Wait…we voted for whut??
The squishy middle elected Obama, because the squishy middle elects all our presidents (us partisans on the outer banks, we just decide how big or small the margin is).
The squishy middle is watching that nice young man they voted for morph into a crabby old party pooper.
Oh, this is fun…
September 16, 2009 — 7:54 pm
Comments: 12
Round three: IT’S ON!
Well! Mongo won round two with Patrick Swayze, and the precious tin of haggis shall be hers! That’s right: hers. Mongo is apparently some kind of girl…with, like, boobies and everything.
Huh.
Kennedy and Swayze were pretty low-hanging fruit. Round three should get a little harder; I don’t recall any previous picks that had quite so tenuous a hold on oxygen consumption.
So, sing out for round three! Celebrities of any kind; you don’t have to wish ’em dead (but it helps!). First come, first served. Newbies welcome. One pick per customer. Poaching other people’s good picks from previous rounds is positively encouraged. This isn’t tiddly-winks, folks — it’s Dead Pool!
(Fabulous prize TBA).
UPDATE: and this round’s fabulous prize is…
ZOMG, this is going to be good!
September 15, 2009 — 6:20 pm
Comments: 106
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
Not going to do a September 11 post this time
I remember. You bet I do. But the date just makes me feel sullen and angry, and too many of the memorials only make that worse.
We let those poor bastards down terribly, and it all feels unresolved and unavenged. Too much hand-wringing, not enough smiting.
Unfinished.
September 11, 2009 — 5:38 pm
Comments: 20
A little light housekeeping
I was once a very conscientious little weasel. I scanned my logs and followed up people who linked to me. I checked out the blogs of my commenters. I read my way down my blogroll religiously. Now I no longer sit behind a desk eight to ten hours a day, surfing the ‘tubes and siphoning away precious resources from my employer, I am not nearly so well read.
Pity. I enjoyed you people.
Anyhow, there are some new commenters since the last time I updated my (pain-in-the-ass to update) blogroll. To reiterate the standing offer — anybody wants a link, just say the word. Here or in email or whatever. You don’t have to be a regular or anything. As long as your blog isn’t a grossly obvious topical mismatch, I will
give you that sweet, sweet linkage.
That’s just the kind of craven suckup I am.
September 10, 2009 — 5:54 pm
Comments: 31
New stove!
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. It looks exactly like the old stove. Ahhh, but the old stove was completely buggered. The doors didn’t fit, the vents didn’t work properly. It was basically an open fire in a metal box.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go watch Obama’s healthcare speech to Congress.
Hahahaha…psych!
September 9, 2009 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 17
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
Rumbled.
Well, that’s just swell. Using his awesome Google-fu, my nephew has discovered my blog. That means I can’t say bad words any more. Like shit. Or nipple. Or pillock. It’s a fambly friendly weasel from now on.
So, we took the gang out to our favorite chish and fips shop on Tuesday. I was twiddling the silverware waiting for our order (as you do) and I discovered my knife and fork were moderately magnetized. We went around the table, and all of our silverware was magnetized. Can any Professor Smartypants out there tell me why? Something to do with industrial dishwashers, perhaps?
It was fucking fascinating, is all I can say.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
September 4, 2009 — 5:45 pm
Comments: 23
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