Another Date That Will Live in Infamy

Let history show that on September 9, 2009, this country and everything it stands for was brutally and verbally attacked by radical terrorists whose visceral hate for Americans knows no bounds, and who have infiltrated every level of government. Although the hand of peace has been repeatedly offered to these people, they have now proven they have no sense of human decency and cannot be reasoned with. In order to prevent future attacks on our soil, we must not rest until they are rooted out and brought to justice, wherever we find them.

Real Americans Don't Need Their Pinkies Anyway

They discussed pros and cons, and the fact that Rice is retired and that the injury was to a relatively unimportant finger on his non-dominant hand. Still, the doctor tried to talk Rice into reattachment. "He disagreed with that plan," Carraway-Bowman said. "He left the tip of his finger with us and he went home."

William "9.75-Finger" Rice knows that a pinky finger (pink is just a shade of red, after all) is only useful for Harvard-educated liberal-socialist elites to stick out while they toast Osama Bin Laden with cups of green tea.

Everyone knows the most important finger -- the one you could least afford to lose -- is the middle one you raise towards the American flag at the secessionist rally; towards anyone who isn't white, heterosexual, or likes to quote Thomas Jefferson out of context; or towards the Constitution and any part of the Bill of Rights other than the 2nd or 10th amendments.

A close second is the index finger, which you need to pull the trigger on your AK-47 while you're watering the tree of liberty, etc.

In fact, every true tea-party patriot who opposes socialized medicine and government death panels (private-industry death panels are OK, just to be clear) should go straight to the kitchen, grab the biggest meat cleaver he can find (you do have several to choose from, don't you?) and lop that troublesome, Nazi-socialist-Marxist-terrorist-sympathizing digit right off, in protest. Hell, chop off several fingers, while you're at it. Don't even think about having them reattached, because emergency rooms in major-city trauma centers are mostly taxpayer-subsidized by the goddamn nanny-state government.

And come to think of it, this business about opposable thumbs has to be a communist plot...

[cross-posted at Blue Mass Group]

Losing the Message War...Again

I'm afraid Steve is right about why the right is winning the spin war on the town hall thuggery:

The last two election cycles were fun, but for decades we were told that right-wingers and Republicans are "normal," even when they engage in racist attacks or blow up federal buildings, while liberals and Democrats are dirty hippies who don't go to church and eat arugula and use four-letter words in public. That ingrained notion doesn't go away overnight, or even in a few years. And the right-wing/corporate noise machine knows just how to tap into it.

But there's another problem here (apart from the fact that nobody took my advice): as long as the conflict is between 'people' and 'politicians', people are going to instinctively side with 'people', even to the brink of physical violence. If it were clearer that this is a conflict between 'people' and people--that the thugs aren't just getting in the face of 'politicians', they're actually trampling all over the right of other people to be heard--I think the polling would be very different. As it is, though, the people who are getting shut out of the process (not just supporters, but non-crazy people with legitimate questions) are virtually invisible in all of this.

The only way to have turned this around (apart from taking my advice, of course) would have been to mobilize the (pardon the term) silent majority who were shouted down. A dozen or so calls to each local TV station, a dozen or so letters to the editor, maybe some complaints to the police, all coming from the people who are really getting screwed by the thugs, would at least have had a chance of changing the public perception of the dynamic.

Democrats Cave, Win GOP Support of Health Care Plan

Democrats have gutted their health care plan of its key components in a bid to placate Republicans and win bipartisan support. Some of the progressive ideas removed from the plan include: Euthanizing your grandmother, nationalizing hospitals, government-subsidized abortion on demand, unlimited free health care for illegal immigrants, and government control of your bank accounts.

With these concessions having been made, I trust that we can now move forward on health care reform with a broad, bipartisan consensus. Blue Dogs and Republicans, you can now rest easy knowing that the concerns of the town hall protesters have been met. While the progressive dream of a nation in which old people are slaughtered to pay for the abortions of ACORN-employed illegal immigrants will again have to be deferred, we are willing to settle for a bill without these measures in the name of bipartisanship.

[credit: Stroszek at The Daily Kos]

Saved by Dental Hygiene

Robin is plunging to his death from the top of a building. At the penultimate moment Batman throws him a bat shaped boomerang with a rope attached. Robin catches it in his teeth and uses it to pull himself to safety. Robin (excitedly) "Thank Goodness I take good care of my teeth!" Batman (solemnly) "You owe your life, to Dental Hygiene. If only more people understood."

More...
Sure, it was all campy fun in the sixties but as it turns out it makes damned good sense for us, as a country, right now. Dental health is a gateway to all kinds of health. A few years ago it was demonstrated that pregnant women with poor dental care--as in homeless or unemployed women--were much more likely to miscarry. The Times ran an article which I can't find a link to about just how poor dental care hampers work success: people with ugly or missing teeth simply can't be hired for "front of the house" jobs and are relegated to social obloquy and low wages. Children with poor dental care or no dental care routinely go to school with the kind of abscesses and jaw pain that floor older workers. They can neither eat a healthy diet nor study appropriately. In fact last year a child died of poor dental care when an untreated abscess lead to a very costly infection of the brain. Yet Dental care for children and adults is a luxury that few can afford. The quickest and most useful "jobs program/stimulus" in the world would be to sign up every school aged child for a federally paid tooth exam and cleaning at their local school.

A correspondent raised with me the question of whether a country whose economy was founded on people buying more and more trash could ever recover its equilibrium once people grasp that an infinite supply of plastic objects is not really within their economic grasp. Its something that has been on my mind, too, ever since I realized that although I could afford a new set of holiday themed tableware from Crate and Barrell I couldn't *store* a new holiday themed tableware set from Crate and Barrell. So, if I wasn't updating my housewares every season who was? And for how long? Answer: increasingly, nobody.

But there are one or two areas of life in which increased spending is never wasted, is always necessary, and has unlimited payoffs in intangibles like "human welfare" and that is health care spending. One way to arrive at that conclusion is to simply turn Republican arguments on their heads. Its my preferred way of studying society and politics at this point, because its infallible. Take their argument, reverse it, and you have a good approximation of a better argument and policy. One of the main Republican arguments against national health care is that people's health care wants are bottomless. If people could get access to good healthcare, man, they'd be all the time demanding stuff like stronger teeth, braces, good glasses, prosthesis, cancer treatments and even NICU units and prenatal care. The uxurious luxurious bastards. Likening ordinary health care costs and needs to cosmetic surgery, just as they liken ordinary contraceptive needs to some kind of bar hopping party game (I tried linking to Mark Steyn's priceless column on how the Contraceptive portion of the Stimulus bill was a luxury gift to drunken sluts but when you enter "Mark Steyn" and "Contraception" into a google search you discover the limits of google when it comes to handling a cottage industry of wingnuttitude), consensual sex to rape, and frat pranks to torture, the Republican version of reality inverts what we know to be true: Health Care is a smart investment for individuals, families, and for society.

The wealth of a country is its people, not its roads or houses. No people, or no healthy people, and all of that other wealth, all of those things, go to waste. Sure, its a gaping maw of need and to a certain extent the more we pay out for, say, children's health the more we are spending. But that doesn't make it any different from other kinds of consumer needs and wants, does it? I don't see the Republicans coming out against repeat trips to Disney because those trips aren't "needed" or are "costly." In fact, as I recall, Former President W asked us to continue shopping and going to Disney after 9/11 because he thought maintaining a steady stream of rodent bedazzled four year olds was important to our economic and political health.

This is, in very short order, precisely the debate we are going to have about National Health Care. On the left we see an infinite number of reasons to create and maintain an extensive, well funded, system of taxpayer financed health care. 1) It would relieve businesses of the cost and paperwork associated with insurance companies, 2) it would relieve individuals and families of the anxiety and risk associated with lost health care benefits when employment is suspended or terminated, 3) it would remove the profit motive and insurance company cost cutting from the medical equation, 4) it would produce a healthier population overall and enable more people to continue working while they or their loved ones are ill, 5) it would enable entrepreneurs of all sizes to take risks in creating new companies or trying new jobs, 6) it would create a burst of good jobs in the health care industry where "good job" is a job that requires good education, high skills and doesn't consist of simply pushing paper and denying benefits. On the Right, of course, all of this is inverted and the increased need for health care professionals and health care provision is seen as a sign of weakness and dependency in a welfare type population of slackers, health care jobs that provide health care are seen as unnecessary while insurance company jobs that deny health care are seen as good.

We are having a hugely ugly and pointless debate about the Jobs program in which the Democrats have failed to make the case that the stimulus bill is a Jobs program and the Jobs program redounds to the benefit of every American now and in the future. We are about to have the exact same debate about health care if we don't seize the initiative and the upper hand semantically and demonstrate again and again that "infrastructure" means human bones and hearts, health care spending is a jobs program with benefits for all of us.