I was twoogling the Faceblogtubes today and came across this:
‘An Intimate evening with Pamela Geller’
I will be speaking in Texas next month for a conservative Republican fundraiser. Did you get your tickets yet? The Republicans in Texas are having an Atlas hoe down throw down.
Which just goes to show that we were right all along.
Update: OMFG!
Q: How much does Jeebus love me?
A: This much:
GOP councilor would rather abolish police force than see it unionize
A conservative politician in Georgia is telling his hometown police force to stop looking for the union label, or find new jobs.
“Big deal!” you say. “So some crank local official wants to deny his police force the right to organize and will risk leaving his town without any cops just to prove a point!”
Well get a load of this:
Erick Erickson, the managing editor of RedState.com and a city councilor in Macon, Georgia, has called for the abolition of Macon’s police force if it votes to unionize.
The Macon Telegraph reported on Monday that some 130 police officers on the city’s municipal force want to unionize because of “officers bearing the burden of rising insurance costs, a loss of incentive pay and the city not having a pay scale.”
“I’m thinking I’ll have the City Attorney draft me legislation to dissolve the police department and contract with the Sheriff to provide public safety services,” Erickson wrote on the blog Peach Pundit.
“You didn’t read that incorrectly,” blogs Zaid Jilani. “Councilman Erickson’s response to the possibility of Macon’s cops forming a labor union is to abolish the police department.”
I’m old enough to remember when Republicans used to pride themselves as the law-and-order party who would be willing to spend some extra dough to hire more cops and get criminals off the streets.
Now they just want to abolish the police force.
We need a smarter center-right party in this country. Hell, scratch that. We already have a center-right party called the Democrats. What we need is a center-left party that can balance out the braying lunacy of the modern conservative “movement.”
So:
I’ve been spending the last two months researching the ins and outs of our st00pid health care system and learning why it’s proven such a wicked beeyotch to reform. The results can be found here (Part 1) and here (Part 2). I’ve put a ton of work into this and I hope you enjoy the fruits of my labor.
Getting back to the current debate: as enjoyable as it is to whack Obama around for the tactical errors he’s made in pushing reform, we should understand that this is something that has confounded progressives since the time of Woodrow Wilson. We have a fragmented medical establishment made up of hospital chains, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies who have all created fiefdoms within the system and have all staked their claim to profit from it. Without the government acting as the lead negotiator to drive down prices, this inefficient and fractured system has led to absurdly high prices for medical services that simultaneously price tens of millions of people out of the insurance market.
Combine this with the fact that nearly a century’s worth of propaganda has made universal health care seem unpalatable to the American public, and you’ve got the bizarre specter of uninsured, blue-collar workers standing outside of town hall meetings and demanding that the government not give them health care. Yes, we’re the only country where this sort of thing occurs.
What, then, needs to happen going forward? Welp, it’s pretty clear that we’re not going to get real reform — i.e., a single-payer system or a system of tightly-regulated nonprofit private insurers — with this round of legislation. Meaning, that we’re going to have to go back to the damn well again once the costs of health care truly threaten to bankrupt us. And if we’re going to be successful in getting that done, it’s going to require a long-term siege war against the status quo with strong, consistent messaging that makes it 100% clear to Americans that our system is a racket and a ripoff. As I put it in my latest AlterNet piece:
And to be fair, we Americans have a lot to be proud of: in addition to prevailing in two world wars and the Cold War, America has brought the world the cotton gin, the electric telegraph, the electric light bulb, the airplane, the moon landing, the Internet, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, hip hop and all the world’s biggest blockbuster films.
But our health care system is not Miles Davis, Raiders of the Lost Ark or the Chevy Corvette C3. Our health care system is Kevin Federline, Waterworld and the AMC Gremlin. Our ability to spend 16 percent of our gross domestic product on health care and still leave tens of millions of people uncovered is not something the rest of the world looks upon with a mix of envy and awe. Rather, it’s something that makes them crinkle their eyebrows and say, “Dude. For real?”
And that’s what it’s gonna come down to.
Bob Owens says, “Take the Front Line Course, fully endorsed
by me, the Confederate Yankee, and you’ll never have to
poop in fear again!”
Oh fuck me. As if we needed any more enraged backwoods wingnuts packing heat, Bob Owens is now pushing a firearms training course from some outfit called Front Sight Firearms Training Institute where, allegedly, you can learn
The ability to draw from a concealed holster and put a controlled pair of shots to the target’s thoracic cavity from 3-5 yards away, in less than 1.5 seconds.
And you can learn to do that even if you’re busy taking a dump from a seat attached to the trailer hitch on the back of your pickup truck and your concealed holster is somewhere on the ground covered up by your overalls.
The pitch, which offers a megabazillion dollars worth of “free” extra stuff, including a stainless steel folding knife worth at least THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS (if you could buy it in stores1) for one simple low payment of $1,199. And you get a pistol worth, allegedly, $600 absolutely for free, BUT ONLY IF YOU ACT NOW!!!!!11! Operators are waiting for your call. Spaces are limited, etc., etc., etc., and also. And, of course, Owens gets an affiliate referral fee.
Intrigued by such an exciting offer, I employed my mad Google skillz and, whaddiyaknow, but in less time than it takes (if you’ve taken the course, of course) to put a controlled pair of shots in the target’s thoracic cavity from 3-5 yards away I learned that this looks like it may be the biggest scam since Owens’s charcoal grill fundraiser.
Front Sight is run by one Dr.2 Ignatius Piazza,3 who is the Bernie Madoff of gun and real estate Ponzi schemes. When people arrived at their gun training courses, he sold them lifetime memberships for hundreds of thousands of dollars which would include, at some date in the future, their very own home at the shooting range with hundreds of other gun-owners in the deserts of Nevada. Needless to say, the homes never materialized. You know, Piazza just couldn’t find the right developers and so forth and so on. His victims sued and got an $8 million dollar settlement which Piazza then never paid, leading to a court order seizing all of his assets.
So, yeah, CYers, give Dr. Pizza $1199. Sadly, No! heartily endorses this idea. In fact, buy the course for yourselves and all your family members and their friends. Please.
2As in “Dr.” of chiroprocterology.4 By the way, bitchez, from now on I am Dr. Tintin to you.
3As in this guy.
4Chiroprocterology is the practice of giving someone a back massage while simultaneously sticking a finger up the butt of the person being massaged. It is often confused with Chiroreflexoprocterology, which is where the masseur instead sticks his finger up his own butt while giving the massage.
Shorter Anne “Babe” (Not That One) Huggett, Renew Merka
Drugged out of one’s gourd
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
Like D.A. below, I ain’t ever spoke ill of the dead and I ain’t gone start with this Bill Sparkman feller who I done caught snoopin’ around my carrot farm early in the mornin’. But there’s talk down here that there was a no-good long-eared galoot who was a-dressin’ up as a woman and tryin’ to seduce me t’ git at my carrots and then a-blast me with a canon and…
OOOOOOOO!!!!
I shoulda known it was you, rabbit! Git back here, ya rascal, git back here so I can blast ya! OOOOOOOO, I hate that thar long-eared galoot!!!
Above: There’s no a-foolin’ Yosemite Riehl.
Now I ain’t ever spoke ill of the dead and I ain’t gone start with this Bill Sparkman feller who been found hanged by his neck down there in Clay County. But there’s talk down there in Big Creek that some folks seen a carpetbagger trespassing on folks’ property and asking ill-mannered questions about how much kin they had and such. Now I ain’t saying that Bill Sparkman and the carpetbagger was the same feller. I ain’t saying that. And I ain’t saying Bill Sparkman was a Negra, either. But I reckon I seen a colored over in Annville walking hand-in-hand down the road with a white girl, just pleased as punch, and ain’t none of them city folks said a damn thing about it. And I ain’t saying it was Sparkman what was that Negra boy, but I ain’t heard it warn’t him neither.
This is interesting:
Sparkman’s Son: “He Didn’t Do This To Himself”
The Associated Press has tracked down the son of the Bill Sparkman, the Census Bureau worker found dead earlier this month in rural Kentucky. And Josh Sparkman, 19, has no doubt his father was murdered.
“I look at it as disrespectful to be still throwing suicide and accident around,” he said. “He didn’t do this to himself. That’s dishonorable. My dad was a good man. No person on this planet is going to fight cancer like he did, then turn around and kill himself a year or so later.”
See, it’s funny. I thought, based on what Dan Riehl wrote, that the kid would have been happy to see his dad go, since he was apparently a “child predator.”
But no, I guess that everyone that Dan Riehl dislikes is not some sick, inhuman monster.
This still won’t stop Fred Hiatt from hiring him as a regular columnist, of course.
Above: Have dumb, will travel
Shorter Thomas Sowell, Townhall.com:
The Brainy Bunch
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com made big news recently with its undercover investigation of ACORN, a notorious haven for poor people. The key to taking down this blight on the body politic was sending youngsters James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles into deepest, darkest ACORN-frica, decked out in native attire (fig. 1).
All well and good, but now the ACORN sting is yesterday’s news. Breitbart & Co. need another hit story — and really, this NEA thing just isn’t cutting it. Couldn’t they have at least dressed up O’Keefe and Giles as a sleazy West Bank artist and his nude model for another sting operation? That would have been hot.
Let’s face it, we all want to see Hannah Giles decked out in slinky clothes again. That’s why we at Sadly, No! are offering free of charge a new sting idea to BigGovernment.com. We think James and Hannah should infiltrate M.E.Ch.A., the Chicano students’ organization that wants nothing less than to recreate the Seven Caves of Chicomoztoc in downtown Burbank (fig. 2).
More O’Keefe-Giles sting operation ideas to come over the next week. Link your own creations in comments … we’ll do one of those contest-thingies. First prize is a James O’Keefe dolphin costume from his epic infiltration of Greenpeace.
