Please, Brer Rush, Don't Throw Us In That Briar Patch

Limbaugh: I'll Leave US If Health Care Reform Passes (VIDEO)

Responding to a caller who asked him where he would go for health care if Congress enacts reform, Limbaugh replied,

I don't know. I'll just tell you this, if this passes and it's five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented -- I am leaving the country. I'll go to Costa Rica.

First: Costa Rica has a socialized, single payer health care system.

Second: It's ranked higher than ours.

Third: Remember when Alec Baldwin was called a traitor for saying he'd leave the country if Bush was re-elected?

hat tip: Balloon Juice

Who's the Mad Man Here?

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I've said it before, and I'll say it again: A lot of modern television commercials leave me me scratching my head and wondering what the heck the people who made this thing were thinking. Maybe it's just me, but it looks like the problem is getting worse.

Take, for instance, an ad for Bridgestone Tires which premiered during the Super Bowl. In the ad, a villainous-looking group stops a car at a roadblock on a darkened, rainy mountain road. The head bad guy calls out to the driver “Your Bridgestone tires...or your life!" There's a brief pause. Then a good-looking woman gets kicked out of the passenger seat onto the road. The exasperated head baddie calls out to the retreating vehicle, "not your WIFE, your LIFE!"

Bridgestone: you'd rather leave your beautiful wife to be raped and murdered than give up these tires. Uhhh...what?

Then there's the Levi's ad where young people, filmed in black and white, cavort in what looks like a destroyed amusement park, while a scratchy, old-man voice recites what sounds like total gibberish. The voice, as it turns out, is that of 19th century poet Walt Whitman, captured in an early wax-cylinder recording, and reading from his poem "America" : "Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love," etc. Because, as we all know, nothing makes 21st century kids want your blue jeans quite as much as a recitation by one of America's most eccentric and tedious dead poets. I am informed by my consultant on youth culture (my 15 year old daughter) that Levi's are now regarded as dorky, and her opinion of Walt Whitman could best be described as lukewarm. I'm not seeing how this ad is going to help either one.

There have been a number of ads recently in which a company's message seems to be "Okay, we know we've really sucked lately, but we're better now." Considering Toyota's recent spate of product recalls, it's easy to understand their recent mea culpa ads, which tell us that the company "hasn't been living up to the standards that you expect from us, or that we expect from ourselves," but promise that they're "trying to make things right." After all, these are products that can and may have killed people, so some high-profile groveling would seem to be in order when things go wrong.

It's harder, however, to figure out the latest campaign from Domino's Pizza. Domino's, as far as I know, hasn't killed anyone, but their latest ads seem intent on completely demolishing the reputation of every pizza they've ever sold. They quote customers complaining that Domino's pizza was "bland" and the crust was "like cardboard." It's a decidedly odd feeling to look at an ad and respond, "Oh, come on guys, your product's not THAT bad."

The ad did have one desired effect, however. It did motivate us to try the "new and improved" Domino's, just to see. And the verdict? Eh. Not terrible, but not great, either. But then, that was the verdict on their previous recipe, too. I'm thinking Domino's could have saved the millions it spent on a new product roll-out and and just kept selling to its core demographic: drunk college students and harried parents trying to feed packs of rowdy kids rendered nearly feral by hunger. These are people who really only want something cheap, brought to them quickly. Flavor's nice, but edible will do.

Perhaps the most incomprehensible ad to me is the Viagra spot where the gray-haired guy's walking down the street, apparently on the way to his doctor's office. He's passing a set of windows when his reflection begins talking to him: "Are you going to ask the doctor about our erectile dysfunction?"

Yeah, pal. Sure. As soon as I get done asking him why I'm being nagged by a hallucination.

Oh, and will someone please make those talking baby ads go away? They do nothing to make me want to use E-Trade for my investments. Not only is the effect really creepy, but that kid's really turning into kind of a douchebag.

It’s the question that eternally bedevils me: which one is getting crazier, the TV or me? I’m sort of afraid to know the answer.

UPPERDOWN VOTE UPPERDOWN VOTE UPPERDOWN VOTE

Obama: Give health care an 'up or down' vote:

President Barack Obama urged Congress Wednesday to vote "up or down" on sweeping health care legislation in the next few weeks, endorsing a plan that denies Senate Republicans the right to kill the bill by stalling with a filibuster.

Finally!

I say that because it's high time the magic words "up or down vote" were used in place of "reconciliation," which most people don't understand (including, apparently much of the Senate).

After all, the phrase (often rendered as 'upperdown vote") became a Republican mantra when they were in power and the Democrats threatened a filibuster. "So and so deserves an upperdown vote," "The American people want to see an upperdown vote on Judge so and so", etc.

I'd love it if every supporter of the current health care reform bill was on TV 24/7 from now until the vote, repeating "upperdown vote, upperdown vote, upperdown vote", till the thing passes.

Unfortunately, I don't know if the Dems have the message discipline to do it.

Why We Fight

Rep. Louise Slaughter during the Health care Summit:

“I have a constituent that you won’t believe and I know you won’t, but her sister died, this poor woman had no dentures,” Slaughter, D-Fairport, said. “She wore her dead sister's teeth, which of course were uncomfortable and did not fit. Do you believe that in America that’s where we would be?”

Rush Limbaugh, overfed rich white drug addict, commenting on the story:

“If you don’t have any teeth, so what? What’s applesauce for?”

Remember folks: at one point, assholes like Limbaugh ran the country. Now, the chicken-livered Democratic Congressional Delegation acts like they still do.

Enough is enough.

Fight.

Bipartisanship In Action

The Washington Monthly

Two thousand federal transportation workers will be furloughed without pay on Monday, and the Obama administration said they have a Kentucky senator to blame for it.

Federal reimbursements to states for highway programs will also be halted, the Transportation Department said in a statement late Sunday. The reimbursements amount to about $190 million a day, according to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

The furloughs and freeze on payments were the result of a decision last week by Republican Sen. Jim Bunning to block passage of legislation that would have extended federal highway and transit programs, the department said. Those programs expired at midnight Sunday.

The extension of transportation programs was part of a larger package of government programs that also expired Sunday, including unemployment benefits for about 400,000 Americans.

Bunning's reaction, when pressed on the issue:

"Tough shit."

But Lamar Alexander claims that if the Democrats pass the health care bill through reconciliation, it will "end the Senate as a protector of minority rights, the place where you have to get consensus, instead of just a partisan majority."

Of course, reconciliation wasn't a problem for Senator Alexander the times he voted for it.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warns of a "severe reaction" if reconciliation is used.

Of course, he didn't have a problem when it was used 19 other times to pass bills the Republicans liked, like the Bush tax cuts.

You know what, Senator Alexander, Senator McConnell? You've had plenty of chances to have a say in this, and your reaction has always been to whine that anything less than total capitulation isn't being "bipartisan."

Well, tough shit. Pass the damn bill.

BIG TEACHER IS WATCHING YOU

Blake Robbins probably thought it was pretty neat when his school, Harriton High School in the wealthy Philadephia suburb of Ardmore. sent a new Macbook laptop computer home with him. His school district, one of the wealthiest in the country, had issued the laptops to its high school students.

But when Blake was called into the Vice-Principal's office and accused of '”inappropriate behavior off school grounds,” he discovered another use for the computers that neither he nor his parents knew about. According to a lawsuit filed in Federal Court, Blake was confronted with pictures of himself, allegedly taking drugs. The pictures had been taken by the built in camera on his own computer.

Now, anyone who's had any contact with the justice system here in the 21st century can probably tell you about defendants who've been undone by taking pictures of themselves brandishing weapons, ingesting drugs, or showing off ill-gotten gains, then posted them on their MySpace and Facebook pages (yes, some criminals really are that dumb).

But that wasn't what happened in Blake's case. He found, to his (and his parents') horror, that the computers contained software that allowed school administrators to turn the cameras on remotely and photograph whatever was in the room with the computer.

At first, the school admitted that it had turned on its all-seeing eyes a total of 42 times, but insisted that the system was only used to track “lost or stolen” laptops. This did not address the question of how Blake's machine, which was neither lost or stolen, had its camera activated so that school administrators could peer into his home.

Later investigations by the Philadelphia Inquirer showed that the network administrator responsible for the laptop program apparently had not gotten the memo about only using the program to search for purloined hardware. In a case of almost too-perfect irony, the administrator, Mike Perbix, had posted his own video on line touting the neat things that could be done when you turned school computers into surreptitious surveillance devices. It showed him, for example, snapping “as many as 20 photos of a teacher and some students without their knowledge while in the classroom.” Perbix apparently thought this was a keen thing to be able to do: “It's a fantastic feature," the Inquirer quotes him as chuckling. I don't know about you, but the idea of some geeky IT guy chuckling over his ability to spy on kids without permission creeps me out.

Blake's parents have now filed a class action suit against the school district. The FBI is also investigating for potential violations of Federal wiretapping laws.

For years, under the banner of “maintaining order”, the schools have demanded increased power to encroach on the privacy and free-speech rights of students. They've also moved to criminalize every behavior problem, to the point where students who commit infractions that would at one time have gotten them sent to the office end up in court, charged with crimes. And the courts, on all levels, have pretty much let them have their way, especially in the post-Columbine world, in which it sometimes seems as if every student is regarded as a criminal by default. In one case that I've written about in this column, a student was locked up when his response to the prompt “write a scary story” led to...well, a scary (and violent) story. In another, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a student could be suspended for a drug-related joke made off campus. In such an environment, why shouldn't a school feel entitled to send surveillance devices home with a student? Especially if he was caught doing drugs?

Except that those “drugs” Blake was supposedly taking turned out to be candy. Something called Ike and Mikes. I'm sure we're all glad that this brave new technology is being deployed to protect us and our children from sugary snacks.

George Orwell, in the book “1984”, wrote about a society in which everyone had a “telescreen,” a device in the wall that provided propaganda broadcasts, but which could also be used by the totalitarian government of Big Brother to keep an eye on citizens. You never knew when the screen was being monitored, so you had to live at all times as if you were being watched.

In 2010, is Big Teacher watching you?