Today in 1773, rebel colonists performed the first recorded mass sexual act in American history:

Colonists objected to the Tea Act for a variety of reasons, especially because they believed that it violated their right to be taxed only by their own elected representatives… Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson … apparently did not expect that the protestors would choose to destroy the tea rather than concede the authority of a legislature in which they were not directly represented.

Wikipedia also corrects the legend that Boston teabaggers were disguised as Indians. Modern-day teabaggers, as we know, frequently disguise themselves as idiots.

Boston Tea Party [Wikipedia]

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 »

We have only two questions regarding healthcare reform:

1. Is it better than what exists?

2. Does it screw us over?

The second question has never been an absolute deal-breaker for us — just an ongoing note of concern. We can deal with some degree of fuckitude for the good of the Republic. Just be gentle with us.

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Jalopnik has their 10 Most Sexually Suggestive Car Ads up, and this one was banned in Australia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcFaSTbk4pI

Amusing? Disturbing? You be the judge.

Constitutional scholar Glenn Beck is no stranger to channeling the ghosts of the Founders, who were avid retail gold speculators and resorted to crying when debating the finer points of establishing post roads. But today on his radio show, Beck explored a nuance of Foundational gamesmanship that had hitherto escaped us:

Do you know who wanted slaves to be counted as a full person?… Slave owners… The reason why they wanted that is because of the balance of power. The South could control the numbers in Congress. Their representation would go through the roof… That’s why, in the Constitution, African-Americans were deemed three-fifths people, because the Founders wanted to end slavery and they knew if the South could count slaves as full individuals you would never get the control to be able to abolish it.

As we know, the Founders wanted to end slavery so much, they diddled the help and waited until everyone was generations dead before addressing it. And by cleverly granting slaves three-fifths of a vote while denying them the right to vote, they were able to place themselves on the right side of history, whenever history was ready to catch up with them.

Beck Defends Founding Fathers’ Decision To Count African-Americans As Three-Fifths Of A Person [Think Progress]

Does Glenn Beck support the slave trade or is he just an “idiot”? [Media Matters, Sept. 23]

Desperately seeking a healthcare-reform scapegoat, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee takes clear aim for insurance companies Republicans Max Baucus Bart Stupak Joe Lieberman Rahm Emanuel?

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As if anyone really needed a reason to despise Joe Lieberman even more… David Herszenhorn’s New York Times blog helps flesh out just how odious Lieberman (I. – Insurance Lobby) really is. By now it has been widely reported that Lieberman’s opposition to a Medicare buy-in plan for Americans aged 55 and older stands in sharp contrast to positions he took just a few months ago, and seems to have emerged just as the possibility of such an arrangement began to take fruition. What Herszenhorn newly reveals, are Lieberman’s stated reason for the flip flop: Read more »