patrickumsted.com

[hattip: BoingBoing]

Everyone who goes to an ER without health insurance has to be paid for by the rest of us.  If you are against any health care reform, you should also be against the uninsured going to the ER with no way of paying for it.  So I thank you Ms. Marianne Stebbins for advising the uninsured to do whatever is in their power to increase my insurance premiums and health care costs while not providing any ideas whatsoever to lower the impact on our health care system of the uninsured.

Context–She is upset over Rep. Cao(R-LA) voting for Obamacare, or Pelosicare, or Hitlercare, or whatever the Teabaggers call it these days.

I don’t agree with a public option at this time.  Make COBRA coverage available and realistic. End the insurance companies’ ability to limit coverage based on pre-existing conditions.  Allow insurance companies to compete state to state with one another.  These ideas I can support and these ideas would increase coverage while encouraging competition in the marketplace.  However, just telling the uninsured to just go the the ER is the status quo and is unsustainable as our population and the number of uninsured grow.

P.S.- I also thank your pirate hat.  GAAAARRHHH!!!!!

[hattip: Washington Independent]

We Found Waldo

And by awesome I mean awesomely stuck in the 1990’s.

I realize that the last 18 years have been tough for 1980’s hair bands. Grunge comes along to rape and pillage your careers. But this Internet thing comes around to let you link up with your few remaining fans. So you come up with this:

In 1996, this is a state of the art band website.  While most of the Internet universe is still making their way out of Gopher, CompuServe, and Prodigy, Whitesnake moves past the AOL universe into something that would even make the most accomplished HTML nerd on Geocities stand up and take attention.

Once again, however, Whitesnake is overtaken by the inertia of history. The Internet moves on…Geocities dies, AOL tries to destroy TimeWarner, the advent of Flash, Java, The Google, and Facebook. What is a over-the-hill rock band to do? Sure, they would’ve liked to invest money into a new website, however, the casinos and tractor pulls they’ve been playing sporadically over the past decade just don’t pay the bills like sold out arenas once did. They are touring with Judas Priest this summer. Perhaps Rob Halford can give the guys a loan to get their website at least into this century.