Sadly, No!

As Michelle, wrong again and knowing it, dodges around accusing people of random things, she offers the following example of a responsible conservative who refuses to let government pick up the tab for his family’s health care:*

I Could Qualify For SCHIP!

I just phoned California’s SCHIP program, Healthy Families, and found that my family could qualify.

This is the scenario I laid out:
· Husband, age 62 (which I’ll be in 2-years), collecting early Social Security; Wife, age 41;
· Two minor dependent children, ages 2 and 7;
· Currently covered under self-paid individual health insurance (incidentally, costing about $10,000 a year, HMO, with $35 doctor visits and 30% co-insurance payments for other services, formulary Rx’s $20 generic and $35 brand);
· Mutual fund capital gains of $50,000 and ordinary dividends of $30,000;
· Earned income of $2289 a month by wife at job without medical benefits. (My wife is not currently working, being a house-mom.)

Thus, even though having substantial liquid assets, saved through a lifetime of scrimping in order to fund retirement, I would qualify for California’s Healthy Families SCHIP program. Assets and unearned income (e.g., Social Security, capital gains, ordinary dividends) do not count against SCHIP qualification.

We live in one of the highest cost areas of the U.S., San Diego, owning a modest house in a middle-class neighborhood, with substantial equity. We drive two old, almost 100,000-mile cars, paid off. We can’t afford baby-sitters in order to go out, so we don’t, and we eat out once a week at a fast-food restaurant. Pasta is a staple on our table. We don’t have a cell phone or broadband, saving about $100 a month on those common conveniences. We do not have pensions.

What could we do with an extra $10,000 a year, if we didn’t have to pay insurance premiums, and instead SCHIP and taxpayers picked up the tab? Fix-up the 24-year old house; Buy a new or recent car; Hire baby sitters and get some additional sanity from entertainment; Eat better than at Jack or the Clown; Put steaks on the table; Have a cellphone, at least for emergencies, and faster downloads; and so on.

So wait. What we’re hearing here is that with SCHIP, this family wouldn’t have to live in a dumpy house, drive jalopies, forego child care, eat crap food, go without a cell phone (for emergencies!), use an obsolete dialup connection, and/or so on.

We make choices, in favor of frugality and self-responsibility, and can thus afford to continue to pay insurance premiums.

My God, SCHIP is sounding worse and worse! Average Americans love paying sky-high insurance premiums, and positively dread being able to afford the necessities of life!

Please have mercy, citizen-journalists of the right wing. Please stop pushing this issue as effectively as you’ve been doing.

No really, we mean it.

No, seriously, you’re so out in front on this one, we just can’t take it.

* Update: James, Los Angeles adds in comments:

Guy’s lying. First, unearned income counts. Second, Healthy Families only covers the kids. Third, there would be a waiting period of 3 months if they dropped their present coverage. Fourth, Healthy Families isn’t free: there is a monthly premium involved and copays.

These lying sacks of shit never stop, do they?

Sure enough, James is right (.pdf).

Hey Michelle, Ezra Klein has sent you a challenge.

Let’s Debate

“It’s militant leftist bloggers,” writes Malkin, “who wouldn’t know a good-faith argument if it bit them in the lip.” Let’s have a good faith argument. I will debate Michelle Malkin anytime, anywhere, in any forum (save HotAir TV, which she controls), on the particulars of S-CHIP. We can set the debate at a think tank, on BloggingHeads, over IM. Hell, we can set up the podiums in the shrubbery outside my house, since that seems to be the sort of venue she naturally seeks out. And then if Malkin wants an argument, she can have one. We’ll talk S-CHIP and nothing but — nothing of the Frosts, or Congress, or her blog.

My sense has been that Malkin doesn’t want an argument. Rather, she wants to feed her readers the steady stream of outrage that keeps her traffic numbers up. But I realized tonight that I could be wrong, and I shouldn’t assume Malkin doesn’t want a real argument unless I actually ask her.

So c’mon Michelle: Let’s debate health care. Prove to the world that you really want “a good-faith argument.” We can talk crowd-out, and cross-subsidization, and whether lower-middle class entrepreneurs are able to procure health care on the individual market. If this is a policy argument you care so deeply about as to travel to the Frost family’s house to see if they really deserved S-CHIP benefits, surely you’ll want to set up a web cam and talk through the issue.

Unlike you, he actually knows something about health care. So come on, then. Get on Bloggingheads and debate him.

We triple-diggity-dog-dizzare you. What do you have to lose, eh? Chicken! Chicken! BWAAAAAK-BWAAAAAAK-BWAAAAAAAAAK!!!!

‘Democrat poster-child abuse, the nutroots’ pushback, and the continued campaign to silence the Right’

• WAAAAAAAAH-HAAAAAAAAH-HAAAAAAAAAH, mean wibweral bwoggers are twying to siwence me by calling me names, it’s not faaaaaaaaaaaay-yerrrrrrrrrrr!!!!

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

UPDATE: Leenk ees feexed.

Hey, Michelle! It’s a good thing there is no larger right-wing strategy to hide behind children and use them as cannon fodder in a losing bid to get stuff like forced pregnancy passed into law.

Like, the campaign ad below from Wisconsin Republican Paul R. Nelson can’t possibly feature the voice and image of a real child. Because what kind of monster would manipulate a little girl into calling her mother a murderer for a TV ad? What sort of cynical, vote-hungry scumbag would — just going on pure speculation here — exploit a marital rift between two parents to get the go-ahead from the father to use their daughter to get back at the mother for her decision not to bear another one of his children?

No, that can’t possibly be what happened here:

Also, David Vitter hired midgets to play his children in this series of 2004 campaign ads compiled by TPM:

Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, yes, it’s just terrible that that scheming 12-year-old and his deadbeat parents are allowed to suckle at the public teat instead of going out and earning enough money to cure brain damage. And yes, we’re all just horrified that a God-fearing Christian man can’t have an innocent heart attack while preparing to go deep-sea diving with a dildo up his ass without people jumping to conclusions. But have we all forgotten that there is a war on? A war between white people and people who just happen not to be white?

Fjordman has not forgotten.

Fjordman, who used to have his own blog before the IT guy from The Office came and planted a bunch of suicide logic-bombs in his hard drive, now posts exclusively at The Darkies Are Coming. His latest endless spiel about the bloodthirsty hordes of Dusk People got him an extra-special link over at Big Boy Jammies, so I thought it worth checking out. For your convenience, I’ve compressed it — or “condensed”, as the good people at Campbell’s Soup and Reader’s Digest put it — from its original skileventy vrillion pages into a mere fifty. It’s called “The Age of White Masochism”, which promises something sexy like HBO’s Sex and the City, but instead turns out to be boring and depressing, like HBO’s Real Sex. But let’s watch anyway!

Imagine if you planned a country’s economic future using calculations exclusively based on even numbers. For ideological reasons you excluded odd numbers because you declared that they represent bigotry and have divisive nature since they cannot be divided equally in half. Absolutely all calculations for the future would then end up being wrong.

Imagine if you started out a lengthy article using a metaphor that made no sense whatsoever. Absolutely everything that followed would end up being pointless.

An international poll in 2007 showed that 90 percent of the inhabitants in Egypt, Indonesia and India believed that each country should guard their innate culture and lifestyle.

And if the people in the crazy Muslim countries believe it, it must be true!

Guarding your identity is thus a universal human trait, not a white trait. In fact, it is less pronounced among whites today than among anybody else. Only whites cling onto the idea of universalism, everybody else sticks with their own ethnic group.

He’s got me there. I can’t think of any non-whites in modern times who preached that we should celebrate universal humanity among all people.

In white majority Western nations it has become a state-sponsored ideology to “celebrate diversity,” despite the fact that all available evidence indicates that more diversity leads to more conflict.

That’s true also, except for that it’s not.

At all.

Not even a little.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is just insane.

I know that I keep saying this. I probably say it a few times a week at this point. And each time I say it, I’m always convinced that I’ve hit the insanity apex – that it just doesn’t get any more freakishly out there and insane than the latest thing I’ve seen.

And each time, I’m wrong.

You can now pay to subscribe to a service that will broadcast an endless stream of DHS terrorism alerts and security threats to your cellphone.

People are actually paying money to have a constant stream of “AAAAAH! MUSLAMONAZIS!!!! BOOGA BOOGA!!!” pumped into their ears and scrolled across their phones.

Just read their ad copy:

The threat of additional terror attacks on the U.S. homeland, as well as on American citizens and interests abroad, is very real.

So you should wet your pants RIGHT NOW!!!! BOOGA BOOGA!!!!

Government agencies, intelligence officials and terrorism experts repeatedly warn that more attacks are forthcoming.

In fact, it could be ANY SECOND NOW!!!! ARE YOU SCARED YET??? HEY, IS THAT GUY OVER THERE BROWN?!?!!!?

Each repeatedly warn you to increase your threat awareness and stay informed.

And then WET YOUR PANTS!!!

AlertsUSA gives you an information edge, regardless of your location, with timely notification of substantial terrorist threats, warnings, advisories and other events and incidents of national significance – sent direct to your mobile device.

An information edge? Over what? The excruciating effort it takes to turn on your TV and put the news on?

When did we turn into a nation of inveterate bedwetting hatebags?

As if this weren’t bad enough, there’s still one choice bit of vile at the bottom of this barrel of viciousness that’s still unscraped:

This story is about the parents, Bonnie and F. Halsey Frost who grew up with all the advantages and, despite what I might assume is a liberal view on abortion….

Yep. Riehl went there.

That’s class.

Police: No foul play in Aldridge’s death
October 9, 2007

Police have closed their investigation into the death of the Rev. Gary Aldridge.

Detectives determined that no foul play existed in the case and therefore no crime had been committed, according to a news release from the Montgomery Police Department.

Aldridge, 51, was found dead inside his home about 10 a.m. June 24. He had served as pastor of Thorington Road Baptist Church since 1991.

Forensic results indicate Aldridge was alone at the time of his death, the police release states. A report by the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences states the final pathological diagnoses for Aldridge’s death as “accidental mechanical asphyxia,” according to the release.

Montgomery County District Attorney Ellen Brooks had sealed the Aldridge case after an initial autopsy conducted by Dr. Stephen Boudreaux, a medical examiner, was sent to Forensic Sciences on July 13. Boudreaux’s report stated Aldridge died of asphyxiation and there were no injuries to his body.

Well, that’s sort of a polite way to put it. In fact, here are some relevant details on the death of Aldridge, a Liberty University graduate and former Jerry Falwell employee:

Dead Reverend’s Rubber Fetish
Autopsy: Pastor found in wet suits after autoerotic mishap

OCTOBER 8–An Alabama minister who died in June of “accidental mechanical asphyxia” was found hogtied and wearing two complete wet suits, including a face mask, diving gloves and slippers, rubberized underwear, and a head mask, according to an autopsy report.

Investigators determined that Rev. Gary Aldridge’s death was not caused by foul play and that the 51-year-old pastor of Montgomery’s Thorington Road Baptist Church was alone in his home at the time he died (while apparently in the midst of some autoerotic undertaking). While the Montgomery Advertiser, which first obtained the autopsy records, reported on Aldridge’s two wet suits, the family newspaper chose not to mention what police discovered inside the minister’s rubber briefs.

Because, okay, you totally don’t even have to click that link, either.

…Two wetsuits?

I will stop blogging about this eventually, but Right Wingnutistan’s latest foray into unabashed insanity has even me stunned. Big Daddy Ezra K writes:

Something has really gone wrong on the Right. Become sick and twisted and tumorous and ugly. To visit Michelle Malkin’s cave is to see politics at its most savage, its most ferocious, its most rageful. They say they’ve spent the past week smearing a child and his family because that child was fair game — he and his family spoke of their experience receiving health care through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. For this, right wingers travel to their home to inspect its worth, they insinuate that the family is engaged in large-scale fraud to receive government benefits, they make threatening phone calls to the family.

This is the politics of hate. Screaming, sobbing, inchoate, hate. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to drive to the home of a Republican small business owner to see if he “really” needed that tax cut. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to call his family and demand their personal information. It would never occur to me to interrogate his neighbors. It would never occur to me to his smear his children.

And that, my friend, is what is truly stunning. I say a lot of nasty things about right-wing crazies such as Dan Riehl. But it would never occur to me to invade his privacy by posting live dispatches about his living conditions from the shrub outside his driveway. What Malkin and her fellow travelers are doing is creepy and immoral, and they don’t seem to give a damn about it one way or another. The idea that these people make up any significant part of our population- even if it’s only 30%- is terrifying to me. Where does this sort of viciousness come from?

When Graeme Frost spoke on behalf of expanding the S-CHIP program, I’m sure he had no idea that he was setting up his entire family to be condemned by every loser gasbag in the right-wing blogosphere. Here, for instance, is Dan Riehl:

Yes, the Frost children are victims, but not of conservatives. They look more like victims of a couple of mostly spoiled brats who became parents and never felt compelled to take responsibility for themselves when it came to the bottom line on that.

Y’hear that, Graeme? Your daddy sucks! The super-cool Dan Riehl has said so!

This is the crown jewel, though:

How about getting Dad [Ed. note: The 12-year-old kid’s grandfather] to cash in on the vintage 1956 T-Bird, 56 being the year he graduated from Princeton, F H? Doesn’t he care enough about his Grand kids? I mean, that question’s fair game, right? After all, you weren’t too ashamed to put it to us by allowing your child to be used by a liberal political machine, right?

That’s the car that recently won him third place in an antique car show. He has money to help send the Princeton Band on the road – how about calling Dad next time you need some help instead of trying to reach into the collective pocket of the American taxpayers, you irresponsible, simpering wimp.

I hate to pile on here, but some of what I’ve been reading given a deeper search kind of steams me. Following up on Michelle’s post on Graeme Frost, meet Mr. and Mrs. A. Corwin Frost of Bronxville, N.Y.

And since Dan didn’t move out of his parents’ house until the age of 59 (he’s now a sprightly 197 years old), he knows what he’s talking about.

The lesson here, folks, is this: if you publicly take a stand in favor of a policy that wingnuts don’t like, they will rummage and troll through your personal and financial life in order to ‘expose’ you in any way possible. As I’ve said before, they simply have no souls.

UPDATE: John Cole is making sense:

If you look through this family’s dossier, it appears they are doing everything Republicans say they should be doing- hell, their story is almost what you would consider is a checklist for good, red-blooded American Republican voters: they own their own business, they pay their taxes, they are still in a committed relationship and are raising their kids, they eschewed public education and are doing what they have to do to get them into Private schools, they are part of the American dream of home ownership that Republicans have been pointing to in the past two administrations as proof of the health of the economy, and so on.

In short, they are a white, lower-middle-class, committed family, who is doing EVERYTHING the GOP Kultur Kops would have you believe people should be doing. They aren’t gay. They aren’t divorced. They didn’t abort their children. They aren’t drug addicts or welfare queens. They are property owners, entrepeneurs, taxpayers, and hard-working Americans.

Nope, that don’t matter none. They got help from the government to pay for their kid’s health care, ergo, THEY ARE SIMPERING LOSERS, unlike that hunka-hunka-burnin’-hottt man, Dan Riehl.