hahaha

The attacks on Berwick are wildly unfair, but they also reflect the core incoherence of today’s conservative movement on the subject of health care policy.

Sarah Palin summed things up with a pithy tweet:

SarahPalinUSA: Press Corps-pls do your job as Obama sneaks in Berwick appt;pls cover his mission:socialized healthcare&rationing based on”quality of life”

You have it right there. Conservatives are against “socialized health care” (i.e., the public financing of health care services) and they’re also against “rationing” (i.e., limits on the availability of public financing of health care services). Their position is that whoever’s already been granted socialized medicine—i.e., old people—are entitled to have an infinite quantity of funds spent on their health care services. At the same time, they deem it intolerable for the government to provide health care to anyone else, since to provide it in unlimited quantities would be unaffordable. It’s as if we said we ought to ban everyone under the age of 65 from the library, because if we let them in we’ll have to “ration” the books by asking that they be returned in a timely manner.]

Think about it.

As I’ve said before, if we’re going to cut spending on retirement programs then it makes much more sense to reduce Medicare outlays by $1 than to reduce Social Security benefits by $1. Social Security benefits can be used to buy health care, and reducing Medicare spending could reduce system-wide health care costs. What’s more, if we’re going to cut spending on retirement programs then such cuts should be broadly shared and not exclusively inflicted on younger people. Such moves are both fairer and more credible. Last, if you want to cut Social Security benefits you should just cut Social Security benefits. Reducing outlays via the mechanism of a higher retirement age is going to mean that the incidence of the cuts falls most heavily on people with physically taxing—or simply boring and annoying—jobs. It’s one of the most regressive possible ways of trimming spending.
-Matthew Yglesias

That's a pretty good argument for cutting Medicare benefits and murdering the Baby Boomers. My favorite is the following clip which shows the people whose lives we toil to extend:

I think Tarantino lost

oh

Now, just as many consumers can no longer use their homes as cash machines, many small businesses can't draw on their properties to invest and hire. In a 2008 survey, 22% of small employers told the federation that they had taken out at least one mortgage to support their business operations.

"In olden days, many of the start-ups got financing by refinancing their homes. That's gone," said Sung Won Sohn, a California State University economist.

Sohn recalled a small auto dealer in Los Angeles who made most of his money not by selling cars but by frequently refinancing the mortgage on his lot, which until recently kept rising in value.
-LAT

What I learned of world affairs watching No Reservations this afternoon.

Answers

Eminem’s Recovery just sold 741,000 copies in its first week of release, making it the biggest first week since AC/DC’s Black Ice in 2008. when i was in high school my mom would bake cookies and cupcakes to bring to a group home for mentally challenged adults in our town around thanksgiving and christmas. she would bring me with her to drop them off. the last time i went i remember seeing all of the residents crowded around the TV, singing along to every word of The Real Slim Shady. now i’m not saying they bought ALL those copies of Recovery, but, like, they definitely bought some
-Pitchfork Reviews Reviews

This is what you get when you look up "Hotel Yorba" on Google Maps