It’s an inclusive movement drawn from a cross-section of the American heartland! Tens of We teh Pipple showed up yesterday to stop Pelosi’s socialist juggernaut. Michele Bachmann repeated Sarah Palin’s outrageous lies in the most irritating nasal tones this side of Fran Drescher.
A nutty bald guy waved a stack of paper around, calling it an “abortion” and complaining that there are demons coursing through the Capitol. Yep, these are the folks liberals should work with to make sure we get Nordic-style health care coverage right here in America.
UPDATE: In the interest of blogular integrity, I should note I altered the above photo slightly, changing the text on two signs. Original photo after the jump…
From yard-sign-to-yard-sign, yesterday’s anti-HCR protest in Strongsville, OH lasted slightly longer than it takes to microwave a breakfast burrito.
PS: Nice editorial bookending by the videographer. As the Bush/Cheney sign drifts into frame, you can almost hear Charles Foster Kane whisper “Turdblossom.”
In a brazen, grisly assault, former George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove brutally attacked the concept of self-awareness during an ABC television broadcast.
As viewers and the production crew watched in horror, Rove seized self-awareness by the neck, sank his razor-sharp fangs into its carotid artery, sucked out its core meaning and then dropped its lifeless body on the studio floor:
Appearing on ABC’s “Top Line,” Rove attacked the Obama administration over a series of alleged foreign policy missteps arising, he said, from insufficient “groundwork.”
“We saw it in Honduras,” Rove said. “Where, rather than monitoring the situation, [the Obama administration] let a cowboy president try to act in an extra-constitutional way to violate a fundamental principle in the Constitution, all without having done their homework in advance.”
A stunned nation was left to ponder these three words: What. The. Fuck.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
Rush Limbaugh sez he’s leavin’ the country if it happens. Listen for yourself. (via Think Progress.)
I guess all I have to say to that is: “ohpleeeezohpleeeezohpleeeeze!!!”
The real punchline is that he’s planning to move to Costa Rica - home of one of the best soshulized medicine health care systems in Latin America. Hey, they even provide coverage to non-citizens. Like, umm, Rush would be.
Glenn Beck made a big deal out of landing an exclusive, hour-long one-on-one with outraged, seething, ready-to-go-Krakatoa Dem Congressman Eric Massa. Malkin and Limbaugh both warned him that interviewing Massa was likely to be the “Al Capone’s Vault” of misbegotten on-air scoops, but Beck predictably followed his gut straight into this year’s Christmas party reel of TV’s Queasiest Moments.
I haven’t screened the entire show, but this clip is guaranteed to make you feel like Emily Litella watching a live performance of “Who’s On First?” featuring Bob Dole and the ghost of Brother Theodore. The other segments can be viewed here.
From the comments on the Freeper live-thread, I get the feeling Beck was as bored as his audience by the end. Bored—but, surprisingly enough, not to tears.
Fulfilling his bloggy mission, Zandar points out the stupid in this wingnut-prØn poll, which finds that, according to Americans, the US has lost international standing during the Obama administration:
What a ridiculous poll. If you want to know how the US is perceived internationally by non-Americans, why are you asking Americans?
Good question, Zandar. As it turns out, Gallup released a poll last month that actually did gauge non-American perceptions of American leadership and presents data from 2006-2009:
