None the less:
Is our media learning? RT @Heminator: A GIF is worth a thousand words. RT @seanagnew: Um.. http://t.co/T1I8YXsSb0
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) October 7, 2013
Oops. Continue reading Tweet of the Day, Those Giant Hornets Are Still Freaking Nightmare Fuel edition.
Yeah, the song that John Denver sand. I’m not exactly sure why that is, and neither is anybody else.
For decades, Danoff’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” — a 1971 hit for John Denver — has been a sing-along favorite at Munich’s Oktoberfest, a nostalgic touchstone bound to bring Germans to their feet whenever it’s played.
Why? “I have no idea,” [Bill] Danoff, 67, told us. “I’ve never been to Germany” — though he’d never been to West Virginia either before he wrote his ode to the Mountain State.
Ask German natives why they get misty-eyed over a song about the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge, what cultural resonance they find in it, and you’ll get a quizzical stare: It’s a really good song, don’t you think?
After the fold: video of Germans losing their minds (to quote the article) upon hearing the song. Continue reading So, apparently Germans really, really dig “Country Roads.”
Worth it, just to see the screaming. From Constant Reader BigGator5:
I am going to go against the grain and agree with President Obama. Change the name…
President Barack Obama says that if he owned the Washington Redskins, he would “think about changing” the team name, wading into the controversy over a football nickname that many people deem offensive to Native Americans.
…To the “DC Tea Party”.
And oh, my, but there would be screaming.
Stuff came up. Nothing bad, just time-consuming.
Well, this must have been somewhat uncomfortable. Chris Wallace smacking around Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on his party’s shutdown of the government:
“Despite these stakes, the president is refusing to negotiate,” Wallace said. He noted that previous votes to raise the debt ceiling have included campaign finance reform, school prayer, and a nuclear freeze. “What’s unprecedented is not Congress tying strings; what’s unprecedented is a president refusing to negotiate.”
“Frankly, I think your history is wrong,” Lew said. “If you look at the cases where the debt limit was involved, there were many other things attached to the debt limit, but the question of threatening to cause a default of the United States, not until 2011 did it become a positive agenda—”
“With all due respect, your history is wrong,” Wallace responded.
Continue reading Jack Lew gets called on @BarackObama’s #shutdown nonsense.
Not that I bought that in the first place, but still:
Representative Peter King (R., N.Y.), a vocal critic of the GOP’s conservative wing, has publicly said he would back a “clean” funding bill to end the government shutdown. But he will not back an effort from House Democrats to force a vote on one.
Peter King was never as likely to sign away his future career as Democrats inexplicably thought that he would have been; but he was one of the most likely ones. So if he’s not going to break ranks on a discharge position then it beggars belief that enough of the supposed other waverers will. This one runs out to the end, folks.
Moe Lane
PS: The Democrats have been guessing wrong on what the GOP is going to do in response right from the start, huh?
Jesus Christ on His Heavenly Throne: they have a bot handling Obamacare Live Chat inquiries. This must have caused John Dickerson physical pain:
[4:30:27 pm]: Welcome! You’re now connected to Health Insurance Marketplace Live Chat.
Thanks for contacting us. My name is PGSTX0534. To protect your privacy, please don’t provide any personal information, like [your] Social Security Number, or any other sensitive medical or personal information.[4:30:51 pm]: PGSTX0534
Hello, how may I help you today?[snip of ‘Alice*’ describing problem.]
[4:32:21 pm]: PGSTX0534
Thanks for your interest in the Health Insurance Marketplace. We have a lot of visitors trying to use our website right now. That is causing some glitches for some people trying to create accounts or log in. Keep trying, and thanks for your patience. We’ll continue working to improve the site so you can get covered[.]Continue reading Automated bot on #obamacare Live Chat *almost* passes a Turing Test.
And BOOM goes the dynamite.
Meet Tom Waschura, Californian, father of two – oh, and right: Obama supporter. Just got a letter from his healthcare provider telling him that his private health insurance just went up by ten grand a year:
“I was laughing at Boehner — until the mail came today,” Waschura said, referring to House Speaker John Boehner, who is leading the Republican charge to defund Obamacare.
“I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy.”
Let me tell you a secret: we don’t need people like Mr. Waschura to love us. We just need people like him to vote their class interests, to quote the Marxists who unaccountably confidently expect this rotating disaster of a health care rationing system to fuel public outcry for socialized medicine. They don’t have to vote Republican forever, you know. We’ll be happy if they vote Republican just enough to allow the party to kill this thing. With that in mind, let me just be the first to assure Mr. Waschura that his hope that the rates will be adjusted down in a few years is only half-justified: left unchecked, they will be adjusted. Only upwards. The Democrats always expected and planned that Obamacare would be funded by raiding the incomes of as many people as possible; making the insurance companies the mechanism for jacking up premiums was the only way to get the insurance companies on-board.
In other words, Mr. Waschura: what happened to you was not a bug in the system. It is the system. And now you have to ask yourself: are you really prepared to pay ten grand a year and rising for the privilege of having a legislator theatrically agree with you on, say, first-trimester abortion? – Because I’m sure that the California Republican party will be able to find a candidate that won’t go out of his or her way to aggravate you on that topic.
I’m pulling the music-video-that-I-couldn’t-load-anyway and putting up this trailer that Constant Reader BG5 just sent me:
I, Frankenstein. Otherwise known as Promethean: The Created: The Movie. How the heck do these people manage to keep ripping off White Wolf and not get sued?
They are going to go see their war monuments whether you and the rest of the Democratic party likes it, or not.
Stop embarrassing yourself: more importantly, stop embarrassing me. I feel at least mildly responsible for not being able to keep you out of office in 2008 and 2012.
