Trust...but Verify

My aunt is the only one who sends me the right-wing e-mails anymore, and even then, they are few and far between. Is it because instead of forwarding them on with a "Heh, indeed," I tend to reply with calls of bullshit? Well, that's what I do when I see bullshit.

Here's the latest:


This was accompanied with this little note: "Too bad Abe isn't around to explain this to Obama."

Actually...too bad Abe never said that. It doesn't even sound like something he would say. (Yeah, Lincoln says things like "You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves," but then he goes and issues the Emancipation Proclamation. Riiiiiight.)

This quote comes from a guy named William J.H. Boetcker. His wiki says:

An outspoken political conservative, Rev. Boetcker is perhaps best remembered for his authorship of a pamphlet entitled The Ten Cannots. Originally published in 1916, it is often misattributed to Abraham Lincoln.

Love the quote if you want. But don't fool yourself into thinking Lincoln said it.

Cuz he didn't.

What's the Matter With Kansas?

Steve Benen tackles the psychology behind the wingnuts losing their shit over health care reform. He points out an essential truth with this:

Some of Rush Limbaugh's listeners are one serious illness away from bankruptcy. Some Michele Bachmann voters can't get coverage because of a pre-existing condition. Some Glenn Beck viewers will see their insurance companies drop them when they need their coverage most. Many of Bill O'Reilly's fans already enjoy the benefits of government-run health care. Some RNC donors may want to start their own business, but can't because they can't afford to pay the monthly premiums. Some of the same people who attended "Tea Parties" in April saw the insurance for themselves and their families disappear after they lost their job.

The whole post is good. Read it.

Straw Men...Setting em up and Knocking em Down

I'm not mad about the wingnuts going crazy about health care. I read this and cracked up.

This is called "Sarah Palin raging against the demons in her own head."

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.

A death panel?

Sorry, Sarah, HB 3200 doesn't say anything about death panels.

More than that...I bet you a hundred bucks the folks who are most vocal about the evils of the plan have not bothered to read it.

And now that I have provided a link to the plan, all 1017 pages, will they bother to do so then? Doubt it. "It's 1017 pages!" they'll say. "Who has time to read that?"

Um...look at it again. Sure it's 1017 pages. The margins are two inches on either side and it's double-spaced. If it were single spaced, it would be a little over 500 pages. And with the margins, there's like 4 words per line.

And it's in English even!

Never open your mouth until you know what the shot is.
- Ricky Roma, Glennglarry Glenn Ross

I Love Casual Fridays

I just saw the most glorious ass walking down the hallway and, of course, I was compelled to follow it.

And yes, it belonged to a female.

Blind Panic and Rage

I don't know if you've noticed, but these dumb ass right wing protesters have really pissed me off. So they're obnoxious...protesters generally are. So they're right-wingers...I can live with that.

What pisses me off is that they are completely ignorant about the subject on which they are opining. It's just a knee-jerk reaction, stemming from the belief that the government is evil, that Democrats are commies, that the dude saying "Obama wants to kill your granny" is telling the truth. No.

Andrew Sullivan captures the dumb here:

Another woman asks heatedly, "Exactly where's the money coming from? Is it coming out of my paycheck? I wanna know if it's coming out of my paycheck--yes or no!" Well, if she has health insurance from her employer, yes it already is coming out of her pay-check in larger and larger amounts. Is she aware of this? Are the Dems planning to tax her to pay for insuring the uninsured? Unless she's very wealthy, no. And these pretty basic misunderstandings are then converted into a simple slogan: "Liberty or Tyranny!" Mark Levin has indeed had an impact.

Look: if these people were yelling: "End the employer tax break!" or "More Cost-Controls!" or "Malpractice Reform!" I'd be more sympathetic. But this is blind panic and rage.

You forgot ignorance, too.

Just for the record, I'm no fan of Obama's health care plan. I trust Hillary even less. I don't like mandates. I don't like the government paying people's insurance premiums.

I'd like to see them get more muscular, set more rules. No, you can't charge $19,000 for that shot. Yes, I know you spent 10 years developing it and it's made from the gossamer wings of fairies from Reykjavík, but sorry, Merck or Pfizer or whoever, you're gonna take a bath on this one. My Mom is bleeding to death and I'm not taking "Fuck you, pay me" for an answer.

But then again..."fuck you, pay me" has replaced "E Pluribus Unum" as our national motto these days.

Love to Let You Down

Damn you, You Tube copyright police, damn you all to hell!

I wanted to post a vid of Life of Agony playing their song, "Love to Let You Down," but I can't find the one I wanted to post. The live one, the one where Keith Caputo's voice doesn't sound so thin and whiny.

I mean, this guy's tiny but he's got pipes. Unfortunately in the album version, he sounds like he's hiding in his bathroom, worried about waking up the neighbors. Belt it, Keith.

But of course, the footage I had seen a few weeks ago and planned on posting is nowhere to be found. So here's the lame ass album version.

"Love to let you down" should be You Tube's slogan. Hell, it could be the slogan of a lot of things.

Angry White People

Video of the town hall meeting in Tampa that turned into a melee.

They chant "Hear our voice," but all I hear is a voice saying, "Hear our voice, hear our voice." Done...and done. You got anything else to say?

Then they start to close the doors, you know, probably because they were meeting inside and there were some crazy people chanting outside.

Some genius says, "It's a public meeting." Yeah, no shit. So show some decorum. It's not a goddamn football game, despite all the "my team versus your team" rhetoric that gets thrown around. Sit down, shut up, speak when it's your turn.

You think we're going to let PETA sit outside and chant "Hear our voice?" Fuck no.

You act like a grown-up, or we're going to close the doors.

I do love it, though, when the guy starts protesting about fire codes. You're there to disrupt a public meeting on healthcare reform, presumably because you're the "small government" type, and you appeal to fucking fire codes? I see, you're one of those "small government when convenient" types.

Guess what? There's nothing in the fire codes that allows assholes free access to chant their slogans.
You know protesting has totally jumped the shark when the right-wingers are doing it.

Healthcare Sucks This I Know

For Glenn Beck told me so.


These people need to get a life.

Read a book. Watch a movie. Hang out with friends.

But for God's sake...shut off the fucking radio. Or turn it to FM, listen to music like a normal person.

And when you do that...learn how to think for yourself.

“However big the fool, there is always a bigger fool to admire him.”

Nicholas Boileau, a Frenchman, said that a couple hundred years ago. He was talking about Glenn Beck and his peeps.

Things I Didn't Know

I remember when Kansas City linebacker extraordinaire Derrick Thomas died. I couldn't believe it. I heard that he was killed in a car accident, tragic of course, but I didn't know that...

The car accident didn't kill him. It killed one of his passengers, yes, but Derrick Thomas survived, back broken, neck broken, fucked up beyond all repair. He was paralyzed below the chest for three months before a pulmonary embolism finally ended it.

Three months to contemplate the cruelty of fate. And then a full taste of it in the form of a blood clot.

Derrick Thomas is being inducted into the Football Hall of Fame this year.

Sign of the Times

I, for one, am sick of all the racist Obama-hating nuts going on murderous rampages. I'm sorry the liberals want to give you healthcare, but seriously....

Grow

The

Fuck

Up

Already.

Conflicted

I'm of two minds on this journalists released from North Korea story. I don't think anyone should be sentenced to twelve years of hard labor for being journalists, and I think it's great that Bill Clinton brought them home. (I can't imagine any of the Bush crowd doing that. Their approach to foreign affairs seems to have been never negotiate, never accomplish anything.)

But on the other hand, what did these girls think would happen? Did they think their membership cards in the Journalist's Club was going to protect them? That North Korean authorities, who show no deference to its own citizens, would treat foreign journalists with kid gloves? C'mon.

What's that saying? "You play with fire, you're gonna get burned."

Of course, North Korea is going to snatch you up, as a reminder to all the other intrepid journalists trying to get the "real story," not to mention to use as a bargaining chip. (There's been much speculation about what Clinton offered to secure their release. There probably was some quid pro quo, but I think it took the form of a picture of Kim Jong Il standing next to Bill Clinton rather than an okay to restart their nuclear program. Clinton was in no place to offer anything and Kim Jong Il just strikes me as someone who is that petty.)

It's almost as if these journalists thought their bubble of righteousness would protect them. Why would they think that when righteousness never protected anyone? Yeah, sorry, guys. It didn't save Jesus, and it's not going to save you.

Blackwater Rising

I told you those Blackwater guys were no good.

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

Reading through the sworn affidavit, there's a lot of stuff that reads as hearsay, much of it unprovable, but many of the allegations sound all too plausible.

Just Saying

It's a good thing I didn't die this weekend. My family and friends would feel really bad if it was my boss that found my partially-decomposed corpse.

But like I said, good thing I didn't die.