Don't Fear My Darling the Lion

New York Times Online:

White House Offers Grim Outlook for Medicare

I'll just tell you right now I can't read this article because I will suffer an aneurysm. God damn it, I cannot think rationally about depriving Americans of access to what little health care they have -

Okay, I read it and only went a little cross-eyed. Here's the howling mad part:

President Bush set forth his vision for Medicare in February, in a budget that proposed savings of more than $180 billion in the next five years. The House and the Senate rejected those proposals in budget blueprints adopted earlier this month.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the reports reflected policy decisions made by Mr. Bush early in his administration. The president inherited a budget surplus, but, rather than using it to shore up Social Security and Medicare, she said, he squandered much of it on “tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.”

Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the senior Republican on the Budget Committee, said the reports showed that the looming crisis in entitlement programs “is not a phony issue, as some Democrats have stated, but a very real problem that is on our doorstep.”

The administration has lied to us so often it now sends someone out to say, "We're not lying"? If you're lying, and you say you're not lying, YOU'RE STILL LYING. I believe this is another effort to turn the fiscal clock back to the heyday of the robber baron, and I'm quite sure about 67% of Americans agree. Don't fuck with old people!

The lighting fixture that started our quest for color that honored Pete's late mother's taste in furniture.

In other Stuff You Won't Believe, Stop & Shop corporate headquarters has not responded to my email this time to find out if I'm a real human and actually talk like this, but the local store's manager called me at work. We talked about recycled stuff and healthier products and he tried to convince me that he was doing the best he could. Chitter chatter chitter chatter later, I asked him straight out, "Why did you call me? You're not going to convince me to buy Bounty and shut up." He actually tried telling me that all his product options were set at corporate and recycled products weren't available. I said, "The Stop & Shop across the river has an entire recycled and healthy products ghetto, which is bullshit because when customers are in the paper products aisle they can't see what their real options are."

He said, "They have that?"

I said, "Maybe you'd better go look and compare notes. Your store is in trouble when I can tell you what you can order and you don't know."

DING! Thus ends Round 2. I may have taken that one but anyone could still lose.