Sadly, No!

Aha. Here’s a lesson in how to get away with things. In true contemporary-Republican fashion, Malkin has learned that, facts be damned, one must always stay on the attack — ideally against a phony, made-up conspiracy of enemies that, perforce, can’t generate any real pushback:

And here’s what she said earlier:

Update 3:20pm Eastern. See my new post on Pete StarkRavingMad. These people can’t contain themselves. And let’s stop the delusion that the Starks are the fringe. They are the center of the nutroots-i-fied Democrat Party.

And it just goes on and on, down the series of links and throughout other topics, and in her most recent book, and so forth.

Well fine, we’ll do that too. Here’s Brad’s post from yesterday translated into Malkinese:

ZOMG! The GOP Is Unsurprisingly Maddened With Demented Hatred

For those who simply can’t believe their eyes, Rep. King has created a thoroughly unremarkable chart to advance a sickening new low in Republican partisan insanity, suggesting that S-CHIP may as well stand for “SH*TTING ON CHILDREN HOWEVER I PLEASE.” Is this how boldly the right-blogs are now attempting to whitewash their plan to, as it were, so-called “sh*t” on children? (Pardon our language.) This jaw-dropping murder rampage comes as a surprise to no one.

(Hel-lo, “Representative” King: The chart actually says “Socialized, Clinton-Style Hillarycare,” as if you could read, which excuse me, apparently you can’t. Hmmm? Waiting for a response. Wai-ting.)

(Doop-de-doop, waiting.)

Update: King has responded:

Hey, hold on just a second here. I never said that the…

We refuse to dignify his insane, hate-drenched attacks with a reply.

As we have shown previously, Rep. King represents the absolute reasonable center of Republican politics, and his shockingly deranged right-blog-fueled actions are in no way out of the mainstream. With this unspeakable, quotidian act, he merely expresses the screaming craziness of the howling far-right Nazi Stalin Republican Internet death brigades, who are daily plotting to attack infants and you and myself, and are backed by far crazier, screaminger Nazis exactly like themselves in every detail, only different.

America and the world can no longer afford ineffectual wimps, like Rep. Peter King, who weakly impede fair debate with their feeble and pathetic whinings. These ivory-tower right-blog elites are dirty bums who live off the public food-stamp teat, and their constant, champagne-drenched shrieking for human blood is exceeded only by the eternally pacifistic quietude of their treasonous tri-state killing sprees. They are the bellowing subhuman enemies of all humanity, and civility is the first casualty of their tedious and unmemorable mumblings, which we can only ignore.

Wacky loonies may disingenuously accuse us of asking: Can their lazy, croquet-playing Brownshirt terror-tactics at last be crushed by a pitiless tide of fists, boots, and deniable instances of arson? How long until our patience is exhausted?

Update: [chom-chom-chom burp] Eatin’ a child.

Update: OMG, can you believe how they’re against children? Their sick attacks on us are flagrantly libelous.

Update: Ha ha, let’s attack babies.

Update: SCREECH! Pathetically, many desperate and sad liars are dementedly accusing us of attacking babies.

Update: [chom-chom-burp] Mmm, tasty child.

Update: AIEEE! Other people are transgressing social norms!

PS: The man can’t bust our music.

Episode 9.73 x 10^16 (in a series of jabibbity-squillion).

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehn goodbye . . .
18 Oct 2007 03:21 pm

Forgetting that the entire industrialized world except for the US has nationalized health care, the best source of data on nationalized health care is a famous 1982 RAND Corporation study.*

It shows that if you make health care free, people will use more health care without getting healthier.

However, Alex Tabarrok points to a major flaw in the study: People with serious illnesses seem to have dropped out of the program, skewing the results.

This is certainly important, and it seems to me that it is a problem with medical studies in general.

Why can’t states run single payer systems?
18 Oct 2007 03:53 pm

Ezra avoids the obvious: State health care programs all fail because they are expensive.

Why are they expensive? As the [mumble mumble] evidence seems to show, if you make health care free, people will just use more health care. And, uh, costs will shoot through the roof, is why.

Oof
18 Oct 2007 04:14 pm

Whoah Nellie, check out this correction that the AP ran, following a misapplication of statistical health care data.

Update: Good discussion going on in comments as to whether this poke at McArdle is fair. Should I issue a correction (y/n)?

* Not the 2006 one with different findings, but the good old 1982 one.

This probably isn’t the most appropriate time to get into this … oh, well.

It’s worth remembering that Benazir Bhutto is a corrupt beneficiary of nepotism who ran an already screwed up country into the ground. Not that she or her entourage deserve a hail of shrapnel or anything, but let’s just go easy on the idea that the attack on her was fueled solely by Teh!Evilest!Evar!New!Caliphate!Jihadis!

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But Bhutto’s no heroine of feminism. Please.

I just opened up the following e-mail:

I know you don’t do book reviews, but I have a humorous book on vampires that just came out, and thought it might be worth a mention, if it makes you laugh. I could send you guys a copy, or copies. It’s about Dracula, but also the evil seducation of funnel cake, and about Romanian hookers, terrible roads, failed theme parks, and how Kevin Dillon shows us that you can look like a good-looking person without being good-looking yourself.

You win — that is too, too awesome for me to ignore. Here’s his book’s website.

Go read Glennzilla’s hilarious book report on the allegedly forthcoming title, Goddammit, Mom, That Old Coot Buckley Won’t Give Me A Raise And You Never Said I’d Have To Work So Hard When You Got Me My Job At National Review So Fuck You Mom Just FUCK YOU TO HELL YOU FUCKING BITCH!!!1!: The Jonah Goldberg Story.*

* Now with a brand new afterword: “Get Me A Fucking Coke, Mom, You Whore; And How Come J-Pod Gets A Window Cube And You Never Got Me That Boba Fett Action Figure I Fucking Wanted When I Was 9? That Totally Scarred Me For Life, You Heartless Cow! Fuck You Fuck You Fuck You Just Leave Me Alone I Wish I Was Never Born I HATE YOU!!!!”

Keep it up, GOP. Please, please, please keep acting crazy.

For those with bad eyes, Mr. King has created a chart claiming the S-CHIP really stands for “Socialized Clinton-style Hillarycare for Illegals and their Parents.”

Guys, you’ve done outdone yerselves on this one. Please, please, please keep insulting middle-class families who can’t afford health insurance. I guarantee that it will launch you right back into power.

UPDATE: By 2008, these guys will be the GOP’s only reliable voting bloc:

The Palace Mobile Home Park is a place that welcomes sex offenders. Ninety-five of these 200 residents are convicted sex offenders, including some pedophiles.

The adults-only, nondescript, low-income trailer park near St. Petersburg, Florida has gained a reputation among sex offenders on probation as a good place to live and stay out of trouble.

“Out there … it’s a jungle,” said Michael, who did not want his last name used for this report. “In here, it’s our own little piece of paradise. We’re safe here.”

Michael was released from prison in June. He’s been a familiar face to law enforcement in Florida and Mississippi for the past 20 years, serving prison time for grand theft, drug possession and sexual battery on a child.

Go get ’em, GOP! They’re Mark Foley’s best chance at making a comeback!

Senator Larry Craig (R – State of Denial) wants you to know that he’s not gay and never has been gay, not even for a couple of minutes after having polished off a bottle of Captain Morgan’s and smoked a few doobies in Jamaica. So he bared it all, so to speak, in an interview with Matt Lauer.

During the interview, Craig could hardly keep his right foot in place, but each time it tapped its way just a tad too close to Lauer’s foot, Craig’s wife firmly shoved her elbow into Craig’s side and made a very, very stern face that made her look like she had just chomped down on an extra large piece of spoiled lutefisk. The strain of having the burning hunk of Lauer love so near and yet so far took its toll on the Senator, who seems to have, as a result, gotten all confused about crucial details of what exactly went down during his fateful encounter with Officer Karsnia in the Minneapolis airport men’s room

This is what he told Lauer:

Something attracted my attention, and I looked down. And as I looked down, I saw a piece of toilet paper on the floor. And it happened to be under my heel … and I don’t know if you’ve seen it before, but I’ve seen it, somebody walk out of a booth with a piece of toilet paper stuck to their foot. I’d reached down to take it off my shoe, or out from under my shoe. And my hand did go below the divider at that moment in time.

You know, just last week I saw a guy leave a stall with a piece of toilet paper stuck to his wingtips and everyone in the men’s room started snickering and pointing and saying mean and tawdry things, so I certainly agree that this would be a reason to pick up a sticky germ-laden piece of used toilet paper from the floor of a public bathroom in a busy airport. Now notice where that piece of paper was — under his heel.

But what did he tell Officer Karsnia right after the event in question?

Dave Karsnia: OK. And then with the hand. How many times did you put your hand under the stall?

Larry Craig: I don’t recall. I remember reaching down once. There was a piece of toilet paper back behind me and picking it up.

Hmmm. The piece of paper was apparently behind him and under his heel and in the next stall all at once — all while Craig is sitting on the crapper. I think Craig has a calling as a contortionist for Cirque de Soleil once he completes his senatorial gig. Of course, we could speculate as to how the Senator might have developed the redoubtable talent of twisting himself up like a pretzel in a public toilet stall. But Sadly, No! is a serious journalistic enterprise, and such speculation would just be wrong.

Doug Ross has been getting a lot of attention lately for this post, in which he utilizes a cunning visual style of storytelling to prove that the dirty bomb attack in Manhattan which is totally inevitable any day now is all Nancy Pelosi’s fault. (Like James Lileks, Ross also likes to rock himself to sleep at night by fantasizing about a nuclear attack on Seattle. What did the Emerald City ever do to these guys?)

Anyway, as I’m sure you all know from my best-selling series of “Larry Kotter, Wizard School Dropout” novels and my hit TV series Most People Are Favorably Disposed Towards Leonard, there’s nothing I love more than glomming on to other peoples’ popularity. So I have taken Ross’ idea a bit further, while still grounding it in the hard-nosed reality that characterizes his original post.

***

These are the pliers we could have used to yank out the teeth of suspected terrorists if some people weren’t a bunch of pussies.

This is one of the dirty America-hating hippies who didn’t want us to be able to use pliers against terrorists.

These are the Iranian Iraqi North Korean Syrian Islamofascists in Lake Conroe awaiting word to blow up Houston with a space laser. Probably. I mean, just look at them.

This is an artist’s conception of the al-Q’aeda space laser, which we would have been able to shut down if it weren’t for that meddling traitor Mohammed el-Baradai.

This is the sophisticated telecommunications device, modified to throw off suspicion.

This is a cat, a type of domesticated house pet that can often be entertained by the use of a laser pointer.

This is one of hundreds of laser pointers purchased by terrorists throughout the greater Houston area and used to assemble the al-Q’aeda space laser.

This is a 1998 Saturn SW-1 station wagon, a reliable, sensible late-model family car perfect for transporting components of a terrorist weapon of mass destruction.

This is the logo of “Freedom Wheels”, a Houston-based wheelchair service provider chosen as the main target of the terrorists because they hate things with the word ‘freedom’ in them.

This is what a wheelchair looks like after it has been hit point-blank by a Sharia-powered laser beam from outer space.

This is a baby, who is crying because he is sad that Houston blew up.

This is a team of emergency au pairs, brought in at great taxpayer expense to try to help calm the untold thousands of babies upset by the destruction of Houston.

This is one of many Gymboree stores that suffered highly reduced sales in the days following the space laser attack due to a high number of inconsolable babies.

This is what Houston looked like for a million bajillion years thanks to the Islamofascists.

And it was all the fault of these two.

Big Daddy Ezra K sez:

I’m always amused by well-paid journalists and pundits complaining that teachers’ compensation isn’t closely enough linked to performance. Is Megan [McArdle] hauled into James Bennet’s office once a week, presented with updated traffic numbers where traffic boosts and drops are disaggregated from intra-Atlantic links and general noise, and then paid less or more depending on her performance? Of course not.

Ironically, I think Ms. McArdle does rather well for herself in terms of traffic, if for no other reason than people like us are linking to (and laughing at) her on a fairly regular basis. Memo to Atlantic editors: if it’s traffic you seek, I know of this hot young writer named Mark Noonan who will totally drive up your page views. Please check him out.

“I need a job!”

Gavin adds: If Megan, as a pundit, were paid according to how often she knows what she’s talking about, she’d be wearing a barrel and eating government cheese.

Why did I have to leave the Northeast? It means I have to miss this. Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchens debating religion promises to be a wildly entertaining evening of bombastic hysterics versus simple minded platitudes, ending in a harmonious resolution when both parties agree that Mooslims SUCK!

Allow me to look into my crystal ball and give you a transcript of the debate…

Read the rest of this entry »