Jeat? Really?
Really?
By way of cultural disambiguation, it turns out that a gaggah (at least out in Massachusetts’ variably scaled Cape) is a wicked lahdge quahog. That’s a clam. You snap a gaggah at your own risk.
Anywho, it would seem that little Rhody (and Providence Plantations) has a somewhat different spellings, definitions, and entire language. Down there, this functions as what we call “advertising.”
Imagine what the centrists would say if universal government-run mail delivery was proposed today.
Why are the Republicans so afraid of the Power of the Market? Here’s (extremely conservative) Democrat Ben Nelson saying why he’d support a so-called “trigger” option that would, at some hypothetical point in the future, activate a public plan built into some version of the forthcoming insurance reform (emphasis added):
“If, somehow, the private market doesn’t respond the way that it’s supposed to [to other aspects of health care reform], then it would trigger a public option or a government-run option,” Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, “but only as a failsafe, backstop to the process. And when I say trigger … I don’t mean a hair trigger. I mean a true trigger – one that would only apply if there isn’t the kind of competition in the business that we believe there would be.”
Naturally, the Republicans are against even this idea (emphasis in original):
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Republicans aren’t likely to be receptive to public option “trigger,” which would kick into effect only if private insurers fail to meet benchmarks.
“I don’t think so,” Gingrich said on Fox News Sunday.
[–]
Gov. Pawlenty says “all it does is delay the inevitable… if Republicans embrace the trigger, all they’re going to do is shoot themselves in the foot.”
I see. I see. What we have here is the old accidental truth seepage. If you’re in front of cameras, lying, for long enough…eventually and by accident some truth will get out of you. The GOP leadership in charge of messaging knows damned well that the mythical “market” of insurance won’t work at all. Healthcare is not and has never been a traditional market. It’s the nature of it. Thus, they know, KNOW that a trigger option, no matter how non-hair-trigger it might be will, in fact, be triggered. In one fell swoop such a trigger would show both the inability of the markets to solve every problem on this Earth, and (b) implying a role for government in, you know, anything not abortion or gun-ownership related.
Fuck the general welfare and well-being of The Republic. This would undermine the fundamental, guiding principles of the GOP: government isn’t part of the problem, government is the problem. And, just like with S-CHIP, such things cannot be allowed, no matter what the human cost.
Reagan or Obama?: As a wise Frenchman one wrote: “Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.”
Obama or Reagan?: I’ve talked a lot about responsibility. I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn. I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV
Reagan or Obama?: [O]ur revolution had already occurred “in the hearts and minds of the people.”
Obama or Reagan?: […] we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.
Reagan or Obama?: America is not yet complete, and it’s up to each one of us to help complete it. And each one of you can place yourself in that painting. You can become one of the those immortal figures by helping to build and renew America.
Obama or Reagan?: These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.
It’s hard to get a party to message robustly when its campaign contributions depend upon its not doing so.
Shriver contends that genetically engineered pain-free animals are the most acceptable alternative (Neuroethics, DOI: 10.1007/s12152-009-9048-6). “I’m offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering.”
Pain free animals for farming. I can’t forsee any possible problems there…
AT&T was happy to sign up as many iPhone customers as they could. Their mentality was probably very similar to gyms who sign up as many people as they can in January when everyone makes their New Year’s Resolution to lose weight. Gym are packed the first few months after January but then there’s a drop-off in attendance, because people tend to slack off
In fact, far from being New Years’ Resolution Gym people, iPhone users are probably using their iPhones to stream music at the gym. All the more data for AT&T to try and avoid handling.
Krugman, writing in a blog post, notes the same utterly detached form of group insanity that Joe Klein observed at a recent Arkansas town hall:
The point is that whatever is driving all this doesn’t have anything to do with the realities of what I, or, much more important of course, Obama say or do. Obama could have come in proposing to pursue an agenda identical to Bush, and he would still be a socialist/Commie/fascist, with those of us who don’t see it that way lying Nazis ourselves.
Something is going very wrong in the heads of a substantial number of Americans.
At least on the point of the communist nonsense (and, if you haven’t been following the output of the nuthatch: Obama is secretly larding his White House with Marxists), I think we can parse the madness pretty damned easily. The first signs of it emerged from the fact that various high-level advisors who report only to the President are commonly referred to in the popular media as “Czars.” That must refer to some kind of a Marxist, right? Why, there are more “Czars” in the Obama administration than in Old Russia! Where there was one… and the more frequent english spelling there is actually, uh, “Tsar.” But let’s take it at fully idiotic face value: never mentioned or grasped is the seemingly equally critical fact that Obama’s is the first administration since Reagan (whose team seemingly popularized, but didn’t invent, the term “Czar” in its modern US political usage) that has actually stopped using the term at all. Early on during the transition period, the administration went out of its way to put a stop to the common usage, going so far as getting out there and providing quotes that made it into various stories, such as this one in Politico, which specifically note that:
“Obama aides say that Browner will not be called a “czar,” a term they dislike. They say she will simply focus like a laser beam on energy-reform issues, which the president-elect has named as a top priority and one of the linchpins of his economic recovery plan.”
Of course, the media positively loves the term. And continued to use it. Even when specifically corrected:
Reporter: On Ken Feinberg, I think that he’s maybe the 20th czar-type position you’ve named.
Gibbs: No, I think the title is “special master.”
And now fans the flames of this nonsense by failing to mention any of this, ever. And act as though this is the first administration EVAR to have such positions and to call them something like “Czars”, and it is all so much more evidence of secret Marxism in the Obama administration.
Secondly, that “Something” of Krugman’s post is largely personified in the form of one Glenn Beck. Who holds particular disdain for one Van Jones, Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). See, absolutely no mention of “Czar” in there anywhere. Why, that gets us one closer to the number of Tsars around in the time of the Romanovs. In fact, I think we can all probably agree that Jones is a secret Marxist because Color of Change, an organization he co-founded has, as of this moment, successfully peeled off no fewer than 57 advertisers from Beck’s show. Clearly, only a secret Marxist would do such a thing, and a grateful nation owes Glenn Beck much for so selflessly pursuing this issue… That most of those advertisers still have contracts with FOXnews is troubling, but at least it’s a start. One might think that there’s a good MSM article in there somewhere, tracking the various personal vendettas that the right-wing echo chamber turns into grist for the mill. But, no, not interested. It’s just a “strange thing we’re observing on our various excursions flying across the hinterlands. Wonder what that’s all about?” Or, more succinctly:
“Sometimes in life you want to just keep walking… Sometimes, I think, just keep walking…. Some of life just has to be mysterious.”
God help us if we ever get a functional media class. People might actually learn something. Starting with those people in the newly functional media class.
“My fellow Americans, we say that healthcare is a right of all citizens. The other party says that it is a privilege for those who can afford it. If you agree with them that healthcare is a privilege, not a right, then vote for them. We would like to persuade you to join us, but if we can’t, then we are going to defeat you.
"Decades ago our opponents tried to block Social Security and Medicare, using the same bogus arguments that they are using today against healthcare reform. They said Social Security and Medicare would bankrupt the country. They were wrong. Once we fix the cost inflation of our broken medical sector, with some minor tweaks Social Security and Medicare can be made solvent forever.
"Decades ago, our opponents said that Social Security and Medicare would turn the United States into a fascist or communist police state. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. And not only are they wrong, they are hypocritical. Many of our opponents who claim absurdly that universal healthcare will bring tyranny to the U.S. have defended some of the greatest assaults on civil liberties and the rule of law in American history during the previous administration.
"They can draw a Hitler mustache on me. They can draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa, for all I care. They are wrong and we are going to defeat them.
"We won the elections and we are the majority. We would like to build the biggest consensus possible, but progress is more important than consensus. Our job is to help the American people, not split the difference between right and wrong by giving a veto to the party that the American people have rejected.
"In this fight, as in earlier struggles, powerful interests are opposed to the needs of the people. In the 19th century, we the people defeated the Southern slave owners, freed the slaves and saved the nation. In the 20th century, while fighting alongside many other nations to save the world from militarism and totalitarianism, we the people here at home tamed the corporations for a generation and fought segregation based on race, gender and, more recently, sexual orientation.
"Today the campaign for affordable healthcare as a right, not a privilege, is opposed by powerful interests in the medical and insurance industries. They seek to deceive and confuse you. And they seek to bribe or intimidate your elected representatives into serving their will rather than the needs of the public.
"They may win this battle. They may win the next. But we will never stop fighting for the needs of the many against the greed of the few. For more than 200 years, from the time we threw off the tyranny of the British empire and established our republic, we have worked to realize the spirit of ‘76 on this continent and in the world beyond. The enemies of progress have money on their side. We have history on ours.”
Worth noting, in the run-up to James Cameron’s Avatar (his first movie since the Clinton administration), that old JC is just not a very good writer. Don’t get me wrong: he has great ideas, just shockingly little execution in terms of compelling, believable dialogue and/or dramatic events sequencing (this is totally separate from the ability to film a compelling sequence; it’s the narrative string of those sequences and the dialogue that binds them together that he frequently has troubles with). Rather than give a tick-tock of dull examples (to quote Leo upon ice-breaking: “this is bad!”), let’s just hash one out: The Abyss.
Released in 1989, it follows the travails of a team of deep-sea specialists as they are joined by another team of deep-sea not-so-specialists who hope to investigate the loss of a submarine and its various attendant secrets and the occasional nuclear bomb. The Soviets (yep, still around!) are also snooping in the area, and naturally the two teams each contain exactly 50% of a former couple who still love but cannot love. Mayhem ensues; it’s Die Hard on a submersible platform. [Spoilers ahoy!] Turns out there’s a mess of aliens down there. They are more or less set on destroying the Earth from their abyssine fortress, uh, sooner or later, but are convinced by the selfless act of Our Hero to relent and wait to see how (or if) humanity shapes up (recall that Ed Harris chases the nuke that the SEALs sent down into The Abyss and disarms it with great fortune due to some color-perception issues that crop up at the final moment in glow-stick lighting (see: great ideas, poor execution!)). In the aftermath, both the submersible platform and the alien fortress surface (the latter in the form of a pink-hued paper plate filmed in a bathtub), and everyone is happily reunited.
In the “Director’s Cut” we get an extended sequence of events with the aliens. While it’s inconcievable that it could be a worse ending than that which shipped with the original film: it is. Occasionally, the studio is right to fuck with the film.
Now imagine this:
Same set up. Same basic buildup too: a series of odd things happening with increasing frequency as more time is spent below. Are there aliens out there? We occasionally see some odd lights. Perhaps sea creatures of some unknown kind? The Red Menace? Maybe it’s just a problem with the exotic gas mixture (this, conveniently enough, already is basically a plot-point of the film), and, played along with the also already-in-there SEAL commander’s gradual descent into madness (like Ted Striker, he can’t handle the pressure), we could be made to wonder if, in fact, everyone aboard is just going nuts and there’s nothing out of the ordinary happening down there at all. Plug in a few POV-type fantasias (or are they!?!) at key moments to build on each of these potential explanations. Then have the SEAL commander send the nuke due to his own, personal theories. Ed Harris doesn’t know if there’s something down there or there isn’t, but whether it’s the Roosky or the Alien, he’s not risking it, and he goes anyway. Just imagine the glory of these Cameronian lines:
BUD
Baby, maybe there’s something down there, maybe there isn’t. But we’re going to find out. Soon. And for a long time. Now you go live, goddammit, LIVE!
LINDSEY BRIGMAN POV–VIRGIL ‘BUD’ BRIGMAN DESCENDS INTO MOONPOOL AND VANISHES
LINDSEY
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Later, we have the same choppy, text-based communications as depicted in the real film; he’s reached the bomb. They tell him what to do. And he is never heard from again. Did he get there? The bomb didn’t go off, but maybe it just malfunctioned at that depth. Was it him? Was it aliens? Sea monsters? Red Menace? They are rescued (though without alien help, as occured in the film), but clearly can’t hope to explain any of the many events that happened. Technicians note some minor helium imbalances in the air handling system and some odd organic residues that could…be…anything.
Roll credits.
Tell me that’s not almost infinitely better, ‘Merica. Tragic, mysterious, and action packed. It’s the fucking American Dream.
Lemkin 