Five, four shots, I be ready to splash.
Sorry I missed you last week! Holidays are frickin' rough around here. But I pledge that if I live I'll deliver through Christmas. That's the alicublog pledge!
It’s pretty weird watching the death of democracy roar down the track, its glowing Sauron eye getting bigger by the moment and Tubby's fat face darkly looming in the cab, while most of the information on the bearing-down is coming from a completely bought-off Prestige Press that talks about it as if it’s a fun TV drama like “Succession” that we can switch off when we’re bored.
This weirdness is informing my “Received Opinion with Bolt Upright” sketches at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (my Substack newsletter! Surely you’re heard of it!). This week’s is one of three (3) REBID editions released to nonsubscribers. In this one, the gang considers the latest Trump appointment: Fox News celebrity Poopmouth to chair the National Endowment for the Arts. A lively discussion ensues!
The other news-related item has to do with the death of a health insurance CEO and why a lot of people aren’t crying over it. I was raised a Christian (well, Catholic, close enough) and I don’t like to take pleasure in the death and suffering of others. Nonetheless I’m a lot more angry about our fucked-up health care system, and how it depraves us -- so much so that this murder puts us less in mind of the victim's bereaved family and friends than of the bereaved family and friends of “beneficiaries” whose suffering and death his parsimonious policies hastened along. I would also mention that the incoming administration promises to heavily promote the fraud-rich Medicare Advantage program, UnitedHealthcare’s primary scam, by appointing one of its shills as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and (as outlined in Project 2025) making MA the default choice for new Medicare enrollees.
Normally we only have two freebies but I’m also opening up this week’s Fun Friday because it’s about old-school bloggers (my classmates, as it were!) who are still stoking the boilers. (This has also served as a reminder to refresh my blogroll here. Shadowproof, which had taken over from Firedoglake, is discontinued and its slack picked up by The Dissenter; Gin and Tacos has turned into a podcast; I don’t know what happened to ThinkProgress. The “Forget About Politics” section has several discontinued sites, but that’s OK, because they’re mostly not about current events and worth a peek. Also, I’m sentimental about Lance Mannion and Terry Teachout.)
In this edition I mention Atrios, Blue Gal, Driftglass, Vagabond Scholar, and Sheila O’Malley in the body copy; commenters have kindly added the Grade-A work of Digby at Hullabaloo, Nancy Nall, Joe My God, Lawyers Guns & Money, Nuclear Diner, Scripting News, The Daily Howler, et alia. It’s good to be reminded that, as the Prestige Press gets shittier by the minute at their job, we can rely on them just for the basic facts and then offload the analysis to guys like these. If only America would take the hint! (Note: Some of these blogs don’t even user Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, that’s how old-school they are, so be careful!)
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