reliably snarky

On November 7, 2009, the US House of Representatives passed HR3961, its version of comprehensive health care reform. The late Saturday night vote came after an all day debate which played out for the American people on C-Span.

For C-Span this was like the first game of the World Series.

The very next morning on his Sunday talk show, Reliable Sources, Kurtz quipped that the vote had come late on Saturday night ‘when no one was watching’.

I think this means that the vote came when Howard wasn’t watching. Sorry, Howard, real people out here in the hinterlands were watching. I put in a supply of low fat popcorn, took a break from reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Bright Sided” and planned my day around this event. For those of us in the Mountain time zone the vote came early enough.

I feel that Mr. Kurtz is not a reliable source on the C-Span’s audience size since he represents a commercial network, CNN, which competes with C-Span for attention.

I’m posting this now because, once again, we have a Saturday night event, this time in the US Senate, and this time on C-Span2, as Senate Democrats got exactly the 60 votes they neeed to bring their version up for floor debate. Will Kurtz display a similar degree of snarkyiness on his show this morning?

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

News about the ACORN Act which is different from the defund
ACORN Act. Goes with the Rachel Maddow Show continuing series about the war against ACORN

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

This is episode five in a continuing series from the Rachel Maddow Show. Washington ‘gunslingers’ are available to say anything if you will pay them. Meet Rick Berman

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Will the next target for the right wing smear machine be SEIU? Episode four in a continuing series from the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The truth about voter registration fraud vs. actual vote fraud. Fired US Attorney David Iglesias is interviewed. This is episode three in a continuing series from the Rachel Maddow Show.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Watch the video for news about how Congress stripped all Federal funding from ACORN. Now if they would just do the same thing wrt
KBR, Halliburton, etc. This is episode two in a continuing series from the Rachel Maddow Show.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

See the video for news about how the mainstream media got
it wrong about ACORN. This is part of a continuing series on the
Rachel Maddow Show.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Death Panel Idol

Dog days, mid August. Congress is out, health care reform is a hot topic. This is a great time to scare seniors with talk of death panels and euthanasia. These imaginary death panels seem to be the work of Betsy McCaughey, a thinktanker at the right-leaning Hudson Institute.

There is a provision in one of the health care bills that says doctors may be compensated by Medicare for the time they spend counselling patients on end of life decisions like Living Wills, Advanced Health Care Directives and such. It takes an evil imagination to twist a noncontroversial idea – seniors should make end of life decisions ahead of time – into some sinister plot to have the government pick who gets health care or not.

Your Gypsy Chief blogger will be 73 next month. Procrastination has been a life issue with me. But the bullshit being foisted off on seniors by Betsy McCaughey, Sarah Palin, Chuck Grassley and friends didn’t make me scared – it made me mad.

Mad enough to do something about it. First thing is we’re all going to die. Recognize that fact. Make it easier on those you leave behind by making your wishes known now, before you fall into a vegatative state.

Second, I don’t feel that I need counselling by a doctor in order to determine what end of life options are best for me.

For me, a consideration is do I want to live a little longer with tubes sticking out until the money is gone, or would I rather leave something for my kids to inherit.

I am so mad about this death panel stuff that I decided to stop procrasting and make a Living Will. I went to LegalZoom.com . The proces is very easy and straightforward. You can save a partially completed worksheet and return to it later. It took me less than half an hour to get the whole thing done.

That is how I beat the Betsy McCaughey – Sarah Palin – Chuck Grassley death panel.

Two other points to be made. People who deliberately make stuff up like these false death panels should not be considered as having a credible voice in the health care debate. I think that news directors make a huge mistake by allowing folks like Betsy McCaughey to have any air time when they have proved they do not deserve it. News directors do so to ‘present the other side of the story’. But that is just nonsense. The story is do we or do we not want to provide Medicare reimbursement for doctors to consult with patients on end of life decisions like Living Wills.

Final point. People think they can scare seniors by using loaded terms like death panels and forced euthanasia. Not all seniors are dumb enough or so poorly informed as to fall for such tactics.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Photo Credit: Paula Abdul Death Panel photo is the work of Mike Licht. See http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/

For years and years, decades actually the Van Nuys News and Valley Green Sheet ran a story that said monorail was coming to the San Fernando Valley. It was supposed to come over Cahuenga Pass from Hollywood to Van Nuys.

This story ran again and again, about every two weeks, essentially unchanged from the early 1950s for about 20 years.

Moral: If you are going to get it wrong you might as well be consistent.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Monarchs WNBA Champs 2005

OK, I admit it. My so-called guy friends give me tons of grief when I tell them that I like the Sacramento Monarchs and watch their games.

“You actually watch that?”, one friend asked.

“What’s wrong with the Monarchs?”

“Well, they are a bunch of lesbians”, was the best he could come up with.

My Yahoo! home page lets me know whenever there is a Kings game or a Monarchs game. They don’t always get it right. Sometimes, very infrequently, Yahoo! will make a mistake regarding a Kings game. Wrong starting time, wrong score, whatever.

The Yahoo! track record for the Monarchs is much worse. Again and again Yahoo! reports the score as 0-0 after the game has been played. Or they will report no game when there is a game.

This has happened so often it cannot be a coincidence. The message Yahoo! conveys is that women’s sports is not as important as men’s sports. The WNBA is not as important as the NBA. Is that fair? Certainly the audience for women’s sports is smaller, but that is a different question. And I’d be the first to admit that the WNBA game is different than the NBA game. Still, those ‘lezzies’? are as competitive and as tough as the guys. I love a down-to-the-wire close game with plenty of lead changes. And that’s what I get from the Monarchs. Given the fact that the Monarchs won a WNBA championship (2005) and the Kings didn’t even make the playoffs this year I say go Monarchs. I’ll be watching provided Yahoo! remembers to let me know.

Yahoo! failure to assign resources plays right into the hands of misogynistic men who diss woman’s sports as an acceptable? way to be passive-aggressive. They can’t express disrespect to their wives, girlfriends, sisters or moms without being in trouble. So they diss woman’s sports instead. This makes them feel better. If Yahoo! fails to assign adequate resources to update their web content it must mean that the WNBA is inferior and not worth wasting time on. Heck, nobody’s watching anyway.

The remedy, I think, is for men who don’t hate women to squawk about this.

Complaints from women could be dismissed since they might be coming from [gasp] lesbians.

Yahoo! failure is a failure in sports scores reporting just as serious as it would be for them to consistently get it wrong regarding Kings scores and schedules. And men should speak up.

Posted by Gypsy Chief and Veronica