I have no idea what I clicked to get here, but now I can’t contain my excitement at the prospect of looking this professional and empowered, for only a penny-per-month more than the cost of a Glenn Beck-style Survival Seed Garden.
Plus, who could fail to be ensnared by compelling, hypnotic ad copy like this?:
A professional website design establishes you as a serious contender, and catches the eye of your supporters (and, likely, your opponents). More importantly, it gives you credibility. You know you are running a professional campaign, but the world needs to know it too.
Yes, by God, I AM serious…and the world MUST know who I am! Where do I sign…and does this deal include that Tweetie thing?
Sarah Palin hates Health Care Reform so much, she doesn’t care how bad it hurts you to tie your shoelaces or pick up the newspaper on your porch. Hell, she’s young, rich and healthy—and she’s probably never even heard of stenosis—so what does it matter to her as long as you twist your crushed nerves and scoliosis into an upright position to oppose the Dark Machinations of the Kenyan Usurper?
With a Stiff Spine America Must Stand Against Obamacare
Today at 11:24am
If Senator Reid, Speaker Pelosi, and President Obama get their way, soon our country will be changed forever. Using every partisan parliamentary trick in the book (including some they invented just last week), Washington’s Left intends to ram through their takeover of our health care system regardless of the consequences.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I have to oppose Obamacare with a stiff spine, I might as well oppose it with my enlarged liver, predisposition to diabetes, diminished lung capacity and melon-sized prostate.
Snark aside, Sarah’s new Facebook emission is chock-full of warmed-over, debunked BOILERPLATE FAIL, which she has apparently recycled in an attempt to remain relevant to somebody, somewhere. I encourage you to read it, if only for the fun of hunting down the implied-Death-Panel “Easter Egg” she has cleverly hidden in the plastic grass of her crouton-padded word salad.
Maha, over at The Mahablog, is doing some myth busting on health care reform herself.
She points out that, despite the Rethugs breathy claims that Dems will be totally screwing themselves in the 2010 elections if they pass health care reform (thanks for the disinterested tip, guys!), the polls in fact show that approval v. disapproval of reforms is just about even. Additionally about 1/3 of those opposing reforms are against them because they don’t go far enough to reform the system (as am I but I still want to see the bill passed and at least get us on our way.)
Good morning, and I do hope you remembered to set your clocks back 1 hour.*
As is often the case in times of rapid momentous change, Twitter has stepped up to the mark in the face of these developments you may already have heard about:
It’s been a brawl for years, this education culture war that seems to take on a particularly vicious turn in the heart of Texas. The latest and most important round, a drastic revision of the social studies curriculum standards to put a conservative spin on history and economics textbooks, was given preliminary approval after a series of heated meetings of the Texas Board of Education that didn’t do much to improve the image of the nation’s second largest state as a sometimes small-minded political and educational backwater.
In a matter of days last week in Austin, the majority of the 15-member board, insisting they were only trying to offset liberal bias in textbooks, questioned Darwin’s theory of evolution and the constitutional principle of separation of church and state; debated hip-hop and genocide in Darfur; deleted Albert Einstein and Thomas Alva Edison from textbooks; emphasized Christian teachings and fundamentalist values; adopted conservative articles of faith like American exceptionalism; promoted right-wing leaders and organizations like Phyllis Schlafly and the National Rifle Association; and refused to give adequate attention to Hispanic and African American contributions to U.S. and Texas history.
Trab Stupak (I refuse to call him by his proper first name because that was the name of my late boxer dog, who was a vastly superior creature) shares some plaintive thoughts with his fellow fetus fetishists at National Review Online:
Sitting in an airport, on his way home to Michigan, Rep. Bart Stupak, a pro-life Democrat, is chagrined. “They’re ignoring me,” he says… “That’s their strategy now. The House Democratic leaders think they have the votes to pass the Senate’s health-care bill without us. At this point, there is no doubt that they’ve been able to peel off one or two of my twelve. And even if they don’t have the votes, it’s been made clear to us that they won’t insert our language on the abortion issue.”
According to Stupak, that group of twelve pro-life House Democrats — the “Stupak dozen” — has privately agreed for months to vote ‘no’ on the Senate’s health-care bill if federal funding for abortion is included in the final legislative language. Now, in the debate’s final hours, Stupak says the other eleven are coming under “enormous” political pressure from both the White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). “I am a definite ‘no’ vote,” he says. “I didn’t cave. The others are having both of their arms twisted, and we’re all getting pounded by our traditional Democratic supporters, like unions.”
Pesky unions! Always whining about trivial shit like benefits for union workers, non-union workers and even the unemployed! A Democrat in an anti-union, full-employment state like Michigan is wise to ignore them.
I was totally happy to see this piece by Paul Krugman in the NY Times today. It’s been driving me crazy to hear Rethugs repeat these lying talking points over and over.
Myth Number 1: Obamacare will result in a government takeover of 1/6 of the U.S. Economy
Myth Buster from Krugman:
Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care, while private insurance pays for barely more than a third (the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses). And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated.
The only part of health care in which there isn’t already a lot of federal intervention is the market in which individuals who can’t get employment-based coverage buy their own insurance. And that market, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a disaster — no coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, coverage dropped when you get sick, and huge premium increases in the middle of an economic crisis. It’s this sector, plus the plight of Americans with no insurance at all, that reform aims to fix. What’s wrong with that?
Myth Number 2: Obamacare will do nothing to control costs.
Myth Buster from Krugman:
[C]ritics point to reports by the Medicare actuary, who predicts that total national health spending would be slightly higher in 2019 with reform than without it.
Even if this prediction were correct, it points to a pretty good bargain. The actuary’s assessment of the Senate bill, for example, finds that it would raise total health care spending by less than 1 percent, while extending coverage to 34 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured. That’s a large expansion in coverage at an essentially trivial cost.
Only two days into their sponsorship of Beck’s radio show, TurboTax tweeted a contrite acknowledgment that it had mistaken a liability for an asset.
According to StopBeck.com, TurboTax is the 120th advertiser to shift or outright yank its buys from Beck’s radio and TV programs.
Hard to say at this point whether TurboTax was responding to howls of consumer indignation, or the sudden realization that Beck supports a Soviet-style Flat Tax and a vastly simplified Tax Code, neither of which represents an exciting growth opportunity for sellers of tax-preparation software.
Palin propagandist John Ziegler warns that unless God Himself sends a golden chariot drawn by legions of cherubs to elevate Sarah Palin to the presidency, she is toast should she choose to disregard his advice and run in 2012:
[B]arring a literal act of God, there is absolutely no chance that Palin can beat Obama in 2012.
[snip]
[T]here is no doubt that her celebrity power keeps her theoretically viable to do literally anything she wants, except the problem here is that huge portions of public believe, wrongly, that they already know the real Sarah Palin… [A]re Republicans really going to run against an over-hyped, inexperienced, charismatic celebrity by nominating someone who is already thought of exactly that way by at least half of America?
Alaskan blog Palingates, which broke the story on March 3, additionally serves up some compelling speculation on the mystery of why Sarah Palin was standing in front of a snowmachine in her TV commercial spot promoting the Iditarod, which is rather famously a dog-sledding event. Opportunistic product placement or spontaneous scene propping? You decide.
Beyond that, the jokes write themselves: The CBS story notes that Citgo has been the target of repeated Wingnut boycott initiatives. Palingates includes a video from the 2008 Primary where Sarah admits to a Venezuelan interviewer that she believes Hugo Chavez is a dictator. Chavez responded at the time by calling Sarah a confused “Beauty Queen.” Elsewhere, Salon split the difference by dubbing Sarah the “Hugo Chavez of Alaska.”
Optically, this is a bad look for the Palins. But perhaps embracing foreign socialist Enemy-of-America sponsors and cashing paychecks from dictators is just a “common sense solution” for energy self-sufficiency she hasn’t shared with us yet.
Several of Rep. Eric Massa’s former Navy crew members go public with tales of Unwelcome Scrutiny on the High Seas. Joshua Green breaks the story at The Atlantic. [H/T TPM]
During an appearance on a right-wing Internet radio show on Monday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called upon voters who oppose the health care bill to get loud.
“Well I couldn’t agree with you more, as to the timing and the sense of urgency,” Bachmann told a caller to the show, Hot Tea Radio. “That’s why with everything within us we need to start literally banging garbage lids together, to create enough noise so that our neighbors and our co-workers realize where the time clock is at this point, because the second hand is literally banging up against 11:59 on the clock on freedom when it comes to health care.”
The people who elected this kook literally eat their own boogers every day when the Clock o’ Freedom strikes 12.
Some of you may remember when we wrote about the Florida case of a juiced-up musclehead with anger management issues beating down a Greek Orthodox priest with a tire iron because he claimed he was a genital-grabbing terrorist. Let’s just say it didn’t end the way we were hoping that it would. What a travesty.
In an encouraging sign that science may yet survive vigorous efforts to replace it with “common sense,” Dan Brown novels and radio call-in shows, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court has ruled that the End of the World, should it occur, will likely be initiated by something other than CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.
The Court rejected an appeal in the case of a woman who was seeking to halt operation of the LHC in order to avert the Earth’s destruction, possibly as a result of the accidental creation of a localized Black Hole, or some other damn thing that only happens in cartoons and Star Trek movies.
