Shut the Fuck Up Hippie, Vol. 1: Corn Subsidies

With budget cuts a hot topic these days, I hear a lot of liberals complaining about the federal government’s farm subsidies, particularly subsidies given to corn farmers to make biofuels like ethanol. They say that farm subsidies function as a form of welfare for an extremely wealthy segment of the population, and that if we’re going to invest federal money in alternative energy sources, it should be something more efficient and progressive than ethanol. I get it. I see where you’re coming from, and I’ll admit that your premise kind of makes sense. On the other hand, why do you want to mess with farmers?

Seriously, is there any group of people who cause fewer problems than farmers? When was the last time you read a story about a robbery or an assault that ended with, “police are seeking a farmer for questioning,” or “the victim described the suspect as a farmer of average height wearing a black hoodie?” Farmers also pay a ton of money in taxes. When things are good, they can make millions. When things are bad, the government pays them enough so it evens out. Yeah, that’s not particularly efficient, but if farmers never cause any problems, isit such a bad thing to reward them for it?

[RIGHT- This guy has the idea, saving the environment, one drag race at a time.]

Nothing costs the government more than healthcare, and farmers don’t cost the government a dime in healthcare expenditures. In fact, farmers don’t even get medical attention when they actually need it. A farmer is likely to cut off his finger in a tractor in the morning, then put it on ice until he has time to deal with it at the end of the day. Even then, instead of going to the emergency room, he’ll just lash it back on with some twine and duct tape, and never complain about it. It is not worth messing with these people; it will not end well.

Plus, it’s not like farmers are selfishly hoarding all of the country’s resources and not giving anything back. I would be willing to bet that farmers serve in the military at a higher rate than any other portion of the population. Think about it, every time you’ve ever talked to someone who was in a war, or seen a war documentary on TV, they have started every war story with “a guy I served next to in the trenches was just a regular old farm boy from Mississippi.” Or Iowa. Or Missouri. But not California because all they grow there is bottles of wine to drink at their nipple-rubbing parties. Think about that. Everyone who has ever been to war served next to somebody from a farm. How many people do you know who are farmers? Unless you are reading this on a dial-up connection, you can probably count the number on your limbs, which means less than five, unless you are deformed. Say you know 400 people. That means about one out of every 100 people you know is a farmer. But if you’re in the army, one out of every TWO people you know is a farmer! And maybe the guys on both sides were farmers! Do the math people: farmers are 50 times more likely to serve in the military. Giving them subsidies is a small price to pay for that patriotic allegiance.

Penn Jillete was complaining about corn subsidies. That obese fucker needs to shut his gaping asshole of a mouth before another piece of shit squirts out. His mouth needs to clamp shut as a last minute intervention to save his heart from another Orville Redenbacher butter lover’s blitzkrieg or to prevent him from embarrassing himself by reminding us that magicians don’t get to have opinions. I don’t care. Either way. As long as he’s as silent as his mute boyfriend Teller, it’s really six of one and a half dozen of the other.

Maybe the worst part about the people who complain about biofuels is that they think they have to live the lifestyle and they buy a Vespa. Now every time I’m stopped at a traffic light, some bitch on a pink moped with a matching pastel helmet is four inches from my bumper and I can’t pick my nose because she could reach out and slap my hand away since she’s so close to my car. What are you trying to prove on that piece of trash vehicle? You top out at about 30 MPH, which means you can never go more than eight blocks from home, so good luck living your cosmopolitan lifestyle when you’re trapped in one square mile. And I don’t care if you get 435 kilometers to the litre, which you say to show everyone that you like soccer and crepes. You can also get pretty good mileage by walking, but that’s also slow and inconvenient, so we invented cars. Stop trying to drag me back in time.

I am not trying to say that ethanol is a cure-all for energy problems. I’m not even saying it’s a good thing, but it’s not worth fighting about. Think of it this way: imagine that there are three friends together at a bar. One is an alcoholic prone to drunken rampages, one is a straight-edge ninny, and the other one is a normal guy. The lush is trying to get everyone to do tequila shots with him at 7 PM, and the normal guy sees the writing on the wall and tries to convince him to stick to beer for the night. Everything is going great until the ninny starts rattling off stupid stats like, “you know, 70% of all DUIs come from people who had only been drinking beer.” Now the drunk guy is getting a look in his eye because he thinks he’s going to get to start drinking tequila again. The normal guy sees the problem emerging and nudges the ninny saying something like “can you shut up for a minute? I’m trying to keep him from getting incredibly wasted and starting a fight!” But now it’s too late and the guy has a double shot of Patron in his gut and he’s yelling at some Puerto Rican guys to go back to Mexico, all because the whiny guy couldn’t keep his damn mouth shut. That is like our situation with ethanol. No, it’s not perfect, and it could still get our friend the gas guzzler incredibly fucked up, but it’s better than what we have now, and maybe it can get us moving in the right direction. So for that, I say Shut the Fuck Up, Hippie.

Congress Passes Sweeping Health Care Reform

By Jack DeLuca, OMG Teh Newz!!!11 White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON- After seemingly interminable debate and months of backroom horse trading, Congressional Democrats and Republicans finally reached a consensus on health care reform yesterday. President Obama is set to sign the bill, which was sent back and forth between various committees a near record number of times, at a rose garden ceremony tomorrow.

Gone from the bill is the ballyhooed public option that would put a government run health insurance plan up against private insurers in the open market. Stringent regulation and oversight of insurance premiums and healthcare costs is also absent from the bill’s final draft, as those provisions proved too contentious for any final consensus. In their place is a regulatory scheme for 'non-profit, private, third party co-insurance cooperatives,' which do not currently exist. In fact, the only large scale change in the bill’s final iteration is a ban on public funding for hospitals and clinics that perform abortions.

“We faced so much uncertainty, so much confusion over the past several months,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D- Cal), “We eventually started to believe that it was more important to pass some kind of legislation, no matter how weak the language, reform, and, enforcement mechanism may be.” Indeed, the final draft of the health care legislation that made it through the bicameral conference committee was only 4 pages long, and two of those pages were intentionally left blank. Several senators were overheard at the final vote discussing the fact that this bill was the first piece of legislation any of them had read cover to cover since Reagan was in office.

“Candidate Obama promised change, but not even he could have anticipated the scale of the paradigmatic shift that President Obama has delivered,” said White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel this week on Face the Nation. In the past, the vast majority of presidents have felt the need to speak out against problems, push for legislation, propose meaningful reform- President Obama has moved beyond all of that.”

Emmanuel went on to explain that the President’s approach to the health care debate is part of a larger policy strategy that has shaped his entire administration. “Sure, policy wonks will praise Obama for not offering any legislation to Congress and letting both houses bicker endlessly over the details before eventually arriving at a compromise that offends no one and runs no risk of failure. When you look back, though, you will notice that President Obama has successfully diffused every issue without making so much as a ripple. When the economy started slumping, instead of offering a comprehensive bailout package to stimulate growth in lagging sectors, he just gave a blank check to some bankers and let them do whatever they wanted. We weathered the storm, let the economy improve on its own, and then claimed that our calm and measured response was the appropriate course of action. The strategy works in foreign policy as well- President Obama’s big change in Afghanistan was to keep doing the exact same thing, but with some artful wording, he was able to parlay that ‘plan’ into a Nobel Peace Prize. The approach of acting through inaction is perfect because we can claim success for everything that goes right, then blame the previous administration when something goes wrong. Look at Iran; they’re still enriching uranium, and we say that it’s because we haven’t engaged them enough. Nobody even knows what that means, so we can take credit if the situation improves and continue shifting the blame if it doesn’t.”

The bill has received the sort of bipartisan support not seen on the Beltway in decades. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D- Nev) did not try to hide his excitement at the press conference held to announce the passage of the bill. “From Roosevelt to Johnson to Clinton, democrats have tried to pass a bill called ‘Health Care Reform.’ But only through my visionary leadership and my cunning idea to include no actual health care reform in the bill of the same name was our great country actually able to achieve the goal. So suck on that, bitches. Now can somebody please give me some money? Everybody finally realized that I’m a fraud, and I’m going to need to pull a Steinbrenner and spend my opponent into submission if I want to get re-elected.”

[Left- The solid form of Santorum poses for his family's 2009 Christmas card.]

On the other side of the aisle, prominent republicans exhibited similar enthusiasm. Former Senator Rick Santorum, who is busy in preparation for a 2012 presidential campaign, said that the bill has made him question his assumptions about the way democrats do business. “When I was in the Senate, we had republican control, and the democrats were always trying to block what we were doing. I thought it was because they were socialists, but I was wrong. It turns out they just didn’t want to do anything. Health care reform that does nothing but ban abortion? That’s a plan that Rick Santorum can get behind,” the candidate told a crowd of confused gay men at an adult bookstore in Boston. The crowd mistakenly gathered in response to a “See Santorum live on stage” flier outside a nightclub and proceeded to sit through one of the most awkward hours since they came out to their grandparents.

“With leadership like that, maybe I will run for president as a democrat instead! My former Pennsylvania colleague Arlen Specter switched last year, and I’m at least as much of an opportunistic douchebag as him!” Santorum added before lighting a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. on fire and goose stepping off of the stage.

With the heath care legislation in the books, the White House has started to prepare for inaction on several new fronts. Next up on the docket is same-sex marriage legislation that is heavy enough in legal doublespeak that it will confuse everyone into no longer talking about the issue.

You’re missing the point; we don’t want poor people to have health insurance

By A rich guy

The debate about health care reform goes all the way back to the Truman Administration, and Barack Obama has recently received praise for bridging the gap between liberals and conservatives through the introduction of a plan that would put the government into the health insurance industry as a competitor with private insurers that often operate as local monopolies. The problem with Obama’s so-called “compromise” is that it misses the point- opponents of universal health care do not really care about the distinctions between a single-payer system and a government-participant system; we just don’t want poor people to have access to health care. Think about it: if poor people have health insurance, they will live longer and put more of a drain on the system that I support.

What’s worse is that the health care system would have to support even more people than it already does. I went to the emergency room with a sprained ankle and had to wait amidst that sea of humanity for almost three hours before I could get in for an x-ray with the overworked ER nurse. In just that amount of time, two people came in with gunshot wounds and got to go to the front of the line. How is that fair? Would I get to go to the front of the line at a restaurant if I came in with a gunshot wound? I put in my time, and they cut in ahead of me because they are stupid enough to get shot. Imagine the indignity of waiting in line behind a poor person with a serious injury? That scenario alone should give pause to anyone considering universal health care a legitimate option.

It’s simple math, rich people are worth more to the world than poor people, so giving them the same health care options flies in the face of the American ideal. I make a six-figure salary every year, I pay my taxes, and I contribute to society. Poor people watch stock car racing and hunt. They don’t add anything to society; they just use the services that I pay for. I’m productive, damnit, I shouldn’t be subjected to funding any more welfare programs.

New studies by the Congressional Budget Office say that extending health care would offer universal coverage for a 4% cost increase over the next decade. I say that’s 4% too much to spend on the poor. It should go to more sub-prime mortgages for me to buy up and insurance on my yacht.

[LEFT- Poor people dreaming up new ways to hurt themselves and make me pay for it.]

I don’t care if it’s a single payer system, a public-private competition, or just an expansion of Medicare and Medicaid. As soon as I hear the words “universal healthcare,” I can’t help but thinking about 80-year old trailer trash grilling up chicken fingers, cluttering the newspaper’s editorial pages with letters to the editor whining about leash laws for their Dobermans, and wasting my FICA Social Security contribution on Busch Light and camouflage pants. Obama says he wants this waste-of-space to have access to the life-saving chemotherapy procedures he needs to cure his chaw-induced throat cancer. I say: why?

The New York Times recently described a health cooperative outside of Seattle as a model for the 21st century style of health care institution. I swear on my mother’s grave that I would rather die than have some tie-dyed burnout telling me to do acupuncture for my kidney stones and prescribing medicinal marijuana for my wife’s postpartum depression.

I remember years ago when my doctor would make house calls; those were the days. Back then, you never had to wait in line to see a doctor, and you never had to worry about poor people jumping in front of you because they started a firefight in the alley behind a bombed-out row house. Indeed, we’re all better off with the current system, at least those of us who matter.