CNN has live coverage of the media blackout in Iran. This basically amounts to showing Twitter screen caps and telling us the same shit we’ve already heard before every fifteen minutes or so. I feel compelled to stay tuned anyway, since I’d hate to miss anything exciting.

Among the words of wisdom from our intrepid anchor drones:

“…Ayatolla Khamenei, the Supreme Leader. Supreme Leader is pretty much what it sounds like.”

Thanks for clearing that up for us.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), it appears that the march scheduled for today isn’t going to happen, presumably because the Iranians don’t want to be shot down in the streets. Can’t blame them for that. So I’ll blame Obama instead; his refusal to flame the fires of violence freedom is just the most recent display of his failure, not only as President, but as a human being as well. If only there was some brave Republican who could step up, take control, and proudly demonstrate the bravery of being out of range that Dubya used to epitomize.

Oh, well, I reckon it’s better not to have the distraction today, since I have to partake of my favorite “happy homeowner” activity in the world wide today: plumbing.

Why is it I look forward to the weekends again?

Update: Tear gas, batons, and water cannons used to disperse the crowds, a blast at the Ayatollah Khomeini shrine. Looks like they’re going to hold Mousavi “accountable” for the “illegal” protests. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Oh well, back to the disgusting muck of my sink drain pipe….

Looks like the Senate Finance Committee has released an outline of their healthcare reform plan. Single-Payer? Yeah, right. No, it seems they plan on requiring insurance companies to offer plans covering between 65 and 90 percent of your medical expenses (depending on whether you go for the bronze, silver, gold or platinum plan). Supposedly, they’ll be forced to cover anybody, with no pre-existing conditions provisions and no “status rating” (I’m sure those parts of the bill will be quietly stricken in conference – if they even make it that far). There will be penalties for large companies not offering insurance, and “tax credits” as incentives to individuals and small businesses for purchasing insurance. Sounds like a good deal for the insurance companies, doesn’t it?

For the really poor people, there’s medicaid. If you’re a childless adult living at the poverty level, you’ll be able to opt in. Pregnant women and children get to be living at 133% of the poverty level. So, let’s see. Looking at the HHS site, the poverty income level for a single adult is $10,830. That’s about $200 a week – less that $1,000 a month. $5.20 an hour, if you’re working 40 hours a week. And that’s not even minimum wage.

There’s no mention of how much this is gonna cost, but their last plan (basically the same as this plan, except this one is reduced) was estimated by the CBO to cost $1.6 trillion, so I’d venture to guess that this one will be at least $1 trillion. That’s a trillion dollar gift to the insurance industry (no to mention the co-pays and whatnot) from us to continue the shitty system we have now, and to encourage them to keep denying claims and making sick people (and their families) even more miserable than they need to be. All so they can keep raking in huge profits.

Sounds like a great plan. Right up there with Medicare Part D. I agree with Bernie Sanders. If you’re not gonna do it right, then don’t fucking do it at all.

The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that Walter Cronkite is “gravely ill.” They don’t give any details, but he’s 92, so, well, it doesn’t sound too good. People around my age grew up getting the news from Walter.

He also did a Saturday show called “You Are There” – which started as a radio show – where they’d recreate historical events. Except they had CBS news reporters covering it. Always liked that show.

Anyway, I remember seeing Cronkite in an interview years ago, talking about his first “broadcasting” job , working for a bookie at a horse racing parlor (this being way before “Off Track Betting”). They’d get the wire reports from horse races around the country, and then he’d hang out in the back and “report” them “live” over a loudspeaker.

If you’re old enough, you probably got the news of JFK’s assassination from Walter Cronkite. You stayed up late one night in July, 1969, and watched humans walk on moon for the first time. And you heard “the most trusted man in America” tell you that the war in Vietnam was lost (effectively ending LBJ’s presidency).

Good luck to you Walter. If you can, try and stick around for a few more years. If not, may you pass easily. And do a remote report from the other side.

I guess we’ve all (and by “all,” I guess I mean me, Sue, and Sunshine Jim) seen Barack Obama nailing that pesky fly during a teevee interview by now. Well, so has PETA, and they are not amused. Because they “support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals,” they’re sending the president a “Humane Bug Catcher.” Setting aside the whole “insects aren’t animals” argument, I can’t disagree with that.

I don’t especially like killing flies (except for deer flies and black flies, but they’re generally asking for it) or other insects (well, except for mosquitoes, of course – again, if they weren’t fucking with me, I’d leave them alone, too; it does say something about me – and most people, I guess – that I feel justified in killing, just because a creature is annoying me), and happily trap and release them whenever possible. It’s just that they don’t seem to understand my benevolent intentions, and they often refuse to fly out the door when I open it for them.

So I thought maybe this bug catcher thing would be cool. Something you could leave out for an hour, and then all the bugs in the house would be in there noshing on some bait, and patiently waiting for you to set them free to finish out whatever remains of their 20 day lifespan. Then I went and looked at the thing.

The Katcha Bug ^™ Humane Bug Catcher is basically a stick with a box on the end of it. The directions for use say,

Simply place Katcha Bug over the bug and slowly slide its plastic trapdoor shut.
[…]
You’ll have no problem catching even large spiders with this handy gadget. Katcha Bug measures 9 inches in length, so you won’t have to get too close for comfort.

Uh, OK. That might work for flies that are already dead (or are really stupid; I once rode in the back of a van that was infested with huge, slow, and really stupid flies from Buffalo to Cleveland to see a Dead concert. These flies would more or less let you pick them up and pet them – or step on them. I think they were doing mushrooms. Oh, wait, that was me), but the average fly doesn’t typically just sit there while you “simply place” a box over it.

If they did, I wouldn’t need an $8 box mounted on a 9″ stick. As for spiders, a shoebox with a piece of paper works quite nicely. Except, why would I want to evict a spider in the first place? They catch the goddamn flies and eat ’em so I don’t have to (catch them, that is; I only eat them while riding a bike with my mouth open).

I wonder if PETA disapproves of spiders, too?

Well, the launch of space shuttle Endeavour was postponed due to another hydrogen leak this morning. Too bad, since I was looking forward to watching it go up on HDNET. It’s about as close as I’m ever likely to get to a launch. It’s kind of sad, really. When I was a kid, NASA was young and shiny and strong. Now that they’re getting on in years, the shine is gone, and they seem to have trouble getting it up.

One person who apparently doesn’t share NASAs problem is Nevada Senator John “Insane” Ensign, who was forced to admit to having an affair with a staffer who is the wife of another staffer. I see this as improvement for the GOP, scandalwise, since a typical Republican politician would have been forced to admit having an affair with the husband.

“I violated the vows of marriage. It’s absolutely the worst thing I’ve done in my life.”

Am I wrong to doubt that?

Want to work for free? Boy, has British Airways got a deal for you! The struggling airline (is that redundant?) sent a memo to its staffers, offering them the option of up to four weeks of unpaid leave. But, if they ask nicely, workers can opt to work for free instead. Hmm, let’s see. Tough choice there.

Speaking of Britain, I’ve avoided mentioning the whole kid flushing the puppy down the toilet thing, mostly since I can’t bear to think of it (let alone look at the pictures and/or video). The only saving grace is that the puppy is OK. I know the kid didn’t do it maliciously, but I think I’d flush him down the toilet, too, just to let him see what it’s like, and perhaps reinforce the idea that it wasn’t a good thing to do. Waterboarding him would also be an acceptable option.

We could be about to see some really interesting shit go down in Iran, according to Iran expert Reza Aslan.

There are very interesting things that are taking place right now. Some of my sources in Iran have told me that Ayatollah Rafsanjani, who is the head of the Assembly of Experts — the eighty-six member clerical body that decides who will be the next Supreme Leader, and is, by the way, the only group that is empowered to remove the Supreme Leader from power — that they have issued an emergency meeting in Qom.

Now, Anderson, I have to tell you, there’s only one reason for the Assembly of Experts to meet at this point, and that is to actually talk about what to do about Khamenei. So, this is what I’m saying, is that we’re talking about the very legitimacy, the very foundation of the Islamic Republic is up in the air right now. It’s hard to say what this is going to go.

Ironic, isnt’ it, that the US having a president who isn’t a blithering idiot spewing venomous hate speech threatening Iran’s government might actually have been the impetus for a (relatively) peaceful revolution overthrowing said government?

Have to get an early start today, since the van needs to go in and get inspected. Shouldn’t be much wrong with it – I kinda quit driving it when gas got up around $4 a gallon.

Looks like the citizens of Iran have forced a recount in their recent presidential election. Whether it’s just for show or will be legitimate, who knows. But you have to admire the Iranians having the guts to get out into the streets and face down riot squads to demand action. Especially if you happen to live in NY State, where political news can now be found in the entertainment section of the newspaper.

Some good (and rather minor, but we take what we can get) news in that they’ve decided they don’t need to split up my area code now. They thought we’d run out of numbers by 2010, but now say we’re good at least until 2013. Apparently nobody can afford to have a phone anymore. Even though my area code covers 21 counties with a population of slightly less that 1.5 million people, I’m not sure how we can really be close to using up all our numbers anyway.

You figure there are a possible 1,000 “exchanges” in a given area code (000 – 999). Assuming you don’t want numbers that start with 0 or 1, that’s 800 (there are currently 684). Then there are a potential for 10,000 numbers within any exchange (0000 – 9999). So that’s 800 * 10,000, or 8 million numbers. Even given that, in the US, cell phones have reached the saturation rate (that is, on average, everybody’s got one), you’d still think 8 million would be adequate. Assuming everybody’s got a cell phone and every household (at 2.6 people per household) has a landline, that’s about 2.1 million numbers, with another 6 million or so left over for businesses. And there aint many of them left these days. Though there are at least two businesses that I know of that have bought up (or otherwise acquired; not sure how it works) entire exchanges. In fact, SU has two of them.

There is, however some potential good news on the business front. I think I mentioned a while back that a company that makes transfer cases for SUVs was leaving the area after workers turned down a contract renegotiation. Since then, there were two subsequent votes after new ‘offers’ from the company. The offers were rejected by wide margins. The company had repeatedly lied to the workers in the past, and the new “deals” would have taken away negotiated severance packages (with pretty decent education and training bonuses) while still not guaranteeing the company wouldn’t leave anyway. So the company wanted to string them along for a while, screw them out of their bonus packages, and then leave town anyway. Or, that’s what it sounded like to me, anyway (and apparently the workers, too).

Anyhow, now a wind generator manufacturer is looking at the plant. They say they can easily convert the machinery, and are interested in having pre-trained workers that already know how to use the equipment. It could means thousands of jobs, and I hope the clowns in Albany can do do something to make it happen, ‘cuz we need it around here.

Speaking of jobs, better get to mine.

Holy shit, halfway through June already. The snow will be flying before you know it. Things are a mess in Iran. You have to give them credit – people in this country barely seem to notice (or care) when our elections are stolen. Here in NYS, we no longer have a State government, which has been more or less shut down. They don’t actually seem to be in session all that much anyway, so we’ve barely noticed. As long as I keep getting paid, I guess I don’t really care. Oh well, time for work, I guess.

This is gonna have to be a quickie. Press the Meat has Joe Biden and a fair and balanced roundtable of Republican Mike Murphy and Republican Joe Scarborough.

At Faze the Nation it’s Dick Durbin and Chinless Mitch McConnell.

Fux News Sunday has Chris Dodd and Charles Grassley and the US Chamber of Commerce CEO, whose name I can’t remember. And some fuxheads.

At the Goebbels network, George Snufalufagus has Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Mitt and the magic underpants Romney. Plus a roundtable with George :jerk: Will, Donna Brazile, National Journal’s Ron Brownstein and WSJ lackey Kimberley Strassel.

Mostly, though, it’s the season premiere of True Blood on HBO. Mmmm. Sookie.

It sounds like the Iranians put Katherine Harris (or Ken Blackwell) in charge of their presidential election. Either that, or they’re using electronic voting. Mirhossein Mousavi says he definitely won, but Iran State media has declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner. Somehow I don’t think Mousavi will cave in as quickly as John Kerry did. Unless Ahmadinejad has him shot or something. Hey, I know. Maybe the CIA should stage a coup and overthrow the Iranian government. I mean, what could go wrong with that?

Yesterday, the UN Security Council voted to tighten sanctions on North Korea. In a somewhat predictable response, North Korea says it will now weaponize its plutonium. You know, China really needs to step in and deal with li’l Kim. It would be a very bad thing indeed if Obama felt pressured to respond militarily to all this, and we don’t have an Asian version of Israel to do the dirty work. The North Korean people are really getting the shit end of the stick here, and I’m not sure how you “sanction” a country whose government doesn’t seem to care if its citizens starve to death while shivering in the dark. I mean, at least it was warm in New Orleans.

Well, now I know why our lawmakers are so up in arms over the prospect of putting “terrorists” in US prisons. They’re afraid they’ll start throwing bar mitzvahs, like the one Tuvia Stern threw for his son down in “The Tombs” in NYC. Stern was convicted of first-degree grand larceny, but that didn’t stop him from throwing a celebration that included live music, catered Kosher food, and some 60 guests. I wonder if they used “the chair” for the chair dance?

I dunno, the politicians seem to be afraid that the terrorists would convert the other inmates into radical Islamic fundamentalism. Sound more like the terrorists need to worry about being converted to Judaism.

Apparently the former Miss California – Carrie Whatshername – went on Larry King to “set the record straight.” Really, seriously now. Isn’t this chick’s 15 minutes more than up? Why does she keep getting so much face time on the teevee? Are we really that hard up for bleach blonds with fake tits that they have to keep dragging this dimwit out? Go find one with a brain.

Or at least one with a porn video on the Internet.

After the delay back in February, today’s the day that the analog teevee signals get shut off. Whether that’s a good thing or not doesn’t really matter. Much like healthcare reform, nobody cares what we the people think about it. One interesting aspect here is that one of our lo-cal teevee stations has to shut down its digital OTA signal to make repairs to the transmitter, yet is still required to kill the analog signal today. So they’ll be off the air (to those w/o cable or satellite) until Sunday. One would think they’d have fixed their transmitter, oh, I dunno, last week maybe, but one would be wrong.

Big day for Republicans in NYS politics yesterday, as they assumed control of the NYS Senate. Sort of. First, they couldn’t get into the Senate chamber, and somebody had to go find a key. They finally got in and began the session, but they couldn’t get any legislative work done, because the bills are kept in some sort of an “official” desk, and that desk – you may have already guessed – was locked. And the Democrats, apparently, are the ones with the key.

Speaking of Senate Democrats, they decided to boycott the proceedings, calling them illegal. So, absent them, the Republicans needed all of their members to be present, plus both of the Democrat traitors, in order to form a quorum.

At some point while Republicans were looking for the key to the desk, one of the traitors – Hiram Monserrate, the girlfriend slasher – decided to split (he publicly said it was to go find other Democrats to join him, but it’s starting to look like he’s a triple-crosser, and wants to cut a deal. As somebody once said, “an honest politician is one who stays bought,” and this guy is far from honest).

So, absent both a quorum and a locksmith, the Republicans turned out the lights and left with their tails (and little more) between their legs.

It’s balloon festival weekend here, so the skies will be filled with hot air balloons (weather permitting). I used to go every year, back in my youth, but now it just means the dogs are SOL for a few days, since it’s held at the same place where we go for walkies. They will not be happy about this.

Oh well, the Today Show is touting both Sarah Palin and the former Miss California with the fake boobs whose name I’m pleased to say I don’t remember (Carrie something, I think). Wow, both of them on the same show. Makes me glad I’ve gotta go to work. I’m outta here.

So I was in the car yesterday, and I heard a commercial for some kinda stuff that’s supposed to make you smarter. Can’t recall what it was (which probably means I need some), but they finished off the ad with something like, “so, if you want to read 1,000 times faster, or read 10 books in the time it takes most people to read just one…” And I thought to myself, hey, wait a minute. If I’m gonna read 1,000 times faster than I do now, but only 10 times faster than “most people,” aren’t you kind of assuming that I read, like, 100 times slower than most people to start with? I’m no Evelyn Wood, but I don’t read that slow.

Three cheers for the AMA, who let Congress know they’re opposing any sort of public insurance. It’s not too surprising, since the AMA coined the term “socialized medicine” back when they had Ronnie Reagan shilling for them. And people wonder why I don’t like doctors.

Speaking of public heathcare, Dana Milbank says yesterdays House subcommittee hearings were just a way to let Single Payer advocates blow off some steam. Kind of like a pat on the head of a likable but stupid child. “There, there, dear. You go ahead and cry.” Conventional wisdom, of course, is that single payer hasn’t a chance of being enacted and everybody knows it, but they need to do something to keep the peasants from revolting. Just because “We the People” want it doesn’t mean it has a prayer of passing.

Oh well.