Because I have nothing even remotely useful to add:

Because you need yet another cat video:

Oil spills. Republican idiots screaming about derailing Kagan, preachers pestorking rentboys … we need kittens on a sliding board:

Nobody on the Internet knows you’re Iggy.

[via a long chain ending with Blue Gal]

t’s ON! As the Senate health care reform bill nears a possible-maybe-if-Joe-Lieberman-isn’t-paying-attention chance of passage, a dispute is breaking out in the liberal blogosphere as to whether the bill in question (and the reconciliation bill that would result from the Senate/House conference) is an awful, shitty, rotten,
low, stinking, kick below the belt with a pair of steel toed boots right smack in the beleaguered crotch of working Americans, that’s worth supporting because, Goddamit it’s better than nothing; or whether it’s far worse even than that and should be put out to pasture next to the stinking corpse of Joe Lieberman’s sense of shame.

On the one hand, we’ve got every progressive’s favorite statistician, Nate Silver, crunching the numbers and suggesting that without the Senate bill, Americans will shortly find themselves wallowing in a hell-hole swamp of misery and disease as premiums for a family of 4 shoot up to somewhere north of $19,500.00 by 2016. With the Senate bill, Silver argues:

A family of four earning an income of $54,000 would pay $4,000 in premiums, and could expect to incur another $5,000 in out-of-pocket costs. The $4,000 premium represents a substantial discount, because the government is covering 72 percent of the premium — meaning that the gross cost of the premium is $14,286, some $10,286 of which the government pays. Read more »

It’s a horrific day, so I thought we needed a fat Japanese cat acting out.  Not his best work, but it’s not bad.

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Cute Baby Snow Leopard Makes Public Debut in Tokyo