Progressive POS. Have fun burning in Hell for eternity. — Red Meat
Good people don’t promote laws that will directly lead to the death of millions, hope someday I get to spit on his grave. — Swampy
So long Andy [smiley emoticon] You are a total sell out to this great nation. You are a communist piece of garbage and you will not be missed. — Truthbeliever2
Sadly, my first thought when I saw the headline was “if he’d passed away at age 82 I would have missed him so much more” … Now, I only feel angry the old shill didn‘t live another year or two so he’d have to face a “death panel” before kicking it. The old bastrd died too soon to reap what he helped sow. I feel cheated that we’ll never get to hear him lament his decision to be a wh0re for the socialist DNC. — Wool-Free Vision
Another dead Democrat…today’s shaping up to be a better day than expected. — teddrunk
America’s sheriff? Maybe he was Maryberry’s, but Arpaio is America’s sheriff!!!! — catholicextremist
The guy that was the spokes person for Obamacare dies 1 week after it is upheld, 1 and counting. — Love The Kids
I had hoped that he would live long enough to be denied the healthcare that he helped shove down America’s throat. — Posterchild
So how did that Maobamacare you were pimping a couple of years ago work out for ya? Gee did the death panels keep you waiting too long? — Sweetrae
Ever see a lib blog after one of ours dies? Ever seen the unbridled filth and hatred in which they roll around like pigs? I for one am sick and tired of playing nice with commies. We will never win if we continue to allow them to play by different rules.
IF ANDY GRIFFITH, DEAD, IS THIS CONTROVERSIAL TO THESE ASSHATS, SERIOUSLY ASK YOURSELF: HOW MUCH LONGER CAN THE MIDDLE HOLD???
Below, evil communist pinko—and probably SECRETL KENYAN socialist dogfucker—Andy Griffith “betraying the country” in a 2010 ad promoting healthcare reform:
A few years ago, someone I went to public school with left an idiotic comment on my Facebook wall about something I’d written on DM, basically saying in a totally dipshitty way that “the country can’t afford to insure everyone” and asking “why should hard-working people like me have to pay the way for others?” and THEN this moron proceeded to almost brag that she had a husband and five (FIVE!) uninsured children and she STILL felt this way and was active in the Tea party, natch.
“Who” is “the country,” in the minds of some of these dolts? Apparently, though, she was in agreement with her fellow teabaggers about giving the “job creators” like Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney and buddies a gigundo tax cut.
We were both educated in the same public school system. Go figure. People on my FB wall just tore into her, viciously, but I blocked her. I hadn’t spoken to her since the 6th grade, probably, and wasn’t all that interested in picking up where we’d left off at the age of 12 for more of her brain-damaged Tea party nonsense.
Here’s a list of what is already in effect, courtesy of CaspianX2 [I’m not block-quoting to save space, this is but one short piece of a much longer post at reddit]:
It allows the Food and Drug Administration to approve more generic drugs (making for more competition in the market to drive down prices)
It increases the rebates on drugs people get through Medicare
It establishes a non-profit group, that the government doesn’t directly control, PCORI, to study different kinds of treatments to see what works better and is the best use of money.
It makes chain restaurants like McDonalds display how many calories are in all of their foods, so people can have an easier time making choices to eat healthy.
It makes a “high-risk pool” for people with pre-existing conditions. Basically, this is a way to slowly ease into getting rid of “pre-existing conditions” altogether. For now, people who already have health issues that would be considered “pre-existing conditions” can still get insurance, but at different rates than people without them.
It forbids insurance companies from discriminating based on a disability, or because they were the victim of domestic abuse in the past (yes, insurers really did deny coverage for that)
It renews some old policies, and calls for the appointment of various positions.
It creates a new 10% tax on indoor tanning booths.
It says that health insurance companies can no longer tell customers that they won’t get any more coverage because they have hit a “lifetime limit”. Basically, if someone has paid for health insurance, that company can’t tell that person that he’s used that insurance too much throughout his life so they won’t cover him any more. They can’t do this for lifetime spending, and they’re limited in how much they can do this for yearly spending.
Kids can continue to be covered by their parents’ health insurance until they’re 26.
No more “pre-existing conditions” for kids under the age of 19.
Insurers have less ability to change the amount customers have to pay for their plans.
People in a “Medicare Gap” get a rebate to make up for the extra money they would otherwise have to spend.
Insurers can’t just drop customers once they get sick.
Insurers have to tell customers what they’re spending money on. (Instead of just “administrative fee,” they have to be more specific).
Insurers need to have an appeals process for when they turn down a claim, so customers have some manner of recourse other than a lawsuit when they’re turned down.
Anti-fraud funding is increased and new ways to stop fraud are created.
Medicare extends to smaller hospitals.
Medicare patients with chronic illnesses must be monitored more thoroughly.
Reduces the costs for some companies that handle benefits for the elderly.
A new website is made to give people insurance and health information. (I think this is it: http://www.healthcare.gov/ ).
A credit program is made that will make it easier for business to invest in new ways to treat illness by paying half the cost of the investment. (Note - this program was temporary. It already ended)
A limit is placed on just how much of a percentage of the money an insurer makes can be profit, to make sure they’re not price-gouging customers.
A limit is placed on what type of insurance accounts can be used to pay for over-the-counter drugs without a prescription. Basically, your insurer isn’t paying for the Aspirin you bought for that hangover.
Employers need to list the benefits they provided to employees on their tax forms.
Any new health plans must provide preventive care (mammograms, colonoscopies, etc.) without requiring any sort of co-pay or charge.
For what’s still to come with the change in healthcare laws, you’ll have to go over to reddit for more. You’ll notice that CaspianX2 has edited and refined his guide to Obamacare with the help of the reddit community, so this is an evolving document.
Below, Miit Romney explains the individual mandate better than Obama or the Democrats ever have. Poor Mittens having shit like this following him around. How will Republicans react to seeing this? Chances are they won’t ever see it, as this clip will probably never get anywhere near Fox News or Drudge…
The recently published graphic novel, Cleveland, by the late Harvey Pekar and illustrator Joseph Remnant, is a flat-out masterpiece of the form. One (hefty) part “biography” of a city, Pekar being Pekar, Cleveland is also another piece (and a key piece at that) of the grand tapestry recording the life of one of the city’s most notable residents, and certainly the man who will forever be known as Cleveland’s unofficial poet laureate.
In Cleveland, Pekar, who famously said “Life is a war of attrition,” tells his own story (as is his wont, of course) alongside that of the city he loved so much. It’s a broadly sweeping narrative for a writer usually so invested with the minutiae of life, but the Pekaresque observations are no less potent as the author takes an aerial view of over 200 years of the rise and fall of what was once one of America’s greatest cities and placing the events of his own 70 years living there in the larger context of Cleveland’s role in the American experiment itself. This is not the “day to day” life, little—yet potently illuminating—observations we’ve come to expect from Pekar, but in the beautifully-rendered pages of Cleveland, Harvey’s take on a slice of American history that he witnessed first hand (well, about a third of it, let’s say) is no less rewarding.
Cleveland is so beautiful and so heartfelt that it brought tears to my eyes several times (reading it, as I did, mostly in a dental office). I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you hail from Cleveland (or anywhere near it) the book is a must-read, but I’d say the same to anyone who simply wants to be dazzled by a great American writer at the very tip top of his game and working with one of the best visual interpreters of his long career. Cleveland is a masterpiece, a modern American masterpiece.
I sent Dangerous Minds pal Jeff Newelt, who edited Cleveland (Newelt is also behind Smith magazine’s delightful online “Pekar Project”) a few questions about the process of bringing a work like Cleveland to fruition and keeping the flame alive of one of America’s most distinctive literary voices.
In what kind of shape was the project in when Harvey Pekar died?
When Harvey died, the script was totally done, and Joseph had already drawn 18 pages. Harvey had seen those pages and was pleased to say the least. He was thrilled and it wasn’t easy to thrill Harvey!
Joseph Remnant’s artwork in Cleveland is just stunning, he’s clearly one of Pekar’s most inspired collaborators. What kind of research went into the panels?
Joseph was the clear and only choice to illustrate Cleveland. He was already working with Harvey and myself on The Pekar Project webcomics, and after he did such an incredible job on the story “Muncie, Indiana,” that clinched it. Because half of the book is literally a history of Cleveland, Joseph did TONS of online research searching for images, and also took out piles of books from the library. Regarding Harvey himself, luckily we were blessed in that we spent a nice chunk of time with “our man in person. The whole Pekar Project crew flew to Cleveland for Harvey’s 70th Birthday Party in 2009, and we had a wonderful weekend, him giving us a guided tour of his favorite spots. Priceless experience.
As an editor, how did you approach the material?
Cleveland was originally developed with Vertigo editor Jonathan Vankin, who did the initial heavy conceptual lifting of what the book should be. Then the powers that be at DC couldn’t be bothered to look at this incredible script, so on behalf of Harvey, I brought in Josh Frankel/ZIP Comics to publish the book, and brought in Top Shelf Comix to co-publish. So with Cleveland, the toughest editing was done, and I just copy-edited/ cleaned up some inconsistencies here and there. With short webcomics he wrote for The Pekar Project, Harvey would call me up and read me each story over the phone, then we’d jam on it for a few minutes and choose which artist to give it to.
I love the fact that the book is a parallel biography/autobiography of the city and one of its most notable and emblematic lifelong residents. It just works so brilliantly.
Cleveland was always so prominent in Harvey’s work as to almost be a character, so it was inevitable that he’d one day do a book with the city as the focus. I think Harvey identified with the perma-under-doggedness of the city.
Cleveland is such an unabashed love letter to what most people would consider a drab, horrible city, but Pekar’s magical voice and pithy, erudite historical observations and Joseph Remnant’s wonderful illustrations really evoke the city’s heyday, its rise and fall and fall in such a vivid, vivid way. It’s an extremely moving historical/dramatic arc that is unique in American literature.
It’s all about the love. The appreciation. The key to understanding Harvey’s work, IMHO is realizing how much of an “appreciator” Harvey was. Too many words are wasted on the Harvey-as-curmudgeon labeling, reinforced by the excellent-yet-ultimately one-dimensional performance by Paul Giamatti in the American Splendor film. All the little mundane moments in his many classic autobiographical stories come down to Harvey noticing, appreciating and wanting to share a special something he overheard, or a magic-yet-mundane moment he witnessed. Also so many of Harvey’s stories are appreciations of underheralded jazz musicians, klezmer artists, Russian novelists, etc. So it’s the same with his city. He was frustrated with Cleveland but he LOVED it nonetheless, so that love charges a jazzy poetry in his narration.
How did Alan Moore come to be involved with Cleveland? He not only wrote the introduction, he also generously helped you raise money to defray the cost of publishing, too, right?
I passed a galley to Alan through comics scholar Paul Gravett a longtime pal of Alan’s who I hung out with for 10 days at the Rio Comicon along with Melinda Gebbie (Alan’s wife and artist of Lost Girls) and Kevin O’Neill (artist for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Alan Moore was always a huge Pekar fan. He even drew a one-page American Splendor story. Plus, Alan was a character in Pekar story because Joyce, Harvey and Danielle visited Alan and Melinda in England on the movie tour. Harvey Pekar was to Cleveland what Alan Moore is to Northampton. When we were thinking whom we should get to do the intro, he was my only choice. Then Alan helped raise money for the Harvey Pekar Memorial Statue on Kickstarter by offering a 2hr live webcam chat as a reward!
What else is still to come from Harvey Pekar?
Over at the Pekar Project the next installment of the epic Harvey Pekar / Douglas Rushkoff teamup, illustrated by Sean Pryor, is coming soon. Also, released next week is Not The Israel My Parents Promised, illustrated by JT Waldman. This is my blurb on the back of that book: “Pekar peppers accounts of perpetual persecution with poignant autobiographical anecdotes in this concise compelling and sure-to-be-controversial graphic history of the Jewish people and state of Israel. Waldman’s art, juxtaposing realism with ancient styles, rocking exquisite mosaics and elaborate medieval and middle eastern design flourishes, is nothing less than a majestic tour de Schwartz.”
I read a comment this morning suggesting prank phone calls to conservative radio talk shows. The commenter had heard one such call where the caller just started laughing hysterically once they put him on the air.
Childish? Sure.
Fun? You betcha!
So in an effort to encourage this form of merriment, we’re going to hold a contest for the next 48 hours to see who can make the best, funniest, or even just the most childish prank phone calls to reichwing radio shows. All you have to do is record your prank phone call, post it to YouTube, link from the comments on this post and then DM’s readers will select the winner.
It’s that simple. We don’t know what the prize will be yet, but we’ll try to make it a good one. I don’t think the prize is actually the lure here, but we’ill update the post once we figure it out.
(If you can get on Rush, Glenn Beck, Dr Laura Schlessinger or on Michael Savage’s show, you’ll get extra points!)
This didn’t help them much in the credibility stakes, now did it..?
It was odd flipping around the Internet there for a few minutes… Every other tweet coming in was contradicting the one before it. Matt Drudge got it right, but with its vast resources, CNN did not.
By the way, for “research purposes” I subscribe to a number of far-right newsletters and my inbox is being inundated with Tea party and GOP fundraising emails. Dozens have come in in the past 10 minutes.
Schoolchildren in Louisiana are to be taught that the Loch Ness monster is real in a bid by religious educators to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution.
These private schools follow a fundamentalist curriculum including the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme to teach controversial religious beliefs aimed at disproving evolution and proving creationism.
One tenet has it that if it can be proved that dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as man then Darwinism is fatally flawed.
The textbooks in the series are alleged to teach young earth creationism; are hostile towards other religions and other sectors of Christianity, including Roman Catholicism; and present a biased version of history that is often factually incorrect.
One ACE textbook – Biology 1099, Accelerated Christian Education Inc – reads: “Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? ‘Nessie’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.”
Another claim taught is that a Japanese whaling boat once caught a dinosaur. It’s unclear if the movie Godzilla was the inspiration for this lesson.
Well, If you believe in the existence of one mythical being, why not believe in them all?
Perhaps one day the popular BBC kids show The Family Ness will be revered as gospels:
“If you hunt or just like shooting guns, the 2nd Amendment will always be a good thing. History also tells us it’s our last line of defense in the face of an out-of-control government. And killing fruits and vegetables is… what? Better watch the video to see…”
If you look at the number of views this numskull is getting for his YouTube channel, obviously it’s not even worth the effort to continue making them. Clearly Wurzelbacher is a man who knows how to waste time and effort for no payoff. The only way he can get any attention anymore is when he’s being especially stupid. That’s fucking pathetic.
Given the current Neanderthal state of the Republican party, it’s no surprise that the best candidate they can find to run against veteran Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur is a befuddled moron who doesn’t seem to know his ass from his elbow, let alone anything about history.
But Joe loves America! What more does America need to know about Joe, anyway? Joe is one of us!
“One of us! One of us! One of us! One of us! One of us! One of us! One of us! One of us! One of us! One of us! One of us! One of us!”
This Troy, Michigan civic brouhaha happened last November—I confess it was news to me—but it’s currently getting a second go ‘round via reddit/r/politics and Redditor ClydeStuff.
Absolutely worth watching, this “reverse psychology” propaganda tactic is GENIUS and could be successfully adapted to a number of different situations in other parts of this country, as you will see:
The city of Troy, Michigan was facing a budget shortfall, and was considering closing the Troy Public Library for lack of funds. Even though the necessary revenues could be raised through a miniscule tax increase, powerful anti-tax groups in the area were organized against it. A vote was scheduled amongst the city’s residents, to shut the library or accept the tax increase, and Leo Burnett Detroit decided to support the library by creating a reverse psychology campaign. Yard signs began appearing that read: “Vote to Close Troy Library on August 2nd - Book Burning Party on August 5th.” No one wants to be a part of a town that burns books, and the outraged citizens of Troy pushed back against the “idiotic book burners” and ultimately supported the tax increase, thus ensuring the library’s survival.
As someone who has toiled in the trenches of advertising and marketing myself, I genuflect to whoever thought this up. This is the kind of thing that can really cheer you up when you’re feeling down about living in an Idiocracy.
The creatives on this Swiftian tour de fource should be snapped up by the Democrats now and given extremely high-paying consultant gigs. And the Democrats should unleash them and fund them to do whatever it takes to deploy this stunt nationally and stay the fuck out of their way.
BRAVO! Standing ovation!
Troy, Michigan’s controversial mayor is Tea party favorite, Janice Daniels. You may dimly remember her as the dipshit who made national news last summer when an unintelligent, unfunny comment she made about gay marriage in New York on Facebook came back to haunt her. Then a few months after that she said she wanted an expert to testify that homosexuality is a mental illness at an anti-bullying educational forum for high school kids!
Dum-dum Daniels, who now faces a recall vote in November which she will surely lose, is also deeply unpopular for her vote against millions of dollars in federal funding to build a transit center near the Troy/Birmingham border that would have created hundreds of new jobs in the area and increased the town’s tax base.
Last week, reacting to news of the recall vote being called, Daniels, doubled down on the stupid by musing aloud that she felt homosexuality might be “dangerous”—like cigarettes!
Ignorance and ideology is a nasty combination.
Of course as soon as she is recalled, Fox News will probably race to sign-up Janice Daniels as a commentator on gay and lesbian issues! I mean hey, wouldn’t she be the perfect spokesperson for all those dimwitted Christian Americans who have had their First Amendment rights stomped on by TEH GAY AGENDA?!?!?
It helps to live in Austin to fully “get” this “Judgmental Map” but anyone who lives in any major town or city that is undergoing rapid changes should appreciate this very witty (and painfully accurate) map created by Albert Bui.
Click on the map to see a larger version.
I live in the “comfy fattie” section of town and I’m afraid to admit that since moving to the area I’ve put on weight and gotten real lazy.
“XXL hookers,” “Target addicts,” “lesbian furniture,” and “cowpeople”. Hahaha. Great band names.
, by the late Harvey Pekar and illustrator Joseph Remnant, is a flat-out masterpiece of the form. One (hefty) part “biography” of a city, Pekar being Pekar, 
