Ric: Neener neener, human! You thought opposable thumbs were necessary to open the cat beds.
How have your pets shown you that opposable thumbs are not necessary?
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Open Threads
Ric: Neener neener, human! You thought opposable thumbs were necessary to open the cat beds.
How have your pets shown you that opposable thumbs are not necessary?
by DougJ| 217 Comments
This post is in: Assholes
I though the protests last January around time of inauguration were great. Let’s make this an open thread about protests of the tax scam bill. In particular, let’s hear about any protests going on in your area and let me know if you hear of any centralized place where people can about protests they can go to.
by David Anderson| 160 Comments
This post is in: Women's Rights Are Human Rights, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Assholes, Nobody could have predicted
Compare:
JUST IN: Veteran Congressman John Conyers announces he is "retiring today" and endorses his son, John Conyers III, to fill his seat. https://t.co/tDUNsk1hZc pic.twitter.com/4MMgDIfHwp
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) December 5, 2017
and Contrast:
RNC official confirms to me that national party is again "involved" in Roy Moore race. Will be sending money to Alabama GOP "for their efforts."
— Henry J. Gomez (@HenryJGomez) December 5, 2017
This post is in: Open Threads, General Stupidity
Microsoft seized control of my laptop when I cranked it up this morning to start work. It said, “Working on updates. Don’t turn off your PC. This will take a while.”
It wasn’t kidding. I’ve been watching the spinning circle for an hour and a half, and it’s 75% complete. It would have been nice to have some advance warning that this goddamned update would consume hours of my workday. I have deadlines to meet, but Microsoft don’t give a fuck!
Anyhoo, while I wait with growing impatience, a story: I was in town last night on an errand, and I stopped by the world famous Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City to pick up some take-out. Aside from their food, mosaics and early 20th century architecture, the Columbia is famous for their flamenco dancer shows, which look like this:
As I was awaiting my food at the Maître D’ stand in the crowded foyer, a tourist approached the hostess and inquired about tickets to the “flamingo dance.” In the ensuing conversation, it soon became clear that he thought there were actual dancing birds at the Columbia.
Everyone laughed at the poor bastard. The end.
Open thread!
by David Anderson| 48 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
2010 was a rough year financially for my family. I had been laid off the previous September. My wife was working part time in a position that did not utilize her skills to the fullest of her ability. We were both looking for full time work in our respective fields and finding nothing.
We also have an amazing (and increasingly not a ) little girl. I was lucky, I was able to spend fifteen months of the most critical developmental time with Elise.
We had a routine and we had fun. Long walk to the library on Monday and Wednesday for story times, bus rides for lap sits and finger plays on Tuesday and Thursdays. Playground time with her little buddies almost every day so that they could toddle and I could talk with other adults. Fridays usually meant we had lunch dates with the moms in the group that we had assembled. I don’t know how much of this routine was for her and how much of it was for me as it was my social life as a stay at home parent.
When I had been laid off, I tried to COBRA my family’s coverage. We had the stimulus subsidy of 65% of the COBRA premium helping, but health insurance was still one of my four unemployment checks for a policy with a $2,500 individual deductible. My wife and I quickly realized that this would blow through our savings and run up credit card debt too quickly. We decided to see what we could find for Elise while we applied for an underwritten plan with a $12,500 deductible, no maternity and a 6 month non-emergency surgery exclusion waiver for under $100. We could not afford a $12,500 deductible but we could probably pay that off over several years if we got a cancer diagnosis.
We applied for CHIP, and after the application ping-ponged back and forth between the Medicaid qualification team and the CHIP team, we put Elise on heavily subsidized CHIP. $25 a month for UPMC for Kids. It had a big network, low co-pays and good customer service. And we barely used it for her. She had her one year old visit covered by CHIP. I betrayed her as I held her down as the nurse gave her the vaccines. Daddy was supposed to protect her. I was not supposed to aid and abet people stabbing her. Ice cream fixed that betrayal.
And then mid-summer came. She suddenly transitioned from being a happy go lucky kid to being a complete cranky pants. In the last week of June she would just sit down in the middle of a walk and cry. She would reach for Mom or Dad to carry her instead of running with the other kids. She was not herself.
We took her to the pediatrician, he saw nothing, but said to trust our instincts. A few days later on the 4th of July, we knew something was not right so we took her to the ER. They X-rayed her and thought nothing too strange was happening and sent us back to our PCP. He saw her again and set up an appointment with an orthopedist as he saw that Elise was not walking right.
Three days later, I took her to the orthopedist. He made funny faces at her and offered her a lollipop as the grown-ups talked. He poked and prodded. He thought he saw something on the original X-ray, and ordered another that focused more on her shin than her ankles. Four minutes later, we had a diagnosis, a green stick fracture. Once he had a clear indicator, he showed me how the ER team missed it as the break had not been obvious.
She got a walking boot. Three odd steps and a high five to the orthopedists, and we were on our way. And then she was back to being a happy kid as we stopped at the mall to let her play in some air conditioned space:
CHIP made sure my little girl was safe, CHIP made sure my little girl got the care that she needed. CHIP made sure my little girl was not walking around in pain for the summer. CHIP made my little girl’s life a whole lot better.
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Excellent Links, Open Threads
This is basically halfway to being a children's book pic.twitter.com/DjwUPHy9Wz
— Erin McGuire (@e_mcguire_) November 29, 2017
This is the Internet, so of course Max has an Instagram account, and also got a story in the Washington Post:
Meet Max, the cat who lost the library but won the Internet https://t.co/8xcSXXVEGM
— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) November 30, 2017
… Max spent time on the streets as a young cat, so he learned to roam early on. About a year ago, he was adopted at a shelter by Connie Lipton, who lives across a small street from Macalester, where Lipton’s husband teaches religious studies. Max made very clear that he wanted to continue roaming, Lipton said in an interview Wednesday, so they let him.
And roam he did, making friends across campus. Last summer, Max hung out at a reunion event that featured live music and a large tent. He enjoyed spending time on a vast green where students play Frisbee. He frequented student housing down the street, entered the science building more than once, and stopped by the Spanish and Portuguese department…
“We’ve had multiple calls because his phone number is on his tag,” Lipton said. “He’s a funny guy. He loves people. He loves to socialize — with groups.”…
But when Max began entering the library, zipping by students whose arms were loaded with books, “he started getting in trouble,” Lipton said… An employee is very allergic to cats, and some people worried Max would get locked inside, Lipton said, so a handwritten sign announcing his banishment was posted about a month ago. It was replaced more recently with the version that went viral this week, which was made by an artist and library employee named Christopher Schommer…
The sign recently came down, Lipton said, because Max’s roaming privileges have been revoked. A major construction project is happening on campus, and she didn’t want the cat to somehow get stuck in its mess. He now has a red harness and a leash, not that he’s happy about it.
“He’s going crazy. He cries and howls and paces around, looking out the windows,” Lipton said. “I’m really hoping he takes to walking on the leash. Then I can just walk him over there and he can still see his peeps and have his social life.”…
Such sociability is a condition for which red tabby boys are known — by cat standards, they’re party animals. Our current redhead, Rocket the Viking, is a rescue we’re pretty certain escaped from his original home in search of a good time, and then couldn’t find his way back. He’s also inherited the Siamese genes that lead to a depraved appetite (term of veterinary art) for various inedible fibers. In the three years he’s lived here, his unnatural desires and burglary skills have cost us some hundreds of dollars in sweaters, t-shirts, socks, towels, jeans, dish scrubbies, etc. (We installed child-proof latches — which don’t always thwart him — on the cupboards, and keep the toilet brush container rubber-banded shut.) There is one room to which *none* of the pets are allowed access, because that’s where my clothes/hobbies/sewing supplies are stored; needless to say, Rocky thinks of this as The Big Sock Candy Mountain, and spends hours trying to work the doorknob & complaining in his meezer yowl when he’s once again rebuffed…
***********
Apart from sympathizing with a guy so cruelly deprived of his Feline Rights, what’s on the agenda for the day?
This post is in: RIP, Daydream Believers
John Anderson, 10-term congressman who ran for president, dies at 95 https://t.co/erUEMMu38f
— The Guardian (@guardian) December 4, 2017
Anderson got my first presidential vote (because you had to be 21 to vote in 1976, and my 21st birthday fell a week too late). In my defense, those were more innocent days; I was outraged at Jimmy Carter’s cynically abandoning women to court “heartland” anti-choice voters, and besides, my individual vote didn’t mean much in then-dependably-Democratic Michigan.
What happened next convinced me (and should have convinced younger voters, IMO) that there are only two possible choices in American presidential elections, and the Democratic one is always preferable. The ensuing, increasingly suicidal, embrace of Ralph Nader by “progressives” only reinforced my conviction that too many leftists are less interested in actual political progress than in performative virtue-signalling.
We may not have fully appreciated it in 1980, but John Anderson marked the last bastion of Liberal Republicanism. Per Ed Kilgore, at NYMag
John B. Anderson of Illinois, who died today at the age of 95, served in Congress for 20 years. But what gave him national fame was a briefly sensational independent candidacy for president in 1980, running against President Jimmy Carter and soon-to-be-president Ronald Reagan. By doing so, Anderson represented two milestones in modern political history: He was the most conspicuous of early conscientious objectors to the conservative movement’s takeover of the Republican Party, and he was the prototype for the kind of centrist third-party presidential candidate that so many pundits and billionaires long for in today’s era of partisan polarization.
Anderson was not, of course, the first moderate-to-liberal Republican to oppose the rightward drift of his party. But he was the first to take an unsuccessful presidential primary candidacy right out of the GOP and into an independent ballot line. He took that fateful step in part because of the low regard he had for Ronald Reagan, his vanquisher in the primaries. But he also realized his brand of socially liberal, fiscally conservative politics had a stronger constituency outside his own party…
For a while, Anderson’s campaign was quite the phenomenon. In June his National Unity Party ticket (with running mate Pat Lucey, a Democratic former governor of Wisconsin) was polling at 24 percent according to Gallup. But as is typically the case, voters returned to the two major parties as the election approached. And in fact, Anderson largely abandoned his centrist positioning in order to poach liberals from Jimmy Carter, whose Evangelical background, fiscal conservatism, and cool relationship with Israel alienated a lot of usually Democratic voters. I recall seeing Anderson speak in San Francisco in the fall of 1980, by which time he was emphasizing his progressive social views, including what was then an unusual attitude of support for gay rights.
In the end, Anderson won only 7 percent of the vote, and his National Unity Party vanished without a trace. By 1984, Anderson was endorsing Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale. And so he was the prototype for millions of other relatively liberal Republicans who trended Democratic as even larger numbers of conservative Democrats joined the GOP. He had a distinguished later career as chairman of the electoral-reform group FairVote, which promotes a national popular vote and ranked-choice voting…
One of only two third party presidential candidates to get a televised debate with a major party nominee. (Ross Perot is the other.) https://t.co/n51DU7itM5
— Jim Antle (@jimantle) December 4, 2017