Chronically Pissed

Obama's Gonna Pull the Plug On Granny - THE SONG!

Okay...are you ready for your first Chronically Pissed multimedia experience? Well here it is. Chronically Pissed is pleased to present a special musical presentation of Obama's Gonna Pull the Plug on Granny!

Lyrics: CP

Piano: CP

Banjo: CP

Upright Bass: CP

Vocals: CP

Why They Must Sit Down and Shut The Fuck Up

 

A prolonged, nasty, unproductive debate with a Facebook acquaintance has left me struggling to find a pithy, coherent way to address the morass of issues that has consumed the healthcare debate. We have truly lost our ability to discuss issues with civility and an open mind. I am as guilty of lowering the level of debate as the next guy, but you’ll have to forgive me if I feel somewhat justified in having reached the end of my rope with this particular opposition. I do not, for example, think it unreasonable to say that They – let’s generalize and call them Conservatives – can claim a whole lot of intellectual credibility after remaining largely silent for eight years while a conservative President sank us into a murky abyss of debt, recession, and international interventionism. I do not think it unreasonable to expect them to realize that the decent thing to do right now is to give this President a little breathing room, not only to clean up what can only be described as a calamitous clusterfuck, but to institute the kinds of progressive, liberal policy positions that won him a decisive victory in a national election. In other words, I do not think it unreasonable to hope that Conservatives would moderate the vociferousness of their antagonism for a brief spell.

Alas, while trying to have a sincere debate about how to curb the upward trajectory of Americans’ health care costs – costs that are eating deeper and deeper into already strained family budgets – we are instead discussing whether or not Barack Obama is a legal citizen, whether or not the President of the United States should speak to school children, whether or not we’re on the verge of becoming a Nazi-like state, whether or not Barack Obama is going to “pull the plug on Granny,” and whether or not he plans to institute “death panels.” And so on. All the while, the legislative possibilities have dwindled so precipitously as to render the whole debate nearly meaningless anyway.

I don’t even know what the fuck we’re all talking about anymore. Conservatives are still ranting and raving as if we’re still debating a wholesale switch to a single-payer, universal health care system. We’re not. We’re barely even considering a public alternative to private insurance at this point. I’m not entirely convinced that we’re not about to make matters worse for the average American and a whole lot better for the health industry.

If an actual debate had taken place, if real ideas had clashed in the arena of public opinion, and if health care reform had gone down on its merits, I would hold my head up high and take the defeat with an ounce of dignity. But that did not happen. Health care reform has gone down on a heaping pile of horseshit, bludgeoned to a bloody pulp by the blunt force of ignorance disguised as principle, poisoned by sour grapes masquerading as righteous revolution. So you’ll have to excuse me if I’m sitting here painting the walls with my own shit and piss, plotting to rape and kill the next leprechaun I see in my yard.

In this Théâtre de l'Absurde, President Barack Obama is evidently required to appease all of the objections and accept all of the demands of the party that was dramatically ousted from power on the basis of its miserably failed stewardship over the previous eight years. Any idea that does not accord with their vision – a vision, mind you, that bankrupted and indebted us, oversaw the collapse of our financial system, sent thousands of our young men and women to killed and maimed in a futile search for non-existent weapons of mass destruction, etc. – is met with a charge of “Socialism!” Never mind that they don’t understand that Socialism is not a political system, but an economic idea, no more inextricably tied to the villains of Europe’s past than baking is to the Holocaust. Not only would they eat their babies rather than give up their Medicare or Social Security, they don’t even understand that these are socialistic programs.

What Conservatives don’t seem to understand is that when we participate in any insurance program – health insurance, car insurance, dental insurance, flood insurance, life insurance – we are participating in a collectivist enterprise. What is collectivism? It is “the practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it,” according to the Oxford American Dictionary - aka socialism! Insurance is simply the pooling of resources to protect the long-term interests of everyone in the pool. It relies on the bell-curve produced, actuarial reality that some people will end up paying more than they take out – aka wealth redistribution.

Consider our socialized fire protection system: Your tax dollars go to pay for your local fire department. In the unfortunate event of a fire at your home or business, a big, red, expensive truck will show up and attempt to rescue your family and put out the fire. Now, we could privatize that system. I mean, it certainly has nothing to do with the national defense. Instead of paying an infinitesimally small percentage of each paycheck toward that service, you could pay a monthly fee to one of several competing private companies, each of which would have their own big, red, expensive trucks, other associated overhead costs and an unquenchable thirst for profit – a goal that might be realized by opening fewer fire houses, purchasing fewer trucks, or refusing to come to your house if you forgot last month’s payment. That sounds like a pretty dumb idea, doesn’t it? You might say that would be playing with fire.

Now I know it’s easiest to just think that Liberals want the government to give us all free healthcare, but that’s like saying that you want the government to give you free fire protection. They don’t give it to you for free. They take from your paycheck what is needed to pay for that service – and not a penny of profit. That is what Liberals want. We want the government to take significantly less out of our paychecks than the insurance companies are taking out of our pockets (or than our employers are invisibly taking out of our wages to pay the insurance companies).

Anyone with health insurance has already signed on to collectivism and wealth redistribution. What’s left is simply a question of who administrates the benefits – a profit-motivated corporation or a neutral government agency?

If your fear of government is so profound that you would rather line the pockets of Aetna’s shareholders, then you must, in the interest of consistency, begin to inveigh passionately against all socialistic programs – not just the ones that Barack Obama might be fantasizing about. You must call for the immediate dissolution of Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, fire and police departments, public schools, and so on and so forth. You cannot simply fight Barack Obama’s socialistic policies. You must fight FDR’s, Lyndon Johnson’s, Richard Nixon’s, Gerald Ford’s, Bill Clinton’s, and yes, George W. Bush’s. You must exhibit greater personal fortitude!

If you are not up to that task, then you must sit down and shut the fuck up. You must stop regurgitating what Glenn Beck said last night. You must stop sending bogus emails to all of your friends and family. You must have the decency to stand aside and let the democratic process work without you.

You must sit down and shut the fuck up – not because your opinion doesn’t matter, but because you don’t have the courage OR the convictions to be relevant or useful.

Why I Am Not A Conservative - The Health Care Edition

There is a very compelling case to be made for pure capitalism, even in the case of health care. Strip away all the emotional pleas, short-sighted humanitarian concerns, and political rhetoric. Contemplate the increasingly crowded state of the planet and its ever-diminishing resources. With just those cold, hard considerations, there is a case to be made that capitalism is the only thing that can save us. If everyone lived to a ripe old age, we would be in more serious trouble than we already are. Our survival depends upon a death bell curve - and laissez-faire economics are the best way to achieve that.

While this case is not being explicitly laid out by anyone - for obvious P.R. reasons - it is the academic core of the argument being made by true fiscal conservatives. And to tell the truth, when I take everything into account, I can appreciate the simple beauty of it. Actually...as an unsentimental atheist, unburdened by the fates of souls and such, I agree with the premise. I don't want all of my fellow earthlings to live forever. I am counting on many of them to die before life expectancy predicts they will. I accept the fact that I could well end up on the front end of that curve myself.

Capitalism is a beautiful idea - a game of sorts in which all beings have a chance to chart their own course, to sink or swim, to beat the odds or lose their shirts. Here's the problem: In order for the game to be even remotely fair, the players have to start on something resembling equal footing. Most of the wealth in the world is concentrated in the hands of a very few and has been concentrated in those hands for a very, very long time - and much of that wealth got concentrated in those hands through very unsavory episodes in our not-so-distant past. In America, much of it was earned on the backs of native Americans, slaves, immigrants, sharecroppers, children, and other similarly underpaid, overworked, cheated, abused, raped, and murdered peoples. It's all very convenient to forget those episodes, to wash our hands, and pretend that all is now right in the world - but that's a heaping pile of stagnant fucking horseshit. Until we level the playing field for massive groups of historically and cyclically impoverished human beings, the game is hopelessly rigged against the poor and thus capitalism is only a beautiful theory waiting to be tested under more ideal circumstances.

The liberal social programs that have been enacted over the years are not just bleeding heart refusals to demand personal responsibility and redistribute wealth for the sake of wealth redistribution. The have been an ongoing effort to address this exponentially compounding inequity in the hopes that one day those more ideal circumstances, that more perfect union, might come into being. (Then - glory of glories - we could all be Republicans!) Sadly, conservatives refuse to accept our national responsibility for the sins of our past, resisting and watering down all attempts at reparation, determined to continue the game they've been playing all along, lest they have to sacrifice anything for their country other than the blood of soldiers they send to war and the money that apparently only they are allowed to spend on causes they deem worthy. As a result, the roots of our problems are never addressed, while progressives are forced to triage these economically alienated groups, attempting to alleviate the worst consequences of this long, sordid tale.

I've lost track of where I was headed with this and I'm tired...but you get my drift. Health care is next on the list. A majority of us are getting screwed with our pants on so that the insurance industry can continue to reap billions of dollars for their shareholders and corporate executives. Conservatives refuse to deal with the fundamental issues at stake, so here we are again, trying to make life affordable, trying to keep pain and suffering to a minimum, trying to take back just an infinitesimal fraction of what we never had a fair shot at...

Fuck FiOS

I get these direct mail pieces from Verizon several times a week. I know...everyone hates junk mail, but here's the thing: Verizon doesn't provide FiOS TV at my address (the address they sent this piece of mail to). Furthermore, they will not offer the same deal on their non-premium [read: inferior] services.

In other words, there is no way - none whatsoever - to get TV, internet, and phone from verizon for $79.99 per month (for the first 6 months) - and yet these ads have been clogging my mailbox in the month since I moved here. When I went online to look into this deal, the first thing the website prompted me to do was to enter my address (the address printed on the other side of that piece of mail). Based upon that information, the website was able to tell me that I could not take advantage of this deal. Does Verizon not have an internet connection? Couldn't they do this themselves before wasting paper, ink, and another precious piece of my sanity?

This is unacceptable, not only from the perspective of the consumer, but for environmental reasons as well. How many thousands (millions?) of these heavy card-stock, two-page brochures are being sent to households where Verizon cannot provide this service? Get your shit together, Verizon. All you've managed to do is alienate me so that I will no longer consider FiOS...if it is ever available to me.

INSUROCORP Thanks You For Defeating Socialism!

We Defeated Socialism! INSUROCORP! - watch more funny videos

Love Thy Neighbor To Death

Hey folks. Sorry it's been so long. A long-distance move was the initial problem. Lately, the great inhibitor has been the utterly helpless feeling that nothing I say could possibly make people any less stupid than they apparently are. A friend shared a quote recently from a comedian named Jimmy Dore: "You can't reason someone out of something they weren't reasoned into." And that, really, is the problem here. Liberals can't win these big societal debates because we traffic in reason and deliberateness, whereas Conservatives traffic in faith and gut-level reactions. Conservatives accept on faith the absolute validity and truthfulness of the voices they've chosen to listen to. Once their political messiahs have spoken, contrary voices may as well be trying to convert them to Islam. So if Sarah Palin says there will be death panels, there will be death panels. Never mind that she once supported the same program she is now trying to demonize. If Glenn Beck says Obama is personally going to come to your bedside and smother your with a pillow when you turn 65, it will be so and it must be opposed. So really...what's the point? Barney Frank hit the nail on the head when he told a town hall protester that "trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table." It really is that useless.

Still, while I can't muster a full-throated argument about the healthcare right now, I can't stop myself from pointing out a few details that I don't think have been adequately clarified for the American people - not for the ideologues, but for the average, working-class Joe Republican who has been frightened by all the scare tactics. Here goes...

1. If you have "free" health insurance through your employer, IT IS NOT FREE. In fact, it is a tax on your salary, just like any other tax, except that a) you don't see it being deducted from each paycheck and b) a large portion of that tax is ending up in the pockets of corporate shareholders and executives. If you have a family, that insurance is costing your employer somewhere in the ballpark of $10,000 per year. So ask yourself this question: If you had two comparable job offers on the table, both offering the same salary, but one offering health insurance, which would you choose? If you answered "the one offering health insurance," you did so because they might as well be offering you $10,000 more in salary. In effect, they are. And then they're taxing you $10,000 to provide you with health insurance. 

Your beloved capitalism is at play here. Dollars are dollars, whether they go into your paycheck or into your health insurance. If it became unnecessary for employers to provide health insurance, those surplus funds would go right back into luring the best candidates on the market - which means higher wages and better benefits for you.

Now you're saying "But the guv'ment would have to raise my taxes! I hate taxes!" Okay...but the government can do health care without regard for profit. This means that they don't have shareholders who want to keep a large portion of your health insurance premiums for themselves. This means that the government can (and does) do health care at a lower cost to the consumer. So if the government has to tax you a fraction of that $10,000 in order to provide you with the same care, is it really the kind of evil tax you're used to bitching about? Is it really a tax at all? Or is it actually a discounted price on health insurance?

2. When people tell you that the government is going to stand between you and your doctor and tell you that you CAN'T HAVE certain procedures, they're bald-faced lying. What the government will do, however, is tell you that certain procedures are NOT COVERED. This will not in any way prevent you from purchasing that procedure with your own cash money on the open market. They will do this when medical science and statistics reach the conclusion that the procedure you seek is not effective and/or cost-effective.

The government will, in other words, do exactly what private insurers already do, except that the government will not pay an army of specialists to find technical, non-medical reasons to deny you coverage. The government will not deny you coverage. The government will not drop you from your plan. The government will not squeeze you for higher and higher premiums while looking for ways not to settle your claims.

But fine. You don't want to pay less for heath care? Well, thank you. Thanks for ensuring that I will continue to pay $300 or more per month for insurance that saddles my family with a $5000 per person deductible. Thanks for ensuring that I will continue to ignore the lump behind my left ear and the moles on my wife's back because our son had to have $5000 worth of surgery last year and we simply can't afford to find out whether we need surgery ourselves. Thanks for ensuring that my employer - a not-for-profit arts institution can't afford to provide me with health benefits despite my already lower-middle class salary.

Thanks for taking this deeply principled stand against...what? Against something that might just help me a little more than it will help you? Against something that might help some people a lot more than it will help you? You're so averse to letting other people get a little help that you aren't willing to accept a little yourselves?

Sotomayor

I must admit that I have not been watching the hearings. I check the highlights. Several things have become clear. Lindsey Graham is a fucking douchbag of epic proportions. Jeff Sessions is a fucking bigot of epic proportions. John Kyl is fucking douchebag of epic proportions. And Sotomayor is going out of her way to appease their white, male sensitivities.

Republicans are trying to exploit the gap between Sotomayor and the hypothetical "most qualified candidate." There is no such candidate. There are no metrics to determine who that would be - and if there were, he or she would likely be extremely old, owing to their many, many years on the bench. So they are free to insinuate that Sotomayor is obviously not that candidate, in which case she could only have been chosen for one reason: She is a Latino. And if she was chosen solely for her ethnic qualifications, she must be an militant advocate for her people. And anything she's ever said about her heritage is evidence of that.

I almost - ALMOST - feel sorry for these ridiculous caricatures of entitlement and privilege. These men, along with many of their constituents, can't comprehend that our nation's past and present treatment of people who are not rich, white, male, Christians may be relevant to anything today - hence the attempted demonization of empathy. Empathic is a code word, as far as they are concerned, for "possibly able to consider how the experience of minorities in America fits into a broad, historical context and how that might be material to the modern interpretation of a document that was written by slaveholders (and impregnators)."

So what if her heritage played a role in her selection? High offices have always carried with them the weight of symbolism. Symbolism is important. It would be hard to argue that Barack Obama's race was not a factor in his ascent, symbolizing drastic change. George W. Bush was a symbol for the profoundly common man, proof that literally anyone could become President of the United States. No one accused Bush of choosing Harriet Miers because she was white. They accused him of choosing someone manifestly unqualified for the position. You seldom hear conservatives bitching about George H.W. Bush's selection of the self-loathing, hateful, and dim-witted Clarence Thomas for what could only have been symbolic purposes. 

It simply does not follow that consideration of her race makes her any less qualified. It just means that on top of her judicial qualifications, she also happens to help broaden the demographic spectrum of the court. Is there anything so terribly wrong with striving for a court that is representative of our people?

Miraculously Unmiraculous

From MSNBC.com:

'Miracle' Girls Heart Heals Itself

British doctors designed a radical solution to save a girl with major heart problems in 1995: They implanted a donor heart directly onto her own failing heart.

After 10 years with two blood-pumping organs, Hannah Clark's faulty one did what many experts had thought impossible: It healed itself enough so that doctors could remove the donated heart.

But she also had a price to pay. The drugs Clark took to prevent her body from rejecting the donated heart led to malignant cancer that required chemotherapy.

From the Oxford American Dictionary:

mir-a-cle
noun
a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency : the miracle of rising from the grave

Yes, there are two additional definitions which take into account that the word is now applied to less profound circumstances than bodily resurrection, but I'm not sure we've evolved enough as a people to reliably distinguish between the two. Many people see that headline and think "See...Jesus does perform miracles!" 

Given this ambiguity, I wish news outlets would stop applying that word to situations in which highly skilled professionals bring all of their experience and talents to bear in extraordinary ways, inevitably aided by deep scientific learning. If a homeless man had performed this procedure, it could rightly be dubbed a miracle. If the "miracle girl's" heart had actually healed itself without major intervention by medical personnel, she might indeed be a miracle girl.

What actually happened here was that some very smart doctors tried something radical and new on a patient who would otherwise be experiencing the miracle of bodily disintegration beneath six feet of earth. And then she got cancer and almost died when her body rejected the donor heart, except that the new procedure seems to have unlocked the secret to the heart's regenerative powers - powers that we've apparently long known the zebra fish to possess, according to this 2006 article from Scientific American. I suspect - and this comes from a man with no medical training whatsoever - that the miracle girl's doctors had been searching for a way to "get mammalian progenitor cells to behave more like zebra fish cells," by "introducing growth factors and activating the receptors on epicardial cells." 

Or maybe it was a miracle.

A Lesson in Airport Baggage Carousel Etiquette

A Lesson in Airport Baggage Carousel Etiquette:

First of all, you are not the only person who wants to collect your bags quickly and get the hell home, to the bar, or to your Argentine mistress. Everyone has somewhere to be, whether its an important meeting or a date with internet porn and a tube of Jergens. Fortunately for all of us, the airport baggage carousel is brilliantly designed in such a way that courtesy and common-sense are not mutually exclusive with your objective of exiting the airport in a timely fashion (assuming your bags are not lost). 

The current modus operandi apparently dictates that everyone should descend upon the carousel as if it were the last virgin in a whorehouse, shoulder-to-shoulder, toes touching the metal, bent over at varying degrees, waiting to snatch your bag (or bag your snatch, in the case of the virgin), swing it painfully into the crotch of the person waiting next to you, and then jostling through the three-deep crowd that wasn't fortunate enough to get a first row position, displaying a not-so-subtle smirk as you flee the scene.

This could all be avoided if everyone would take advantage of the ample space that has been provided around the baggage carousel, leaving approximately 8-10 feet between yourself and the passing luggage. Due to the laws of geometry, the circumference of that rounded formation will grow as the surrounding baggage-seekers back away from it, allowing more of them a position from which to inspect the passing valises. When you spot yours, calmly step up to the carousel, check the tag, luxuriate in the wide expanse you will have in which to remove your bag, place it on the floor, and wheel it to an exit point in the crowd. 

Thank you.

Meet the Press 7/12/09

Watching McCain on Meet the Press. Coupla' thoughts...

McCain says torture is wrong, "should never have happened," he was an "outspoken critic" of waterboarding, yada, yada, yada...but that there is nothing to be gained from AG Holder appointing a prosecutor to investigate related crimes by the Bush White House. He "agrees with the President of the United States that we should look forward, not back," that doing so would further harm America's image in the world, that accountability has been achieved because damage has been done to people's reputations. 

Okay...that's cool. So, I assume Senator McCain will henceforth accept that precedent with regards to crimes of all sorts. From now on, when someone is accused of murder, rape, theft, genocide, or child molestation, we can all just be happy that their reputation was harmed and move forward without the trouble and further pain that would be caused by a trial. Right? No need to think about deterrence or justice. Let's just close the book and move on. Senator McCain's position should help empty our prisons rapidly. Maybe we could pay for healthcare with the savings?

With regards to Palin's resignation, McCain says he has "never seen a sustained, personal, family attacks that were made on Sarah Palin and her family in, in, in, in my life." He goes on to whine about the "media establishment attacks" on her. Let's set aside, for the moment, the fact that the Clintons might take issue with the assertion that Sarah Palin was the victim of "the most sustained personal attacks...in recent American political history," as McCain complained. (Frank Rich has more to say about that.) Could it be - could it POSSIBLY be - that Palin was a victim of media attacks because she was a supremely unqualified and dangerously ignorant candidate? Would you complain about media attacks if Andy Dick was running for office? No...you'd consider them a justified attempt to inform the public about the dangers of electing him. Stop bitching.