
Last night's episode will be discussed in infinitesimal detail, so if you haven't seen it, and don't want any spoilers, move along...

Pennsylvania seems to be very close to establishing a single-payer health care system for the state:
They claim to have the best legislation, which will provide everyone with healthcare, pay for it, and in fact save people and businesses money, as well as getting around the federal restrictions Congressman Dennis Kucinich has attempted unsuccessfully thus far to waive for states. In Pennsylvania they have Democratic and Republican cosponsors. Imagine that in Washington, D.C.! And they have a governor ready to sign the bill into law.See HealthCare4AllPA for more info.
I don't care how many people Megan Fox has slept with.
So much do I not care about it that I would not even mention it at all were it not for the media's obsession with it.
The latest item across which I've stumbled is the unintentionally hilariously titled "Megan Fox Has Had Limited Lovers," by which the writers mean limited in number, not in prowess, despite the fact that one might reasonably expect to find beneath such a headline an article about all the men who have failed to bring Megan Fox to orgasm, say.
The article is a perfect example of the tone routinely engaged to discuss Fox's sex life, or lack thereof:
The 'Transformers' actress, who is regarded as one of the world's sexiest women, insists she has only been intimate with long-term partner Brian Austin Green and her first boyfriend as she can only have sex with people she loves.Translation: "Megan Fox, who is SUPERHOT, dubiously claims to not be a TOTES SLUT.
Megan, who has previously claimed she is bisexual, insists she is nothing like her sex siren image and is happy living a quiet life with former 'Beverly Hills 90210' star Brian and his eight-year-old son, Kassius.Translation: "Megan Fox, who is SUPERHOT, dubiously claims to not be a TOTES SLUT.
Our old friend Texas Governor Rick Perry has won the hard-fought gubernatorial Republican primary against our old friend Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison.
Yay?
I'm sorry, Texas. That was gonna be a shit sandwich either way.
You know I can relate. I've got two words for you: Mitch Daniels.
Perry will now race for reelection against the winner of the Democratic primary, former Houston mayor Bill White.


Suggested by Shaker Beo_Shaffer: What are some of your favorite movies/books/webcomics that pass the Bechdel test?
Obama embraces GOP health care proposals.
Sigh.
President Barack Obama extended a bipartisan olive branch to GOP leaders in the health care debate Tuesday, stating in a letter that he is willing to consider several of their ideas in a compromise plan.That the GOP is unhappy with the concessions should not be mistaken for a commentary that the concessions are merely sops to bipartisanship. These are material proposals, and some of them are garbage. For example, the "high-deductible health plans" being referred to are Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), and Obama's willingness to "help to encourage more people to take advantage of HSAs" is not a good thing.
Specifically, the president said he may be willing to:
– commit $50 million to fund state initiatives designed to reduce medical malpractice costs;
– allow undercover investigations of health care providers receiving Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs;
– boost Medicaid reimbursements to doctors in certain states; and
– include language in the final bill ensuring certain high-deductible health plans can be offered in the health exchange.
The president said his decision to consider the GOP ideas was a result of last week's health care summit.
"The meeting was a good opportunity to move past the usual rhetoric and sound-bites that have come to characterize this debate and identify areas on which we agree and disagree," he wrote. I "left convinced that the Republican and Democratic approaches to health care have more in common than most people think."
GOP leaders were unsatisfied with Obama's concessions. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said the president's ideas were little more than a few items "inadequately addressed in a 2,700-page bill."
Deeky: That video you sent me is hilarious.
Liss: I laughed my tits off at figure skating being gayer than "competitive assfucking."
[Relevant transcript starting at 0:38: "Is Johnny Weir too gay for figure skating? Wait—is that even possible? Figure skating is the gayest sport of all time. In fact, let's take a look at where it falls on our official Sports Sexuality Spectrum: On the hetero extreme, there's football, then hockey, then baseball, then tennis, croquet, wrestling, ascot-tying, scented candle-making, competitive assfucking, figure skating. The sport is gay! Deal with it!" H/T for the video to Shaker Veace.]
Deeky: That may be my new favorite phrase.
Later…
Liss: It sounds like Leno's return to The Tonight Show was as totes awesome as we expected. [Sends Gabe's review of the horrendous disaster.]
Deeky: LOLOLOLOLOL!
Liss: "So the set is a low rent garbage disaster."
Deeky: Seriously, if I could figure out a way to put "low rent garbage disaster" and "competitive assfucking" into one sentence, I might explode.
Liss: "Deeky wanted to bring Matt Damon to the competitive assfucking tournament, but Damon was unavailable, so he brought that low rent garbage disaster Ben Affleck instead."
Deeky: LOLOLOLOL! Clean up on aisle five!
This is how I look every Tuesday from the moment I awaken in anticipation of a new episode of Lost:

It's either a lesson in irony or just plain bigotry, but the Catholic Charities in Washington, D.C. is changing its healthcare benefits to exclude the possibility that one of their employees might want to cover a same-sex partner now that the District legalized marriage equality.
Starting Tuesday, Catholic Charities will not offer benefits to spouses of new employees or to spouses of current employees who are not already enrolled in the plan. A letter describing the change in health benefits was e-mailed to employees Monday, two days before same-sex marriage will become legal in the District.As the article notes, Catholic Charities is a private, non-profit organization, so they can do whatever they want when it comes to providing benefits to their employees. And they are free to pass along the impression that they're also a bunch of bigoted and sex-obsessed tight-asses who actually go out of their way to ostracize legally-recognized married couples. How charitable of them.
"We looked at all the options and implications," said the charity's president, Edward J. Orzechowski. "This allows us to continue providing services, comply with the city's new requirements and remain faithful to the church's teaching."
Catholic Charities, which receives $22 million from the city for social service programs, protested in the run-up to the council's December vote to allow same-sex marriage, saying that it might not be able to continue its contracts with the city, including operating homeless shelters and facilitating city-sponsored adoptions. Being forced to recognize same-sex marriage, church officials said, could make it impossible for the church to be a city contractor because Catholic teaching opposes such unions.
After the council voted to legalize gay marriage, Catholic Charities last month transferred its foster-care program -- 43 children, 35 families and seven staff members -- to another provider, the National Center for Children and Families.
Orzechowski said Monday that the change in health benefits will be the last move necessary in response to the legislation.
"We do not anticipate any further changes whatsoever," he said. "Taking the action we have on foster care and spousal we feel has addressed everything the new law requires of us."
Shaker Laurakeet sent in the following advertisement for a thyroid surgical procedure from the University of Illinois Medical Center:

Don’t let Thyroid surgery take away your beauty.Emphasis is in the original.
Dr. Pier Cristoforo Giulianotti
The University of Illinois Medical Center understands that beauty is important to every woman.
The University of Illinois Medical Center is one of the few hospitals in the country offering thyroid surgery—without the need for a neck incision.
For more information visit uic.edu/com/surgery or call 312.355.5562
University of Illinois at Chicago Department of Surgery College of Medicine
University of Illinois Medical Center—Changing Medicine. For good.
Mention this ad for a FREE CONSULTATION to see if this procedure is right for you.

"With the valuable Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldberg endorsements in hand, Mickey Kaus' bid for a Democratic Party primary win is looking more solid than ever."—Matt Yglesias, waxing sardonic on the professional concern troll who's decided to run against Barbara Boxer in California's Senate Race.
Once upon a time, I took a quiz meant to discern what American accent you have. I was told my "accent is as Philadelphian as a cheesesteak! If you're not from Philadelphia, then you're from someplace near there like south Jersey, Baltimore, or Wilmington." Or...you've got a dad who was raised in Indiana and a mom who was raised in Queens, and you've spent some time in Britain and longer married to a Scot, so you have some weird accent all your own that unscientific quizzes say is Philadelphian.
Mama Shakes' accent is all but gone now, although when she speaks to her brother, or Aunt Gladys, who still live in New Yawk, it creeps back out, and I am reminded of why I thought for years that the word spatula was spelled "spatuler," and why my classmates always giggled at my pronunciation of the word horrible.
At home I was Lissa; at my grandparents' house, I was Lisser. "Lisser'n I aw gunna wawk down to the cawnaw stoah." It was almost a different language, but I spoke it—and I knew it meant I was going down to the corner store with my granddad, where he'd buy a paper and give me some change to buy 5¢ candies kept in big glass jars on the countah.
It was the language of summertime. When school let out, including for my parents, who were teachers, we went to New York, driving across the country—Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania…—and by the time the Verrazano Bridge was in view, I was giddy with anticipation of hearing that language again. Lisser, New York called to me. Lisser. All the mystery of a magnificent city wrapped up in a voice that made my name thrillingly unfamiliar to my own ears. I never got used to it, because I never wanted to. I preferred to let that language remind me always of the chance for exploration and wonderment that a city which wasn't my own provided.
I loved (and love still) Central Park, and the Empire State Building, and the Statue of Liberty. I loved the subway, and the ferry, and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel on the Long Island Expressway. But everything I loved the most could be found on one block on 68th Street in Queens. Cellar doors on raised cement porches, fuzzy white caterpillars in the narrow, kid-sized crevices between row houses, my grandmother's desk whose drawers were filled with outdated secretarial tools that fascinated me, my grandfather's closet with its old-fashioned hangers and shoehorns, the dumbwaiter that ran to the cellar, the pocket door between the living room and kitchen, intricate metal heating grates, an ancient wallphone with a phone number written on it that contained letters, the best junk room in the world stuffed with a working electric organ, a massive collection of Mad magazines, and a box of funny hats. And my favorite thing in the world—the giant, steel kitchen sink, that doubled as my bath when I was a wee thing.

Lisser, my mom would say. It's bath time. The cold sink would be filled with warm, soapy water, while I waited patiently in my toddler chair with its vinyl seat and cool metal arms. And then I would be undressed and lifted into the sink, where I'd slide against its smooth sides, and my mom would have to reach in and pull me upright again as we both laughed. My grandmother would tell me about how she and my mom and my uncle were bathed in that sink, too; We'll look at the pictures later, Lisser. Later…when I was wrapped in my big green terrycloth towel, complete with a hood, that was perfect for snuggling after a bath—or wearing to play Robin Hood any old time.
Once I was too big to be bathed in the sink, it became a benchmark for how grown-up I was from one summer to the next. I'd stand before it and stretch in my arms, to see if I could touch its deep bottom. Maybe next year, Lisser. My fingertips reached its depths the same year my grandfather died.
The last time I stood at that sink, my nephew was carrying the tradition of kitchen sink baths into a fourth generation. Look at your Aunt Lisser, he was instructed, for a photo. He giggled and slid across its bottom.
After my grandmother died, the house was sold, and I'm sure that antiquated old sink is now long gone, a victim to modernization. But the language that falls from millions of tongues reminds me of it still. Lisser, I hear—and it conjures sunny afternoons on Myrtle Avenue, the Four-Ones cab company, corner shop candies, the Hudson, my New York and everyone else's. And a kitchen sink.
That trickster Jesus is up to his magical shenanigans again, making a saucy appearance at a Scranton pizzeria:

Ms. Salerno was at [Brownie's Famous Pizzeria, a long-standing eatery on Luzerne Street] and talking with her granddaughter, 23-year-old Jackie Krouchick, while she made a pizza. Her granddaughter is a single mother who she said is struggling through tough times. Ms. Krouchick told her grandmother she worried she was losing her faith.I love the implication that atheists are just too fucking dumb to comprehend the presence of Jesus in a tub of pizza sauce. Even a two-year-old knows Jesus when he sees him!
As Ms. Salerno poured tomato sauce from a white plastic bucket, she urged her granddaughter to keep believing. That is when she saw it, the image of a man with long hair and a beard in the leftover sauce.
...Maryann Marsico, who works at Brownie's, said even an atheist would find it unmistakable.
"My 2-year-old grandson knows who it was. ... He just looked at it and said, 'That's Papa Jesus,' " Ms. Marsico said.
It was not lost on Ms. Marsico that Jesus appeared at Brownie's at the start of Lent, a holy Christian time that also happens to spur pizza sales because observers are not supposed to eat meat on Fridays.
"I will never cheat and eat meat again," she said.
Thumbs-up, with the tempered hope that this meeting was not for show and will result in material policy adjustments:
The American Humanist Association (AHA), as a member of the Secular Coalition for America, participated in a meeting with the Obama Administration on Friday, February 26, to discuss issues of concern to the nontheist movement. The Secular Coalition for America's Briefing with the Obama Administration marked the first time in history a presidential administration has held a national policy briefing with the nontheist community, signaling an unprecedented enthusiasm and willingness on the part of the Executive Branch to include nontheists in public discourse.Visible inclusion is important. Access is important. But more important is designing/supporting policy, and using rhetoric to defend those positions, with nontheists in mind. For example, an administration that does not support same-sex marriage, particularly one that defends its continued prohibition on religious grounds, cannot rightfully assert to have anything but a religious position—and a limited religious position at that, given that some religious denominations are currently performing (or performed, in California) legal same-sex marriage ceremonies where allowable by state law. The only viable position on the issue, as the issue of abortion, as another example, to accommodate the views of nontheists who lack religious objections, is full access and equality, granting individual opportunity to make use, or not make use, of rights as we each see fit.
"We are very pleased to have had this opportunity to talk with the White House about issues that are important to the nontheist community," said Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association. "Too often, nontheists have been disregarded by politicians and the public only because we don't happen to believe in a god. But by President Obama giving us a seat at the table, he has sent a powerful message that we hope others will also embrace: What unites us is that we are all Americans--not that we all share a belief in the same god or any god. There is no faith prerequisite in wanting what's best for our country."
...The issues discussed included ways to improve the Faith-Based Initiative, ending military proselytizing, and protecting children from neglect and abuse that can occur due to a lack of government oversight over faith-healing treatment providers.
"We are optimistic that this is just the first of many such meetings with the Obama administration," said Speckhardt.
It's really too bad this article is riddled with gendered clichés, sexist puns, and intersectionally offensive turns of phrase ("brain burka"—seriously?!), because otherwise it makes some excellent points about the virtual media blackout after Kelly Kulick made history in January by becoming the first woman ever to win a Professional Bowlers Association Tour title.
Like, for example, pointing out that the few male sportswriters who are writing about Kulick's win are serving up bullshit like this delightful observation, care of FanHouse's David Whitley: "Rule No. 1 in determining whether an activity is a sport: If the best female in the world can beat the best male in the world, it doesn't qualify."
Because there is no full-time women's tour, Kulick competed against the men—and as soon as she won by a resounding 70 pins, suddenly it's not a sport anymore. Of course.
It's great that Rick Reilly is in Kulick's corner, and if it hadn't been for his writing about her, I might not have heard about her, either. But I wish he'd managed to do it without engaging many of the same tropes that are fueling the very treatment of Kulick he rightly bemoans.
[H/T to Iain.]

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