What Digby Said

Hullabaloo

I have a moral objection to paying for any kind of erectile dysfunction medicine in the new health reform bill and I think men who want to use it should just pay for it out of pocket. After all, I won't ever need such a pill. And anyway, it's no biggie. Just because most of them can get it under their insurance today doesn't mean they shouldn't have it stripped from their coverage in the future because of my moral objections. (I don't think there's even been a Supreme Court ruling making wood a constitutional right. I might be wrong about that.)

All over the blogosphere people link to Digby and simply say "what she said". This is one such post.

A good question

Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » Unspoofable

I have been wondering why very very robust public options for flood and crop insurance are OK, but not for health insurance?

Lifted from the comments

John Cole on stuff

Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » Whatever

Nothing short of breaking up all the large banks, executing the credit ratings agencies, and then a strict and ruthless enforcement regime will help, and there simply is no willpower for that. Not only is there no willpower for this, as both parties are bought and paid for in full, but if there was any movement on this front, wingnut teabaggers would scream about socialism and tyranny, Reason magazine would scream about government involvement in the private sector and the free flow of capital and the glory of the invisible hand, moderate Democrats everywhere would worry about such public involvement, Joe Lieberman would spend months posturing in front of cameras with a furrowed brow, and whoever was tasked with enforcement would be found in bed with a hooker or whatever else is required to destroy them.

In short, we’re just screwed. Learn your place, deal with it, and learn how to grow food. Watching the way the big money boys have shaped the debate, whipping people who would be helped into a froth about socialism, it just seems so clear to me now after spending the last two decades in a haze. “Sorry unemployment is at 10 percent and you are losing your health insurance while I give myself a couple million dollar bonus, but socialism and Hitler and abortion on demand and death tax oh my God two gay men want the same rights as you! SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE! SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE!”

Such a joke.

/dirtyfuckinghippy

John Cole is a recovering Republican

Yglesias on US internet infrastructure

Matthew Yglesias » Open Access Needed

* A certain strain of conservative persists in a perverse effort to try to deny this reality, pointing out irrelevant things like that Sweden is smaller than the U.S. or more urbanized. This is true, but the U.S. contains urban areas that are the exact same size as Stockholm and Göteberg and they have slower internet than those Swedish cities. Meanwhile one of our fastest states—about the same on average as Sweden—is the very rural New Hampshire. Our internet is slower because it’s slower, and it’s clearly slower.

On Patina

Caitlin Kelly - Broadside – Patina — The Beauty Of The Weathered And Worn - True/Slant

Some things are best enjoyed shiny and new: electronics, cookware, lingerie. When it comes to decorative and functional objects, patina rules. Patina is the change in appearance that occurs after years, decades, centuries — even millenia — of use. It comes with delicious names: craquelure, foxing, crazing, all of which denote what is, in effect, decay and ruin of the orginal, but a ruin that shows its age. Some can be repaired or restored and some must be left alone — like the paint on good, old furniture — to retain its commercial value.