Hard to know where to begin. Just click thru, read the transcript. Oy.

Digby:

The Republicans believe that people should be completely destitute, living in a one room shack and working two jobs before they “deserve” subsidized health insurance. The middle class who are one car accident or one cancer diagnosis away from losing their jobs, being unable to afford either the cadillac COBRA plans from their employers (my last one here in California was $1700.00 a month and I’m healthy) must not be allowed to keep ANY assets.They must be, as Steyn’s pal wrote, “dying on the streets with sores on their bodies” before they qualify for aid.

But, of course, neither will they necessarily even be able to buy private health insurance at any price even if they do live in a one room apartment with their four kids and work two jobs. (I was turned down recently because I had had gum surgery in 1996.)

This is the world in which we live. Insurance companies only want to cover young, healthy or rich people. And even if you manage to pay the expensive premiums with huge deductibles, they will try to find a way to avoid paying for your care anyway. That’s the way it works. If you are lucky enough to have health insurance at your employer you’d better hope you never lose that job. More importantly, you’d better hope you never get sick.

Related cartoons (in reverse chronological order) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Read at your own risk; it’s particularly depressing to see how relevant sixteen-year-old cartoons on the topic remain.

The recent run of outed Republican Sexual Hypocrites reminds me of the moment — and I remember this quite clearly — at which the phrase “going postal” entered the lexicon. You read about one postal worker going on a gun rampage, and then another, and then yet another — and then suddenly it seemed to click for everyone, that there was a distinct pattern emerging, that these weren’t simply troubling isolated incidents but rather a symptom of some larger problem (i.e. the soulless monotony of the job).

We’re clearly at that pattern recognition moment now, the moment at which it becomes obvious to everyone that there’s more going on here, that some not insignificant percentage of sanctimonious moralizers are in fact leading personal lives significantly at odds with their public pronouncements. To put it politely.

I’m just not sure what the phrase should be in this instance. “Going Republican”?

With people like Craig and Vitter and the diving suit guy, it’s hard to not imagine that everyone would have been a lot happier if they’d just been able to accept what they were, rather than making it their mission in life to project their personal denial onto society at large. Especially the diving suit guy, who really should have just moved to San Francisco and hung out with the rubber fetishists, rather than going to Liberty University and hanging out with Jerry Falwell and, ultimately (and quite literally), dying of shame.

Which is not to suggest that there are no boundaries. The key words here would be “consenting” and “adult” — get beyond that, and you cross the line from pitiable to repulsive. Which brings us to the case of Klutzo the Christian Clown. (More after the fold).

Read the rest of this entry »

Amanda:

The entire situation is highlighting the profound differences in vision that the left and right have for what government and economy is for. I think that it really gets to the heart of it, actually. The left generally seeks a society with widespread middle class prosperity, where all people have access to the good life, defined as having roughly these things:

* Decent housing with some privacy.
* Education.
* Useful employment with a fair wage.
* Health care.
* Enough free time to pursue some pleasures in life and have a family life.
* The ability to retire.
* The right to free and equal participation in society.
* The right to self-determination.

Of course to have these things, we can’t have an elite hoarding all the wealth (generated by the workers, mind you) for themselves. We can’t have Enron holding entire states hostage so they can charge grandmothers $400 a month for electricity. The elite will have to suffer sharing some of their wealth with the people who actually create it. It’s this point that is up for contention.

This is the vision the right has for the world:

Are there even a thousand really poor people in all of America? Really poor. Dying-on-the-sidewalks-with-open-sores poor?

There you go—anything less than reducing the population to a bunch of people dying on the sidewalks with open sores while the rich blow by us in armored vehicles is spoiling America.

TBogg has more on the writer whose skepticism Amanda highlights. Turns out she’s Canadian, and a beneficiary of the health care system there. If there is a God, at least we know s/he has a fine sense of humor.

OCTOBER 8–An Alabama minister who died in June of “accidental mechanical asphyxia” was found hogtied and wearing two complete wet suits, including a face mask, diving gloves and slippers, rubberized underwear, and a head mask, according to an autopsy report.

Investigators determined that Rev. Gary Aldridge’s death was not caused by foul play and that the 51-year-old pastor of Montgomery’s Thorington Road Baptist Church was alone in his home at the time he died (while apparently in the midst of some autoerotic undertaking). While the Montgomery Advertiser, which first obtained the autopsy records, reported on Aldridge’s two wet suits, the family newspaper chose not to mention what police discovered inside the minister’s rubber briefs.

The late Reverend was a Liberty University graduate and former Jerry Falwell employee. More here.

… and more at Hullaballoo, including an extraordinary graphic from the website of the Rev’s church.

Trita Parsi, now head of the National Iranian-American Council, has written for Rootless Cosmopolitan on some little-known history of Israel-Iran relations. Based on his book Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States, it’s the kind of thing that tends not to make it into books, and certainly not onto the Learn Nothing From History Channel. The book’s website is here, and its Amazon page is here. And here’s Parsi recently on Democracy Now!:

I’m sure you’re familiar with this story by now, but it’s refreshing to see a reasonably accurate portrayal of one of these rightwing hatefests in the mainstream media. (As Atrios notes, “Thankfully, for once the media realized the story wasn’t that people were being mean to poor Michelle Malkin, but instead that Michelle Malkin is in fact an asshole.”) I’m working on a cartoon on the whole thing for next week, and here’s the weird part for me: what I’m really doing is reworking a cartoon I finished before I went on vacation, in which I used the idea of the Republican Hate Machine going after a child as one of those really wacky cartoon examples meant to parody their extremism. Except, in the intervening week, they actually did it. I’ve said this before, but these are difficult times for satirists; there’s almost nothing you can think of that’s more ridiculous or appalling than the things that are really happening.

Anyway:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 — There have been moments when the fight between Congressional Democrats and President Bush over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program seemed to devolve into a shouting match about who loves children more.

So when Democrats enlisted 12-year-old Graeme Frost, who along with a younger sister relied on the program for treatment of severe brain injuries suffered in a car crash, to give the response to Mr. Bush’s weekly radio address on Sept. 29, Republican opponents quickly accused them of exploiting the boy to score political points.

Then, they wasted little time in going after him to score their own.

In recent days, Graeme and his family have been attacked by conservative bloggers and other critics of the Democrats’ plan to expand the insurance program, known as S-chip. They scrutinized the family’s income and assets — even alleged the counters in their kitchen to be granite — and declared that the Frosts did not seem needy enough for government benefits.

* * *

The critics accused Graeme’s father, Halsey, a self-employed woodworker, of choosing not to provide insurance for his family of six, even though he owned his own business. They pointed out that Graeme attends an expensive private school. And they asserted that the family’s home had undergone extensive remodeling, and that its market value could exceed $400,000.

One critic, in an e-mail message to Graeme’s mother, Bonnie, warned: “Lie down with dogs, and expect to get fleas.” As it turns out, the Frosts say, Graeme attends the private school on scholarship. The business that the critics said Mr. Frost owned was dissolved in 1999. The family’s home, in the modest Butchers Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, was bought for $55,000 in 1990 and is now worth about $260,000, according to public records. And, for the record, the Frosts say, their kitchen counters are concrete.

Certainly the Frosts are not destitute. They also own a commercial property, valued at about $160,000, that provides rental income. Mr. Frost works intermittently in woodworking and as a welder, while Mrs. Frost has a part-time job at a firm that provides services to publishers of medical journals. Her job does not provide health coverage.

Under the Maryland child health program, a family of six must earn less than $55,220 a year for children to qualify. The program does not require applicants to list their assets, which do not affect eligibility.

In a telephone interview, the Frosts said they had recently been rejected by three private insurance companies because of pre-existing medical conditions. “We stood up in the first place because S-chip really helped our family and we wanted to help other families,” Mrs. Frost said.

“We work hard, we’re honest, we pay our taxes,” Mr. Frost said, adding, “There are hard-working families that really need affordable health insurance.”

* * *

But Michelle Malkin, one of the bloggers who have strongly criticized the Frosts, insisted Republicans should hold their ground and not pull punches.

“The bottom line here is that this family has considerable assets,” Ms. Malkin wrote in an e-mail message. “Maryland’s S-chip program does not means-test. The refusal to do assets tests on federal health insurance programs is why federal entitlements are exploding and government keeps expanding. If Republicans don’t have the guts to hold the line, they deserve to lose their seats.”

As for accusations that bloggers were unfairly attacking a 12-year-old, Ms. Malkin wrote on her blog, “If you don’t want questions, don’t foist these children onto the public stage.”

Mr. and Mrs. Frost said they were bothered by the assertion that they lacked health coverage by their own choice.

“That is not true at all,” Mrs. Frost said. “Basically all these naysayers need to lay the facts out on the page, and say, ‘How could a family be able to do this?’ S-chip is a stopgap.”

More from Digby.

It wasn’t too long ago that George Bush made a widely-mocked reference to the novel The Quiet American, but Thomas Friedman appears not to have noticed. From this morning’s column:

It’s for all these reasons that I’ve been calling them “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad.

Via Yglesias, where a commenter reminds us of Matt Taibbi’s classic take on Friedman:

Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius.

Related cartoon here.

… that he is featured in this nifty new Scott Bateman animation on Salon. So I’ll do it for him. Go, watch.

For a long time, I’ve had a direct link to the Working For Change archive of my comics over to the left under “Newest Comic.” I’ve received a number of emails lately from readers puzzled by the fact that said archive hasn’t been updated since August. It’s really no big mystery, they’re just revamping their site, and the archive should be back up sometime soon. In the meantime, I’ve updated the link to the main page, and will probably leave it that way — there’s a lot of good stuff to read there, and I’ve probably been doing everyone a bit of a disservice in bypassing it.