has the light gone out for you because the light's gone out for me?

I got my license renewed today.



If you're an organ donor, congratulations. If you're not, please consider signing up.

have you heard the news? THE DEAD WALK!

I guess I've done enough posts lately about real shit (also known as things that are the least bit interesting) to allow myself to indulge in an all about me update. at this point I'm pretty much just typing to keep my brain from shutting off, so if I begin to ramble or misspell words it's not because of a brain tumor, or at least not as far as I know. I worry about that sometimes, although not as much since two Thanksgivings ago Dad took me to the medical college and got me a CT scan, then we hung out in the doctor's lounge drinking bad coffee and looking at my brain in slices. No tumors, but I do have a larger sac of cerebrospinal fluid cushioning my brain stem than most people! It's still within the standard deviation and doesn't make a damn bit of difference, but it's nice to be above average.

the last week or so has been kind of a big ole fucked up blur, starting with the severe insomnia on Tuesday night, severe celebration from rockin' my political psychology final on Wednesday night, and a severe all-nighter "this is my last paper of the semester oh god let this be over" writeathon last night, meaning that over the last 72 hours I've spent about... five, maybe six hours asleep. And now I'm waiting around in the library drinking coffee like I was in Nightmare on Elm Street because I stupidly agreed to squeeze in one more custodial shift today from 3:30 to 8. I honestly have no idea what I was thinking. Given my continuous torrid love affair with procrastination, the possibility (otherwise known as "the certainty") that I would pull an all-nighter really should've entered into that equation. Oh well, live and don't learn. However, thanks to the legally-prescribed magic of a 30mg Adderall XR taken about 10 hours ago, I am currently as energetic and erudite as a zombie on meth!

anyway, here's what I wanted to share in the first place before I wrote all that nonsense. One song. Two music videos. It's a song that gets stuck in my head a lot when I'm sleep deprived.

this one's the official video that they won't let me embed for some reason. If you're already putting your shit on youtube for people to watch for free, why bother limiting its ability to spread? Anyway, I just straight-up love the way this is filmed - every close-up looks like it's pulled out of this amazing and delightfully surreal Spanish movie I watched in my Opposing Cinema class freshman year. What was it called? The Glass Beehive or something like that? It definitely involved bees. It's one of those movies where if you're not paying close attention none of the actions of the characters seem to connect with anything else, but it had the best long shots of people's faces. You honestly don't even need subtitles, the dialogue is sparse and relatively meaningless, because the faces tell the whole story.

the other one I came across while clicking through political blogs, literally right afterI started humming the song to myself. It was all sorts of weird. I really like this style of amateur videos, even if this one feels a little too much like an overly cute Apple commercial. I can't really see it catching on beyond just illustrating songs or demonstrating the capabilities of Google Wave, though.

time to getmore coffee.

ain't there nothing I can take to relieve this bellyache?

I FREAKING CALLED IT!

I'm trying not to brag here, but I've been saying for MONTHS that the polling on health care reform has been absolutely fucked. The standard question has always been some variation on "Do you approve of the health care reform plan currently being considered in Congress?", and the results of these polls are always, always, ALWAYS below 50%, sometimes even below 40%, numbers that the conservative portion of the media have been repeating ad nauseum. It's always "The Obama administration is shoving this down our throats" or "America doesn't want this" or "Government takeover of health care is being rejected by the American people."

However, they're missing a large portion of the story; namely, that I don't approve of the health care reform plan currently being considering in Congress. Why?

• It's not single-payer.
• It perpetuates the expensive and inefficient system of employer-provided insurance.
• The public option in the House bill is completely weaksauce. Not only is it opt-out, it's not tied to Medicare rates and would only cover a small portion of the uninsured. Everything that makes the public option a good idea has been stripped out because it's not powerful enough to provide real competition and drive down costs.
• Despite there not being an affordable public alternative, there's still an individual mandate.
• The Stupak amendment, barring abortion services from any plans that receive any federal funds, arbitrarily forcing the entire cost of a legal medical procedure onto women who need federal subsidies and therefore are least able to afford abortions. Unless they buy separate abortion insurance. But who the hell plans on getting an abortion?

So yeah, I don't approve of the legislation, but in the polling my opinion is lumped in with all the dumbasses who think Obama wants to kill Grandma and ration care just for the hell of it. I'd still rather have the legislation than not have it - the Senate version has some surprisingly good cost-containment measures, Medicare will have a lot of waste stripped from it, the deficit-reduction is nice and in general it's pushing us in the right direction. And I feel like a lot of liberals/progressives must feel the same way, something that is not reflected in a overly simple yes/no poll.

Until now. Once again, FiveThirtyEight proves itself to be an extremely valuable resource:

Ipsos...did something that no other pollster has done. They asked the people who opposed the bill why they opposed it: because they are opposed to health care reform and thought the bill went too far? Or because they support health care reform but thought the bill didn't go far enough?

It turns out that a significant minority of about 25 percent of the people who opposed the plan -- or about 12 of the overall sample -- did so from the left; they thought the plan didn't go far enough.

Ipsos also asked a parallel question of people who supported the plan: did any of them support the plan because they oppose health care reform and thought that the plan was sufficiently watered-down so as to "keep health care reform from happening"? A small number of people picked this response: about 10 percent of those in favor of the plan, or 3 percent of the entire sample.

One way to look at this: 43 percent of people favor health care reform, whereas 38 percent oppose it (20 percent are undecided). But the actual plan under consideration gets numbers that are more or less the reverse of that -- 34 percent in favor, 46 percent opposed -- because a significant number of people think the plan doesn't go far enough.

This development really needs to become part of the broader health care discussion. Tell your friends.

oh yes we do

I love you, Wonkette, and I swear I felt that way even before I found out you were founded by the extremely hot Ana Marie Cox:

It’s amazing how efficiently Republicans get their shit together when there’s an opportunity on the horizon to act like jackasses. But hey, that’s their prerogative! TO ENSURE THE DEBATE IS THOROUGH BEFORE THEY DECIDE THEIR VOTES.

Good luck, Harry Reid! Yeesh. Too bad the Democrats can’t bring Lyndon Johnson back from the grave to guest-spot as Majority Leader for a few months. He’d somehow hear that Republicans were planning to pull this crap weeks before they had even thought of it or knew they could, then appear in their dreams, slap each of ‘em on the back, grin, and threaten to publish obscene Polaroids he’d obtained of them fornicating with Negro waiters in their fraternity houses, which is maybe illegal.

God, it's like if The Daily Show had a blog. And was founded by a foxy and insightful redheaded political analyst.

One day, I will work there.