Pirate Treasure

And away we go!

1. Lisa Golden (That's Why) on fielding calls at AARP during the previous attempt to reform health care insurance:

   My colleague, the one who used to narrate her whole fucking day, turned and gaped at me. Then she actually laughed out loud, started holding her sides, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes and finished by falling out of her chair and onto the floor where she rolled around laughing until her ass fell off.

2. Shark-fu (Angry Black Bitch) on the upcoming presidential address:

   The partisans have been weighing in from jump, but a bitch overheard something this weekend that I think speaks to an under-covered factor impacting health care reform. I read an article about parents who intended to keep their chil’ren out of school rather than expose them to President Obama’s back-to-school message of staying in school and working hard. The thoughts of one father caught my attention – he said that America is the greatest nation in the world and he didn’t want his son to hear that there was something flawed about this nation.

   As if the kid won't find out anyway. But I digress.


3. Avedon Carol (The Sideshow) proposes agitating for reform directly to the media:

   The thing is, the media seems to be dominated not by people who want to cover issues or who consider the needs of the populace anything more than a side entertainment, but by people who truly seem to believe that the priorities of rich, influential people matter more than the literally millions of lives that are being lost to an increasingly bizarre system. ... But they care about themselves, and more than that, they think reporting on each other is actually hot stuff - they think people who are having to make the choice between going into massive debt that will cost them their homes or allowing their own children to die because the costs of medical care are really out of their grasp should care more about the concerns of overpaid celebrity journalists.

4. Lower Manhattanite (Group News Blog) on the former Vice-President:

   Cheney isn't worried about what you or I—crazy moonbats us—think of him. He is however sweating a little bit at how conservatives ultimately remember him. Oh yes, right now he's still for the most part the tough, fuck-the-world, J. Press-suited “Master Of The Universe” they slobber over...but the concern on his part is over what we'll find out he signed off on in terms of “exquisite rendering”...a.k.a. torture of anybody deemed if not dangerous, at the very least, questionable. Let me amend that. It's not over what we'll find out, but rather, what the whole world—especially the Muslim world finds out about just how crazy he was down for us to get “in the name of preserving America”. If the news breaks that the sick he urged on is documented...in detail, and those awful deeds (rape as leverage for information, willy-nilly torture and brutality for scraps of information that meant squat, etc.) become an obvious rallying point behind the likes of an upswing in recruiting for “Al Qaeda 2.1”...then that is the thing more than drunkenly shotgunning a buddy in the face that cracks his tough guy veneer like nothing else could. The flop-sweat on his brow during his reach-around “interview” with Chris Wallace on Fox News and his daughter's desperate keening on “This Week” is borne of his biggest fear. ... His fear is of his legacy being that of him cast as an idiot. A fool. An unthinking clod who fucked it all up and catalyzed terrorist hellfire thanks to his ill-conceived efforts.

   I'm so glad he's back.