. Have a good weekend, everyone!
July 31, 2009 — 5:39 pm
Comments: 8
Things got a little tetchy ’round the old Badger place…
I’m doing my taxes, and Uncle B is…well, he is what he is. Can’t change that, can we? (Photo via Lipstick’s drunken badger link).
Yeah, filing from a foreign country, I automagically get an extension until…well, okay, I’m still late. But they owe me, so they don’t usually care. And I’m damned if I can find Form 998 and some other shit. I was going to do this one on my ownsome, but I finally broke down and crawled back to TurboTax.
Which, I have to say, wasn’t MUCH easier. Though they acknowledge foreign filers in a superficial way, they won’t accept my UK phone number, address or postal code. In the end, I had to use the address of the house I sold in Rhode Island just to get the forms to print out (no e-filing from out of the country).
Do you know, I’m going to have to file with Uncle Sam for the rest of my days? I’m unlikely to make enough money that I owe anything (over and above what I pay Her Maj, that is), but I have to file anyway. The theory is, the only reason anyone would possibly leave the good ol’ US of A is to evade taxes, so they have to keep asquint on us shifty overseas types.
Generally speaking, I’m as much of a rah-rah, flag-humping, pie-loving, jingoistic, obnoxiously patriotic American as the next weasel, but this fills me with meh.
July 14, 2009 — 7:02 pm
Comments: 14