In a way it's the oddest bit of ObamaCare propaganda we've seen so far. "This Is What an #ACASurge Looks Like" was the title of a Saturday post on the White House Blog by senior communications adviser Tara McGuinness.If you can't complain about how no one wants it, complain there are long lines to get it. Plus communism. You can't lose!
"The line started forming at 5 a.m. in front of an enrollment center in Miami," McGuinness boasts. "The final deadline to get covered in 2014 is in just two days, and Americans are literally lining up at grassroots events across the country to make sure they're covered. This is what momentum looks like"...
The first thing we thought of when we saw the pictures was the photos we've recently seen on Twitter of Venezuelans waiting in bread lines. Waiting in line to purchase necessities is a characteristic not of a prosperous free society but of command economies under repressive regimes. Closer to home, one doubts even the Transportation Security Administration would be so tone-deaf as to advertise long airport lines as an indication it's doing a great job.
Oh, and even better:
It may be that the people who waited in line to buy ObamaCare were doing so primarily to express their allegiance to Obama.He's got a point. I have a health plan through my job, but I was thinking of buying an Obamacare plan anyway, in order to show my loyalty to WHAT THE HELL WHO EVEN THINKS LIKE THAT.
Has Alex Jones weighed in on this yet? Maybe it was space aliens.
Waiting in line to purchase necessities is a characteristic not of a prosperous free society but of command economies under repressive regimes.
ReplyDeletePriceless, there is so much tendentious bullshit in that one line the universe is threatening to fuck its own face.
On the contrary, buying Obamacare as an expression of allegiance makes perfect sense. I mean remember those millions of W supporters who expressed their allegiance by enlisting to fight in the war on terror? ... uh, nevermind.
ReplyDeleteWonder he'd make of all those bank rushes at the start of the depression? People lining up to get not only a necessity, but a necessity they already owned. Was the repressive regime there Herbert "laissez-faire" Hoover, or the banks themselves?
ReplyDeleteMight as well ask why he doesn't think it's like the lines that form — and are celebrated! — for the new iPhone.
ReplyDeleteThis kind of goes without saying but--I spent the last month doing some organizing on community college campuses and among the demographic least likely to have care here in Denver (and wouldn't you know, it's a white male in his 20s). We had lines occasionally too, but let's be frank: you can't brand the buttocks with the OFA insignia unless the sheeple are standing single file.
ReplyDeleteYes the site sucks. Yes it's complicated and difficult to understand without a navigator present. Yes the grassroots campaign, here in CO at least, was an afterthought and approached less like something that was a political project than some kind of new consumer product rollout. Yes it's not single payer. But every single person we organized were genuinely thankful that they have access to healthcare they didn't have before (me included) and not a one praised Allah and the Kenyan Usurper at our table.
Waiting in line to purchase necessities is a characteristic not of a prosperous free society but of command economies under repressive regimes.
ReplyDeleteAnd that, comrades, is why the Friday after Thanksgiving is aptly named "Black" by our people, who are forced to wait for hours in the dark and cold to purchase their necessities due to the repressive economic policies of the tyrannical Obama regime.
Guess Taranto sleeps in on Black Friday. It's not like he has a long list of people to shop for anyway.
ReplyDeleteexchange. A surprising number of students at the local state colleges were extremely unhappy with the insurance they had to purchase in order to attend, and the admin at said schools--supposedly progressive institutions--wanted absolutely nothing to do with the exchange effort.
ReplyDelete(Sorry--Disqus apparently doesn't like this IPad I'm on. I blame our new repressive regime).
Shopping on the exchanges sucks mostly in the same ways shopping for individual coverage has always sucked. I used to do some web development for insurance companies, and there's really no way to make such a complicated process easy to use.
ReplyDeleteAt least the exchanges introduce the metal rating system, so you don't have to compare coverage on an item-by-item basis. Insurance companies are obviously hesitant to clearly rank their products by quality, so you end up starting with "Optimum PPO Premium Plus" and you end with "Platinum PPO Advanced Access Supreme with Cheese".
There are ways to make the process simpler, but it would take away the almighty right of the Individual Consumer to make Informed Decisions about what's Right For Them.
I saw a clip of KKKRove waving around a whiteboard with "the real numbers" of enrollments on it. Some people can't learn.
ReplyDeleteNot to mention when he started believing that access to affordable health insurance was a "necessity".
ReplyDeleteThe reasons for the suckiness run deep. But on balance this has helped millions of people and I'm proud as hell I got to be a part of this.
ReplyDeleteRemember the good old days when white people lined up to buy gold from Glenn Beck? Now they're going to have to sell that gold to buy healthcare. THANKS A LOT, OBAMA!
ReplyDeleteFeh! Those grapes are probably sour, anyway.
ReplyDeleteFor those of you noting that people willingly wait in lines, Taranto addresses this in his inimitable fashion. To wit:
ReplyDeleteSo what in the world could the White House have been thinking? Here's a guess: They look at the ObamaCare lines and think not of communist subjects queuing up for bread or toilet paper, or Americans for driver's licenses, but something more like the lines of consumers eager to be the first to get the new iPhone or the latest Harry Potter book...One obvious difference is that whereas the iPhone and Harry Potter queuers are eager to get the new thing first, the ObamaCare ones are presumably anxious not to miss the deadline (even if it's not rigorously enforced).
So, to follow the evolution of the "Obamacare is a failure" argument: No one wants health care; people want health care, but can't get it; people may seem like they want health care, but it's only because the gubmit is making them get it. But wait, there's more:
But ObamaCare was supposed to be a comprehensive reform of the health-insurance market to achieve universal coverage. The notion that one can build a functioning insurance market around affiliation to one party or politician in a divided country is preposterous.
We can't have universal health care because it will make everyone dependent. But we can't have universal health care because young people won't sign up and the network will be stretched too thin. But we also can't have universal health care because too many young people will sign up out of political loyalties. Not that it matters, because we don't have universal health care. Except the universal health care we have is going to be the end of us all.
I need to lie down.
I take my allergy medication to show my allegiance to Obama. What I want to kmow is HOW DID JAMES TARANTO KNOW THIS?
ReplyDeleteI guess Precious never stood in line for the latest Diktat iPhone
ReplyDeleteCan we have a moment of honesty here? Please? Just for a moment? Thank you. I have something important to ask: Am I the only person here who thinks that James Taranto looks like a wet turd sculpted by Jonah Goldberg?
ReplyDeleteThanks in advance for your answers!
The fuck? This logic is unassailable. Listen, when people stand in long lines to purchase tickets or ride rides at Disney World that's because Stalin. HOW DO YOU NOT GET THAT?
ReplyDeleteSTOOPIT, JAY.
Taranto dismisses those similar queues as different things entirely, because idiot. But he's totally convinced me that Megan McArdle camped out all night for an iPhone just to show her support for Friedrich Hayek.
ReplyDeleteThe notion that one can build a functioning insurance market around
ReplyDeleteaffiliation to one party or politician in a divided country is
preposterous.
I dunno. My father signed up for Medicare as a way of saying "fuck you!" to Ronald Reagan.
It may be that the people who waited in line to buy ObamaCare were doing so primarily to express their allegiance to Obama.
ReplyDeleteHuh. I thought they did that when he won those two presidential elections. Maybe ask Hans von Spakovsky about that.
I heard that due to purchasing limits, they wouldn't let her buy one for each Chicago Boy.
ReplyDeleteThere's an entire chapter on "Waiting in Line" in Alinsky's Rules for Reds. It's right after "Laugh at Wrong Times" and "Always Eat Your Vegetables."
ReplyDeleteThe notion that one can build a functioning insurance market around affiliation to one party or politician in a divided country is
ReplyDeletepreposterous.
Requiring that Republicans switch parties and swear allegiance to Obama to get insurance is my least favorite part of the ACA.
You're granting Jonah skill in the arts that he hasn't displayed in any other arena: style, manners, critical thinking, language skills, or acumen of any sort. I'm afraid he's used up any benefit of the doubt he might be entitled to: unless I see Jonah complete a work of art (in feces or any other media) with my own damn eyes, I will continue to believe that his only skill is charm.*
ReplyDeleteOf course, you could have just put a period after "turd" and been just fine.
*Check out this picture. Then subtract twenty years and thirty pounds.
http://theblackberryalarmclock.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/jonah_goldberg-274x300.jpg
I have a health plan through my job, but I was thinking of buying an Obamacare plan anyway, in order to show my loyalty to WHAT THE HELL WHO EVEN THINKS LIKE THAT.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it makes more sense when you remember these people base their fast food choices on which companies are anti-gay rights. "Sense" being relative.
O.K....He does.
ReplyDeleteMOMENT IS UP NOW!
~
Not to mention, you wouldn't even be allowed to join the bread and toilet paper lines if you had the pre-existing conditions of an appetite and shitting.
ReplyDeleteI try to avoid places that don't believe in equal rights.
ReplyDeleteBut I sure as hell don't buy anything to prove my "loyalty" to some fucking elected official.
The lines are a one-time event, caused by procrastinators like the ones who mob the post office on April 15. The poor people in communist nations had to do it all the time.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I feel a little stupider just by addressing his idiotic point.
So healthcare is a necessity now? Progress!
ReplyDeleteThe fact that he phrases it as "to buy ObamaCare" indicates how far over the cliff his derangement syndrome has taken him. It's about signing up for health insurance, people!!!
ReplyDeleteI have an annual physical scheduled to show my allegiance to Obama. Then next, I'm going to have my prescriptions refilled to show how much I support him!
ReplyDeleteWaiting in line to purchase necessities is a characteristic not of a prosperous free society but of command economies under repressive regimes.
ReplyDeleteUm, dickwad? If we just gave everyone health insurance, THERE WOULD BE NO FUCKING LINES.
But thanks for admitting it's a NECESSITY.
You know what else people line up for ? Voting.
ReplyDelete"Who even thinks like that?" The Right does, that's who.
ReplyDeleteWhen Obama suggested that people check their tire pressure as a way of increasing gas mileage, I heard people call in to the Rush Limbaugh show to say that they would deliberately let air OUT of their tires.
When the First Lady suggested that children eat healthier, Sarah Palin made a point of feeding sugar cookies to her children.
Plenty of people on the Right are that petty, and that spiteful. Since they so often make personal decisions motivated by hatred of the president, why shouldn't they project a mirror image of this pettiness on the Left? That projection could easily take the form of imagining liberals waiting in line to express their allegiance to Obama.
"Waiting in line to purchase necessities vote is a characteristic not of a prosperous free society but of command economies under repressive regimes."
ReplyDeleteLong voting lines are the kind of lines Republicans are bringing to Americans.
If you mean the War of Ideas at Home(tm), sure.
ReplyDeleteYou know how it is with purity tests and allegiance* displays. The bar keeps going up. In a month's time you'll all be comparing notes on your latest colonoscopies.
ReplyDelete* Kudos to BSpencer on spelling "allegiance". I always get it wrong.
Good point.
ReplyDeleteI meant "sculpt" in the same way Marines are sculpted.
ReplyDeleteUh yeah. It was me, not my spellcheck.
ReplyDeleteYou're a good solider in the Obamarmy.
ReplyDeleteIt's true.
ReplyDeleteDown here in North Georgia, I remember having to wait half a day to vote in the presidential election of 2004. There was a shortage of voting machines and staff members, which caused lines to reach all the way 'round the block. I live in a predominantly African-American district, which is in a tiny blue dot east of Atlanta.
When I was finally able to drive across town to get to work, my Republican-voting coworkers had been in the shop for hours. Voting was much easier for them; they were able to get in and out of the polling place in a matter of minutes.
It may be that the people who waited in line to buy ObamaCare
ReplyDeleteI guess this is the new party line. It was those Democrats who attached the label "Obamacare" to the PPACA, in a perfidious plan to politicise a public-health initiative and turn its success into an advertisement for party affiliation.
Lie down? You need health care.
ReplyDeleteIt was really hard to click "See more" here. Really hard. Of course, now I know what not to wear with a gray suit if I ever have a gray suit.
ReplyDeleteStill, I gotta admit I loved it when he took their phones away and gave them to the welfare queens.
ReplyDelete"The notion that one can build a functioning insurance market around
ReplyDeleteaffiliation to one party or politician in a divided country is
preposterous."
"True, the only one suggesting such a thing is me. But I never said I was right or not-proposterous. The point is, people are standing in line, just like they did in Stalinist Russia. And everybody knows how bad people's health was in the USSR. It was bad from standing in line--*outside*--in that terrible weather. About which, President Obama is conveniently silent. Does Obamacare offer coverage for colds caught in Russia? The question answers itself."
That's a shame, because turd sculpting is exactly what Taranto is engaged
ReplyDeletein here.
You can't spell "allergy" without the "alle" in "allegiance." Alle uber alles.
ReplyDeleteKnow what else we can't have? Anything nice, because of those bastards.
ReplyDeleteAs, indeed, you are. As are we all. What I "like" about Taranto, however, is that he's so patently a lying idiot. As is his co-WSJ columnist Stephen Moore. I keep expecting the Journal to put forth smart guys making deft points I'd find hard to refute. But no: we get these doofus shills and their nyah-nyah sneering every time. It's World Nut Daily material in a nicer suit.
ReplyDeleteWhere's the Obamarmy Armory?
ReplyDelete"Waiting in line to purchase necessities is a characteristic not of a prosperous free societ...."
ReplyDeleteBack up there, asshole. So you are admitting that health care is a neccisity, not a privilege or luxury? Cause that changes a whoile lotta things, donnit, asshole?
I am so sick of those people. We live in an anusocracy.
Well, I see what he means. Didn't McMegan wait in line overnight to get her iPhone just like a refugee in Somalia or Syria?
ReplyDeleteBloody hell,thats what I get for not reading down before posting.
ReplyDeleteIsn't that the core of Frankfurt's distinction between "lying" and "bullshit"? These guys would betray the entire bullshit ethos if they tried to make a convincing case.
ReplyDeleteAnd the drag queens.
ReplyDeleteI'll just leave this here.
ReplyDeletehttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/56/Bus_Queue.jpg
Christ, get your mind out of my bedroom, smut clyde. I'm actually undergoing my Obamacolonoscopy prep right this very minute. Its scheduled for friday. After that they'll get me right into my obamatransexual surgery right after tying my tubes and snipping my vas deferens once they insert it or whatever they need to do before gold plating my teeth and giving me my new African name.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget the flush-in where we all flush our toilets at the same time to end the war.
ReplyDeleteI'd really have liked it if the Insurance companies were basically allowed only to offer things in basic flavors:
ReplyDeleteAetna Bronze Narrow, Aetna Bronze Extended
like that. People just don't need that much fake choice. Basic formulary, Basic number and type of doctors and specialists. Eventually some method by which people who have major illnesses and accidents just get put into a special category and given more access to specialists than most people need for the majority of their lives.
One of the current whinges being whined is that people only "lined up in order to avoid paying the mandate." I'm pretty sure that the people saying this have no idea how tiny the mandate is, or how difficult it is to collect, or that it won't be collected for a year. I've also seen indications from some trolls that the next line of attack is going to be that Obama forced insurers to drop great policies in order to force the hapless citizenry to purchase substandard policies for fear of being mandated out of existence. Its a perfect storm of misinformation. The story is going to go from "the old policies were great/cheap" to "the new policies are substandard/expensive" with a detour through an accusation that Obama and the Insurance companies are in cahoots against the insurance companies.
ReplyDeleteMy work here is done.
ReplyDeleteGood Lord, was that even a thing?
ReplyDeleteI defy you to say "Obamarmy Armory" three times in a row, really fast!
ReplyDeleteYes. The liar cares about the truth, but endeavors to replace the actual truth with a falsehood that, he hopes, you'll think is true. The bullshitter is indifferent to truth. He seeks not so much to convince as simply to smother or neutralize the topic at hand. Which, as Frankfurt says, might account for why we feel less affronted by bullshit than by an actual lie. We feel, not that we are being manipulated (as with a lie), but "only" the topic at hand is being manipulated, and in a way that isn't even necessarily concealed from us.
ReplyDeleteJames Taranto trying to make a convincing case would be like Pinocchio trying to convince you that he's really a great guy.
Oh, man. Are they on their way to the gulag or what?
ReplyDeleteThey are just realising that the #76 is late AGAIN and it would have been faster if they'd walked to the Gulag.
ReplyDeleteI haven't heard anything from/about Arglebargle in quite a while. Darn! I was hoping she'd weigh-in on the missing jet liner.
ReplyDeleteNear Emory.
ReplyDeleteThe Chairborne Division!
ReplyDeleteLast time I checked she explained that the ACA was a failure because not enough people were signing up and of those who are signing up not enough are of the young and healthy variety thus pushing the law into a death spiral.
ReplyDeleteIt must theoretically be possibly to build a mathematical prediction model based entirely on McCardle, Kristol and others being wrong. I predict that there's money in it.
Yep, the biggest threat to the US were always the fifth columns of the decadent left in its enclaves on the coast.
ReplyDeleteHark, what's that I hear? A rightwinger finally admitting that health coverage is a necessity?
ReplyDeleteNot to mention that under a universal, single-payer system, no one would have to wait in line to get that necessity.
Heh. I attended a meeting once where the company had booked us in at one of the Disney hotels. We had some free time one day which I spent walking around in the part of Disney World adjacent to the hotel (the part you didn't have to pay to get in). It was primarily a shopping and dining area. I came away with the idea that Disney World was much like the former Soviet Union, only with brighter colors and better weather, because everywhere I went in this part of the park there were unhappy people standing in long lines waiting to buy overpriced, shoddily-constructed merchandise they neither wanted nor needed, while everywhere you looked, looming over it all on triumphant banners, was the larger-than-life-sized visage of Mickey Mouse - the Lenin of Disney World.
ReplyDeleteYou know Dr. Noisewater. I didn't really need the image accurate or not. And I carefully avoid seeking out pictures of James "I like rape" Taranto.
ReplyDeleteYou are correct, yellow teeth do not go with a gray suit.
ReplyDeleteThat thing about reading the thread before posting.
ReplyDeleteSo, how many liters is yours?
ReplyDeleteI like my ending better where they make tons of money on the backs of wingnuts and leave a ruined America for Norway or somesuch.
ReplyDeleteI keep hearing so much about Saul Alinsky and his Rules For Radicals, I guess I oughta get around to actually reading it someday.
ReplyDeleteI mean, being a good Liberal and all...
I will remember to check for similar voices of disdain from the Wall Street Journal during the next Black Friday.
ReplyDeletelow lying Megan
ReplyDeleteI for one appreciate the ambiguity there.
There is that.
ReplyDelete"It was a dark and stormy night. The huddled masses wilted in the cold rain for Obamacare the WalMart to open."
ReplyDelete(Laughing, 'cause I work near there.)
ReplyDelete"Waiting in line to purchase necessities is a characteristic not of a prosperous free society but of command economies under repressive regimes."
ReplyDeleteRight, and in prosperous free societies with non command economies and non repressive regimes, such as we had pre Obamacare, the necessities were simply unaffordable for many people. Which means that they did not have to wait on line for them. And thus were much, much better off! Really, I would much, much rather not have a chance to buy affordable health insurance at all than to have to wait on line for it. Same with health care itself....if I have an emergency medical need, but there is a wait at the ER, I just leave. Ditto with my doctor and dentist appointments, and any tests they might schedule. No socialist waiting around for me!
Am I the only person here who thinks that James Taranto looks like a wet turd sculpted by Jonah Goldberg's interns?
ReplyDeleteFix't
Better a bread line than no bread at all.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lad5bc6Gpb4
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing like Liberty, except maybe Collier's, or the Saturday Evening Post!
There's a reason why liberals keep hoping that one day the Obamas will announce their new "Don't drink bleach and lick power sockets" public awareness campaign. The wingnut problem would solve itself overnight.
ReplyDeleteWhy, thank you sir. That's exactly what I'm talking about.
ReplyDeleteI'm really surprised the lines didn't remind him of Jews being herded into cattle cars in Nazi Germany.
ReplyDeleteApparently Taranto has never been to a New York restaurant, or tried to get tickets to a Beyonce concert.
ReplyDeleteI always thought that Obama should simply come out in favor of respiration, but your solution would produce more colorful and agonizing results, so OK.
ReplyDeleteWhat's more ironic is that it's traditionally a liberal stereotype, the PC tight-ass who hates everything that doesn't validate their class/race/gender theory. I'm sure that's what conservatives still think (and admittedly, it's not hard to find lefties who live up to that stereotype), even as they've become that stereotype themselves.
ReplyDeleteAlso worth noting is that such "(Popular thing) is conservative" articles always seem to be front-page news even at the supposedly deep and intellectual right-wing joints (TAC, NRO, Brooks and Douthat, etc.) Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't recall Mother Jones, The Stranger or the Nation straining to convince people that The Hunger Games is the symbol of a new liberal generation. (In my experience, mirror-image left-wing culture scolds are more likely to highlight why something isn't progressive and thus doesn't deserve praise more often than the opposite.)
Judging from his physique he just pulls around to the back of the restaurant and buys in bulk.
ReplyDeleteNo problem. We slaves have to stick together!
ReplyDeleteWell, everybody knows that Lennon was no fan of Chairman Mao. Ergo. . . .
ReplyDeleteThat's gonna be their story some day, and they're gonna stick to it. As soon as it gets through their thick heads (and Reardon Metal Reality Shields) that the thing actually works, and people actually benefit from it and like it. Admittedly this is gonna take a while...
ReplyDeletein obama hellscape, alicublog thread comment you!
ReplyDeleteI've been a lefty for a long time. Even went to Berkeley a long time ago, so I guess I should be embarrassed to admit it, but I never even heard of Saul Alinsky until the wingers started talking about him incessantly.
ReplyDeleteI was up on Huey and Eldridge, Abby Hoffman, the Chicago 7, all of them. Never heard of Alinsky until a few years ago.
Oh, Senator McCain, so sorry to hear about the passing of your friend Charles Keating.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's over yonder anyway.
ReplyDeleteAre there no negative, or irrational numbers? Surely math can accommodate them somehow..
ReplyDeleteYes, which is like great, and really hysterical, until you are surrounded by people who think that bullshit is all there is. And the only difference is who has more of it.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of bullshit vs. facts doesn't even occur to them.
"Waiting in line to purchase necessities is a characteristic not of a prosperous free society but of command economies under repressive regimes."
ReplyDeleteYeah, I remember when we had long lines to see Star Wars because of Stalin. Or maybe it was Carter. I get those two repressive regimes confused.
You're granting Jonah skill in the arts that he hasn't displayed in any other arena
ReplyDeleteTrue, but she got the medium right, you gotta give her that...
"In my experience, mirror-image left-wing culture scolds are more likely to highlight why something isn't progressive and thus doesn't deserve praise more often than the opposite."
ReplyDeleteYeah, and that does fit in with the with the PC tight ass who doesn't like anything that doesn't validate his theory about class, race, gender, etc. Which is no great shakes either, and maybe even worse than slapping the "conservative" label on everything that's good. Still, I think most libs that I know can say that something is good, without having to make a case for its politics one way or the other.
The latest Thor movie, to use a typical, blah example, was, to me, fun. But I would never say, "Wow, it was fun because it embraced liberal values!" (although I suppose some kind of strained case could be made for that). Whereas conservaguy doesn't seem to be able to say "it was fun" without finding the conservative message.
And, on more substantive stuff, I don't think the lib has the same need as conservaguy to expropriate artists from "the other side." (Maybe because most artists tend to be liberal, when they aren't radical.)But a lib won't say, in my experience, anything equivalent to the Seeger or Lennon were "really" conservatives. The director John Ford, in my view, was brilliant. But he mostly celebrated what can fairly, I think, be called conservative values. I am not going to do back flips, or, worse yet, try to make Ford and his movies do back flips, to find the "liberal" in him.
The notion that one can build a functioning insurance market around
ReplyDeleteaffiliation to one party or politician in a divided country is
preposterous.
So is that sentence, it's completely devoid of meaning, other than to a pshrink. Stop people on the street, read them the quote, and ask them to explain it. If you stop 100 people, you'll get 73 versions of WTF? The 27 wingnuts wi'll give you a dozen versions of whatever they think Limbannibeck would say (or perhaps did, on that day's show), even though it has nothing to do with the quote you asked about. If you do this, I can only hope you're well paid...
Hey, have you read Mary Roach's book,
ReplyDeleteGulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal? Super, I recommend it highly, especially for your tomorrow, since you will be preoccupied with the subject. She underwent a colonoscopy but skipped the sedation, and experienced a sense of wonder at seeing her own inner infrastructure, along with mild to moderate abdominal cramping. I say read her account and accept the sedation.
He mugs hipsters for their cronuts.
ReplyDeleteStill, I think most libs that I know can say that something is good,
ReplyDeletewithout having to make a case for its politics one way or the other.
Indeed. I'm a big RAH fan, but in *spite* of his Libertarianism, not because of it. The fact that so few on the Right could make the same claim in reverse speaks to the fact that Left and Right aren't mirror images, but represent fundamentally different ways of thinking. The fuzzycists are slowly bringing this to light, one study at a time, but I wonder to what extent it will ever penetrate the body politic. Or rather the "mind politic"...
...It may be that the people who waited in line to buy ObamaCare were doing so primarily to express their allegiance to Obama....
ReplyDeleteDamn. That guy is good. Why, just yesterday I went out and had me an abortion. Was I pregnant? No, and bless your heart for thinking I might be young enough to still get pregnant.* I just did it to piss off James Taranto.
*See Allison Janney, Drop Dead Gorgeous, 1999.
I see I'm a little late with this. So, America in 1932, with breadlines everywhere, was NOT a prosperous free society, which explains why the rightwingers of the day wanted to keep it the way it was and screamed bloody murder at every effort FDR made to improve matters. Riiiiiiiight.
ReplyDeleteBecause he's fuckin' goofy?
ReplyDeleteScrewin' the pooch and still handsomely paid by The Wall Street Journal.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of the Ryandroid, PDAOTNW cut loose on his ass today. Called his latest "budget" a joke, and added "THIS is the definition of insanity”. Funny thing is, she's finally right about something, and she'll probably catch hell for it. One hopes...
ReplyDeleteWhile they're standing in line for their second latte! So why's he bitching about lines? He had to chase 'em down he'd be SOL...
ReplyDeleteFor want of a comma...
ReplyDeleteYes, I'm a Commanist.
ReplyDeleteGotta be a place in there for the square root of minus one...
ReplyDeleteThere is one actual fly in the O'Care ointment, and I wonder what will happen when the Right gets hold of it. An increase in the number of patients, without a corresponding increase in the number of docs is gonna mean longer appointment waits--which are bad enough already--longer waiting room waits, and various and sundry other delays and inconviencings. It's inevitable, and the things that Congress could do about it will be impossible with the republicans we have now.
ReplyDeleteWhich is worse: waiting in line to sign up for health insurance or waiting in line to get basic healthcare from a temporary emergency clinic, only to be turned away at the end of the day?*
ReplyDeleteTo bloodless right-wingers like Taranto, the answer in either case is "fuck 'em."
*The link is to a 60 Minutes story on Remote Area Medical. Thanks to decades of brutal, cold-hearted conservatism, charitable medical organizations are forced to treat the U.S. as just another Third World country.
Well, I'm not so sure. There was just a massive food fight over at LGM over whether one could or could not, in good conscience, enjoy 300 as other than a parodic homoerotic fascist piece of war porn. Or maybe I mean what kind of person enjoys it without recognizing that part of it.
ReplyDeleteI'm currently enjoying the TV show NUMB3RS. One of the things I like about it is the same thing I liked about Leverage. It has a strong pro science, pro humanism approach to crime and human relations and it doesn't cater to right wing viewers (unlike the first season of Bones). By that I mean that they decided that their approach would be pretty uniformly pro-worker/environment/do gooder/scientist/women and there wouldn't be any undercutting of it. No cases where you might think that the corporate bad guy is going to get exonerated and the blame put on the union guy. No stories about how the developer is really misunderstood. I really can't stand to watch things that are counter-intuitive or politically right wing in a contrarian fashion. To me thats counter reality. So I get that on the right side of the aisle they must feel the same way.
Have an egg handy to fry on his head...
ReplyDeleteWaaaaaaaay too much work...
ReplyDeleteChrist, the sedation is the best part. You can still see your internal Mr. Toad's wild ride--at least the way my doctor does it. But the sedation allows me to ignore her babbling away about both my parents' colons and my family history because she does all of us and she's crazy about my father. Its pretty funny really, more like going to the family barber than a regular colonoscopy.
ReplyDelete[dons ill-fitting wingnut chapeau] The Smarmy Army? No...The Army of Smarmness...
ReplyDeleteHey, wingnat lurkers, I'm givin' these things away free here!
I think you are supposed to do it in a federal building, to have the greatest effect.
ReplyDeleteIt was bad from standing in line--*outside*--in that terrible weather.
ReplyDeleteWhich they've been doing since, like, the end of the last ice-age intermission...
We are the folksong army
ReplyDeleteguitars are the weapons we bring
we all hate poverty
war
and injustice
ready
aim
sing!!!1
Precious? You mean Taranto is Gollum?
ReplyDeleteSee also Joe Miller, the once and future Alaska US Senate candidate running on - among many delightful positions - the proposition that Americans shouldn't be able to elect their own Senators.
ReplyDeleteI think most people enjoy reading or watching things where their own moral values win the day, because who wouldn't? I know I do. If you don't sample other stuff every so often though, you're just limiting yourself.
ReplyDeleteI don't require that liberal characters in a work of fiction always win, always be right, or even always be good people. I do require that they aren't merely strawmen set up to be bulldozed over by the right-wing good guys. In other words, they have to be good and believable characters (300, whatever its politics, is a bad place to go looking for realistic human behavior, and I assume people who like it anyway already know that.)
There's also the escapism element, and I don't just mean "I wish I could do that"-type stuff. I like lots of fantasy/sci-fi books that have variously monarchist, militarist, or libertarian values, not because I'm any of those things, but because those books' realities are so different from my own that I can feel free to enter a new reality and sample other ideologies that I already know obviously would not work in my own world. It's kind of like philosophical tourism-I don't mind visiting, but I don't want to live there. (The inverse of that is that I generally shy away from Jennifer Government and other megacorps-rule-the-world type sci-fi, even when the story is clearly on my side politically: often it's just too uncomfortably close to what's happening before my eyes.)
You put your baby in a red hat. That tells Taranto all he needs to know.
ReplyDeleteUnlike the rest of you squares!
ReplyDeleteMy impression was that Palin ripped into Ryan because his budget wasn't Draconian enough. That and the fact that she'll never again have to run anything that isn't her mouth leave me with zero sympathy for her.
ReplyDeleteDear James Taranto,
ReplyDeleteThe actual reason people are waiting on line for health insurance is, in fact, exactly like they waited on bread lines in the Soviet Union: people are afraid that the supply will run out. After all, once an insurance company has sold a policy, that is one policy they can't sell to anyone else. This is why people are attempting to grow there own health insurance now, as well as smuggle in low-grade insurance from Mexico.
I hope you can incorporate this insight in your next column. No attribution is necessary, but it would be nice :)
Your devoted fan,
C.A. Toasters
Yeah, its complicated when it comes to fiction. It was actually a great thread. Good and believable characters can transport you from merely identifying/rooting for people who you imagine are "like you" to identifying and rooting for people who are utterly unlike you. One of my favorite series' is Colleen McCoullough's Masters of Rome. She writes about each "great man" in turn and she finds a way to write about them, from Marius through Sulla to Ceasar and Octavian, in a real warts and all kind of way. Sulla is a hideously complicated character and yet you come to love him and root for him and pity him. Even people who commit horrible crimes against other people, real sociopaths, can be rendered interesting.
ReplyDeletePeople just don't need that much fake choice.
ReplyDeleteFake choice is the cornerstone of capitalism, at least as it's currently practiced. The companies roll out a bazillion different products that are about equal levels of shitty - consumers wade through miles of over-enthusiastic self-descriptions until they mistakenly think that they've found the best one - all the companies get to continue making a profit without needing to actually try to improve their quality beyond that of the other companies, and the consumers get to pat themselves on the back for being hard-working libertarian Informed Buyers who vote with their money. Everyone wins. Okay, the companies win actual money, and the consumers win the right to be smug, but arguably that means that everyone gets more of what they value the most. :P
Then, of course, there are people like me, who close my eyes firmly, reach out to the shelf and pick the first thing I happen upon, confident that any miniscule difference in quality that might exist would not enhance my life more than the act of having to think about this for more than two seconds would degrade it. I rebel through apathy. It may not be the best way, but it's the way that comes easiest to me. :P
In my experience, people who feel like they are in the minority are the ones who keep seeing sympathisers and stealth allies where the existence of such is questionable at best.
ReplyDeleteI suppose that's heartening, at least. Politics are one thing, but as far as the damn Culture War goes, conservatism is losing pretty big. Liberals don't need to comfort themselves by imagining that this person or that is secretly on their side - they already take it for granted that everyone but the real nutters pay at least lip service to liberal beliefs.
Yeah, sure, when I came back from Nepal I remember standing completely stunned in the soap aisle of my local grocery store, unable to process the idea that there were literally hundreds of choices. I'd just spent nearly three years with a tiny little hut of a local shop that stocked about twenty bars of a single variety of all purpose soap (Puja! Sabon! Good for your hair, body, and clothing. Guaranteed not to bother the water buffalo or at least they never complained about it).
ReplyDeleteBut when it comes to services like banking, credit cards, credit applications, or health care the devil is in the details.
Exactly! Turns out another crazy right-winger actually wants single-payer! We'll get them singing the Internationale at the NRO offices any day now!
ReplyDeleteI suppose I have trouble wrapping my head around the fact, not that there are some policies that screw you, but that there are some policies that don't. I mean, what's the incentive in creating them for the insurance companies? We have already seen that people will not only sign up for shitty policies, but will also be quite content with them and scream bloody murder when someone tries to make them replace them with better policies...
ReplyDeleteAh well. It's probably a good thing that I live somewhere where we have socialised health care...
Well, they make money confusing you about your options and they control some medical costs by selling you policies which they have reason to believe won't cover something you are going to want (some treatment, some surgery, some medication) but that you don't correctly guess you will need. They will try to trade benefits that look good but don't cost much while holding down high cost/valuable to you procedures that you might want to access. Historically they have also teased people into some insurance products with low rates/pretend benefits while figuring that they would throw you out and sell you a different product when you tried to access the health care you needed at a later point.
ReplyDeleteAnusocracy would be a great title for a punk album.
ReplyDeleteWell, insurance is a pretty unique thing. At least if I want, say, a stove, I go to the store and give them money and I get my stove. Everyone gets what they want. Insurance is closer to a long-term game of chicken than a one-for-one transaction. At least consumer goods salesmen want to unload their goods, even if they're cheap or shitty goods, because that's the only way to make money and because the physical space has to be cleared for the next shipment, etc. With insurance, you're basically buying the possibility of being paid back in the future, and the most financially successful insurance company is the one that pays back as little as possible. They have basically the opposite of an incentive to sell, because from their perspective they already have the buyer's money and thus they have leverage to jerk around the buyer when it comes to coverage. (Same with banking in general: you're paying someone to pay you back later when you need it, which gives the bank long-term power over you)
ReplyDeleteI'm not trying to make insurance sound like a total rip-off: it's obviously necessary. But it's an oddball product, which is why it needs more oversight than your average market, which every other 1st world country except us has figured out, and why, despite conservative fears, the single-payer umbrella model hasn't spread to consumer goods, because it wouldn't make sense for anyone involved. For a conservative whose economic policy consists of repeating 'free market!' over and over, this is entirely too subtle to grasp.
But aren't fractals infinite? MKM will never stop being wrong. They will discover previously unknown ways of being wrong, before they stop being wrong.
ReplyDeleteLike I said, I have no trouble believing they do all those things. What I'm not sure I can believe in is the insurance-buyer's ability to beat them at their own game except by sheer accident - by happening to get sick in ways that the insurance companies bet on them not getting sick in.
ReplyDeleteSo even if I did live somewhere where I had to buy health insurance, I think I'd still use my usual approach - just take something that sounded more or less right, on the off chance that it'd be useful, while assuming that it probably wouldn't be. And while also assuming that when I tried to use it and found it to be useless, some libertarian douche would turn up and snottily inform me that it was all my own fault for not being a smart buyer, like him.
Yeah, I know. I'm like a straw liberal. :P I honestly believe that we're none of us actually responsible for our own situation, because if the world wants to screw us, it's going to screw us, and there's bugger-all we can do about it.
Right. Health insurance in this country always reminds me of the story some Hollywood Mogul told about how his family got into the film business,way back with the silents. The immigrated from Russia and the mother went to her first movie and came out saying "They take your money first, before you even know if you are going to like it, and they don't give it back. This is the business to be in!"
ReplyDeleteBasically every society has forms of group insurance--hell, even being a citizen and paying taxes is a form of group insurance. You pay in and you get some benefits farther down the road. But the system requires that the risk pools get larger and larger, and the larger the risk pool and the more money sloshing around the more incentive the managers have to skim or to refuse service when you do need what you have pre-paid for.
[A system where everyone in the country as in the pool, and everyone paid a dedicated tax in advance (like all estimated taxes) and drew out of the system at need, with no private middle managers taking a bite out, would be more efficient and less complicated to administer. But because Republicans, we can't have nice things.]
Great post . It takes me almost half an hour to read the whole post. Definitely this one of the informative and useful post to me. Thanks for the share.Sanctuary Cove Sending out a BIG welcome aboard to some of our newest exhibitors who will be joining us at the 2014 Sanctuary Cove International Boat Show.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised a toddler was able to read the whole post at all...
ReplyDeletePretty astute of you to figure out this blog is secretly about boats. Takes most commenters a long time to figure out that "Megan McCardle" is the name of Roy's boat, or that "Jonah Goldberg" is the name of the hideously overloaded freighter that Roy shipped out on when he was a young merchant seaman. The Jonah, overloaded sea-pig that she was, went down in a squall, six days out of Macao, smashed on the the cruel reefs of Alicublog Shoals, taking to her briney doom a dozen seamen and a million gross tons of bootleg copies of "Atlas Shrugged". Only Roy survived, and as he saw his mates and the shitty Malay translations of Ayn Rand's fattest work sink beneath the uncaring waves, he vowed to start a blog, which, as you've deduced, is largely about boats.
ReplyDeleteWe should start frakking for insurance. Maybe there are secret pockets of insurance encased in the limestone deep beneath the aquifer.
ReplyDelete'Course, the difference is that Soviet citizens were lining up for bread and meat that might be gone by the time they got into the store. Americans--the more, the merrier!-- are lining up to buy something there's still going to be plenty of by the time they get inside.
ReplyDeleteWSJ editor: You know these are not the same things, don't you, James?
Taranto: Of course, sir.
Editor: Ha ha! Good one!
Taranto: Ha ha! Thanks!
McArdle would be the first one to grab a subsidy if she were self-employed. It has been fun to watch her increasingly desperate declarations that the ACA is doomed to implode.
ReplyDeleteMaybe she should write a book about her ability to succeed through failure, since people keep paying her to be grossly wrong and irresponsibly shrill.
I'm reading the new, very long biography of the Beatles. (Tune In by Mark Lewisohn). The Beatles were not above shoplifting what they needed/wanted, at least when they were not yet successful. So with John expressing his displeasure with Chairman Mao, and just flat out stealing stuff, it's no wonder the Conservatives are trying to claim him.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget the time that the HMS Alicurati was beset by the black ship of "Bloody Ann" Althouse, with its flag of a skull over crossed onion rings...
ReplyDeleteI think that's the same movie where Groucho shows the bellhop a $5 bill.
ReplyDeleteGroucho: See this $5 bill?
Bellhop: Yes, sir!
Groucho, Well, come back in 10 minutes and I'll show it to you again.
They are really all becoming pretty hysterical over the numbers. Glen Beck is decompensating over them. I think its interesting that they are so focused on the numbers and so determined to hang their antagonism on the idea that the numbers will be too low, too slow, or wrong. I get that this seemed like a good idea from a marketing perspective during the botched roll out. But it was never a very smart bet in the long run. They've acted all along like the last few months were a geologic age, but they are just a few months at the start of a program. It was never, ever, going to be possible to prevent millions of people from signing up and, as they say, "Love and a cough can't be hid." You just can't really hide 7 million, or 15 million when you add in the others, under a rock. People are going to notice. Thats getting to be a really large number of people all telling one or two others that they have insurance. If 7 million people bought a record we'd know about it. This isn't going to be any different.
ReplyDeleteAnd by "Palin" we mean, of course, "whoever ghost-writes her Facebook posts." As to why she got into it with him, I dunno; maybe it was his idea because he has thoughts of trying to run for the big chair in a couple of years and asked Palin to give him a fairly mild rebuke (as far as these things go) to make him seem more of a centrist.
ReplyDeleteAs a card-carrying* liberal, I hereby implore everyone not to jump off very high cliffs. Pretty please?
ReplyDelete*well, I am a liberal, and I carry cards of various sorts.
Paul Giamatti's peevish, untalented cousin.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget the witch's teat! It's practically required for satanic wiccan orgies/D&D sessions these days. I've got, let's see... six. No, seven.
ReplyDeleteGood and believable characters can transport you from merely identifying/rooting for people who you imagine are "like you" to identifying and rooting for people who are utterly unlike you.
ReplyDeleteSee also: Maybe Jaime Lannister Isn't A Monster, After All, At Least All The Time (And Especially Not After A Certain Bad Thing Happened To Him).
Rove's a great example of someone who just keeps on keepin' on even though his time is way past. The spectacle of someone whose entire career is built around promulgating Great Lies trying to pass himself off as a truth-teller is almost funny.
ReplyDelete."Hey, did you see 'Sleepless in Seattle?'" "Yeah, and boy is it a great, liberal movie!"
ReplyDeleteIndeed, "I'll have what she's having" is the epitome of liberal collectivist envy.
It's all about Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of XBoxes.
ReplyDeletewait on line
ReplyDeleteThey use that in Philadelphia, too? Huh. I thought it attenuated away through Jersey.
"These people are waiting on line because there's too much of a wait online."
And such small portions!
ReplyDeleteThat's bad for rich bastards, who would otherwise have gotten it immediately.
ReplyDeleteYup. I think back to the brouhaha over the then-premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, flying to Miami for heart surgery that would have been available in another Canadian province. He wouldn't have been able to jump the queue in Canada just because he had money. (And if it had been genuinely essential to perform it in the US, Canadian Medicare might well have chipped in for it.) Kudos to Dr. Danielle Martin for slapping around Senator Richard Burr over this and other horseshit about Canadian healthcare.
These Sadly, No! in-jokes are hilarious.
ReplyDeleteAnother way to think of insurance is that buying it amounts to placing a bet. When you buy car insurance, you win that bet if you have an accident. When you buy health insurance, you win if you get sick. And of course the bookie has every incentive to rig the game.
ReplyDeleteWell, Jaime Lannister is really a very uncomplicated, classic, Heel/face turn, isn't he? From the very first he clearly had some better impulses. I believe he didn't actually want to kill Bran by throwing him from the window. He did it, but he didn't enjoy it. Its harder to turn a sadist and sociopath into a sympathetic, heroic character that your audience not only likes to read about but actively likes in a personal sense.
ReplyDeleteWell, Aimai, as to LGM, "food fighting" seems to be the dominant mode there, particularly if anyone has the temerity to challenge the party line. Still, I think most libs would agree that "300" probably does not support liberal values, and if you are a lib and you like it, the values being advanced are not the reason. Which is not like the conservaguy, who, if he likes something, feels like he has to make that "conservative" label fit. If anything, what you describe at LGM is more of what Spaghetti Lee was talking about, which is a lib "PC" police kinda thing. IE "you can't like that, precisely cuz it ISN'T liberal..."
ReplyDeleteOn the shows you like, well, it sounds like they do support liberal values. And so you are not straining when you say they do. Some shows, movies, songs, books, etc actually ARE liberal, some are conservative. What I find to be weird is when conservatives insist that everything (not only all shows, movies, etc) but pretty much all things in general, have to be liberal or conservative, and even weirder when they insist that folks and stuff that clearly are NOT conservative (Lennon, Finnish school system) must be anyway, seemingly because they can't admit that anything that is good or effective is not conservative. Even when it is clearly liberal, or even beyond liberal, like Seeger.
Isn't that from "When Harry Met Sally?"
ReplyDeleteThe bloom is off the turd blossom?
ReplyDelete"philadelphialawyer" because I went to law school in Philly (where they would say "in line"), because "Philadelphia Lawyer" is an old slur on a pettifogging, railroad attorney, so, like irony, or something, and because Woody Guthrie wrote a song where a "great Philadelphia lawyer" comes to a bad end after messing around with a Hollywood maid, who is the sweetheart of a Reno cowboy.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in Jersey and have lived in NYC for years. And, you're right, somewhere in the swamps of Jersey, between NYC and Philly, on line become in line.
You guys are funny but now I can't remove the spam comment -- though I have disabled the spam link inside it.
ReplyDeleteWhich is central to my point. Meg Ryan is objectively pro-Leninist no matter what she's in.
ReplyDeleteIn a musty old hall in De-troy-it they prayed
ReplyDeleteAt the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral
It was the Democrats that didn't want single-payer. They put it off the table. Remember Max Baucus 'D'?
ReplyDeleteThis is just one more example of how surprised Americans would be if a few more of us would obtain passports and actually used them.
ReplyDeleteThis middle class bastard-ette has had to wait plenty for health care here in the US, usually for the insurance company to decide if they agree with my doctor's decision regarding treatment. Weeks; months even.
ReplyDeleteThis is what I don't get about Caribou Barbie's "Obama Death Panel" crap; death panels already exist - they're called health insurance companies.
I've worked at dental versions of these (Mission of Mercy). People start lining up the day before, and by 10am the next day all the people still in line are SOL. Hundreds of people, many of whom try again for the next day or just give up.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone know
ReplyDeletewhere the love of God goes
when the Cheetos get smashed
into powder?
A philosopher named Harry Frankfurt published a really great little book called On Bullshit. I recommend it. Ten thumbs up.
ReplyDeleteWHAT THE HELL WHO EVEN THINKS LIKE THAT.
ReplyDeleteConservatives think like that and often act like that.