Burying the Lead while Dating the Metal (and doin' da Foxtrot with Ma "Half-baked Alaska" Kettle)

Burying the Lead

My buddies at the oh-so-unbiased Wall Street Journal are doing their level best to fan the flames of outrage over the admittedly far - FAR - from perfect health care reform bill. Well, well, well. Big surprise. Typical left wing propaganda from the Murdoch-owned paper (we all know Rupert is a commie pinko given the well known liberal leanings of his Fox News).

The latest headline from the Journal screams: Married Couples will Pay More for Health Insurance Under New Bill! Way down in the gooey center of the article hiding in the shadows of that screed lurks a toss-off noting that "more" only applies to the new insurance exchanges and does not affect those who are currently insured.

Venture deeper down into the dark and damp ink stains of this piece and you'll trip over still more "minor details" explaining that a couple would pay more only if their combined income serves to push them over the poverty line. Well, that's not fair but alas tends to be the way things often work (in government and private sector alike). The article doesn't - but should - add that those exchanges are not even an option for these same couples currently. Today, married or single, these fine folks would be paying quite a bit more for private insurance - more even than the "more" WSJ is up in arms about - or live with none at all. But why let the truth get in the way of a good headline?

In my opinion the health care bill in the form that most probably will be signed into law will contain some good but a shitload of bad along for the ride. Almost all the badness can be divided into two steaming piles:

1. The compromises to the right made to appease the fear mongers and gain at least limited Republican support (of which none was provided in the end).
2. State-specific pork that often has little or nothing to do with health care reform but was nonetheless stuffed into the bill in typical beltway fashion. It's the manifestation of the tax-and-spend stereotype aimed (often rightly) at liberal members of Congress but which is in fact practiced by both sides in an institutionalized manner that - God please - shouldn't outta be there but will very likely never go away.
   

Are the small diamonds in the dogshit of the health care legislation enough to justify the thing? I think so. But only with some big bright red warning stickers spelling out the must-haves:

1. Strong enough provisions to ensure private insurance companies don't jack their rates up out of fear they'll lose customers
2. Strong enough provisions to ensure people who can afford private insurance pay for it rather than latching onto the government dole. Or rather I should say the government supplemented dole, since the public option was removed out of misguided fear over impending socialism, death panel hokey and whatnot - this will be the death rattle of the bill probably.
   

Ahh, let's just face the facts that we don't have the national fortitude to do this thing. Fuck the poor. If they want medical attention, they can get off their asses and make some money. Clearly they don't want/need such luxuries. Need a pediatrician, kid? Then start stitching me up some Nikes! It's a win-win solution: we won't have to pass off our hard earned sneaker money to some third world sweatshop once we reinstate these fine institutions back into the economy of the good ol' U.S. of A. and the poor kids will be able pay for their whole family's health care! "Problem solved from your end," to paraphrase Office Space.

Dating the Metal

And now for something completely different (but with some oddly indirect parallels)...

Seems the geeks in the lab have knocked out a bang-up next generation companion for those who cannot - or prefer not to - connect with a real-life sweetheart. This isn't your father's blow-up doll, gang: it's fully electronic and comes with customizable personality in addition to the usual "bells and whistles" (and whips and chains, if you like). Mmmmm. For those saavy investors, this might well be the next big thing: the electronic pimp industry. Get in on the ground floor. Never under estimate the number of lonely and social awkward people there are out there or the fact that these qualities are often proportional to the disposable income these folks have at the ready, just looking for a Roxxxy the Sexbot (or Wild Wendy, Mature Martha, Frigid Farrah and S&M Susan - get 'em while supplies last).


Sista Sarah goes Foxtrotting

No big shocker this. Our Dull Eyed Lady of the Ice Land (apologies to Sara Dylan) signs on with Fox News as their sort of roving (rogueing?) commentator and the defacto Poet Laureate for the network. Though sadly no sign her interpreter Bill Shatner will be enlisted by Fox to jazzercise her sonnets like he's done so successfully in the past, putting a beat to her tweets. Pity. Perhaps he'll freelance as he's been known to do. I look forward to the work. From both of them. And now Tina will have plenty of television footage in the years to come when she will no doubt dust off the glasses 'n goofy smile and sashay forth back onto the SNL stage for the cameos we so loved last fall.

Enough Already

I swore I'd clam up until Friday and so now I will (unless I can't and then I won't). I figure this post has enough vitriol, bombast, smarmy sarcasm and commie-pinko socialist broadsides to piss just about everyone off in one way or another. If so, well then my work here is done.

Tripping

I just had to comment briefly on a strange chat William Shatner had back in August with Rush Limbaugh, to air on the biography channel this Saturday. Shatner, I'm sure you all know, is a master thespian, free love musician and acclaimed beat poet. But you might not be aware that he also hosts his own talk show on basic cable. It's called "Raw Nerve" and often lives up to that title (though perhaps "Weird Non-Sequitur" would be more apt). If you can't wait until Saturday, I've included it below.

As I've recounted in these pages, Shatner recently interpreted Sarah Palin's Twitter Tweets, enhancing her words with a crazy beatnik beat. He also gave equal treatment to Levi Johnson's twitter verbage. Yah, daddy-o. It was, like, way out. Much like his music. But taking on the Rush is something else again, sort of My Dinner with Andre with a healthy side of psilocybin mushrooms. Rush all strung out on Oxy-fueled Ego and Shatner all strung out on - well, Shatner. (I trip just watching him so I can only imagine what it's like being him, his heart pumping lysergic acid through his bloodstream 24/7.)

The actual content of the Shatner/Limbaugh summit is almost beside the point. It's the idea of these two yakking - the concept of it all - that's most interesting.

Anyway, children, put on Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow - or Shatner's own Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds - dim the lights, plug in the lava lamps and groove ...

Sarah in the Sky with Rougeness

Our lady of the midnight spotlight on Russia has already finished her memoirs!  Four hundred pages written faster than she can read.  Going Rogue: An American Life (actual title!) will be on the book shelves in mid-November and I'll be among the first in line to snatch up a copy.

Perhaps she should have coordinated the release with one by Richard "Rogue Warrier" Marcinko for some good old fashion synergy (he didn't know when to quit, she didn't know when not to; they have so much in common besides being all rogue).  I smell the 2012 Republican dream ticket cooking here (I'll leave it to The Architect to work out the details; however, Karl, credit where credit's due, eh?).

If her tweets are any indication of the content - perhaps they *are* the content - this book'll be a page-turner unlike anything since William Burroughs was perfecting the art of the "cut-up" style in the early 1960s.  Perhaps she can convince Shatner to do the reading for the audio book (he's already adept at the interpretation of her work, after all).

Shatner Recites Palin Farewell Speech:


Shatner Recites Palin Tweets:

It was perhaps poetic that the real life inspiration for Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds died today.  A sign to our Star Spangled Lady of the Great White Northern Hope to look to Shatner as Her One True Voice. Her Metatron, the wings to lift her linguistic flights of scribbled down maverickosity (maverickness? gooseness? icemanesque?) so all can behold.

After all, Shatner's reading of Lucy stands as the definitive version of the song, far surpassing the pedestrian effort Lennon and the boys put forward on Sgt. Pepper.  And I really mean this.  With Lennon and the mop tops, you felt they were always at least half kidding with the psychedelic window dressing. Shatner was stone serious, though; his rendition dug down into your spine.  You felt as though you had been dosed with three sheets of the best blotter acid just listening to the guy.

"Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she's Gooooooonnnnneeeeeee!!!!"

Food for thought, Sista Sarah ...

'The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes! ... Sarah in the Sky Wolf Hunting!'

The Guru did some more channeling of the Neocon Nico of the North Wednesday, this time putting the beat into her bewildering tweets.

"From sealife near lush wet rainforests to energy housed under frozen tundra atop permafrost,God most creatively displays His diversity in AK."

Yeah - you say it!

"Great day w/bear management wildlife biologists; much to see in wild territory incl amazing creatures w/mama bears' gutteral raw instinct ..."

Hey, cats! Dig T.J. Kirk's rhythms, jazzing up our Queen Half Baked Alaska's techno-patter, jazzercising through a landscape of stupefyingly incoherent non sequiturs.

Snap. Snap. Snap. Ddddrummm. Yeah!

An overwhelming compulsion drove me back through time to groove on Shatner's greatest hits and those of his Vulcan Hipster friend, Lenny Nimoy. Nimoy was Burroughs to Shatner's Ginsberg. Or maybe Kerouac to his Cassidy.

But they dominated a medium wholly apart from the fringes of the literary world: they were musical giants of a type we'll likely never see again.

'Spaced Out' is in many ways the greatest album ever made.

Simon and Garfunkel, Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Strummer and Jones, Iggy and Bowie, Leiber and Stoller, Rogers and Hammerstein, Edina and Patsy, The Captain and Tennille, Regis and Kathy Lee, Milli and Vanilli. All unquestionably great musical partnerships, but Nimoy and Shatner tower above them and stand alone.

'Mr Tambourine Man? Mister .. Mister ... Mister Tambourine Man?' Indeed, Bill. Keep looking, you'll find him. And Lenny, what about you? What's that you say? If you had a hammer, you'd hammer every morning, you'd hammer every evening? It's hammer time, Leonard. Live long and prosper.

Pay Now or Palin

The man that truly defined both Mr. Tambourine Man and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds in the sixties (Dylan/Byrds, who? Lennon, what?), Mr. T.J. Kirk himself Bill Shatner, raised the bar with a beatnik style reading of Sarah Palin's recent Farewell Speech. Palin was obviously channeling Allen Ginsberg's the Howl for her inspiration and Shatner does her proud. The girl with kaleidoscope eyes, indeed.

I can't wait to see what she's up to next! In an entertaining but not a good way!

Seriously, if we let her within 500 yards of either the White House or Capital Hill (and I mean even on a public tour), we will have really jumped the national shark and it'll be time to go live life under a more reasonable leader ... Like Lil' Kim Jong-Il (with my luck, they'll band together: Jong-Il - Palin 2012 bumper stickers are surely being printed as I write this). Or maybe Ted Nugent. Nugent-Palin, bringing Wolf hunting back to the mainstream where it belongs.