Politics
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Another reliable fake-news tonic for the real news during 2009 has been, of course, The Onion. In my opinion, The Onion’s video segments are a bit of a hit-or-miss proposition, but one subset of them cracks me up pretty consistently: “In The Know,” which sends up the kind of four or five-way pundit scrum the cable news outlets so adore.
A fine example is number five on my top ten videos of 2009, “In The Know: Giant Money Hole,” which festoons the economic bailout in absurdity. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: comedy, economic crisis, economy, lists, news media, punditiots, satire, The Onion, top ten, videos
Over at Scholars & Rogues, Rick Herschlag has spun out a post so good it gave me one of those moments of “damn, I wish I’d written that!” What’s the word for that — writeolization? Pen envy?
I want to keep the health insurance I have—which is no health insurance. I was dropped when I had a heart attack. My insurance company called it a preexisting condition, and they were right. Heart attacks have been around a very long time. The important thing is that I treasure my insurance company’s free market right to maximize profits at all moral and ethical costs. I would willingly die defending that right. And now, finally, I may get that chance.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: death panels, health care, national miscourse, Rick Herschlag, Sarah Palin, satire, Scholars & Rogues, socialized medicine
Keen observers of detail may have noticed that my blogroll has grown, and indeed expanded into four categories. I’ll go into detail about this in a forthcoming post (or perhaps even a dedicated page) soon. Right now I’d like to draw your attention to a particularly astute post by one of the new blogroll-ees.
Over at Dissenting Justice, Darren Hutchinson makes a clear-eyed case that the current charges racism in the political health care clusterfuck are acting as a smoke screen:
I am a law professor who teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, Race and the Law and other areas related to equality. I have spent nearly two decades researching and writing about race relations and public policy. With respect to the rightwing attacks on President Obama, however, I find the issue of race largely uninteresting. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: bloggers, Darren Hutchinson, health care, Jimmy Carter, Maureen Dowd, national miscourse, news media, Obama, race, racism
The following is text I composed for the “Additional message to President Obama” field, after I had signed my name to CredoAction.com’s petition “Tell Obama: The public option is not optional.” I urge all of you who read this while the health care reform issue is still current to do the same. Unless you don’t agree with me. No, fuck that — if you don’t agree I still want you to sign it.
Health care reform has been the issue of greatest concern to me for a long time. Therefore, in the following I will make every effort to temper my vehement language and trust that you will pardon me if a mild profanity or two do creep in.
If you punt on the public option, this whole initiative will have been in vain. All that would be left in the bill would be the window dressing. Window dressing, without a bloody *window*! Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: (in)humanity, big business, Big Pharma, ethics, health care, health care reform, Obama, profanity, public option, rants
How is it that I still occasionally think that I’ve seen it all? Specifically, with regard to the reflexive disingenuousness of partisan political idiocy? My hope for the reformation of our national miscourse keeps feeling more and more audacious.
At this point I feel compelled to alert you, my esteemed readers, that the remainder of this post will contain expressions garnished with no small amount of profanity. If this does not suit your taste, I hope that you will keep in mind that 1) you were alerted beforehand, and 2) it’s my fucking blog.
As I was saying… today’s attempt to make my head explode comes courtesy of Stephen Hayes and William Kristol at the Weekly Standard:
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Tags: (in)humanity, Ahmadinejad, assholes, douchebags, hypocrisy, Iran, Iran election, lies, national miscourse, Obama, profanity, punditiots, rants, Stephen Hayes, STFU, William Kristol
If this is your first visit to C&B you may be wondering, “Who the hell is this guy, and why does he have a blog?” It’s a reasonable question, so I’ve dedicated an entire page to answering it: check out 
…nwood…
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