(1) House passes PelosiCare by a 5-vote margin last night. 39 Ds voted against, and 1 R voted for. Guess who the R was. That’s right: John Boehner’s yellow butt buddy, Joesph “Cash” Cao.
The Senate HCR bill won’t have the five years of ass pounding provision. I think that’s a deliberate move on the part of Senate liberal Democrats. They want the House bill to have a lot of radical shit but the Senate bill not to have, so that there will be easy fodder for compromising out, instead of provisions that Democrats really do want. Basic rule of negotiating: You go into the negotiation initially demanding way more than you want, so that when it comes time to bargain and compromise, you’re not bargained out of your comfort zone. The Democrats will be glad to have one chamber’s bill threaten 5 years in prison for HCR dissidents but the other chamber’s bill not have it, because Republicans will then focus their energy on knocking that part out, but won’t have any steam left to knock out the public option.
(2) London Mayor Boris Johnson saved a filmmaker from further injury when she was being assaulted by a London girl gang. Which makes me wonder: Did the girl gang just not recognize Johnson as one of their own?
(3) George Strait’s “Amarillo By Morning,” nor any other song glorifying the Texas panhandle city, will be playing on London radio anymore.
(4) The ACLU and the state of Illinois are still fighting over an aborticide parental notification law passed 14 years ago. Evidently, aborticide is the only right that the ACLU thinks teenagers should have. Certainly no guns and cigarettes.
(5) Three-quarters of American men and women between the ages of 17 and 24 would be unable to join the U.S. Armed Forces because of educational deficiencies, physical unfitness or criminal history. In passing, the article says:
Even with a high school degree, many potential recruits still fail the Armed Forces Qualification Test (the AFQT) and cannot join. The test is used by the military to determine math and reading skills. About 30 percent of potential recruits with a high school degree take the test and fail it.
That means that 30% of H.S. diplomas are nothing more than feel good pieces of paper. I wonder what the racial demographics are among those thirty percent.
(6) Bring It On: Cumulative Voting, a mechanism that is thought to help minority groups in certain voting jurisdictions, also helps the outside-of-the-lamestream hard right wing, perhaps a little bit way too far outside the lamestream. Some people better be careful what they wish for.
As an aside, Willis Carto once proposed in The Spotlight that a given state should change to statewide at-large cum vote for U.S. House elections, instead of dividing a state up into a given number of districts of approximately the same population. What that means is that to elect Missouri’s 9 Congress(wo)men, all the candidates would be on the ballot everywhere in the state, with 9 holes next to each of their names. One could vote for one of the candidates 9 times, or nine candidates once, or one candidate 5 and another 4, or three each for three candidates, or any combination of 9 votes for anywhere from one to nine candidates. The top 9 candidates in terms of total holes punched would go to Congress. (The U.S. Constitution does not mandate Congressional districts, just a given whole number apportionment of House seats per state, each state having at least one. Therefore, Carto’s idea would be Constitutional.) I wouldn’t mind a smaller state trying it out as an experiment, to see if people could grok it, and to see if it would have Carto’s desired effect, but it sure would be confusing in California.
(7) Unviable tissue masses can acquire the language accents of its haploid cell donors.
(8) Todd Akin read the Pledge of Allegiance at Michelle Bachmann’s “House Call” on Thursday at the Capitol Grounds, and he left out “indivisible.” Fine by me, that’s always been my least favorite part of the Pledge anyway. That word is perhaps the only reason why I don’t want the PoA mandated in public schools.
(9) Now there’s the pot calling the kettle black.
(10) Paint his face white, give him an Anglo or Germanic name, and find a picture of him at a tea party. Then we wouldn’t be hearing excuses about how his life spiraled downward.
(11) I, too, was a map nut when I was that age. The only difference is that I used the toy car on the map to go on fantasy roadtrips.
(12) Because SCOTUS, in all its wonderful wisdom, said no death penalty for people younger than 18, because they’re all dumbasses who can’t possibly cook up premeditiation, gangs are outsourcing their murderous dirty work on those under 18, because they can’t get the chair. Now, SCOTUS is thinking about prohibiting life sentences for juveniles, at the very least prohibit it for crimes other than Murder 1st. That way, the gangs will push even more of their non-murderous dirty work on those under 18, becuase they’ll be able to get out of the hoosegow before too long.
(13) Cameras on every street corner haven’t eliminated crime in London and Chicago. So why are we to think that cameras in every room would eliminate corruption in government?
(14) If I were a medic, doctor or nurse with a “Hasan” in my case load, I’d pull the plugs while nobody’s looking. (“Oops darn, it slipped.”) That would be my way to keep a fancy ACLU or CAIR lawyer from getting him out of the electric chair.
(15) Wouldn’t it be just the shits if his lawyers enter a copy of The Bell Curve as evidence?
