Dying to save a buck

When it comes to being cheap, the American HMOs have nothing on our homegrown Canadian social service bureaucrat bean-counters.
This poor woman is only 30 years old, and she is dying. And she gets to spend her last days fighting with the Nova Scotia government to pay for the pills that keep her alive a little longer.
Adding insult to injury is this --

Ms. Larkin-Hickman says even if she qualifies for her other drugs, she will have to re-apply every three months.

-- yes, lets make her fill out a whole bunch of forms every 90 days because its just so very important that those entitlements for those lazy welfare bums be calculated right down to the penny. God forbid, if her huband should maybe get a raise, that the Nova Scotia taxpayers should pay an extra few dollars for an extra few pills, for six months instead of three.
Because how else, except by being tightfisted with the dying, is Nova Scotia ever going to pay for the industrial incentives they have announced in the last week, payroll rebates of $1.5 million for one company and $7 million for another, to produce more jobs in Nova Scotia.
Maybe Larkin-Hickman's husband can get a second job with one of these outfits, to keep her alive a little longer.

Pundit Hall of Shame

Here is Hilzoy's list:

Jonah Goldberg: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business"
Tom Friedman: "We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind".
And today from Richard Cohen: "In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic."

As Hilzoy then notes:

Richard Cohen: resign. Resign right now. . . . Go visit the families of soldiers who have fallen in the interests of what you considered "therapeutic", or the families of any of the of thousands of people who have been kidnapped off the streets of Iraq for no reason, tortured with electric drills, and then found dead behind some abandoned building or floating in the Tigris. Ask them whether they think that the war in Iraq has been "therapeutic". . . .

Why do any of these people still have jobs? Who listens to them anymore?

Great line of the day

In a post titled Blame the damn Hippies…, Johm Amato concludes:

It really burns them up that the flower people were right.

The Ugly Canadian

That's our boy!

After having offended Europe by abruptly cancelling a summit with leaders there, Prime Minister Stephen Harper this past week turned his attention to undermining Canada's relationship with China. The only relationship he appears to take seriously is with the Bush administration in the United States.

Great line of the day

From the Freewayblogger: "Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam"

Ah, the good old days

Digby writes about the newest front in the anti-abortion movement -- glorifying childbearing and trashing birth control:

As I wrote earlier, we have the DLC hiring crackpot sociologists to write articles about liberals outbreeding the conservative movement, David Brooks talking about "natalism," Newsweek writing respectful articles about the Kooky Quiverfuls and now state legislatures connecting immigration to abortion and suggesting that the white women aren't breeding enough. Anybody feeling the hot breath of a new conservative meme on their necks?
Good luck with that. . . .
I do have a good idea how these people can lead by example, however. Every woman who belongs to the forced childbirth movement should sign a contract agreeing to birth at least four snowflake babies and homeschool them. This way they could assure that each woman fulfills her patriotic duty by raising at least four children (more if she wants to pass on her own very special genes) and the nation will have a nice homegrown uneducated workforce to exploit with low wages and bad working conditions. They wouldn't even have to fuck, which I'm sure would be a great relief for all concerned.

You know, the birth control pill was only developed 50 years ago, but I guess people have already forgotten what it was like when women had baby after baby, sometimes spending the years between 20 to 40 either pregnant or nursing.
If they lived through it.

Up until 1960 or so, birth control was unreliable and complicated and the techniques were mostly secret. But women did what they could to avoid pregnancy anyway -- rhythm or withdrawal or condoms -- not because they "hated children" or "wanted to find themselves" -- it was because they wanted to live long enough to raise the children they already had.

In the community where my grandfather homesteaded in 1905, just a hundred years ago, people used to talk about men "going through" two or three or four wives -- because the combination of hard work, pregnancy complications, and repeated forced childbearing would kill them, one after the other.
I don't think we want to go back to that, do we?

Bullfights aren't funny

*

Will anyone hear the sound of one right wing flapping?

Fox News Channel might air two episodes of a "Daily Show"-like program with a decidedly nonliberal bent on Saturday nights in late January, with the possibility that it could become a weekly show.
The half-hour show would take aim at what executive producer Joel Surnow, the co-creator of "24," calls "the sacred cows of the left" that don't get made as much fun of by other comedy shows.

Well, its pretty difficult to make jokes about dying without health insurance, but have at it, guys. People used to laugh at Amos and Andy, too.
But when I read this story, what I thought of was Mel Blanc's famous anecdote about how Bully for Bugs got made -- maybe it was the "sacred cow" reference that brought this to mind.

According to Chuck Jones, the idea for this cartoon came about one day while he and the writers were trying to come up with a new story for a Bugs cartoon. The producer in charge admonished them, "I don't want no gags about bullfights. Bullfights aren't funny". The thought of putting Bugs in a bullfight hadn't even occurred to Jones, who immediately hit upon it as a great idea, and this resulting cartoon proved to be of the most successful in the Bugs Bunny series.

So maybe somebody at Fox can make Not Having Health Insurance funny. But I don't think Fox News would put up with anyone as subversive as Chuck Jones was.

Science marches on

Non Sequitur:

Who let the Dogs out?

Great news -- Huskies earn home field in Vanier Cup:

"'It's something we've dreamt about all year,' Huskies head coach Brian Towriss said after the game, 'but we've stayed focused on one game at a time."

The Vanier Cup is next weekend in Saskatoon.

Great line of the day

August J. Pollak on women who trash feminism:

I always find women like [Ann] Coulter who spew nonsense about the evils of feminism and women's rights to be hilariously precious. Coulter is a childless, never-married lawyer who reached the highest point of her professional career in her 40's as a self-sufficient freelance social commentator. Sixty years ago, there is not a single part of that previous sentence that would be considered even remotely plausible as an aspect of a successful American female. Coulter, and career anti-feminists like her, have only one honest statement deserving of any feminist's time, and that statement is "thank you."

Emphasis mine.

Great line of the day

Matthew Yglesias writes about how the neocons still believe their beautiful war would have gone just great, except that the Iraqis messed it up:

The neoconservative approach to Iraq has always been marked by a remarkable combination of overoptimism about social and political conditions in Iraq with a not-so-well-veiled racist contempt for Arabs. Obviously, however, one of the major elements of Iraqi society that's made reconstructing it into a democracy under our tutelage is that Iraqis have not felt that it would be a good idea to surrender supreme power over their lives to a foreign occupying force led by people who, rather transparently, don't give a damn about them.

Emphasis mine.

Its because she's a woman

Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi is being attacked by the Kewl Kids Washington press corps.
I wish I could revise Wes Clark's "It's because of Iraq" video to say "It's because she's a woman".
I just hope Pelosi knows about the great quotation from the first female mayor of Ottawa, Charlotte Whitten:

"Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.
Luckily, this is not difficult."

Leonid Meteor Shower Sunday

The annual Leonid Meteor Shower may be visible in North America just before dawn on Sunday morning.
This photo is from 2001.
It was, I think, in 2002 when I stood out in our backyard peering upwards to watch a meteor shower that was being billed as the shower of the century -- I couldn't see that much because we have too many streetlights around about. But I just wanted to be a part of it.

Do as we say, not as we do

Sleazy:

The Conservative government is proposing to open a loophole in its vaunted accountability act by declaring that party convention fees not be counted as political contributions under the law . . . the Conservative party [is] under investigation by Elections Canada for failing to declare almost $2 million in fees paid by delegates to the party's 2005 convention . . . "The Tories seem to be now admitting that they have broken the law," said Steven MacKinnon, national director of the Liberal party. . . . [NDP Pat Martin] said. "I guess that's the advantage of being the ruling party - you can correct your mistakes by statute after the fact. We won't support it."

Great post of the day

John at Americablog asks a startling and relevant question -- Would UCLA have tasered Rosa Parks?
Here is his complete post, which I copied in full because I'll likely want to quote from it again someday:

After all, Rosa Parks was black, committed a premeditated crime, and loudly and rudely disrupted the commute of a lot of nice white people who simply wanted to get home after a hard day's work. Bitch.
Then there's Ernesto Miranda - another colored guy. Hell, Miranda wasn't even American - he was one of those Mexicans that Lou Dobbs is always talking about. And Miranda was even worse than Parks. Miranda got arrested, and convicted, of kidnapping and rape. Yeah, real nice guy. According to the court, he was a "seriously disturbed individual with pronounced sexual fantasies." Freak.
Or how about Roy Allen Stewart - robber, murderer, sentenced to death. He was an indigent black guy who dropped out of school in the sixth grade. Loser.
The list goes on. Michael Vignera, robber. Charles Townsend, 19-year-old heroin addict and "near mental defective" accused of murder, and found guilty.
So there you have it:
Uppity black chick.
Illegal Mexican.
Poor grade-school drop-out.
Retarded heroin addict.
American heroes? Hardly. None of these people have anything in common with you or me. Some of them asked for it, others had it coming. These aren't the kind of people our laws are meant to protect.
I'm glad the police repeatedly tasered that student at UCLA, while handcuffed and seated and offering no resistance, for simply not having his ID in a university library. That student was an asshole. And in America, civil rights aren't for assholes, or niggers, or spics, or burn-outs. They're only for people like you and me.
PS In case a few of you haven't figured it out, the names above are all of famous US civil rights cases. Each of those nasty individuals is responsible for you having some of your most important rights as American citizens. Think about that. You have YOUR rights because the courts recognized THEIR rights. That's why cases like this, where the victim is an "asshole," matter. Those assholes are responsible for most of the rights you now take for granted.)