Sadly, No!

ABOVE: Dan Riehl, c. 1785, Oil on canvas
by Joseph Siffred Duplessis

Shorter Dan Riehl, Poor Dan Riehl’s Almanack
Was Census Worker Bill Sparkman A Child Predator?

• Using the same sleuthing skills I used to solve (single-handedly, I might add) the Natalee Holloway case, I deduced that Bill Sparkman was a pedophile from the fact that he was a middle-aged man without a wife or children. Well, true, I don’t have a wife or children either, but, but, but …

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

*Cf.

[h/t commenter b.g.]

ABOVE: Stephen Spruiell

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Yeah, I know you’ve seen this title before. I stole it from Brad. So bite me. But, really, there was no other title that was even remotely possible for a post about Steve Spruiell’s comments at America’s Shittiest Website™ concerning the Miami student without health insurance who died of the flu. Rather than summon up even an ounce of human pity or compassion for a young girl’s tragic death, which, admittedly, would be a difficult task for this soulless rat bastard, Spruiell shifts into full IGMFU mode:

This young woman’s death is indeed tragic, but it is not an indictment of the U.S. health-care system, cheap left-wing moralizing to the contrary notwithstanding. Many capable young people forgo stable careers in order to try their hands at starving-artistry. The rest of us are under no obligation to subsidize that choice.

This could have been a shorter:

• People who don’t have jobs deserve to die

But that wouldn’t have fully conveyed the malodorous stench of self-righteous indignation wafting from Spruiell’s post. Poor little Steve. Forced to hunt-and-peck his two index fingers to death on a keyboard to earn a paycheck and health insurance from a sweat shop that, by all appearances, is quite content if he shows up to make a few lazy posts at ASW™ and maybe write a longer piece every now and then. I’m sure that getting his butt constantly pinched by a googly-eyed K-Lo doesn’t help matters but, frankly, that appears to be the only thing that happens to Steve on his job which even remotely resembles work.

A shorter also wouldn’t have conveyed this shitbag’s fundamental dishonesty. For example, Spruiell’s little I-told-you-so dance on the young women’s grave includes this statement:

A healthy 22-year-old female in Oxford, Ohio can purchase serviceable health insurance ($30 co-pay for office visits) for $55 a month, according to ehealthinsurance.com.

Oh really? Let’s go see what “serviceable” means. Here’s the policy quote from ehealthinsurance.com that Spruiell was mentioning without, conveniently, providing any details

A $10k deductible is hardly “serviceable” for someone, like the woman in question, who was working two low-paying jobs without benefits in a coffee shop and a bagel joint to make ends meet. Just because Spruiell fell into the lap of wingnut welfare, this doesn’t mean that every college graduate can find a stable job with health care.

I think that there is an exception to the bad karma rule if any of us wishes that Spruiell catches a fatal but treatable disease and then has his health insurance canceled because he forgot to tell his insurance company that he had acne as a teenager.

ABOVE: Selwyn Dukebeard

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Lately most of the wingnutosphere has been all torn up about a YouTube video showing one class in one school in East Wastedump, N.J., singing one time seven months ago one song with the word “Obama” in it. This is, apparently, a precursor to the terrible moment when all children on the planet will start chanting “We Are Coming” which, in turn, is a precursor to the arrival of the “456” aliens, who come from the planet where Obama was really born and who want to take conservative children back with them to their planet. So let’s give a warm round of applause to Renew America superstar Selwyn Duke for pushing this meme even further into the realm of black helicopters, mind control transmissions to radios surreptitiously implanted in tooth fillings, and secret messages hidden in the lyrics of Britney Spears songs.

YouTube caught red-handed cooking stats for Obama
By Selwyn Duke

News aggregator DrudgeReport.com is currently linking to a YouTube video of a government schoolteacher instructing young students to praise Obama in song. While this is shocking, there is an even bigger story here. Consider this: the video’s “views” counter listed only 363 views as of 1:04 p.m. EST on Sept. 24.

But at the same time it had 2,279 comments.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Well I guess since each person viewing the video wouldn’t have left 6.27823 comments, this must be irrefutable proof that the Obamaniacs are monkeying with the statistics for some nefarious purpose.

But why would YouTube cook the statistical books?

Because the exposure a video receives is based on its number of views. And YouTube — owned by leftist leviathan Google — wants to suppress negative information about Barack Obama and the left in general.

Of course, it would have been a whole lot easier, and wouldn’t have left evidence behind that super-sleuth Selwyn Duke could discover, if the leftist leviathan had just deleted the video entirely, but bear with Selwyn a few minutes more.

So I tracked the video a bit … . Now, remember that it had 363 hits at 1:04 p.m. Here’s what I found.

* Approximately 1:25 p.m.: the video still supposedly had only 363 hits but had 2,500 comments.

* 1:39 p.m.: still only 363 hits but 2,668 comments.

* 2:16 p.m.: 363 hits but 3,018 comments.

You get the idea.

So let’s track the video ourselves. Oh dear. 684,940 views at 12:42 p.m. on September 26. Now before all you mean-spirited and hateful liberals start snickering about what a buffoon Selwyn is, did you consider that maybe Google actually read Selwyn’s column and tried to cover up its own dastardly deed? Well, did you? And what’s up with 684,940 anyway? Everyone knows that by now that video has had to have had at least eleventy-billion views. If not more.

Encore, Selwyn! Encore!!

[When] a Britney Spears video titled “Circus” … was issued late last year, it was immensely popular and was prominently featured by YouTube . . . . Yet it quickly was “disappeared.” What was its trespass?

It featured circus animals.

The obvious conclusion is that YouTube’s commissars received complaints from animal-rights wackos — and these were reflected in the video’s comments section, actually — and decided it wasn’t fit for young, impressionable eyes.

Sadly, no!

In his next column, Selwyn will uncover the plot by the socialist supermarket chain Safeway to remove teabags from its shelves in an effort to discredit patriotic teabaggers everywhere in order to protect the illegitimate Negro regime running the country.

ABOVE: P.J. Gladnick circa 1965

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The funny thing about P.J. Gladnick is that when he tries to be funny, such as when he posts at Dummie Funnies, his supposed comedy blog, he is about as funny as a whoopee cushion or a squirting carnation or, frankly, the title of his blog. But when Gladnick tries to be serious, such as when he posts over at Bozell’s Circus, well, he’s pee-in-your-pants, fall-down-on-the floor funny.

Even though PJ’s entire background in science is that he’s got every episode of NCIS on VHS, he has recently been donning his lab coat and expounding upon climate science over at Newsbusters. In particular, PJ has been yelling “Blizzardz, bitchez!” and then explaining how the most respected climate scientist has renounced his former beliefs and now completely debunked the liberals’ global warming conspiracy.

Imagine if the Pope suddenly announced that the Catholic Church had been wrong for centuries about prohibiting priests from marrying. Would that be considered big news?

Of course.

And yet something like that has happened in the field of global warming in which a major scientist has announced that the world, in contrast to his previous belief, is actually cooling.

According to Gladnick, that major scientist is Mojib Latif of Germany’s “Leibniz Institute.”

Being highly skilled, as we are here at Sadly, No!, in the use of a cutting-edge technology called Google, we can tell you, even if PJ can’t, what Dr. Latif actually said:

“Just to make things clear: we are not stating that anthropogenic climate change won’t be as bad as previously thought”, explains Prof. Mojib Latif from IFM-GEOMAR. “What we are saying is that on top of the warming trend there is a long-periodic oscillation that will probably lead to a to a lower temperature increase than we would expect from the current trend during the next years”, adds Latif.

Fortunately for Gladnick there is no penalty at Newsbusters for being flat-assed wrong, and so Gladnick needn’t fear that Bozell will subject Gladnick to a public humiliation or to a cut in his paycheck. But, you know, Gladnick might really want to stop calling his own blog “Dummie Funnies” because it’s rather like the guy in the back of the short bus telling jokes about the developmentally disabled.

Above: Hobbit of Questioning

Michael Gormley, The Associated Press:
Wisdom of taxing rich questioned

• New York’s friendless Gov. Paterson said at a luncheon with AP editors that the rich should not have had their taxes raised, lest New York be destroyed. Reached by phone, rich people sobbed about the outrageous hardships they are suffering, and agree that they will destroy New York, but show no sign of liking Paterson any better. Taxing the rich makes bad? Things say so!

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Shorter Lisa Fabrizio, Renoo Amuhrka
Colorblind?

• Jimmy Carter says that I hate Obama because he’s black. That’s not true because, in fact, I hate other colors even more than black. I hate pink (fags) and lavender (fags again) and green (tree-huggers) and yellow (that hippie submarine cartoon movie) and red (commie Democrats like Jimmy Carter). So there.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

There are times when you read a certain Red State diary and you ask yourself, “Man, they’re assholes. They can’t really be assholes like this in real life, can they?”

Well, as this Red State diary proves, “Yes they can.”

Defending Against an Alinsky Campaign

Posted by Achance (Profile)

For those who haven’t read my bio, my background is in collective bargaining and employee relations. I cut my teeth on the union side as an understudy to an old-time liberal Democrat trade unionist. His mantra was, “Before they do anything, make sure they think about what you’ll do about it.” After a stint in the private sector, I went to work for the State government representing the employer in dealing with labor unions. That is actually very common in both public and private sector labor relations since the union side is the best place to get good, hands on training in labor relations practices.

Ah, he’s a union buster! What a job! He gets to make sure that working people don’t get proper pay raises! This should be good. And it is:

I was pretty adversarial and confrontational and I worked for two administrations, one Democrat, one AIP/Republican, that were willing to be adversarial and confrontational with unions. I was a very good labor relations practitioner and my AFSCME adversaries were not, so I established a fearsome reputation as a negotiator and advocate. I became so cocky about it that I took to making little copies of each union’s letterhead logo and pinning on to the outside of my cubby wall every time I beat them in an arbitration or labor board hearing – sorta like the kill marks on a fighter plane.

Except instead of shooting down enemy planes, he was shooting down peoples’ wages and benefits. What a tuffguy! How did ya do it, huh? Plz, plz, plz let us know!

This is the key: the “community” or union organizers – or Presidents – are insulated; they’re not going to get fired for their actions, they don’t work for you. The followers do and they must be made to pay the price for following those leaders. Yes, it is unfair to off the useful idiots, but if you make a lot of smoke and noise, you don’t have to off many of them before the rest start watching their parking meters and thinking twice about following leaders – to borrow a little Bob Dylan. Ultimately, the union out-performed even my most hopeful expectations and I managed to change the career plans of three shop stewards and even one business agent. That’s my version of hope and change! It’s not often you get to take out paid staff, so I really enjoyed putting that head on my wall.

And this is how they roll.

They get massive thrills up their legs when they think about firing employees who dare stand up for their rights in the workplace. Their greatest joy is ruining other peoples’ professional careers. Look at this shit:

It does amazing things for employee morale when a couple of suits from HQ show up at a workplace and somebody just disappears into the night and fog. It didn’t take many.

If this post were written 160 or so years ago, he’d be bragging about how he beat the living shit out of some poor slave in order to instill fear and suppress rebellion on his cotton farm. To wit:

“It does amazing things for the Negroes’ morale when a couple of uppities get hauled off into the middle of the night and git whupped by me and the missus. It doesn’t take many!”

What a shitbag.

Sure enough, here’s ol’ High Hickory Knob¹ to comment on the US Census worker found apparently murdered with ‘fed’ written on his chest:

Confederate Yankee, ConfederateYankee.com
Census Worker Found Hanged in KY

The state, not the lube.

Above: Found sitting in own pew

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It’s good that he’s been developing a sense for the Dionysian lately, but we must note that our Aurelius of Asheville is not a wino, but a Wyeth, by which we mean:

US: Hey, famous illustrator of Treasure Island and other such books whose son painted Christina’s World.

CONFEDERATE YANKEE: Wha? Why you call me ‘famous illustrator of Treasure Island and other such books whose son painted Christina’s World?’

US: N.C. — No Class.²

Because hey, we don’t sexualize people found dead from hanging unless circumstances exceed what we call the single-wetsuit rule. But we also don’t masturbate into spoiled meat, so what do we know.

The AP report states that Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old part-time Census field worker, was found hanged from a tree with the word “fed” written on his chest in a remote corner of Daniel Boone National Forest.

Predictably, the usual suspects are suggesting that Rush Limbaugh threw the rope over the branch and Glenn Beck tied the knot.

The only problems with that theory is:

* lack of evidence
* lack of evidence, and
* lack of evidence

A nicely slippery diversion with a mock-jaded flourish of jazz hands. The word ‘fed’ written on his chest along with another thing mentioned below would, it’s true, seem to guide suspicion in a certain direction, but maybe these ‘usual suspects’ (Dave Weigel?!) should wait until they see something asserted on a right-wing blog, because then the rule says that you can skip the looking-into-things formality and go straight into the main work of pitching a thoughtless spaz.

And while liberals are quick to blame the vast right wing conspiracy for Mr. Sparkman’s death, they had to overlook this part of the story to do so:

Appalachia scholar Roy Silver, a New York City native now living in Harlan County, Ky., said he doesn’t sense an outpouring of anti-government sentiment in the region as has been exhibited in town hall meetings in other parts of the country.

“I don’t think distrust of government is any more or less here than anywhere else in the country,” said Silver, a sociology professor at Southeast Community College.

Oh, well okay then. They had to overlook that some local college professor was quoted expressing skepticism, because that would otherwise be a decisive turn. Overlooked in this ‘they had to overlook’ construction — with its rote imprecation of dishonesty that’s actually notorious as a cover for, you know, rote dishonesty — is that the body was discovered on September 12, the very day of that whole big ‘hear me roar’ thing of the Teabaggers and their handlers, and was apparently found near a cemetery, where it seems likely that it hadn’t been creaking in the breeze for very long. Also, ‘Sparkman?’ Could they not have found a man named ‘Igniter?’

Hopefully the investigation into Mr. Sparkman’s death will lead to the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of the person or persons responsible for his death. And I rather suspect that when they do find a motive, it will have very little to do with politics and quite a bit to do with him stumbling across marijuana farming, meth labs, or moonshining.

Ah, he’s been reading Free Republic,or worse, reading Stacy McCain who’s been reading Free Republic.

See the Freeper link for the other (equally good) hypotheses. All we know is that these guys seem too hapless and chumpy to actually kill anyone — although come to think of it, whatshisname did decide to let his people go to the big 9/12 rally in DC without him, in order to take care of some local Teabag business. We allege nothing, but only think well of having an open mind as a general condition.

As the New York Times’ resident glibertarian dweeb, John Tierney is supposed to give a full-throated defense of our nation’s stupid, wasteful and inferior system of paying for health care. And indeed, he gives it the old college try in this article, but he inadvertently disproves his whole thesis:

To Explain Longevity Gap, Look Past Health System

If you’re not rich and you get sick, in which industrialized country are you likely to get the best treatment?

The conventional answer to this question has been: anywhere but the United States. With its many uninsured citizens and its relatively low life expectancy, the United States has been relegated to the bottom of international health scorecards.

Well yes, John. When you spend more per capita than any country in the world and still have lower life expectancies and tens of millions of people uninsured, that hurts your score. In fact, I’d wager to say that it’s a good indicator that our health care system is really goddamn inefficient.

But a prominent researcher, Samuel H. Preston, has taken a closer look at the growing body of international data, and he finds no evidence that America’s health care system is to blame for the longevity gap between it and other industrialized countries. In fact, he concludes, the American system in many ways provides superior treatment even when uninsured Americans are included in the analysis.

“The U.S. actually does a pretty good job of identifying and treating the major diseases,” says Dr. Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania who is among the leading experts on mortality rates from disease. “The international comparisons don’t show we’re in dire straits.”

No one denies that the American system has problems, including its extraordinarily high costs and unnecessary treatments. But Dr. Preston and other researchers say that the costs aren’t solely due to inefficiency. Americans pay more for health care partly because they get more thorough treatment for some diseases, and partly because they get sick more often than people in Europe and other industrialized countries.

But that’s just it — the reason Americans get sick more is because our system puts less emphasis on preventative care.

It goes like this: private, for-profit insurers should have an incentive to plow money into preventative care programs for their customers because it would save them money long term. But because Americans change jobs — and therefore, insurers — every five years, the insurance companies see preventative care as an expense that won’t provide them with long-term payoff. The result is that most Americans don’t get important long-term treatment and will only get medical attention when problems hit crisis levels that require expensive and drastic medical interventions. If Tierney had read his own newspaper’s coverage on the difficulties in getting private insurers to cover long-term treatment for diabetes, he would have understood this.

The article gets worse as it goes along, especially toward the end (my emphasis):

When I brought up Dr. Preston’s work to Ellen Nolte and C. Martin McKee, two prominent European critics of the American system, they suggested that he was taking too limited a view of health care. They said the system should take responsibility for preventing disease, not just treating it.

Dr. Preston acknowledges that the United States might do more to keep young and middle-aged people from getting sick, but he says it’s not clear that other countries’ systems are more effective.

It isn’t? Gee, it’s not as though people have written entire books comparing the effectiveness of other countries’ efforts at implementing preventative health care. It’s not like those countries that have done more to emphasize preventative care have health care systems that spend less money for longer life expectancies or anything. ZOMG, there really is no way to tell! None at all!

At any rate, I’ve been spending the last couple of months researching the st00pidity of our st00pid health care system. I’ll have an AlterNet article about it later this week that you can bet I’ll shamelessly plug here.

Coming up later today, I’ll have some LOLz with RedState’s Moe Lane.

UPDATE: By the way, anyone who wants to have a real understanding of health care around the world should read T.R. Reid’s The Healing of America. It’s concise, well-written and not terribly wonkish. I’ve read a bunch of articles and books on health care over the past two months on health care in the United States and around the world, but this was by far the most comprehensive and informative.

S.E. Cupp, Townhall.com:
Generational Racism is Old and Tired

• Racism would barely even exist in this country if it weren’t for loose-dentured old fusspots such as Jimmy Carter, Dave Letterman, Nancy Pelosi, Maureen Dowd and Al Sharpton, who point out every real and imagined instance of bigotry they see. They should take a cue from my generation and learn to approach the topic cheekily and with blunt humor — unlike the old days.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™