Tuesday, March 30, 9:00pm
These are the overall standings after one week. Cumulative totals will be posted weekly.
This is awesome, posted by a commenter on CommonDreams.org with user name Galenwainwright:Sounds about right, unless things are changed drastically. One can only hope that the 13 Republican State Attorneys General are successful in their challenges to the constitutionality of forcing people to give private corporations money. It's kinda funny, because over the past several decades the Republican Party has lived and breathed the idea of the general pool of taxpayers forking over enormous amounts of welfare to corporations (this is somehow known as "advocating free market capitalism", depsite being not free, not a market and not capitalism). In this case the party is objecting to specific people being ordered to give specific amounts to specific corporations, although the practice of (one example of many hundreds available) all of us paying for roadbuilding with public funds so Big Timber can steal trees from our socialized National Forests is hunky dory.
The objection seems to be that - crediting insurance companies with the best intentions, a questionable approach in and of itself - this system cornholes the consumer once. In theory the taxpayer is directly, manditorily assfucked in Obamacare... assuming you do receive health care with your insurance. (I run on the assumption that the assfucking will be more severe than that because private health companies will still dick us out of the care we're forced to buy, but again I'm trying to understand the objection from the pseudo-conservative side).
Republicans seem to enjoy the double- and triple-reaming. Using the trees example again, a great typical Republican program (and for the most part a Democratic one as well since 1980 or so) is that we all pay for the US Forest Service to build roads for timber corporations. So they can cut down our trees... sometimes even trees we told them they're not allowed to have. And then we buy the paper from the corporations without any taxpayer discount, even though those were trees we paid collectively to plant, maintain and partially to cut down. And then we cut taxes for the timber companies as a "job incentive." And we cut taxes for the executives of the timber companies even more, because rich people are Jesus' favorite special little freaking love children.
Now that's fucking the consumer/taxpayer. That's impressive. You have this with coal, oil, food, etc etc down the line. Socialized expense, privatized profit. Again, we somehow call this "free market capitalism."
Requiring specific people to pay specific amounts to specific corporations, however... well, this somehow puts our pseudo-"conservatives'" knickers in a twist. I think the issue is that the product is health care and not paper, and America's right wing finds it extremely important that health care not be viewed as a right. Certainly nothing to be American-style backassward "socialized." Fuck you, you diseased leech. Earth is for healthy and/or rich people. Didn't you know that?!
Regardless, I wish the GOP godspeed with the quite correct argument that it's not constitutional to force specific people to buy specific products. (I would add specific products that are likely defective, unreliable and that require additional inputs that you still might not be able to afford... although the GOP wuvs the health insurance industry and would never append that bit.) When will Republicans, then, start supporting war tax resisters? Anyone...? Anyone...? Bueller..? At least the status quo lets you need insurance and lets you pseudo-"decide" you might prefer to die with dignity instead of crapping your adult diapers at a last-ditch bake sale while trying to raise money for Aetna to let you finally take the fucking tumor out.
It seems odd that after several years of undeclared war, torture, suspension of habeus corpus, and spying on the American public that GOP lawmakers would suddenly flip to the back of their Texas-approved civics textbooks and start reading the fucking constitution, but better late than never. I'll take it.
Ah, the two party system.
On a related note, CommonDreams.org is one of the larger left-leaning news and opinion sites. Not "left" really, not the way the nicer neighborhoods of the non-Idiocracy world have a left. Not a Swedish nor Irish nor German nor Greek nor even Canadian left. Not an effective left, with a track record and a spine, that's given its people five weeks paid vacation, no college debt, no hospital bill bankruptcy. I mean the mamby-pamby "progressives" who support the Democratic Party first, left ideals third and whatever defeatist BS the Democratic Party wants them to believe this week that hobbles left ideals second.
What happens on the site is that they print mainly mainstream "liberal" stuff that paints the Dems in a pretty positive light (the spinal flexibility some professional columnists have one needs to do this is a wonder to behold). And there's a few hardercore leftie articles mixed in too for street cred, the same way boy bands get an actual rapper to do a cameo on one song per album. During the 2008 campaign, as the first week of November approached, they had a Stalinist-style
purge of all of the registered commenters who trashed Obama (because we said that Obama would do exactly what he's done thus far) and counselled voting Green or Nader, or Libertarian, or writing in Mickey Mouse. They not only banned many of us from posting on the site, but Orwell-style unpersoned/memory holed us by removing all of our previous posts on every topic and even - this is nutso - barring our IP addresses from even reading the site any longer!
I moved after the election, had a new IP address and began posting again under a different user name. This time Kucinich came up vis-a-vis the healthcare debate, and those of us who correctly predicted that Kucinich would be a turncoat weasel - because that's the nature of the modern Democratic Party - got purged again before it even happened. Posts gone, IP banned. The only way I can read CommonDreams articles from home now is through the Google cache (or through some IP hiding service, until I'd get banned again...). These are your "liberals", consigning all the Winston Smiths to Room 101 until we learn to love Big Obama.
If you're wondering why I bother reading the site at all, a valid question, it's really always been for the discussion in the comments section. That's where I get to gauge what America's unrepresented lumpen-left - the people who aren't crippled by excuse-making for a failed major party - are thinking. In 2004 maybe 10% were in revolt against Kerry, in 2008 about 20% were against Obama before he sold us downriver to Wall Street and maybe 40% after. Now with this healthcare turd passed about 80% of the commenters have vowed not to vote for any Democrat in 2010 or 2012. And the majority of the regular commenters are finally getting serious about voting Green or Nader, or Libertarian, or writing in Mickey Mouse.
Buckle your seat belts, we're in for a wild ride.
Starting tonight, and for the next five weeks, all teams' quiz scores will be cumulatively totalled.
Men in the traditional garb of Solola state preparing for the Sunday market in Chichicastenango
Scene from the Sunday market in Chichicastenango, in a rural mountain area where Spanish is a secondary language to local Mayan dialects
Guatemala City street performer in the Parque Central... wait for it... waaaaait foooor iiiit...
Blamo!
Goats being led down the middle of the street, Guatemala City, on a Sunday, about 1 block from the center of national government
Catholic Sunday procession, Antigua
Mayan ladies enjoying a ferris wheel in Antigua.
Tuesday, March 23, 9:00pm
This is why I vote for Ralph every four years. If you want to see something with British The Office-level discomfort, watch Dennis "Droopy Dog" Kucinich get torn a new one by Nader on Democracy Now!. Dennis looks like a Soviet official in 1953 admitting to his crimes against the state before being shipped off to an accidental death in the gulag. Such are the wages of major party loyalty. The Obama people bludgeoned Kucinich because he was going to be the only left-leaning vote in both houses of Congress on this shit, and when they tallied everything up it turned out they didn't even need his vote! How bad is it? Kucinich is offering rebates to people who contributed to his campaign because he campaigned as a foil of the insurance industry who'd vote against them. Rebates. When will the Obama people return the "hope and change" campaign money? Even in an act of treachery and cowardice, Kucinich still manages to out-honest Obama on that one.
Tuesday, March 16, 9:00pm
Tuesday, March 9, 9:00pm
I generally pay a small amount of attention to the Oscars because 90% of what Hollywood craps out is lousy and I usually haven't seen more than one or two nominated films in any given year. Of course doing this job I have my head in the Oscars section of the almanac all the time, so I always catch up to who won what a year or two later. AA questions make for good trivia questions because they have definitive answers, and there's a certain level of movie fame implicit in an Oscar. It's hard for anyone to complain that I'm going too obscure if a movie won something.
For about the fifth time in the past couple of years, the link to this URL in the External Links section of the Wikipedia entry for quizzo was removed. I'm usually targeted for removal by the National Trivia Association because I'm the only web presence who periodically points out that the NTA is not national, is not an association, and sucks at generating trivia.
Tuesday, March 2, 9:00pm
