Sadly, No!

OK, so I don’t normally push our beloved readers to actually do stuff beyond bitching on the Internets, but the health care battle is entering into its “Send lawyers, guns and money!” stage and pro-reform groups such as Health Care for America Now could really use your help in ratcheting up pressure on lawmakers to pass a damn health reform bill. Please consider giving them money or calling your Congressman, particularly if you live in a district represented by one of those pesky Blue Dogs.

This is a battle that we can win, peeps. Every little bit helps. Thanks 🙂

“Address my ass, libs!”

---

Who says wingnuts have no talent? What about the talent to look at a poll and see it as confirming your long-held wingnut beliefs without respect to what the poll actually says? Granted it’s hard to take that talent to “America’s Got Talent,” but it is undeniably a talent of sorts.

Let’s watch Brent Bozell perform this very stunt in the super awesomely titled post “Bozell: The Media Needs to Acknowledge There is No Health Care Crisis.”

Media Research Center President and NewsBusters.org Publisher Brent Bozell today responded to a poll conducted by the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and Zogby International that finds that 84 percent of Americans, including 46 percent of Americans without health insurance, are “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with the health care they currently receive.

Released on Wednesday, the poll was glaringly absent from most news reports late last week and over the weekend.

Bozell today called on the media to stop reporting on the American health care system as a “crisis” situation, as the facts simply belie the claim.

Well, who would have ever thought that most people who have insurance think the system is hunky-dory while most people who don’t have insurance think the system sucks? That’s one of the most surprising poll results since ABC News reported that men think about sex more than women do.

And who would have thought that anyone could look at that poll and say it proves that we have the best health care system in the universe? But that would underestimate the considerable talents of Mr. Bozell. Of course, since the health care crisis is that there are a bunch of people who are uninsured, the fact that most people who are insured are happy is as irrelevant as whether Bozell would be more credible if he were sporting a clown nose. If the poll had found, say, that 90 percent of the uninsured enjoyed having no health care, Bozell might have been on to something. But, it didn’t.

That doesn’t matter, of course. As long as Brent gets his bottle of Viagra Cialis for a $5 copay, things are great. Now if he could just get his wife to stop flushing all his $5 bottles of Viagra Cialis down the toilet, life would be perfect.

ABOVE: Surber’s Craig’s List picture

---

On a beautiful Sunday morning, when I have better things to do than peruse the outer fringes of wingnuttia for your entertainment, it is, once again, Don Bob Surber to the rescue with yet another ridicule-worthy post.

Let’s start with the title: “Pravda Corrects Obama.” Oh dear, you are no doubt wondering, is Don Bob so desperate to find bad stuff to say about Obama that he is resorting to the mouthpiece of the evil empire to find shit? What next? Kim Jong Il criticizes Obama’s pitching technique? People’s Daily makes fun of Obama’s ears?

Of course, astute readers no doubt realize that the Pravda that Don Bob is citing isn’t the now-defunct Communist Party mouthpiece, but is a website that has hijacked the name and is run by a cabal of right-wing nationalist cranks with a taste for tabloid trash such as “Russian fishermen catch squeaking alien and eat it.” But Don Bob seems to think that this Pravda is the genuine article:

Hey, who is more expert than Pravda on the type of governance that Barack Obama wants to bring to the United States?

Even more hilariously, the article Don Bob slobbers over is a reprint of a blog post written by one Stanislav Mishin, a Russian lunatic who wishes that the Confederacy had won the Civil War. Not that Don Bob would have a problem with that.

So what is the momentous “correction” which the wingnut Russian blogger delivers to Obama and which Surber thinks worthy of a mention on his blog?

The head of the nation is the czar; his lieutenants are commissars.

Funny, but Don Bob either forgets to mention, or doesn’t remember, that not only has Obama appointed czars but also George W. Bush — the best president ever since St. Ronnie — appointed drug czars, energy czars, war czars, and more czars than Don Bob could shake his pitchfork at.

And for a final giggle, read through Surber’s quote from Mr. Mishin, and you’ll see that Mishin refers to Bush 43 as Obama’s “leftist predecessor.” It makes you wonder whether Don Bob even reads the stuff he quotes. As we’ve mentioned here to Don Bob before, that’s no way to win a Pulitzer.

Shorter Rich Tucker:

ABOVE: Technology’s high point before government destroyed innovation

Rich Tucker, Townhall.com/calumnists:
Why Winners Win

• Winners win because the Japanese and Korean governments put them in school all year round so let’s eliminate public schools, plus meddling bureaucrats have totally undermined the high-tech industry … what I wouldn’t give for a powerful 300KHz Zilog Z80 microprocessor in a punch-card programmed 8-bit Micral CZ teletype computer today!

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Shorter Matt Barber:

ABOVE: Asswipe

J. Matt “Bam Bam” Barber, Renew America:
‘Gay’ penguin flies straight

• Although a whiny-ass liberal homo mocks the idea of going “ex-gay,” he obviously is unaware of a penguin in San Francisco that did just that. Address my penguin, fag!

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Reading Krauthammer’s latest masterwork below has really crystallized my thinking about what, exactly, motivates neoconservatives to support launching unprovoked wars: basically it comes down to getting a vicarious thrill out of seeing other people act heroically in dangerous situations. That’s what Krauthammer is really talking about when he says we should start wars or go to the moon for the sake of “glory.” He simply can’t feel good about himself or his life unless others are risking their lives on his behalf.

All of which brings me to my idea for the official neocon slogan: “If it makes me feel good, then other people should do it.”

Thoughts?

*Thanks to the person in the comments who suggested changing “you” to “others.” I agree, it does work better.

The Moon We Left Behind

• The moon, which I have often called the Celestial Hitler, can sense that our resolve is weakening. Make no mistake: Neville Obama’s refusal to conquer this deadly foe will prove to be his undoing.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Give Krauthammer credit: I never thought he could possibly apply the neocon narrative of “Everyone = Hitler, Obama = Neville Chamberlain” to space exploration. But lo, I was wrong:

Next week marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. We say we will return in 2020. But that promise was made by a previous president, and this president has defined himself as the antimatter to George Bush. Moreover, for all of Barack Obama’s Kennedyesque qualities, he has expressed none of Kennedy’s enthusiasm for human space exploration.

So with the Apollo moon program long gone, and with Constellation, its supposed successor, still little more than a hope, we remain in retreat from space. Astonishing.

Chuckles obviously has forgotten the wingnut meme of howling about the deficit since going to the moon is, you know, goddamn expensive and whatnot. I suppose he could try to square this circle by proposing that we send all welfare mothers to live on the moon, thus satisfying his twin desires to explore space and punish poor people. But that seems like a topic for another column.

And then there’s this:

Why do it? It’s not for practicality. We didn’t go to the moon to spin off cooling suits and freeze-dried fruit. Any technological return is a bonus, not a reason. We go for the wonder and glory of it.

In other words — even though sending humans to a worthless piece of space rock has no material value to us, we should do it anyway. Because it will make me feel tuff.

Another jewel:

We’ll be totally grounded. We’ll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese. So what, you say? Don’t we have problems here on Earth? Oh, please. Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us. If we’d waited for them to be rectified before venturing out, we’d still be living in caves.

It’s amazing to see so many wingnut pathologies playing out at once. Chuckles Krauthammer is clearly insecure about the size of his penis. But instead of doing what normal people do and buying P1LLS 2 GROW UR MONSTER!!!1!, he decides to compensate for his minuscule member by living vicariously through the United States government. Thus, whenever the government does something that makes him feel strong — say, by invading other countries for no reason or sending people to the moon for no reason — he gets a stiffy.

I can’t imagine having my own manhood and self-worth dictated by whether or not my government does a bunch of stupid shit that has no value. But fuck it, that’s why I’m not a neocon.

Teh Where

EDINBURGH CASTLE PUB
950 GEARY ST
SAN FRANCISCO, USA
415.885.4074

Hte When

Saturday, July 18
6pm to whenevaz

Teh Why

For the children

Thought for the day

When I punch a punching bag, I like to imagine that it’s my imagination … and I’m punching it for tricking me into imagining that it’s not a punching bag.

Over at the Corner, we learn that John Derbyshire’s household is playing host to an improbably animate ‘Confucius Say’ aphorism, leading in not-strictly-logical fashion to a brief polemic on the hideousness of the average bare navel. It’s splash park season, you see, and Derb prefers to contemplate the bikini as a comforting reminder of the potential for nuclear holocaust, rather than as a showcase for female bits that aren’t up to his strict standards of beauty.

Still, while he prefers to perv on more modestly attired flesh, that’s no reason to stop mocking the wogs.

In a post about dogs, the Pantload cleverly eschews the obvious line and informs us that it was the Internet that ate his homework this time around. Novel, but not the most important part of the comment, which begins:

As someone who often uses the example of vetinerary [sic] care as an example of free market medicine …

We’ll stop him there, because we sense where this is heading (with an unfortunate turn into Megan’s shop, as it turns out). People are voluntarily spending more money on health care for their pets, which proves that the government cannot be trusted to outfit Americans with state-of-the-art flea collars or something.

We hope they continue to push this line in the health care debate, actually. The focus groups indicate that comparing the uninsured to animals is a real winner.

At any rate, since we don’t like doing our homework either, we’ll just wildly speculate that a fair amount of free market R&D spend on veterinary medicine is for commercial purposes, since there’s a lot of cash on the hoof and trotter out there in Real America. And since we’re not yet butchering the working poor for meat, it may be that we need a slightly different mechanism for keeping them healthy.