Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

So many bastards, so little time.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

The willow is too close to the house.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Back in the Saddle

Reader Interactions

80Comments

  2. 2.

    Belafon

    But remember, folks, the ACA website is supposed to work right the first time.

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

    Signed, Software Engineer

  3. 3.

    SiubhanDuinne

    That word “outage,” I always want to read as “outrage.” Seems like NewsMax-level overreaction.

  4. 4.

    Gin & Tonic

    I can no longer post from home. I compose my pearls of wisdom, hit “submit” and they disappear. No naughty words or anything. I know my IP changed a few weeks ago, but I tried altering my nym to post last night, and that didn’t work either. Posting from work is fine.

  6. 6.

    Botsplainer

    Lots of funny stuff on Twitter feeds mocking Chuck Todd, as well as on LGF.

    The best statements basically consist of “The Best Ofs” from help desks from the mid to late ’90s, consisting of:

    Turn off power and count to thirty.
    Did you reboot from safe mode?
    Try upgrading to AOL 3.0.
    The problem looks like it’s from Prodigy’s end.
    Try booting from the restore disk.
    Hit control-alt-delete 3 times.
    You might want to do a defrag.
    Try turning off Norton.

  8. 8.

    GregB

    It’s like the old saying. First Hitler fucked up the website for implementing universal healthcare in Germany….

  9. 9.

    Belafon

    @NotMax: Your statement, coming right after Botsplainer’s list, is pretty funny. In 10 years, when the government’s rollout of Single Payer on Google Glass fails, will people be writing “Clear your Browser’s cache” to Todd?

  13. 13.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @schrodinger’s cat: And they mean Obama is Wellington, right? A close run thing that worked?

    @Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): St Stewart gave his whole first segment to kvelling and moaning. Ted Cruz and Louie Goehmert taking $24 billion out of the economy and threatening to economically blow up the planet…? Maybe he noticed it after I gave up on him.

  14. 14.

    currants

    Guessing it’s got something to do with my browser, since I also can’t seem to start any youtube videos, like this one about a help desk.

  17. 17.

    currants

    Must be something weird in the coffee this morning. Now posts appear, and are not even in moderation. Sheesh.

  18. 18.

    Felonius Monk

    @Botsplainer: You did not include the universal “re-format your hard drive, then reinstall Windows”.

    Actually not a bad idea as far as Chuck Toad is concerned. He needs to be re-formatted and have a new operating system installed.

  22. 22.

    The Dangerman

    Seems to me that if more Red States (see Kentucky) had set up exchanges instead of being obstinate shits the law (and website) would be working better.

  24. 24.

    Higgs Boson's Mate (Crystal Set)

    OT: Steve Lonegan was stabbed in the back.

    Of course, like Ted Cruz, Lonegan doesn’t think the problem was the shutdown itself — it was the betrayal of mainstream Republicans who criticized the tea party for the shutdown, specifically criticism from John McCain and Lindsey Graham:
    “They drove a stake into our heart,” Lonegan said. “That’s the first time we started to see the momentum move against us. They both should be primaried for what they did.”

    via Wonkette

  25. 25.

    Botsplainer

    @Felonius Monk:

    You did not include the universal “re-format your hard drive, then reinstall Windows”.

    I always loved that one.

    I think my favorite moment was when I was having a broadband outage when operating an old Windows ME box in 99 or 00. The guy at the cable company was insisting that my computer could not possibly interact with the modem. When I stated quite bluntly that the thing had interacted with it for several months without problems, he told me that was impossible, as his manual said so, and refused to issue a work ticket. It took my threats to visit the cable office in order to heave the modem through the window to prompt him to finally get me a supervisor.

    That exercise took about an hour.

  26. 26.

    fuddmain

    @schrodinger’s cat: It’s irritating as hell. People are experiencing delays signing up for health insurance! Oh noes! Don’t get me wrong, the rollout has been a clustefuck, but a bunch of uninsured folk have still managed to get insurance.

    @Botsplainer: My contribution was “Did you press the ‘Any’ key?”

  27. 27.

    SFAW

    @Gin & Tonic:

    I compose my pearls of wisdom, hit “submit” and they disappear.

    Unfortunately, your problem is not computer/software-related, but rather one of Biblical proportions.

    Specifically: Matthew 7:6 admonishes you not to cast your pearls before swine, and since most of us here fall into that category, Jeebus is preventing you from compromising your purity of essence.

    Or something.

  29. 29.

    Southern Beale

    @fuddmain:

    People are experiencing delays signing up for health insurance! Oh noes!

    Wait a minute, I thought America hated Obamacare! Also, we already have the best healthcare in the world so keep your grubby gummint hands OFF! etc.

    Pretty sure the people complaining about this are the people who haven’t been waiting for health insurance for 20 years.

  30. 30.

    Higgs Boson's Mate (Crystal Set)

    @fuddmain:

    My contribution was “Did you press the ‘Any’ key?”

    I worked in tech support for EarthLink back in the early days. At the time one PC manufacturer actually considered labelling the spacebar “Any.”

  34. 34.

    Hal

    I had to laught at Chris Hayes’ montage last night of comparing healthcare.gov to any number of Bush fuck ups. One dips hit compared it to the Iraq war.

  35. 35.

    Felonius Monk

    @Botsplainer: That is the reason that I am generally unwilling to call the No-Help Desk when I have a problem. Nine out of 10 times that was the proffered fix.

    In my experience, most help desks are only two solutions deep —- 1) re-start your computer and see the problem goes away; and 2) re-format your hard drive and reinstall the operating system.

  37. 37.

    mai naem

    I thought the booting from safemode was still current. I could swear I had to do that a couple of years ago with my old laptop which was just 3 yrs old.

  38. 38.

    catclub

    @Botsplainer: I have gotten surprisingly friendly help when I say that I am running Linux. (Not necessarily useful, but friendly.) They never ask me to re-install the operating system.

    ON another tangent. Anyone else see this at Pierce’s Website – the Pope Francis daily surprise:
    “The faith passes, so to speak, through a distiller and becomes ideology,” he said, according to Radio Vatican. “And ideology does not beckon [people]. In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Of every sign: rigid. “And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements. The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances of the Church of the people,” Francis added. “But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh?”

    Just wow.

  39. 39.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @Higgs Boson’s Mate (Crystal Set): Gateway did more than consider it. They claimed their tech support calls dropped by half when they added that label to the space bar.

    I think my favorite is still the guy who tried to install AutoCAD in the multi-floppy days who insisted that the fourth disc would simply not go into the drive slot.

    They had neglected to include “remove the previous disc” in the instructions.

  40. 40.

    Elizabelle

    NPR yesterday on the rollout problems; they mentioned the President’s “controversial” healthcare reform.

    It is controversial because of all the misinformation and deliberate lying. When people are told of its provisions, it’s less controversial and — bingo — more popular than not. By an increasing margin.

    Life is too short. Only catch NPR sporadically, and regret when I do (at least on domestic politics).

    NPR is a “controversial” source of news, is it not?

  41. 41.

    The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik

    I just can’t believe the breathless “THIS MEANS OBAMACARE IS THE WORST MOST EVIL FAILURE-HOAX IN THE HISTORY OF FUCKING EVER!!” crap that’s being peddled in the media over this. Even Jon Stewart, who was fucking great during the Shutstorm as it were, apparently couldn’t help but act like this was the most awful stupid thing the Dems could’ve done.

  42. 42.

    The Dangerman

    @piratedan:

    well we can’t have that now, can we?

    We could if we started playing the hardest of hardball; purposely throwing in monkey wrenches to harm people’s healthcare is roughly equivalent to throwing in monkey wrenches in, say, Jets and Tanks. In the latter example, people would go to jail.

  43. 43.

    Scratch

    Right now, I’m going through one of those stretches where I decide to listen into the conservative mindset which means I get the dubious pleasure of listening to Chris Stigall in the mornings. He was in full rant mode this morning, going on and on about how what a terrible and crazy thing it was for there to have been passed a law which was intended to help the 15% of Americans without insurance. He just couldn’t believe the idea that government should ever do anything to help such a small proportion of the population.

    Meantime, I’m thinking how would that play if would have said how in the past the Voting Rights Act was only going to help about 10% of the American population. Or how he feels about how government tends to pass laws which have greatly helped increase the wealth and well-being of 1% of the American population.

    What a fucking asshole he is.

  44. 44.

    Mike E

    OMFG but Jansing & Co on msnbc is a total shitshow, concern trolling the fuck outa the ACA rollout. If your running quotes from Boehner, Cruz and Issa, you might not care about “facts”.

    Inside Edition would be a better watch than this horror.

    ETA NPR’s decline is one of the most disappointing failures in my media experience

  45. 45.

    Keith G

    Nonetheless the functioning of HealthCare.gov is quite dissappointing and there’s no excuse for the problems, especially given the stakes involved.

    Of course it will eventually work as designed and initial perceptions will improve as the good in the ACA is experienced by more Americans. This was just a missed opportunity.

  48. 48.

    FDRLincoln

    I have only been working here a short distance.
    Have you unplugged your desktop computer, ma’am?
    How is the weather in Biloxi?
    Do you have any matches? Try setting it on FIRE!

    (quotes from the Beavis and Butt-head episode “Tech Support”)

  49. 49.

    Elizabelle

    @Keith G:

    What has surprised me: a few weeks ago, when President Obama was comparing purchasing healthcare to buying books on Amazon, or whatever prosaic comparison he used. Talk about apples and oranges.

    Tiny warning bells in my head. Huge project; probably better to undersell it.

    And PBO is not generally given to ebullient statements like that. He’s a cautious guy.

    SO: one wonders about the information stream on the website’s progress within the White House. Have a feeling it was oversold within.

    All that said, I am thrilled Obamacare is up and running, and those who act like the website rollout informs that Obamacare itself cannot succeed —

    well, you’ve just found your fifth column, haven’t you?

  53. 53.

    The Red Pen

    Remember when Obama destroyed the stock market and Freepers were saying things like this?

    I already closed out my 401k. Stocks won’t be worth a plug nickel. I am investing in survival equipment. Looks like the so-called kooks were right. This is going to be a lot worse than most people think.

    Our news media loves crisis stories. The Great Obamacare Fiasco of 2013 will fade into history. If Obamacare is going to be a fiasco, we won’t really know for another 1.5 months.

  54. 54.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    Beltway reporters obediently nod and note down any bullshit about war and illegal banking for years, and it’s on Web site issues that they suddenly start become self-styled experts and skeptics and start pushing back with “Now hang on, I’m not buying that…”, based on zero knowledge of WTF they’re talking about.

    The entire business is an exercise in failing upward.

  55. 55.

    chopper

    @The Red Pen:

    lol. “i cashed out my 401(k), taking a huge bath in the process, in order to buy a pallet of canned beans right before the stock market doubled.”

  57. 57.

    Seanly

    @Belafon:

    My coding experience is limited to FORTRAN77 back in undergraduate school. As a user of lots of proprietary softwares for structural engineering, I can say that glitches should be expected.

    The new media story is falling for the Republican line that healthcare.gov issues equals failure of Obamacare*.

    * I prefer to refer to it as ACA, but R’s & their media fluffers overwhelmingly call it that.

  59. 59.

    Southern Beale

    @The Red Pen:

    Remember when Obama destroyed the stock market and Freepers were saying things like this?

    Not just saying, DOING. Hubs works with some Teatards, they all pulled their money out of the stock market after Obama was inaugurated, per Rush’s instructions. And then had to sit back and watch the stock market SOAR. Woopsies.

  60. 60.

    Mike E

    And Jansing Shitshow ends by taking a huge dump on camera, using the decriminalization of marijuana as a sad exclamation point. On to the next shitshow, now with Ezra Klein on camera saying stuff that will be ignored in favor of the political horse race. This is like Katrina/Benghazi/Iraq/Gallipoli!! I’ll give credit to the host trying to get the GOP Rep from Md to say how health ins is, umm, necessary. No dice.

  62. 62.

    Higgs Boson's Mate (Crystal Set)

    @Bill E Pilgrim:

    Beltway reporters obediently nod and note down any bullshit about war and illegal banking for years, and it’s on Web site issues that they suddenly start become self-styled experts and skeptics and start pushing back…

    Personal computing and the internet are what four-barrel carburetors were back in the Sixties: guys think they know all about them because they’re able to repeat what some other guy said.

    If you ask them about load balancing or server side scripting language their answer is…

  63. 63.

    BGK

    @Bill E Pilgrim:

    Sadly, not any better than I expected.

    I work in a group which includes software developers. By fortunate chance, this group inhabits a lacuna of the depressingly uniform Paultard technical cohort in that we are all raging O-bots. We laughed heartily in our group meeting/call today at the blinding ignorance willful derangement of some of the reporters’ comments about healthcare.gov.

  64. 64.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @BGK: I’m not even remotely an Obot, but I think Chuck Todd getting all high and mighty and playing the adversarial reporter about something he has no understanding of, choosing this subject to try to become an actual reporter, and failing, is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen.

  66. 66.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Bill E Pilgrim: There’s something inherently ridiculous about Chuck Todd. Back when Parson Meacham and Uncle Brokaw decided gridlock was because Obama hadn’t had Yertle the Turtle to White House for a cook out, you could almost see how happy Chuckie was to have found his ticket to the grown-ups’ table. And my one takaway from “This Town” is how strong the death cult of Tim Russert and his style of the tough-guy pose is, especially at NBC

  68. 68.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: That was so my take from that book also. I listened to the whole thing during commutes in September and the entire chapters, multiple, devoted to the cult of Tim Russert was shocking. The author was supposedly being so cynical and clear eyed about the whole place and had such huge blind spots himself it was just ridiculous. It was DC as seen by a resident Cokie, trying to “expose” the place but revealing himself as unable to understand that for example, not all of the world saw Tim Russert as a God-like figure.

  69. 69.

    Roger Moore

    @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:

    They claimed their tech support calls dropped by half when they added that label to the space bar.

    ISTR that it wasn’t labeling the space bar but changing the message from “press any key to continue” to “press return to continue”. In either case, the take home message is that some people panic and can’t think straight when faced with computers, and any system that’s intended to make computers easy to use for them has to take that into account.

  70. 70.

    Roger Moore

    @Scratch:

    He just couldn’t believe the idea that government should ever do anything to help such a small proportion of the population.

    I guess that means we never need to pass tax breaks for people earning more than $250K/year, since they make up an even smaller fraction of the population.

  71. 71.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Bill E Pilgrim: The author was supposedly being so cynical and clear eyed about the whole place and had such huge blind spots himself it was just ridiculous. It was DC as seen by a resident Cokie,

    I didn’t read it, just excerpts and interviews with the author, but you confirm my sense of it, that this supposedly gimlet eyed take down was actually a gently mocking love letter, especially about the Russert cult, that maybe Brokaw was a little goofy giving Buffalo Bills jerseys as wedding gifts, but of course Tim Russert was a towering giant eclipsing Murrow, Cronkite and Sevareid.

  74. 74.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Bill E Pilgrim: I’ve noticed that since the infamous Gulf War I press briefings – the only time reporters try to do adversarial questions is just to wag their dicks in public. You can almost see the “How day you talk to a SENIOR member of the newsmedia that way” oozing off them like anyone else cares.

  76. 76.

    Origuy

    I suspect that healthcare.gov is interfacing with 51 state systems plus I don’t know how many insurance companies. Each of those systems has their own protocol for sending and receiving requests. The request interfaces may not be well documented and have idiosyncrasies known only to the people who wrote them and have moved on.It takes time to discover the differences between “how it is supposed to work” and “how it really works”. Add to that writing a user interface that is going to be used by everyone from your grandmother to people trying to break it, and it’s no wonder there are problems.

    Speaking of tech support, there was an old trick that they would sometimes use if a customer said that their computer was dead. Asking if it was plugged in got the caller indignant, so they would ask if the power cord had a two-prong or three-prong plug. The caller wouldn’t remember, go and check, and often hang up the phone without comment after seeing the plug out of the wall.

  77. 77.

    Elie

    @Keith G:

    I frankly think that there is zero chance of anything this complex working without a hitch the first week. Much smaller data set ups run into snarls and this was made more difficult by a short time frame for all those federally run exchanges cause states did not want to do them. The feds stepped up and tried to get it all done so that no one from any state would be unable to sign up.

    I really donot understand people on our side who don’t get that and in some cases, actually start in effect, supporting the right wing arguments. Have you ever successfully advocated for something while trashing it? If you were setting up something and a part of the process didn’t work quite as you would like, would you spend all your time talking about what did not work?

    Seriously

  78. 78.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @Roger Moore:

    ISTR that it wasn’t labeling the space bar but changing the message from “press any key to continue” to “press return to continue”.

    Nope. I just sent one of those keyboards off for recycling, since the last computer that required a five pin connector finally died. The label was on the side of the space bar that faces the user, so it was one of the few labels that survived intact.

    @ruemara:

    Almost but not quite as strange as the woman who folded her 5.25 and jammed it into the 3.5 floppy drive

    Congrats, that’s one I never saw. We did have a secretary who used a three hole punch on her 8 inch floppies and then wondered why she couldn’t read them.

  79. 79.

    maeve

    @Roger Moore:

    STR that it wasn’t labeling the space bar but changing the message from “press any key to continue” to “press return to continue”. In either case, the take home message is that some people panic and can’t think straight when faced with computers, and any system that’s intended to make computers easy to use for them has to take that into account.

    I don’t have a return key on my keyboard. (I do have a key labeled “Enter”)

  80. 80.

    leeleeFL

    @catclub: This new Pope is quite something. I honestly find myself a bit nostalgic for the days when things a Pope said mattered. I worry a bit for his safety too. Are all the Borgias dead?

Comments are closed.