Paul McCartney Rocks SunLife Stadium

Sunday, 4 April 2010 – 15:48 EDT

It was twenty years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. Okay, that's totally inaccurate but it remains a fine way to begin a Beatles related post. The concert began with a pre-concert meal at the Hard Rock Casino, but since I was a bit early I decided to donate some money to the Seminole Tribe empire through the use of their three-wheeled deposit-only magical mystery ATM machines. You stick money in, press some buttons and your money is gone. The trick always works. Still, I had fun. We ate, unsurprisingly, at the always awesome Renegade BBQ which I have reviewed quite a few times in this blog, so I won't go over it again except to remind you it's really good and you should eat there. I met Evan there right about 530 and we were seated and received decent service. That's always been the restaurant's weak spot. Service ranges from good to barely adequate and you never know what you're going to get. They need to work on that because I think it probably drives people away. To me, the food is so good it just doesn't matter. We left for the concert after dinner and arrived there about 630 to be greeted by the "pay $30 to park here" line. Ugh.

We went in, and I never park on the turnpike side at Joe Robbie (aka Dolphins, LandShark, SunLife, ProPlayer)  stadium, but that was the way in from the Hard Rock without taking some monumental detours. We relaxed outside in some of the chairs until the gates opened a little past seven. Security was very light, based on crowd dynamics I assume. We were greeted by the obligatory PETA people passing out flyers and DVDs. I ignored them politely. I support some of their efforts but not all — and they've sort of gone off the deep end. The claim meat is murder and it is: tasty, tasty murder. Okay, that was a tasteless comment, but that's how it is.

We took a lap, split some ice cream, and finally went to our seats about quarter to eight. While it was a warm night initially, there was a nice breeze so it wasn't uncomfortable. We were surrounded by relatively decent, non-annoying people. The air was a bit heavy with pot smoke, but I suppose that was to be expected. Not so much the person somewhere off to my left who was polluting the air with either foul-smelling farts or an unchanged diaper full of rotten eggs. Couldn't figure out who it was, but it wasn't so pleasant.

The seating layout left a lot to be desired. It was configured in baseball diamond layout so picture the stage in a diagonal across a football field's end-zone. We were looking at the stage from a forward 45° angle which wasn't as bad as the people who bought the cheap seats who were looking at the side of the stage from a reverse 45° angle. I'm not sure how they saw anything since Paul really did the whole show from centre stage. The floor seats were expensive ($249) and I'm glad I didn't buy them, they went really far back at very awkward angles to the stage. Even from our side-seats I was glad I brought the binoculars.

His voice was good, the sound quality was decent, though his mike had volume drops a few times. The show began about 835p, and ended about 1115pm (times approximate as I wasn't watching the clock carefully). No intermission, which I respect. Most shows go 8 or 830 to 11 with an intermission and he went right through with nary a break except for a 30 second wardrobe change to remove his jacket when he began to sweat.

The set list is as follows. (Checked with two other sites to insure accuracy).

1. Venus And Mars/Rock Show (montage)
2. Jet
3. All My Loving
4. Letting Go
5. Got To Get You Into My Life
6. Highway
7. Let Me Roll It/ Foxy Lady (Jimi Hendrix cover montage)
8. The Long and Winding Road
9. Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five
10. Let 'Em In
11. My Love
12. I'm Looking Through You
13. Two Of Us
14. Blackbird*
15. Here Today
16. Dance Tonight
17. Mrs Vanderbilt
18. Eleanor Rigby
19. Something (George Harrison tribute partially on ukulele)
20. Sing the Changes
21. Band on the Run
22. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da**
23. Back in the USSR
24. I've Got a Feeling
25. Paperback Writer
26. A Day In The Life / Give Peace A Chance (John Lennon tribute)
27. Let It Be
28. Live and Let Die
29. Hey Jude
First Encore
30. Day Tripper
31. Lady Madonna
32. Get Back
Second Encore
33. Yesterday
34. Helter Skelter
35. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
36. The End

* Paul told a story how this song was about the racist events in Arkansas during the civil rights movement. When I saw his last tour he played it and said it was about an attractive young black lady John had seen out his hotel room window when they were sequestered away from fans.

** He said he'd never played this on tour before in North America. Not true.

Leaving the show was a mess. While we got out ahead of most of the crowd, the exit from the turnpike was still set to five lanes into the stadium and two out. A big error that causes chaos as they tried to rectify it. I ended up having to go North and go home the much longer way due to incompetence of staff on hand. Added about ten miles extra to my ride. Still a banner night.

I'll update my big-ass concert list with this show.

By Eric A. Seiden | Posted in Reviews | Comments (2)
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The Quagmire Of My Mind

Friday, 2 April 2010 – 19:09 EDT

I guess I actually need to make a post with the title of my blog in it after all these years.

Having bad memories you can't get rid of, try the Death Bear. Yeah. Right out of the LA Times comes a story on this New York City performance artist who has taken his craft to a whole new level. I'm not even sure why I blogged this except it's pretty damned cool. A shadowy, masked New Yorker relieves people of painful remnants of their pasts: love letters, photos, even underwear. To the man under the giant bear head, it's performance art.

I have often written about secret menu items, most famously at the legendary In-N-Out burger. Many other establishments have such items, and I remain fascinated by this. The latest article on this topic claims you can get poutine at KFC even though it's not listed on the menu. Why you'd actually order it is a separate issue entirely. Some of the stuff sounds pretty good and others, not so much. The bickering commentary is lengthy and amusing by various people who claimed they have worked at various establishments and menu item "X" is/isn't really available. And, to weigh in, gravy is available at local McDonalds in Florida. I'd never purposely ingest it, but it is available.

Reminder: if you find broken links on my blog and report them, I will fix them. I just need a post title or date. I've fixed nearly 100 links so far, but there are thousands in this blog, some of which I am sure I've missed. Links to images, videos, and internal links most using the old naming convention will be broken. Visitors that follow you will thank you for reporting them because they won't be broken.

This magic trick is pretty cool. The first minute isn't so impressive but it gets better and better as it goes. The guy is talented as hell. The only thing I notice is the glass doesn't sound like glass. I wonder how this is done but am sure it's some sort of sliding glass contraption. I am impressed nonetheless.

I recommend you click through on this video and watch it at full size. At small size it's hard to see.

Hell has frozen over. Yeah. Seriously. I'm giving a thumbs up to Bill O'Reilly. No, really. Stop laughing. I'm serious. I agree with the guy. It was bound to happen. The law of averages or something. Anyway, the infamous den of vermin, Westboro Baptist Church, widely hated by liberals and many conservatives protested at yet another funeral service for a dead marine, causing grief to the family. The family sued Westboro, won, had it overturned on appeal and is now being asked to pay Westboro's legal expenses. The case hinges on when do you first amendment rights stop. The clear, common sense answer is when they infringe on someone else's right. I don't think there's a right more important — though unwritten — to able to grieve at the loss of a loved one in peace without some crackpots yelling racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, hate speech at you. Bill O'Reilly earns many brownie points by offering to pony up the legal expenses for the aggrieved family.

"I will pay Mr. Snyder's obligation. I'm not going to let this injustice stand," O'Reilly said Wednesday on his show, "The O'Reilly Factor." "It's obvious those cranks at Westboro were intentionally trying to hurt Mr. Snyder and his family. In a statement to AOL News, O'Reilly said he feels Snyder is a "victim of judicial injustice." I agree. Yes, I do. Totally. And as much as I can't stand O'Reilly, I am totally and completely with him on this. Word.

RIP to John Forsythe who passed away and a belated RIP to Fess Parker who passed away a few weeks ago, and I didn't even notice it. In news that nobody cares about, I'm still sick and it's getting worse. I still have no fever but my nose runneth more, my sinus drippeth more, and I cougheth up a lung. I am displeased.

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April Fool's Day 2010

Thursday, 1 April 2010 – 18:41 EDT

Today's been a busy day on the Internet with April Fool's jokes though this year's crop is less than stellar on average. One of the more amusing ran in London's Telegraph newspaper revealing that Virgin Media uses ferrets as the key to bridge the digital divide. Many major news outlets ran articles on everyone else's jokes. Some of the better ones included Kodak's with the scratch and sniff photographs, ABC which had promos for fake shows (including LOST luggage), XKCD running a command line interface, YouTube serving videos in text format. Google which is usually a riot definitely is on the wane here, their sole worthwhile effort being the button on Google Books and Google Maps that converts the page to 3D (REALLY WORKS but red and blue glasses required). The best joke of the day that was perpetrated on me — so far anyway — was from Pablo who told everyone his car was stolen.

My cough got the best of me last night and I called the doctor today. He's given me more cough syrup and a higher dose (of the same shit that's not working now).

Making the rounds and not an April Fool's joke (sadly) is Congressman Hank Johnson expressing concern that adding 8,000 more people to the population of Guam will cause the island to tip over. No, really. Island. Will. Tip. Over. This is better than April Fool's.

Since we're on politics, these people are terrifying. They've clearly lost a grip on reality and this sign is beyond offensive in the worst possible way. Teabaggers, indeed.

Offensive to everyone, everywhere.

Offensive Tea-Bagger -- Offends everyone.

By Eric A. Seiden | Posted in General, Politics | Comments (0)
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Dark Side Of The Moon Tattoo

Wednesday, 31 March 2010 – 21:06 EDT

I was wondering if I was going to blog today as I had a lack of content. Thanks to Paul, I now have content. He sent me a group of "20 worst" links and I thought I'd  share this one with you. The twenty worst tattoo typos. I won't mention that the guy made a few typos on his site too.  Nothing like a reminder that you're an idiot being permanently attached to your flesh. And thanks to Paul's link I read this quote which still has me amused, "Why the hell would you get an Amy Winehouse tattoo? That's like taking a photo of a dog turd and stapling it to your resume."

Almost concurrent with Paul's email, I got an email from Steve. I love Dark Side Of The Moon. Steve sent this link which is from a guy who took the entire DSOTM album and composed it using eight bit NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) sounds. Josh will probably love this if he reads this post. He's a Nintendo nut. I clicked over and watch two of the YouTube videos. It's rather cleverly done. Though the sound and fidelity will impress no one, it's sort of beside the point.

YouTube has changed their layout and it's fucking horrible.They've also changed rating from 5 stars to a simple like/dislike button. I would highly recommend the "quick tour" when they roll the new layout to your account. So I warn you of that in case you see it when you go to this new link provided by David Higgins. It's a PSA for the first rotary phones. It's dialling instructions. Really. Just a one minute video worth your time.

Speaking of videos, this one involves me so maybe you'll enjoy watching it. I had no idea it was out there until Murph had posted it on Facebook where he got it via Carl. It's pretty intense and very multi-cultural. I never expected to have my image in a PSA. The site it's hosted at is very busy and you may have to click a few times to get the counter moving. Mine stuck a few times. Eventually, the video will start.

The above is an embedded version though no idea if it'll work any better.

I'm still sick. I thought I was getting a bit better but last night and today sucked. It's all my throat and the damned cough. Nothing else is really bothersome except for the lack of sleep the cough causes. I'm plowing through cough medicines. Blech.

Happy Birthday to Karen :)

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Insomnia Is Wonderful

Tuesday, 30 March 2010 – 02:43 EDT

Not.

I'm starting this post at 2:35am local time. Why? Because I went to bed at 1130om and gave up trying to sleep at 1250. The cough doesn't help the sleeping.

I did email, checked AFDB, sent some IMs. Almost nobody was awake to bother, though I did bug SWMBO for a bit.

I did some work on the blog. We now have the most recent seven posts in the sidebar instead of five. People were asking for more, and I tried ten but it looked longish. I slightly reduced the ad count since nobody much seems to be clicking them anyway. Hmph.

I installed some new plugins too. The site is now generating a Google Sitemap XML file. All automatically and without my requirement to deal with it. Perhaps it'll help traffic a bit. The blogroll now recognizes favicons and uses those to make a site more identifiable. I thought it was a great idea except for I have found out that most of my friends aren't using them. If you're hosting your blog on your own domain, I can easily help you with that. If you're using hosted stuff, contact your ISP. (If you can FTP to your files, I can help — otherwise contact your ISP).

I cleaned up a few tags that were empty (deleted those) and a few that were duplicated (single vs plurals) but not all. May do that still. I have until about 5am before I will go to work. 2h 15m to kill still.

And yeah, you really must see "How To Train Your Dragon" — still in my head.

Really nothing much else to report.

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How to Train Your Dragon

Sunday, 28 March 2010 – 22:11 EDT

I wasn't going to see this film. I thought the previews looked silly and the title made it seem uninteresting. The film needs a better name. The reviews were pretty good so ultimately, I decided I'd go see it. The Higgi, Mom, Timmy and went along with me. And with the aid of a shitload of cough drops, I survived the experience.

Everyone seemed to love the film "Up" — and this is way, way better than Up. WAY better. I already nominate this for best animated film for the next Oscars. We saw it in 3D and I didn't even get too bad of a headache. The visuals were nice and I enjoyed them. The sound was quite interesting and fit well. What made this film was the hardest thing for any film animated or not: the story and the characters. There was a plot, and while it wasn't complicated it was a very real, easy to follow, plausible plot for the world in which it was set. Vikings kill dragons because that's what they do. The story centers on the character Hiccup who is a young Viking coming of age and his desire to kill a dragon to forge a bond with his father. His father is very disappointed in Hiccup and it hurts him. That's a universal theme and anyone can relate to it. I really empathized with the character. The dragon, Toothless, looks suspiciously like Stitch. But I didn't really notice that until halfway through the film. You like this dragon and the emerging bond between Hiccup and Toothless isn't trite or formed easily. It's nice to see the trust thing explored and take its time like would happen in real life. These are complex characters. You care about them and what happens to them. Like all 'hero' films, it seems the female lead is always an added token and not well defined. I strongly recommend this movie to everyone of every age. I'm giving it very high marks. Nothing after the credits at the end, for those who want to know. My only niggle is the confusion as to why the Vikings speak with a Scottish accent. That is so random. I will gladly see this film again.

I also saw a preview of the live-action film of Avatar The Last Airbender. I accidentally found this on Nicktoons and have been watching random episodes when I've got insomnia and I find it on. It's really good and I'm excited to see the film. I hope I can find someone who wants to see it with me.

I had dinner with Simon and Mindy (from PHMB) at Renegade and ate myself sick. The food, as always, was excellent, and I managed to finish it all except a chunk of cornbread. We sat around and talked hockey. It's nice to know my feelings about the organization are shared (more or less) by other people. I had an enjoyable time and managed not to cough too much thanks to copious strawberry lemonade infusions.

Back to 3D for a moment. I'm not the only one who thinks 3D is shit and not worth seeing most times. This article details the argument from an art standpoint.

Lastly, a brief note about airport security: you know the thing they do at airports to make you think you're a lot safer while barely making you any safer. Here's a new technique that is pretty cool and might work.

Now if I could sleep through this horrific dry, hacky cough coupled with the irritating post nasal drip that defies any medication, I'd feel better. Feh.

3-29 edit: Not just me. Rotten Tomatoes has it 97% positive!!!

By Eric A. Seiden | Posted in General, Reviews | Comments (4)
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Tickle In My Throat Still

Friday, 26 March 2010 – 21:34 EDT

Being sick sucks big time. I don't even feel bad. There's just this tickle from the dreaded sinus drain that keeps making me cough. I hate it. A lot. And when I lie down, it's brutal.

I had a great dinner with Steph tonight. She's an ex-employee — the only one I'm actually friends with — and I always enjoyed her company. She's really smart and she's one of those people I have a great time with. We went to El Tropico for some Cuban food something she said she missed. Had a nice 30 minute dinner spread over 3-1/2 hours.

My black leather Mickey Mouse briefcase broke. I am devastated. This thing has been with me for nearly two decades. I tried to find a picture on Google and eBay to show everyone what it looked like, but there isn't one. I've found a leather repair shop that says they can fix it. I hope so. It wasn't all that expensive but it has great sentimental value. I'm going tomorrow if I'm feeling well enough.

I am overly frustrated with people making demands on what little leisure time I have. I have very little time in life to do stuff I want and I resent having to share it with people not of my choosing. I'm cranky when I'm sick. Sue me.

I now get to review Freefall the third book in the Tunnels series by Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams. This enormous tome is by far the best in the series. I like how Will develops as does his mother Cecilia who was a 'nothing' character for the first two. Will's father turns out to be a ginormous peckerhead, though I somehow wasn't surprised. What did surprise me is there's another book coming and we've got another cliffhanger. There's more of Bart the cat, Rebecca (both), and some Chester. We have the return of Drake and a lot more detail about the world and I really liked it until the last 50 pages which just pissed me off more than anything else. But I'm looking forward to the next one. This book is far darker than the other two and designed for older audiences than the first two. We have some return to London (yay) but mostly the book has lost all pretence of being anything but a subterranean science-fantasy novel that really reminds me of being part of the steampunk genre.

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Offensiveness And Videos Galore

Thursday, 25 March 2010 – 19:50 EDT

Sometimes it's fun to be offensive, especially if it means getting under the skin of someone without them even knowing why. This example pleases me greatly.

Facebook Win

Sometimes a snappy retort wins the day

Sometimes a post begs a reply and this one was no exception. My reply was especially pithy with double meaning inside. I never imagined how quick the bait would be taken. The original post was made, I saw it some 18 minutes later, retorted with my beautiful one-liner. It took 14 minutes for someone to take the bait. Sadly, I had intended it for the person who made the post, not the random person who replied. I'm not sure a drink can cure cluelessness. I am mightily proud of myself. I'm half tempted to share this with FSJ.

While we're on the subject of offensive, I must direct the alcoholic above (I'm kidding and have no idea if the person's an alcoholic or not) I also must refer to this NY Times Op-Ed piece. "For decades the G.O.P. has been the party of fear, ignorance and divisiveness. All you have to do is look around to see what it has done to the country. The greatest economic inequality since the Gilded Age was followed by a near-total collapse of the overall economy.The G.O.P. poisons the political atmosphere and then has the gall to complain about an absence of bipartisanship. We are so far, in so many ways, from being a class act." Those are just a few sentences to entice you to read the original article. Credit, IIRC, to Evan for this.

Speaking of absolutely, positively no class please observe about 14 seconds into this video:

Observe with your own eyes Mr Bush shake the hand of a man of colour, then disgustedly wipe his hand on the sleeve of Mr Clinton. Seriously. I like to screw around with computer bigots, but this is shameful. Can we deport him? Yep, no class. That Op-Ed guy should see this video. Credit to Dave for bringing this festering pile of shit to my attention. As much as I dislike Bush, I'd never have imagined this would be true.

Special thanks to Suzie-Q for yesterday's papal humour which may have been one of the most brutally offensive yet utterly hysterical jokes in recent memory. It's hard to be that sacrilegious and retain damn near perfect word choice and humour all at the same time. Probably be lost of the guy having the drink. Maybe on Streeter too. Hard to tell. I'm still laughing. Jose liked it too.

Which reminds me, I'll thank him one last time for the help with this blog. Between he and I, every single post in this blog has been fixed. The two missing posts have been reconstructed. Four posts have been re-dated so they can be found and are clearly marked because for reasons we cannot fathom two posts were time shifted a few months into the future. Sadly, that's where the URLs point so I changed the dates. About 150 blog title URLs were manually changed to match old conventions. Two posts had duplicate titles so I fixed those and posted links in them internally so people looking for the other one post can find it. Traffic has returned to normal so the fixes seemed to have worked. I have retained the entire original blog in case anyone notices oddities. I can check the original content. I plan to save that for a few months to be safe.

I've updated a previous post on the Florida Panthers new Den of Honor. There were a number of typos and details that needed correcting. As is policy, I put a note at the bottom so everyone knows changes were made. Real hockey fans should re-read it. Everyone else, you're probably fine with the first reading. I only mention it because all the pictures on Flickr (18) and PanthersHockey.net (69) are now live and they weren't when the post originally woke up.

In random news, my AT&T Uverse service is running amazingly fast this past week. I tested it and it's running at over 20MBPS which is in excess of the speeds they promise and in excess of the speeds I am paying for. Impressive speeds. Uverse by the way is vDSL and not fibre optic. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. When checking things out, I noticed the ROM on the router was flashed and that may be what's accounting for the speed change.

Last, but certainly not least, we have this awesome clip from Top Gear, the show all motor-heads love. This one's from Evan as well. It's a preview of a car by GM called Hy Wire. You know, this video's pretty old. If they had released this car — it requires no gas at all — they very well could own a good part of the market. Why do ideas like this never get released? Maybe the oil companies?

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Vanishing Posts

Tuesday, 23 March 2010 – 19:06 EDT

At least one post 12 October 2008 wasn't in the new blog. I've been monitoring it carefully and when I see an inbound link that goes nowhere I can fix it. All of them have been adjustments to path names. I've only got two difficult posts. One I solved after realizing it couldn't resolve because the post never made it here. Happily Google caches everything, and I mean everything. A cached version of the page was at Google, and it wasn't such a big deal to copy and paste it as a new post here and change the date. So, for those of you who are transferring from Blogger to any platform please realize the "export my blog" feature is NOT WORKING PROPERLY. I've just realized that some posts are missing and I'm not sure how many others haven't made the switch. If you are looking for a post and not getting it (404 error or the wrong post), please email me and let me know. If you don't tell me, I might not ever find out it's gone AWOL.

What would you do if you had 31 toes and fingers? One boy is having the surgically removed today.


Scary stuff. Anyway, I have little to report today except that I have another "go to post office" notice which is another certified return-receipt letter from my Homeowner's Association. I'm sure there will be a lawsuit. They are dumber than dog shit on a hot summer day. They are less professional than a used car salesman who was disbarred from his legal practice. You get the idea.

I am working with the Boinc team to help debug the new client (v36) which was pulled due to many issues. Sort of fun and I think it's working now. Just waiting for Seti@Home to issue a final test.

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My Head Is Going to Explode

Monday, 22 March 2010 – 21:50 EDT

Ouch. Migraines suck. Too many attempts to kill it and nothing's worked so far. I have upgraded to my prescription pharmaceuticals I have for emergencies such as this. Die. Die. Die. My mouth now tastes like fioricet because I didn't get it down the first time. That's one evil taste, let me tell you what.

I have changed commenting to require registration due to the tons of spambots attacking the blog. I got four while I was starting to type this message. Sorry about that, but for now it's going to have to be. If you have trouble commenting you can always write me at darsys at AOL dot com for assistance.

Less links are broken in the blog as I'm fixing them as fast as I find them. Sadly, some links are coming in from posts that have changed names or seem to have vanished. No idea what's up with that. I'll eventually figure it out but not today.

My website on the NHL's Florida Panthers www.panthershockey.net got a nice upgrade today. The Den of Honor page has been added to the menu bar and re-themed to match the rest of the site. The Panthers Road Trip story, previously at darsys.net, has been moved here where it fits in far better and also re-themed to match. The whole site now has a Panther background that's long been missing. I've also updated some content, though gave up due to exploding head syndrome. Speaking of the Den of Honor, there's a new picture of me with Stu Siegel and Cliff Vimer the 'managing partners' of the Panthers that Josh L took unbeknownst to me.

I always joked that I wanted a police escort at my funeral. In fact, my will so requests one. Just found out this very moment that Miami is one of the cities that doesn't do that sort of thing. Then again, I don't technically live in Miami. The article's over at USA Today's site if anyone wants to read it. I can't even die in peace.

And because Paul sucks, he made me feel especially old with this link from CrunchGear. There's a photo of a 1980 IBM 20GB hard drive array (8 @ 2.5GB each) that costs $650,000 in 1980 and weighed 4,400 pounds. Juxtaposed with it is a picture of one 32GB Micro SD card that costs under $100 and weights .001 pounds. The red power button on the IBM unit is bigger than three of the Micro SD cards. I immediately thought of Dave Higgins when I saw this picture.

And for some politics. I just want to reiterate that ObamaCare is a bad idea. I've never been for this healthcare "reform" because it's really not reform. So many people who are for it just don't get what it's about. This is not the system that they have in Canada or England (which sort-of works depending on your point of view). ObamaCare was a visionary but mediocre plan which the politicians have changed and changed again into some stupid joke that I can't believe anyone is even considering. Once special interests get ahold of your legislation, it's doomed.

Many point out that this same sort of outcry was heard when Social Security and Medicare were implemented, and that may be true. Still, we are a republic and we bear the responsibility for having sent to Washington our respective idiots. They seem to not understand that when vast majority of the entire country — all walks of life — is telling you they don't want something, and you ram it down their throats anyway, that should raise a red flag. I'd love to rail about how partisan this is, but it's not. The republicans don't want it. The moderates don't want it. Not even all of the democrats want it. It's not a panacea. It's a pile of festering shite that will cost you more money.

Obama has become  so desperate to prove he's done something with his administration, he's about to move himself into that rare threshold of "failed" presidents. This will be his Waterloo. I predict, sadly, Obama's presidency will guarantee a victory by anyone the republicans put forward and guarantee it's going to be a lot harder for any minority to get elected to the Top Spot. Having said that, I must point out that it's a logical fallacy that because Obama sucks, the next black/Hispanic/etc will also suck , but that's how group-think works. And most people in this country are incapable of thinking for themselves.

Obama's administration — which you will recall I originally supported — made many promises. They are now under the gun having been in the office and not done jack-shit. I am extremely disillusioned with them and how they're doing (not doing) things. Unless the republicans really screw this up and nominate Palin, I'll probably support the republican candidate. While I have supported republicans in the past, it's never been for president.

Yes, everyone wanted a change — even republicans agreed our current health care system is broken. I'm not sure this is what anyone wanted. I think even the democrats in charge don't want it, but since it's all they got, they must pretend they do want this so they can prove they've done something. I am sure poor Ted Kennedy is rolling over in his grave. He'd have said something about this being a sham, a farce, and a disaster. And now they're trying to tell us it will reduce the deficit? Yeah, right. How? By making you pay more, me pay more, and the businesses already struggling to meet current health care premiums to pay more? Probably. It's absurd.

It's shit politics and Bush spent eight years doing this sort of thing. Maybe now the republicans will understand that just because it's legal and constitutional doesn't mean it's right. I hope you have Vaseline™ because you just had a big, fat telephone pole full of splinters shoved up your rectal cavity.

What ultimately happens is (for example) you and I are going to end up subsidizing a bunch of people for insurance who might not have otherwise qualified. Will our premiums go up because of this? No and anyone who tells you so is lying. A larger pool means rates stay down. The bill appears to be pretty well organized as written to keep premiums from going nuts. The people saying this will raise premiums are wrong. It will raise the premiums of those executives in large corporations on the high end POS and PPO plans, but that's a very small group. This will nationalize the debt for indigent care and instead of it being paid by the community where administered, will spread it over the country.

There will be shortfalls of course, especially up front. Those shortfalls will be made up by Uncle Sam. What happens when Uncle Sam needs more money? He raises taxes. Who pays those taxes? We do. You. Me. Your friends. Your family. There is no free ride. Ever.  SOMEONE PAYS. That someone is YOU.

By Eric A. Seiden | Posted in General | Comments (0)
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