The Big O Loses the Big One

Some people just can't be happy for ObamaCare.

The Supreme Court. On most days, but not today, it is simply the Scaley Five. Today, it shocked the world by upholding ObamaCare's individual mandate. The one that makes you buy medical insurance or the IRS will visit you next next April to extract an ounce or two of the flesh you insist is invincible.

BuyO'Pay, one might call it.

Great? Or more like "okay."

The kludge that is BuyO'Pay eeked [sic] by on the tax angle. The Feds can sic the IRS on you until you scream. And then can't anymore. As in, who needs the rack these days?

Mandate on that for a while!

But the rationale that matters, the one that might allow real healthcare reform some day? That one was flogged silly (emphasis, silly) by an argument so comical that this long snoozing blog awoke like the alarm went off before noon.

The rationale employed Jon-Bob (Chief Justice Roberts if you got here late) for rejecting the use of the Commerce Clause to uphold the individual mandate is completely so next to last century, as one would expect. Perhaps, that was the deal that got his vote to uphold BuyO'Pay on taxing grounds.

Jon-Bob is pretending, essentially, that individuals without insurance are not in interstate commerce in the healthcare market.

If pretending were actual thinking, you'd all be at MIT.

He does use the insurance angle, but health insurance is not really not just insurance. Healthcare and its coverage is best though of as the medical risk allocation and coverage market. The one in which you all trade, almost every day. Today, did you take that aspirin you bought last week? Or use a band aid? Soap and condoms (though both may be more about religion and sex)? It's about health and medical care.

Almost everyone's medical risks in this country is covered one or more risk-spreading schemes. Every single product you touch is covered by product liability insurance, mostly to cover medical risks. By car insurance and workers comp, both with significant medical care coverage. Most of America's adult youth are, however vaguely, in the market for jobs not yet outsourced by Bain. Such jobs almost always come with fringes and workers comp. Those who are not interested in jobs, are likely eligible for Medicaid or living in their parents' attic as insurance riders

Your medical risks are covered, in part, by insurance held by others whenever you drive, shop, go to school or eat a Big Mac and super-sized fries.

You are not all in the national market for medical risk coverage? Please. Try to avoid it.

You are all covered by Social Security disability or Medicaid right now. All you have to do is meet the eligibility standards. You pay for Medicare, which is what, exactly? You are covered by governmental mandates that most ER's can't reject your emergency medical treatment, private insurance or not. If that's not a socially imposed medical risk coverage, what is?

Even just using a sidewalk. What do you keep telling yourself: Step on a crack, send your mother the ER. for free. Well, at least, that's her frakkin' risk, not yours. Unless, of course, you trip and break your own back or something silly.

Admittedly, if the sky falls, that is a medical risk that is not covered. And, thanks in small part to Jon-Bob's rationalizing, that is coming.

St. RiK: ObamaDontCare to Socialize The Blues

That screech you hear? It is not some 10-Percenter tooting his own political horn. It is a bona fide, if second-hand whistle-blower blowing on a grand scale. Presidential and Papal candidate St. RiK Santorum has taken up the banter that the Right-Right Reverend James Dobson waved at some lucky congregation recently.

Rev. Jimmy seems to have gotten a phone call from an undisclosed aide of Jesus warning of the impending Obama plan to nationalize an historic Capitalist business, the healthcare Blue Man Death & Denial Squads.

The Blue Man Death & Denial Squads, as everybody knows, are central to the business of tax-break subsidized, non-but-really-for-profit Blue Cross franchisees across America. Blue Cross may have trademarked the terms Blue Man and Death & Denial Squads, but they use the melancholy yet sympathetic sounding “the Blues” when handing down their sentences.

ObamaDontCare has found that spending money to actually treat pre-existing patients and old people with strokes sucks the big... a lot. President TB0's minions, therefor, devised a scheme to seize the entire The Blues structure. It will then force The Blues to review costs on Medicare and Medicaid patients to make damned sure that TB0 will not have to beg the X, Y and Z Generations and the 1% for more frakkin' cash for dubious life-savings. Assuming street-corpse removal costs do not increase too much, the Federal Deficit may once again plunge toward the trillion mark.

President TB0 has not responded to St. RiK or the Right-Right Rev. What, he'll admit more Socialism in an election year? Otherwise, he'd be stuck with a DENIAL. And how electable would that sound?

Still. It is coming. But before you get too upset with TB0's latest Marxist grab, figure this into the equation: The Blue Crosses would be left with no Blue Man Death & Denial Squads to dither about your mom's trephining or dad's stenting; they would simply reject all future insurance applications and pleas for treatment without opening an email or envelope; thus they would dramatically improve efficiency, reduce whimsy and drive non-profits ever higher.

Even Socialism has its Capitalist silver lining.

President Newt to Re-Right History - Every Week!

Although he's not quite there yet, Newt Gingrich has a presidentially grandiose plan for History. Like most of his Republican peers, Newt wants to go back to the past. In his case, of course, he wants to take American society and its government back to 1802, even before there was a Nevada to caucus.

More personally, however, he only wants to return to his glory days of the early 70's academia when he was a Mash teacher--a semi-pro, in fact--lecturing on Geography-based History at the College of West Georgia and Map Repair. There his most daring course as a Wolfie, “Mason and Dixon Were Not Straight Enough” was famously, and wrongly, criticized by Liberals and West Virginians.

Candidate Newt is faced with the difficult task of feverishly rewriting rewritten history on the fly, mostly in the pearly teeth of his supporter Sarah Palin's literate revisionismitis.

Unlike Sarah, Newt is an acknowledged expert in such things and knows how to re it right.

For example, in the undiscipline of Middle Eastern Geography, as evidenced by his Biblical History From 1517 course. Newt is truly unparalleled. It is narrowly believed that he, alone among candidates, has endorsed this Blog's sage use of Proximania in lieu of the histrionically inaccurate term “Palestine” and Firstians for always-there Israelis and Laterians for the non-existent Palestinians.

There is likely zero truth to the disappointing rumor that Newt advocates this Blog's own One Again Proximania Solution, to be implemented by Crazy-Gluing individual Firstian and Laterian Proximates together (at their shoulder-to-shoulder) into a single united Proximate. This geographically inspired effort would render Proximate punches fully self-inflicted and not very hard, ultimately leading to happy fist-bumping and an alphabet someone can actually read.

All this erudition aside, as President, Newt would bring more to the bully lectern than any president since Bill Clinton's Oval Office tutoring. For President Newt and America, his Geographical History on-line course would be enlightening and efficient, doubling, perfectly, as a foreign policy.

With the help of modern technology—Google Earth from an iPad, thrown onto a whiteboard via an LCD projector--and a Sharpie, Newt could redraw borders willy-nilly, as he expertly remembers them or wishes them to be.

The syllabus for the first semester of 2013, released yesterday to Miami voters, indicates that new borders for Cuba are the first lesson.

And those hangmen beardy stick figures? They are just Newt's doodling.

St. RiK & Pope Cliff Boost Semenhood

Newt Gingrich--so very yesterday--is about as much a papist as a post- Boleyn Henry VIII. Like Henry, Newt was a serial spouser, but went the opposite conversion direction. Newt became a Catholic for love but shucked  his death-do-us-part vow; Henry became a not-Catholic for love but stuck to his do-us part vow.

If you want a real Catholic for President—and who doesn't-- Newt would be pathetically lame in one of your New Year's mitres.

There are literally dozens who support Planned Personhood, the liberal offshoot of the Catholic Anti-Definition League, but damned few who pledge fealty to Pope Benedict XVI I, who played Aloisius Ratzinger in "Springtime for Young Hitler" and Cliff, the voluble mail and drivel carrier, in “Cheers.”

Damned few even know what “fealty” means, but pledge away they do.

Not, not as in “touchy fealty”.

Pope Cliff controls the second best conservative definition of the beginning of life. The best, of course, was written by Moses when language looked a lot like Wingbats and was etched in stone by lightning.

Which brings us, however elliptically, to St. RiK Santorum, previously known only as Special-K, for the street where he has thrived lately, or The Prince of Northern Virginia, which is where he lived while he was living in Pennsylvania. Being half viable in two places at one time is a sure sign on sainthood, beating the crap out of Schrödinger's cat, which only managed to be alive and dead at the same time, way short of qualifying for beatification.

St. RiK was almost solely responsible for redefining life in 2005 and more recently redefining the life of a presidential campaign as only requiring a tortured smile, a wink and a nod, brain function or Lone Star Governorship optional.

St. RiKy must now be taken as seriously as any hat in the ring containing an Angel's Diary. He is in Iowa. The second best place for him. He has shocked even RuPaul, which it pretty hard this side of eight- inch platforms and glitter for mascara. St. RiKy is going to win the Iowa Crocuses, granting him the more rights to the color purple than Whoopie Goldberg's.

Okay. Who? And how?

The “Who” is not important. He could be anybody who hasn't learned how to smile. The “How”?

Semenhood.

St. RiK has more ideas than the other Rick, Gov. Perry, has oops, and they are better, but the winner is the Papal Decree of Semenhood.

To keep this part short, Semenhood means that no abortions are allowed after the semen comes out of the blender, like a pina colada but not as frozen, yet (more on that below). Semen is derived from the New England term “Seaman”, because the tiny—okay, okay, microscopically really big--semen floaters are crazy swimmers like the guys who were pitched into the ocean by Moby Dick. Only one, of course, ends up with the prized coffin, but that is one very long narrative away from the point, even for this Blog.

Semen is a tad of a misnomer. Semen is really just the way an Intelligent Designer always packages spermapaloza, which is where the soul really begins but sounds too laughable to support even bingo. St. RiK believes Semenhood down to his every bone. To know this Semenhood theory, one need only study the Pope's Cliffmail on Semenhood Sanctity. Papist dogma requires that Semen be treated as containing millions of quantum tithers.

As such Semen is only to be time-regulated to a Katy Perry-beat mp3's; is not allowed to be detained on Saturday nights by terrifying French ticklers (uh... whatever those are); and is neither to be frustrated days before arrival by some forearm implant nor sunk downside-up--if there's got to be a the morning after--by the damned French again.

St. RiK and Pope Cliff's fluidy dream has led them to whip out a master plan--know in the Latin as the Bull Semen--to protect Sememhood and they expect to expose themselves soon, probably in New Hampshire, unless it's not too frakkin' cold: American Males are to be herded together and interned (not the 1998 meaning) in a Vatican Naval base in Greenland until all their little semem-borne quarks can be granted proper legal representation and definitely long, long before the next Megan Fox film.

This Bull will accomplish two things: It will lower Greenland two-tenths of an inch and it will save the Pope the draining expense of busing to the polls a trillion trillion new little voters otherwise simply wagging at movie posters.

Here's to Semenhood! And its patron saint, St. RiK! Off to Greenland!

Shocking! Devil Not Causing Earthquakes

And you have long thought Pat Robertson had proven that Haiti's pact with the Devil back in the 1800's caused their 2010 earthquake. That earthquake caused horrific effects, including a visit by Sean Penn and a photo of George Bush and Bill Clinton together.

Well, forget that.

Unless Satan is a Capitalist (yes, yes, Barak), he did not cause the end-of-times-of-2011 earthquake that seems to have rattled a McDonald's near Youngstown, Ohio.

Hold on. Ohio? 

Ohio votes Republican!

More evidence that the Devil can not be involved.

The earthquake was not all that bad, a 4.0 on a 10.0 scale (unless Barak raises yet another ceiling). It probably didn't knock the tranche'd pickle off of a single Big Mac or jiggle a chocolate shake. People in Youngstown probably thought it more Walmart price rollbacks, you know, when the Zorro'ed price cards fall away from new, lower ones. Or maybe, Newt Gingrich's polls hitting.

Severity, however, is not the point. The point is what or who caused the earthquake.

Brine.

Wait. Don't flee to the nearest Ru Paul Iraq Indirectly Caused 9/11 Website. Real elucidation awaits. Here, not there.

Brine.

The stuff that makes Heinz pickles down I-76 from the quake?

Not really, although you may have just solved the pickle juice recycling crisis.

Brine is used in Fracking, which is the only way to profit from natural gas stored in the rock under Youngstown and other places. Fracking is all the rage, since it will make America the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. This even though nobody really wants to be the Saudi Arabia of anything, unless you think women drivers...

The United States can not long survive without Fracking. America needs to cook with gas. Figuratively and actually, too.

Natural gas burns cleaner than anything this side of, say, the Sun. It is a great way to make electricity and char Rib Eyes to Pittsburgh Rare. Had America used natural gas instead of coal to industrialize, there would be no Global Warming. Or Al Gore movies. Greenland would be 0.8 inch lower in the water, where it was when the Vikings first rammed a Dragon Head into it. Antarctica would cover Terra Del Fuego, which would just be mapped as Northwest Antarctica, Magellan having circumnavigated only the Falklands for all the damned ice.

Fracking is all about Brine and some benign chemical additives and their high-pressure injection into the gas-hording rock. The rock fractures and America gets gas for it pipelines and twelve fuel cells. Of course, to keep the gasless rock from collapsing, Frackers shoot in sand, long known as compatible with brine and little crabs, into the space where your new water heater fuel used to be. You know how well sand supports your sandal much better near that briny water?

That's the theory, anyway.

Some environmentalists, who obviously do not have land in Youngstown to license, decry fracking as certain to give you earthquakes as well the most environmental-friendly fuel this side of, say, the Sun.

Uh.

Turns out that, however dumb they look hum... hugging trees, these guys are right again.

Earthquakes. Not Satan, Pat. Brine.

So, Youngstown! American! Stop with the Pickle Fracking Juice already!

Not to be confused with Battlestar Galactia-speak. Although, thanks to a few little earthquakes, Youngstown, along with the rest of the now-former Saudia Arabia of Gas, are Frakking doomed.