Banner FAIL

If the United States is Rome burning, then these fuckers are a 60 piece string section.

In addition to the misspelling on that banner, it suffers from the bane of my inner copy editor’s existence – the gratuitous use of quotation marks for “emphasis”

@SanFranLefty: My favorite along that line is the sign posted on a telephone pole near my house:

“STOP”
ANTS!

206-xxx-xxxx

Uh-huh. “Stop” ants. I really need to get a picture of it before weather or humanity take it down.

@SanFranLefty: Welcome to You’re “Doom!”

Although I can go either way on the quotes here. It’s really a design question, and I’d have to try it both ways to decide which is most effective.

Pat can chinga su madre.

@nojo: @SanFranLefty:

Quotes on tag-outs always look apologetic and weaken the message. take it from a pro.

@nojo: Welcome to You’re “Doom!”

Ow. Quit it!

Also: dunno if you guys have seen this yet, but a friend linked to it. Auto-tune the news:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eooXNd0heM&feature=player_embedded

Pretty funny, although I thought the joke wore thin after a bit.

The Republicon war against spalling and grommer haz finally payd ov.

My greatest grammatical pet peeve of late is the use of “should of” for “should’ve,” and so on and so forth. Helping verbs are your friend, people!

Chris Dodd Father’s Day WIN:

I believe that, when my daughters grow up, barriers to marriage equality for same-sex couples will seem as archaic, and as unfair, as the laws we once had against inter-racial marriage.

And I want them to know that, even if he was a little late, their dad came down on the right side of history.

Oh, and when are we going to rag on Megan McCain for her stellar performance on Real Time? I promise not to make zaftig jokes…

@nojo:
I believe it was rptrcub who first tipped me off to The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

@IanJ: Send them the picture of the “Stop” Ants sign.

/Speaking of Repukelican insanity/

I admit that I haven’t followed the healthcare reform debate at all (since the inevitable failure is a foregone conclusion, so why waste precious brain-power, amirite?), but has anyone explained exactly why they can’t just drop the age restriction on Medicare and have people pay the low Medicare premiums? Wouldn’t that in itself guarantee the solvency of the program? Everyone would be covered, and doctors and hospitals are already trained to take it.

@Original Andrew: Or lift the income restrictions on Medicaid.

@Original Andrew: I’m sure the argument, once stripped of its specious reasoning, is that your idea would amount to a single-payer system, and the private insurance lobbying dollars say that’s not going to happen.

@Original Andrew: @SanFranLefty:

Silly stinquers! Who would make a shitload of money on that? Let’s not forget the ultimate goal of health care reform….

@mellbell: Color me insulted.

Too little, too late.

Let him go fuck himself. And his fucking smug over-privileged daughters. Let them tweet with Megan McCain. And all the rest of his ‘well-meaning’ friends.

Using my life to score political points. Trash.

I was not angry since I came to France If that’s not right it’s something very close.

@Original Andrew: IMHO, making Medicare available to everyone as an option is the easiest way do deal with the health care issue. Funny thing how the for-profit insurers who profess a love of capitalism don’t want to compete on price and quality with the feds.

@Tommmcatt doesn’t mind if he doesn’t make the scene: She’s a fat ignorant slut. In the UK we call her Fergie. But at least Fergie knows which fork to use and which wine glass to drink from first and does not stay up all night twittering her BF about how much she loves BJs and Rocky Road.

This is the best that the McCain millions can produce? This dim incoherent sow? At least bring us Princess Caroline. If you’re going to spend all that money. This one doesn’t even rise to the level of Paris.

@Benedick: We can all agree that “a little late” is a severe understatement, so there’s that, but in terms of sheer political math, it’s one Senator down, however-many-more to go.

@Benedick: Well, duh. And we can all buy insurance add-ons as everyone does with Medicare.

One of the reasons I bring it up is that my mom was diagnosed with an extremely uncomfortable–but not life-threatening–health issue in 2008, but she had to wait almost a whole year to have the surgery to correct the condition because her shitty private plan wouldn’t pay for it, but Medicare would once she turned 65.

My own HMO private policy is so flimsy and limited that it’s only slightly better than nothing at all: “We’re sorry, we don’t pay for conditions that start with the letter C, like Cancer and Car crashes…”

@Original Andrew: I have a PPO and still can’t find a GP who accepts my insurance. Ain’t America grand?

@Original Andrew: since the inevitable failure is a foregone conclusion, so why waste precious brain-power, amirite?

That’s my excuse, besides the other excuse that I’ve been, um, preoccupied the past week. But if I must state a position on health care, I’ll have what the Senators are having.

@Benedick:

I have to admit that Jack McCain would do for a bent-over-the-sofa hate fuck, but gramps can keep the rest of his spawn. And Cindy McCain needs to head back to the hell she came from.

@mellbell: They can all go fuck themselves.

If I seem a touch testy I saw Victim for the first time last night. A movie made 50 years ago and nothing has changed as far as the Republicans are concerned. (I would recommend that all of you try to see it and then think of Larry Craig and you will be filled as much with pity as contempt). And now the Democrats want to claim the moral high ground because they have finally seen the light that they did everything they could to stop seeping around the corners of the blackout curtains all these years. I despise them most because they knew better.

PS. Re the movie. This is the only instance I can think of in which a major movie star who was openly gay (to his friends and business associate and also the press) played a gay man. Bravo Dirk! He also was the reason it got made, because he signed on, putting his career on the line. And tried to get Maggie Leighton to play the wife but she couldn’t/wouldn’t do it. Because who would know better than she what it was like to be married to a gay man in hiding from himself? She was married to Lawrence Harvey who treated her so badly that Coward would not allow him to appear in any of his plays.

@Original Andrew: has anyone explained exactly why they can’t just drop the age restriction on Medicare and have people pay the low Medicare premiums?

Not that I’ve noticed, but of course I haven’t been paying attention.

But there was a recent New Yorker article (I think) comparing how health care evolved in other countries. The general point was that they all started with something already in place, and built or expanded from there. The argument was that starting here from scratch — lurching to single-payer, say — may cause a host of transitional problems, much like the new drug program was frightfully confusing.

So let’s grant all of that, and not question why a Bush-conceived program might be poorly designed and implemented. If evolution is preferred to revolution: Then why not expand Medicare/Medicaid? The programs already exist, after all. And I’m already paying about 3 percent of my freelance taxes for them. Heck, I might even survive long enough to collect vanishing Social Security.

@Dodgerblue and Tommmcatt, the LA Bureau:

I really hope that LA mayor Tony V.’s bowing out of the gubernatorial race results in him endorsing Mayor McDreamy. As my mayor has been AWOL campaigning and fundraising for the past year despite budget crises here at home, it was nice to hear Villaraigosa’s reason for dropping out. (To work on the LA budget). Of course, banging the news anchors probably had nothing to do with the drop-out.

Meanwhile, my favorite Republican is the only gubernatorial candidate who speaks Spanish. With a Uruguayan accent, no less.

@nojo: I would gladly pay more taxes to pay less insurance. Say $2000 as compared to $8000.

@IanJ: quitcher whining. Previous comment removed for being obnoxious.

@nojo:

The only reason the Medicare D benefit is so FUBAR was ‘cuz Congress contorted themselves and the law like pretzels to maximize the pharma companies’ profits (ex. the dreaded “donut hole”). They removed the government’s ability to negotiate for lower prices, like govs do in other countries.

@SanFranLefty: Also I don’t think he could win. He’d be better in a policy job where he didn’t have to do any real governing. I think he was angling for that in the Hills administration.

@Original Andrew: Yeah well my OH is in that hole due to diabetes. If we didn’t have medicare we would have been bankrupt 4 years ago. We pay taxes. We employ locals. Like that hot mower guy who will not keep his shirt on when he’s mowing the grass. Not even when it’s pouring rain and it soaks his jeans so they cling like a second skin. I keep telling him he should wear some kind of underwear if his pants are going to ride so low on his ass. But that’s just me. I’m kinda old-fashioned.

This is the thing we have got to get right.

Get Carla Bruni here to help. Get Jude Law. Get Hugh Jackman. I don’t care how we sell it so long as we sell it.

@Benedick:

You are in a MOOD today. I love it.

I concur wholeheartedly. However, she pisses me off mostly because of the little-girl-in-a-great-big-world zeitgeist she tries to give off. Both my sisters were about ten thousand times more articulate and self-possessed at that age, both were up-and-coming stars in their fascinating, public-policy fields, yet did they ever get put on the tube? No, I have to turn on the Teevee and get half-an-hour of this embonpoint sorority girl, who purports to be a spokes-model for the American conservative party but somehow fails to remember the Regan administration.

Grist for the mill, I suppose, but couldn’t she try a little harder?

@Tommmcatt doesn’t mind if he doesn’t make the scene: Which is why I reference her with the inherited ethos of Fergie. Otherwise known as the scum of the earth. And I don’t have much good to say about Di either.

But srsly. Is this the best they can do? Compare please to Amy Carter; to the Kerry daughters; to Sasha and Malia. It is to laugh.

Darling, check out Victim. It’s very distressing but look how we are still dealing with the same shit. Interesting side-bars are the fag hag and self-loathing tough-guy gay man.

@Benedick:

I will. Didn’t they show a bit of that in The Celluloid Closet?

@Tommmcatt doesn’t mind if he doesn’t make the scene: I knew a couple of the actors and I came into London at the tail end of that period. It’s crude as concerns its thriller plot but there is much that speaks to us today. The story is told in terms of love not sex. It is about the way the society stunts and warps the natural need to love. Well worth its Netflix rental.

Back OT: I spent most of Sunday with an Iranian mother and son, and she agreed one thousand percent with the approach Black Eagle has taken with regard to his public comments. Anything more and the leaders there would make it a Great Satan issue.

I hope he doesn’t walk back on this…

Humorously, although she no longer speaks any English, she told me through her son that FOX was the worst propaganda she had seen in her life (they had three televisions on plus the internet, all dialed to different news sources).

@Nabisco: Sorry. Was I OT? Hadn’t realized.

@Original Andrew: Exactly why we don’t do the most rational and sane and efficient and commonsense thing, and just take the existing medicare system, and lower the eligibiility age to “birth?” That reason, specifically and literally, is mass insanity, induced by decades of scaremongering by the conservatives over the bugaboo of “socialized medicine.”

@Promnight:

That’s the funny thing: We already have “socialized medicine” and people love it. Ask anyone over 65 if they’d like to give up their Medicare for a Blue Cross policy, and they’ll look at you like you just landed from Mars.

@Original Andrew: And I work with a lot of bitter early-60-somethings who are counting the minutes, days and years until they’re 65 and can quit the gig and go on Medicare.

@Promnight: That reason, specifically and literally, is

Money.

@Nabisco: No kidding. Lugar was getting behind him on Sunday.

@nojo: Its the same amount of money, or less, than is currently being spent on healthcare. With the difference that everyone will be covered. Your true blue real Murricans, would rather pay twice as much to an insurance company, than get the same thing for half as much from the evil gubmint. Thats the insanity.

@Promnight: Yes, but that “same amount of money” won’t be going to the insurance companies. That’s socialism, pal.

@nojo: Thinking that that matters is insanity, Pal. A mass delusion, the notion that there is something wrong with that, its a delusion, a mass madness. And it stems from the infectious meme of modern conservatism, the idea that government is evil, that collective action is wrong, the insane libertarian notion that the only proper state for human life is one of individual selfishness and survival of the fittest. Its a rejection of even our biological history, we are a pack, a group, a tribal animal, which bands together in groups for mutual support. It is the idolization of a notion completely unnnatural and immoral from any standard of judgment, religious, biological, philosophical, even the standard of pure utilitarian practicality.

@Promnight: it stems from the infectious meme of modern conservatism, the idea that government is evil, that collective action is wrong, the insane libertarian notion that the only proper state for human life is one of individual selfishness and survival of the fittest.

In other words: money.

It’s not some abject decentered fear. It’s an effective paid program of propaganda lasting for decades. Follow the money, and you’ll find bad faith. “Modern conservatism” is a salaried sham.

And in other news, the sun rises in the east.

The psychology is good for understanding why the propaganda is effective: It’s easier to get folks to behave irrationally if they’re scared shitless.