Our good friends at Free Republic have compiled a super serious list of twenty-six reasons why Sarah Palin is a shoo-in in 2012, and why Obama is shaking in his boots to face her.
Since I don’t like to drive traffic to Free Republic, allow me to post the list for your enjoyment. If you have any to add, please feel free in the discussion below.
Enjoy. 🙂
No party for me.
With the media reporting for the eleventeenth time that Obama has, we’re-totally-serious-this-time, made up his mind on what to do about Afghanistan- the question remains on how we’re going to pay for it.
Obviously, the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a huge part of our current national deficit, with estimates running from 1.2 to 3 trillion dollars having been spent either directly on, or on operations associated with (such as DoD funding, research, etc). There isn’t enough spending to cut to be able to address those concerns, and no politician, regardless of their political bent, has the stones to commit political suicide and suggest cutting Medicare or Social Security.
So, how about it? Should we start enacting taxes to pay for these things?
Back in the pioneer days of the Internet- the veritable “boom times”, when men were real men, women were real women, and the Internet was called the “Information Superhighway”- a drunk man misspelled a four-letter expletive and, on a whim, decided to register it as a domain name. No particular reason why- not that a drunk needs a reason for doing crazy things, of course. Indeed, for the first two years of it’s existence, this site’s sole purpose was to display a picture of a squirrel with giant testicles.
Who would have imagined that a mere ten years later, that site would become one of the Internet’s few runaway entrepreneurial success stories- and an important part of the 2008 Presidential elections?
The first thing Drew Curtis, founder and operator of Fark.com, would like you to know is that The first thing you should know is that Fark isn’t a Weblog. It’s a news aggregator and an edited social networking news site. Every day Fark receives 2,000 or so news submissions from its readership- a link to a news article the submitter found particularly interesting, along with a humorous or snarky headline to “sell” the link. About fifty links a day are actually published on the main page.
Sounds simple? Maybe that’s why it works so well, because at over 4 million unique visitors a month, FARK.com is one of the most popular English-language sites on the Internet.
Popular though it may be, Fark doesn’t naturally pop to mind when thinking of US politics. Sites like LittleGreenFootballs, DailyKos, and FiveThirtyEight. Indeed, part of it’s mass appeal is that the impetus for Fark is, and always has been, grounded in humor.
In the course of writing a term paper on the role the Internet, and the blogosphere in particular, played in the 2008 Presidential elections, I emailed a wide variety of people seeking their opinions of how the process worked. Perhaps overly-ambitious, I fired off emails to everyone from Keith Olbermann to Michelle Malkin. David Frum and I chatted briefly, but he was too busy for an interview. The same story held true for Christopher Buckley and Nate Silver. Markos Moulistas, and Erick Erickson both blew me off after hearing some of the questions I wanted to ask*.
The only person to sit down and talk with me in detail was Drew Curtis. While I didn’t get to use it in my term paper (thanks to the lack of other interviewees), I have transcribed it here for posterity’s sake. In light of recent events, and seeing how polarized our political discussion process has become, I think it’s even more interesting than it was this spring.
Without further ado- Drew Curtis and Fark.com’s contribution to US politics, in his own words:
Folks, I don’t think it’s any news that the Obama Administration’s push for socialist-communist-fascist health care is a direct threat to our nation, and our way of life.
For those of you unaware of the implications of socialist, let me illustrate it to you:
Throughout its two thousand year history, Western medicine has been dominated by two broad strategies which drive the delivery of health care.
– In system-centered care, the needs and benefits of the system- the health care facility and the health care professionals staffing it- drive the provision of care.
– In patient-centered care, the strengths and needs of a patient drive the provision of care.
But there is a third strategy which, until recently, has been vastly underutilized- yet which could be even more effective and efficient than either strategy listed above.
– In family-centered care, the priorities and choices of a patient and their family drive the provision of care.
An example of the differences in the presentation of care is demonstrated by the Association for the Care of Children’s Health. Consider a hypothetical scenario of a patient requiring a special diet while in the course of receiving health care interventions.
– In a system-centered care facility, test results may be required to be sent ahead before a nutritionist consult is granted; the patient’s health insurance (or lack thereof) may be taken into account; overall, considerations will be made based on their benefit to the health care facility, rather than the patient (i.e., making dietary decisions before the patient has had contact with a nutritionist).
– In a patient-centered care facility, a nutritionist may assess the patient, design a meal plan, and give it to the patient. While this approach does address the clinical needs of the patient as it is addressed within the confines of the health care facility, it does not address detriments this approach may produce. Often not considered are the patient’s ability to provide for themselves; how their nutritional needs may change upon discharge from the hospital; how nutrition relates to the patient’s health care diagnosis; as well as their dietary preferences and cultural practices are often not considered.
– In a family-centered care facility, a nutritionist may ask to meet with the patient and their family to jointly design a meal plan in line with the patient and family’s resources, preferences, and other realities of their ability to provide continuing care outside the health care facility. Great emphasis is placed on the family’s ability to help the patient provide a continuance of a care diagnosis after they are discharged from a health care facility.
Recent studies suggest that family-centered care is the most effective method of delivering health care services. This is especially important in light of our search for an answer to the health-care crisis currently facing our nation.
But why is family-centered care more effective- and how does it impact our goal of providing essential health care services to every American citizen?
Or so says Sarah Palin.
The Associated Press reports:
Gov. Sarah Palin said Thursday that she would accept only 69 percent of the estimated $930 million dollars that could flow to the state, including $514 million for capital projects and $128 million for a hike in Medicaid reimbursement.
Well, what a principled lady! Say, what in particular did Governor Palin nix? Nothing important, really. Just money for non-essential programs, says the Anchorage Daily News, like…
… schools, energy assistance and social services.
Obviously, Sarah Palin knows how unnecessary these funds are, first hand. I mean, it’s not like higher educations levels are linked to a dramatic decrease in teen pregnancy rates, is it? Nah. In that vein, of course, I suggest the Palin/Plumber 2012 ticket use the following graphic heavily in their advertising. It should appeal to Real Mavriks everywhere.
If I asked you to guess where the busiest ER in the country was, what places would immediately come to mind?
New York City? Nope- but not a bad guess. Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in the Bronx processes approximately 400 triage cases a day, but it’s not even close to the busiest. How about Los Angeles? Close, but no; though USC Medical Center has an average of 500 admissions come through their triage unit a day.
Wow. Tough question, huh? I’ll give you a clue. Examination rooms are converted horse stalls, made into “rooms” by creating walls out of ropes, sheets, and clothing pins. There are sometimes thousands of people in the ER waiting area at a time. Here’s a picture of the waiting area:
Give up?
I present this without comment. Enjoy!
Congratulations! You are too smart to work at CNBC!
From Media Matters comes this report:
During the February 26 edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, CNBC host Maria Bartiromo asserted that among the “unintended consequences” of President Obama’s proposal to let the Bush tax cuts on wealthy taxpayers expire is that “the bottom line is small businesses … are putting $250,000 in revenue out there, and they’re going to get impacted, and this is the single largest creator of jobs.”
Obviously, this is incompetently erroneous at best. The Obama tax plan focuses on raising marginal income tax rates and reducing income tax deductions for individuals earning more than $200,000 per year and for couples earning more than $250,000 per year.
Moreover, Bartiromo’s suggestion that doing so would be a tax increase for most small businesses is also false: as Media Matters for America documented, according to the Tax Policy Center’s table of 2007 tax returns that reported small business income, 481,000 of those returns — about 2 percent — are in the top two income tax brackets, which include all filers with taxable incomes that would be affected.
Two percent? My God, this man is history’s greatest monster, somebody stop him! I only hope that someday soon, these news folks will understand how many bloggers there are out there with OCD and too much time on their hands, willing to hunt down details like this and nail ’em for it.