Cheap shots and googledipities

From Infidel753.

Found poem

From a Salon headline, with just a couple of tweaks:

Liberal Pundit Fail

Rush to attack Obamacare site
Can only aid unhingèd right.

Angela Merkel, Rahm Emanuel, Michael Hayden, and much, much more below:

"Pro-life" doesn't mean quite what you'd think:

Pro-Life Groups In Ohio Sue To Block 300,000 Low-Income People From Gaining Health Coverage

Over Governor Kasich's come-to-Jesus discovery that expanding Medicaid as the Affordable Care Act provides is the right thing to do. Note that the "pro-lifers" aren't doing this to prevent abortions (which the Medicaid coverage would not pay for if only because it would be against the law for them to do so) but to complain about Governor Kasich's end-run around the legislature.


Googledipity

Proposed new term for when your search terms are so configured as to obtain you something you had no idea you were looking for. In a first example of a googledipity, I was looking for some fresh summary account of US efforts to eavesdrop on Bundekanzlerinnen and such and arrived instead at this brand new Onion story:

OTTAWA—A host of high-ranking insect leaders convened in Canada for the annual G20,000,000,000 summit Friday, addressing various challenges facing today’s insects and promoting stability among the global bug population.

The two-day conference, held this year in a secluded, heavily wooded area of the Ottawa National Forest, reportedly includes various insect representatives from North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as over 15,000 different species of beetles from Australia invited as non-member delegates.

Image from North Carolina State University.

On the issue of our history of monitoring the cellphones of the great and powerful Merkels and others, I would just like to note for the record: the NSA memo discovered by Edward Snowden revealing the despicable practice (and the fact that the NSA had dropped it since it provided "little marketable intelligence") is dated 2006, a time when Keith Alexander ran the NSA as he does today, but under a different president whose name I'll remember in just a second. Oh, yes, I've got it. In the Guardian story originally reporting this behavior, on the other hand, Bush's name appears once, while the name of President Obama appears 23 times. (Alexander is not mentioned at all.)

You might think that's just journalism—the story just isn't about Bush, and and it's Obama that's getting all the angry phone calls and has to respond—but I've been half-listening to NPR coverage of the scandal and it's all about "the United States has been listening" and "the status quo is not acceptable" and so on. There is something retroactionary going on here; a kind of memetic confluence making the whole thing seem to be going on now instead of seven years ago and hence somehow Obama's fault. Get a grip, people!

Tom Matzzie and Michael Hayden meet cute.

Incidentally Alexander's predecessor

has found his way into the news; former National Security Agency director Michael Hayden was giving not-for-attribution background interviews on the Acela train when he was overheard by the former MoveOn honcho Tom Matzzie, who proceeded to tweet the event to his followers. A good time was had by all, when Hayden realized what was going on (one can only imagine the network of followers required to make this happen, and you have to realize it means Hayden takes interviews while watching his twitter feed, just like Angela Merkel). He doesn't seem to have been particularly upset at his violated anonymity.

It's clear from the story as I've seen it that Hayden was talking about what a wussy, legally fastidious administration we have now, with its dislike for rendition and illegal surveillance and the like, but this is somehow not considered part of the story. What I mean, if I really have to clarify this, is that we are watching the Bush-era noise machine manipulating public opinion on the Obama administration and we don't even seem to notice. It's like when they watched Lewis Libby committing arguable treason and and instead of reporting that, the story they reported was the one Libby wanted them to report, of no conceivable public interest, outing an undercover CIA agent working the crucial Iran beat with some vague idea of making her husband, a critic of the Bush administration, look bad. And called him "Scooter". It's no wonder Obama doesn't think much of the professional journalists; it's not that they tell stories he doesn't like, it's that they don't know what a story is.

Update:

Hayden denies that he was criticizing the Obama aministration; Matzzie's tweeting got it "terribly wrong."

"I didn't criticize the president,” Hayden told the Washington Post. “I actually said these are very difficult issues. I said I had political guidance, too, that limited the things that I did when I was director of NSA. Now that political guidance [for current officials] is going to be more robust. It wasn't a criticism."

Whether I believe him or not, I guess he did know what the story was.

Emanuel is the chili at far left. Food art by Lauri Apple via Eat Me Daily.

Who was that man in the Rahm Emanuel mask?

This from Edushyster is a very remarkable little development in the world of education rephorm or "reform" as air-quoters call it:

But it was special guest Rahm Emanuel who served as the confab’s designated buzz kill. While Jeb had earlier sung Rahm’s praises as the takes-no-prisoners mayor of Buck-Stops-Here-Istan, Rahm showed up with not so much as a hamburger tendril of red meat. Echoing a growing number of big city mayors for whom reform is now a “dirty ‘R’ word,” Rahm announced that he is no education reformer. And it got worse—much worse. He said that there had been too much blaming of teachers and too little talk about poverty, and that not all of the city’s public schools sucked. In other words, what???? Why did they put steak knives at every table setting if we weren’t going to have an opportunity to use them???When board member William Oberndorf suggested that Rahm look to Milwaukee as a choicey model, Rahm looked as though he’d never heard of the place: Mil-What-Ee? And when ExcelinEd CEO Patricia Levesque asked Rahm to tell the crowd what he really thinks about Chicago Teachers Union chief Karen Lewis, Rahm. Refused. To take. The bait.

Breaking: Bill de Blasio is a politician

I was doing my best to keep it from you, but the intrepid Doug Henwood found out:

.@VinnieTesla looks like @deBlasioNYC is pandering to the yahoos
— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) October 23, 2013

Oy, the Sandinist candidate for mayor in NYC is in fact a card-carrying Democrat! He's been hiding it because the Sandinist vote is so crucial. (Or at least was until Henwood moved to Jersey.)

Dickship has its privileges

Though the President’s three minute address was fairly tame, it’s what he said in the last 30 seconds that raises eyebrows.

“Remember,  nobody ever expected this would be easy. Change never is. It takes time and effort and dedication,” Obama said in his address. “But if we all keep doing what we can to make a difference in our communities, I’m absolutely confident that we will finish the job of making healthcare in this country not just a privilege for a fortunate few, but a right for all Americans to enjoy.”

According to the President, his goal is to make healthcare more than just a privilege — he wants it to be a right for all. (RedAlertPolitics)

Yes, the latest evidence of Obama's Marxist-Leninist tendencies,

his quest to make affordable healthcare more than just a privilege.

Because if you let all the yobs have affordable healthcare they'll just abuse it, right? Refusing to have diabetes. Welfare queens on psychotherapy and young bucks getting tummy tucks. Affordable healthcare is something a person should have to earn.

AP Photo/John Bazemore. Via.