10 Reasons Why Liberals Should Feel Old

There has been a lot of talk lately about the GOP being the party of “old, white guys.” However, liberals have several reasons to feel old as well.

I’ve compiled a list of those reasons right here.
 
1. On election day in 2016, Hillary Clinton will be 69 years old.

 
2. Joe Biden would have been unable to take Sarah Palin to the prom. Biden is 21 years older than Palin.

 
3. Jon Stewart turns 51 this year.

 
4. Labor union membership peaked in 1954.

 
5. When Dan Rather tried to assassinate George W. Bush’s character in 2004, he was already 72 years old.

 
6. Abortion ghoul Dr. Kermit Gosnell is 72 years old.

 
7. Jimmy Carter was the last Democratic Presidential candidate to carry Texas – in 1976.

 
8. Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals was published in 1971.

 
9. The Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion, Roe v. Wade, was in 1973.

 
10. Young people don’t care about global warming.

And Now a Reading From the Book of Obama

“As Cyprus and the European Union demanded that banks extract a good bit of its citizens’ savings, some came to Him saying, “Great Orator, we know that you are the most intelligent one and truthful and teach the way of god faithfully and defer to no one. Tell us therefore, what do you think? Is it lawful for the federal government to take citizens’ savings?”"
“But Obama perceived their confusion and said, “You silly cradle-to-grave wards of the state, show me the currency to be taken by the state.”"
“And they brought him a dollar bill.”
“And He said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?”"
“They said to Him, “Washington’s.”"
“He said to them, “Then render to Washington the things that are Washington’s, and to god… meh.”"
“And hearing this, they marveled, and leaving Him, they went away to buy guns and stock up on ammunition.”

We Need a National Conversation on What Rights Actually Are

So that Harris-Perry nitwit from MSNBC is back with a new promo. And what statist idiocy is she pushing now?

You do have the right to health care, and to education, and to decent housing and to quality food at all times.

No, you don’t have a right to any of those things, you boob.
Let’s pretend we did, let’s say, have a right to food. What would that mean? Well, what if I didn’t have food? Since, I have a right to it, that means someone will have to give it to me. And what if that someone who makes the food doesn’t want to give it to me for free? Then, since I have a “right” to it, the government will have to send people with guns to force him to give it to me. So saying you have “a right to food” is really saying “I have a right to put a gun to people’s heads and force them to give me what I think I need.”
I’ve said this a number of times (including in my last book), but I’m really serious on this: We need a national conversation on exactly what rights are. Too many people don’t seem to get the concept at all and seem to confuse rights with “I really want this.” So anyone know how we get national conversation going? I certainly don’t or there’d be a big new crater on the moon by now.

Apology Required

A salesman stopped at a local bar for a cold one, and sat down between two older weather-beaten cowboys. On TV, a media celebrity was fawning over 0bamacare. The salesman said to the cowboy on his right, “Man, that 0bama is a real horse’s ass!”
The cowboy stood up and knocked him off his bar-stool and walked out.
The salesman got up, dusted of the sawdust, sat back down and after a few moments silence turned to the cowboy on his left and said, “Man, I ‘m telling you, that 0bama is a real horse’s ass!”
That cowboy got up, knocked the salesman off his stool onto the floor and also walked out.
The salesman finished his beer and asked the bartender, “What’s the matter with those two cowboys? Is this 0bama country?”
The bartender said: “Nope. Horse country.”

The People We Love

I'm starting to suspect I'm not going to live forever.  When I was in my 20s, I was pretty sure I would.  Everybody is like that when they're young, but at some point, like everybody else, I started to wonder.  A little while back I tried to ask my cardiologist about it, but he just kept changing the subject.  I started to think maybe he knows something I don't.  I mean he went to medical school and all.  Awareness of your own mortality changes everything.  It makes you think about who you are, what you've done with your life, why you're here in the first place, what happens to the people you're going to leave behind.  If the movie has to end, if it was mine to control, I know how it would be.  I'd like to go out in a hail of gunfire at the age of 112, defending myself from an outraged husband who came home unexpectedly for lunch.  Most people (including my wife) don't understand why I think that's funny.  But none of us knows when that day is, what we can do is enjoy the time we have left, and take care of the people we love.

"The people we love" is the point of this, of course.  And some of them are very young.  Like 2 years old, that kind of young.  Almost unbelievably, for the first time in this country's history, their future is threatened by what is happening around them.  They don't have any control of those forces, but we do, and how this all plays out depends on what we do about it all.  

The feeling I get when I look at it all is kind of like the feeling Humphrey Bogart must have had in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, just when he thought he had it made, he was just a couple of miles from town, he had just found some water, and he was about to get away with all the gold, he heard a voice behind him that said: "hey!  I know you…you're de guy in de hole!"

Ronald Reagan said "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."  I refuse to accept the notion that we will end up having to explain to them how it is that we let this happen.

We owe them more than that.

Fun Facts About the 50 States: West Virginia

Welcome to Fun Facts About the 50 States, where – week by week – I’ll be taking you on a tour around this great nation of ours, providing you with interesting, yet completely useless and probably untrue, information about each of the 50 states.
This week, we’ll be unable to tell if that black stuff on our eggs is pepper, coal dust, or roach droppings as we visit West Virginia. So let’s get started…
_______________

The state flag of West Virginia consists of a blue-edged white background, overlaid by an image of two men debating whether Fahrenheit 9/11 or An Inconvenient Truth was a bigger load of crap.

* West Virginia became the 35th state on June 20, 1863. Originally part of the state of Virginia, the people in the western part of the state broke away in protest of the despicable institution of mandatory public education and the deplorable conditions of literacy that resulted therefrom.
* The state flower of West Virginia is the Rhododendron. State legislators were chastised for picking a flower that most people in the state couldn’t spell, but lawmakers ignored the complaints, since people had said the same thing when the dog was chosen as the state mammal.
* West Virginia license plates are white with blue lettering, and contain the tourism slogan, “Now With A Paved Road!”.
* In a recent survey, 95% of West Virginians report having checked out a book from their local public library within the last year. During the same time period, 95% of West Virginians also reported having found a way to fix that wobbly kitchen table with the short leg.
* The state song of West Virginia is “YAY! No More 3.2 Beer!”
* The celebration of Mother’s Day was first observed in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1908, mostly as a way to get women to stop whining about not being able to vote.
* With a median age of 40, West Virginia has the oldest population of any state in the US. Upon turning 40, it’s traditional for a West Virginian to cope with his mid-life crisis by buying a shiny red convertible to put up on blocks in his front yard.
* West Virginia’s nickname is “The Robert C. Byrd Memorial State” State.
* Jackson’s Mill, West Virginia, was the site of the first 4-H Camp in the US, where rural youngsters learned valuable agricultural skills such as how to milk cows, shear sheep, and hide stills from ATF agents.
* The world’s largest sycamore tree was located in Webster Springs, West Virginia. However, it was recently cut down and sold to David Letterman, who was reportedly thrilled at finally having a toothpick big enough to fit his tooth gap.
* In 1960, Danny Heater of Burnsville, West Virginia, set a world’s record by scoring 135 points during a high school basketball game. Even more amazing was that he accomplished this feat while being the youngest player on the team at age 24.
* Some critics complain that the record shouldn’t count, since he violated West Virginia rules by wearing shoes.
* The first state sales tax in the US was instituted in West Virginia in 1921. It was hailed as a vast improvement over West Virginia’s old revenue-raising technique – random muggings of Yankee tourists.
* The first federal prison exclusively for women was opened in Alderson, West Virginia, in 1926. For those not familiar with women’s prisons, they’re sort of like sorority houses, except with more sobriety, and fewer gratuitously-sadistic, lesbian-overtoned initiation rituals.
* The New River Gorge Bridge in Fayetteville is the highest steel-span bridge in the US, rising 876 feet above the river below. Every October, the locals celebrate “Bridge Day”, when over 100,000 celebrants gather to watch or participate in bungee jumping and parachuting from the structure. On Bridge Day, the bridge itself is closed to both automobile traffic and scissors.
* The state motto of West Virginia is “Montani semper liberi”, which is Latin for “Sister, daughter, wife… whatever”.
* At 69 feet high and 900 feet in circumference, the nation’s largest and oldest Indian burial ground is located in Moundsville, West Virginia. The mound’s many unquiet spirits are frequently seen on TV shows such as “America’s Most Haunted”.
* Nearly 75% of West Virginia is covered by forests, providing the state’s many fine restaurants with beautiful views and fresh road kill.
* In 1824, John Gallaher published the first women’s magazine, “Ladies Garland” which featured the now-infamous centerfold of Andrew Jackson showing off “Old Hickory”.
* The variety of apple known as Golden Delicious originated in Wellsburg, West Virginia, in 1775. It was greeted with overwhelming enthusiasm by a population who’d spent years being stuck with eating the Ocher Atrocious.
* Outdoor advertising got its start in Wheeling, West Virginia, when the Block Brothers Tobacco Company started painting barns with the slogan “Treat Yourself to the Best with Mail Pouch Brand Gumming Tobacco”.
* 15% of America’s coal comes from West Virginia. The state’s coal producers expect that number to rise to 20% once they get their Balrog infestation problem under control.
* In 1997, West Virginia had the lowest crime rate in the US. Coincidentally, this was the year after bribing Senator Byrd was legalized.
* The world’s largest shipment of matches – 210 million of them – was shipped from Wheeling, West Virginia, to Memphis, Tennessee in 1933. They were used as part of FDR’s American Arsonist Army (AAA) program, whose job was to burn down trees so that the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) could have jobs planting new ones.
* Which may explain why – before the word “retarded” was coined in 1940 – extremely stupid people were referred to as “F-D-R-ded”.
* “Coal House” in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, is the only residence in the world which is made entirely of coal. Tourists are strongly advised to bring their own toilet paper.
* In 1841, William Tompkins of Cedar Grove, West Virginia used natural gas to evaporate salt brine – the first known industrial use of the natural gas. Prior to this, the highly explosive gas was mostly used by organized crime figures to fill brightly colored balloons for “kids who saw too much and needed to have an ‘accident’”.
* In May, 1860, the first oil well in West Virginia was drilled at Burning Springs. In June, 1860, the former governor of Texas invaded West Virginia and stole it.
* In 1885, stone quarried at Hinton, West Virginia was sent to Washington D.C to become part of the Washington Monument. Although the monument builders thanked West Virginia profusely at the time, they actually thought the stone was horrid. They immediately hid it in the attic of the monument and now only bring it out when they know a West Virginian is coming to visit.
* The last public hanging in West Virginia took place in Ripley in 1897. After that, folks learned to keep their uppity book-learnin’ to themselves.
______________
That wraps up the West Virginia edition of Fun Facts About the 50 States. Next week we’ll be nibbling ourselves into a cheese-coma as we visit Wisconsin.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go lay in some supplies for my visit to Coal House.

Report: Free health insurance surprisingly expensive

Nancy said that they’d have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it, and today we find out that includes higher premiums for a lot of people:

A new study finds that insurance companies will have to pay out an average of 32 percent more for medical claims on individual health policies under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.
What does that mean for you?
It could increase premiums for at least some Americans.
If you are uninsured, or you buy your policy directly from an insurance company, you should pay attention.

Wait a minute, how is this possible? I thought Obamacare was all about “bending the cost curve down.” This kind of sounds like the opposite of that to me. What the hell could possibly make premiums go up under this wonderful, totes for realsies awesome law?

The study says claims costs will go up largely because sicker people will join the insurance pool. That’s because the law forbids insurers from turning down those with pre-existing medical problems, effective Jan. 1. Everyone gets sick sooner or later, but sicker people also use more health care services.
“Claims cost is the most important driver of health care premiums,” said Kristi Bohn, an actuary who worked on the study. Spending on sicker people and other high-cost groups will overwhelm an influx of younger, healthier people into the program, said the report.

Oh, riiiiiight. It’s that pesky supply and demand stuff that all the cool kids were apparently snoozing through in high school economics class.

While some states will see medical claims costs per person decline, the report concluded that the overwhelming majority will see double-digit increases in their individual health insurance markets, where people purchase coverage directly from insurers.
The differences are big. By 2017, the estimated increase would be 62 percent for California, about 80 percent for Ohio, more than 20 percent for Florida and 67 percent for Maryland. Much of the reason for the higher claims costs is that sicker people are expected to join the pool, the report said.

It should be pointed out that this study was put out by the Society of Actuaries. These are the dull, gray people who look at Real Melvin stuff like risk tables to determine that all of the interesting things that you do like smoking, skydiving, or having diabetes tends to have a bunch of bummer consequences in the real world, such as prolonged hospital stays, death, and–as a result of those things–higher insurance premiums.
In other words, maybe they should have consulted these people instead of the Skittle-shitting unicorns when crafting legislation that would have some serious impacts on millions of people.
Speaking of unicorns:

The Obama administration challenged the design of the study, saying it focused only on one piece of the puzzle and ignored cost relief strategies in the law, such as tax credits to help people afford premiums and special payments to insurers who attract an outsize share of the sick.

Because that money just magically comes out of nowhere. Problem solved.
Yeah.