Things Republicans Hate (A Partial List)

Facebook is basically a useless time-sucker, but--alas--I still take a peek semi-regularly. You see a lot of useless shit on the Intertubes...

I saw this today from a "friend" I've never met; it's "Things Republicans Hate":

No. 61: Gun Control
No. 60: Jeopardy!
No. 59: Men Who Do Not Play Sports
No. 58: Animal Rights
No. 57: Political Correctness
No. 56: Frasier
No. 55: That T-Shirt
No. 54: Tofu
No. 53: Baristas
No. 52: Matisyahu
No. 51: The WNBA
No. 50: Fashion
No. 49: Ferrets
No. 48: Silicon Valley
No. 47: Scrabble
No. 46: Africa
No. 45: The Truth
No. 44: Bob Dylan
No. 43: Sasha and Malia Obama
No. 42: Tossed Salad
No. 41: Peace
No. 40: NPR
No. 39: Grey Poupon
No. 38: Al Gore
No. 37: Cyclists
No. 36: Change
No. 35: Recycling
No. 34: Hanukkah
No. 33: Soul Patches
No. 32: The Kindle
No. 31: The Metric System
No. 30: The Red Dot of Terror
No. 29: Archaeology
No. 28: Barney Frank
No. 27: Canada
No. 26: Advanced Degrees
No. 25: Abstract Art
No. 24: Philanthropy
No. 23: Elton John
No. 22: Critically Acclaimed Films
No. 21: Rachel Maddow
No. 20: Imported Beers
No. 19: Actual Black People
No. 18: Urban Outfitters
No. 17: Geography
No. 16: Unsuccessful Offshore Drilling
No. 15: Chopsticks
No. 14: Women with Small Breasts
No. 13: Arbor Day
No. 12: Pokemon
No. 11: Vegans
No. 10: Soccer
No. 9: Michael Moore
No. 8: Losing
No. 7: Outer Space
No. 6: Foreigners (Not Foreigner)
No. 5: British Humor
No. 4: Broadway
No. 3: Volvos
No. 2: Harry Potter
No. 1: Evolution

My own list is much shorter:

No. 2: Facebook

No. 1: Republicans

"Another Kick In The Gut": Palin Injured By Cartoon Character.

The incessantly-aggrieved Sarah Palin is bitching on Facebook (again), this time about a cartoon she didn't like.

H/T: HuffPo for this item they linked to from Palingates:

My name is Andrea Fay Friedman. I was born with Down syndrome. I played the role of Ellen on the "Extra Large Medium" episode of Family Guy that was broadcast on Valentine's day. Although they gave me red hair on the show, I am really a blonde. I also wore a red wig for my role in " Smudge" but I was a blonde in "Life Goes On". I guess former Governor Palin does not have a sense of humor. I thought the line "I am the daughter of the former governor of Alaska" was very funny. I think the word is "sarcasm".

In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life. My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.

Poor l'il Sarah. So many injustices, and just one Facebook page...

Doesn't Facebook Know I Hate Long Goodbyes?

UPDATED below...

(They know everything else about me...)

I have a Facebook page, but I've largely lost interest in it. Reading the latest Tourette's-like comments on the social networking site is the online equivalent of being trapped in an elevator with Chatty Cathy. My interest in playing Mafia Wars is non-existent. I don't keyboard-flirt. And I surely dread the possibility of reconnecting with some long-lost high school dude who sold me bad Mexican weed in the 1970s.
I read something in the Los Angeles Times this morning that piqued my interest. It's about a site called Seppukoo, which was built to allow a snarky way to exit Facebook while alerting your online "friends" that you have done so. Facebook's recent tweaking of their privacy settings actually results in less privacy, and it should be remembered that Facebook is not remotely a "community." Besides, I already have this blog, and if I want to shoot the shit with friends, I'll go old school and pick up the phone. Hell, e-mail is old school now, too.
So, I logged on to Seppukoo in an attempt to exit Facebook in a blaze of sarcastic glory. But guess what? Facebook's fascist overlords have jammed the site, and it's currently inoperable.
Here's the message I received when I tried to post that on Facebook:


I'll keep trying, though; something about that blaze of sarcastic glory appeals to the smart-ass in me...

(UPDATE): Responding to pissed-off users like, well, me, Facebook has changed their privacy settings again.

(Maybe I'll hang around. But don't invite me to play Mafia Wars anymore, OK?)

Sarah Palin Quit Her Job So Could Watch TV & Play On Facebook All Day.

Stupid is as stupid does, huh?

Sarah Palin Spends Too Much Time On Facebook.

Sarah Palin really needs a hobby. Wasn't everybody (outside of Alaska) better off when she had a job?

The unemployed former governor is back with another Facebook note concerning health care reform, and it reads like a first-draft response to yet another imagined slight.

Concerning the 'Death Panels' finds Palin attempting to elevate herself to President Obama's level by claiming he was directly responding to her at the New Hampshire town hall meeting, although her name never came up:

Yesterday President Obama responded to my statement that Democratic health care proposals would lead to rationed care; that the sick, the elderly, and the disabled would suffer the most under such rationing; and that under such a system these “unproductive” members of society could face the prospect of government bureaucrats determining whether they deserve health care.

Here is what Obama said:

“Let me just be specific about some things that I’ve been hearing lately that we just need to dispose of here. The rumor that’s been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for death panels that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we’ve decided that we don’t, it’s too expensive to let her live anymore....It turns out that I guess this arose out of a provision in one of the House bills that allowed Medicare to reimburse people for consultations about end-of-life care, setting up living wills, the availability of hospice, etc. So the intention of the members of Congress was to give people more information so that they could handle issues of end-of-life care when they’re ready on their own terms. It wasn’t forcing anybody to do anything.”

Actually, Obama cleverly framed the bogus "death panels" fantasy put forth by Palin within the larger context of what those ignorant words have spawned: the hysterical, viral misinformation campaign to which actual lawmakers such as Chuck Grassley are now clinging. The former small-state governor who quit mid-term was used as a prop to mock; a tool to present the main story line.

Palin ends her rambling diatribe thusly:

President Obama can try to gloss over the effects of government authorized end-of-life consultations, but the views of one of his top health care advisors are clear enough. It’s all just more evidence that the Democratic legislative proposals will lead to health care rationing, and more evidence that the top-down plans of government bureaucrats will never result in real health care reform.

What would Sarah Palin know about "real health care reform?" The people in the state she once so poorly governed might like to know, too.

From the Anchorage Daily News:

State programs intended to help disabled and elderly Alaskans with daily life -- taking a bath, eating dinner, getting to the bathroom -- are so poorly managed, the state cannot assure the health and well-being of the people they are supposed to serve, a new federal review found.

The situation is so bad the federal government has forbidden the state to sign up new people until the state makes necessary improvements.

No other state in the nation is under such a moratorium, according to a spokeswoman for the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

In the meantime, frail and vulnerable Alaskans who desperately need the help are struggling. One elderly woman is stuck in a nursing home, for lack of care at home. Another woman, suffering from chronic pain and fatigue, said she's so weak, she often can't even pop dinner into the microwave.

The moratorium is expected to last four or five months. State officials estimate about 1,000 Alaskans will be affected.

A particularly alarming finding concerns deaths of adults in the programs. In one 2 1/2 year stretch, 227 adults already getting services died while waiting for a nurse to reassess their needs. Another 27 died waiting for their initial assessment, to see if they qualified for help.

Sarah Palin lecturing anybody on health care reform is about as credible as would be a Sarah Palin handbook entitled, "Task Completion: Getting the Job Done."

(Cross-posted on Daily Kos.)

"Are You F***ing Kidding Me?"

H/T to Gawker for the heads-up on this l'il ditty from Kate Miller-Heidke about Facebook and those long-lost friends you may want to see stay, you know, lost...

Twitter Goes Dark; World Temporarily Spared Useless Inanities.

From the AP:

A hacker attack Thursday shut down the fast-growing messaging service Twitter, and Facebook also said it was looking into possible site problems.

Twitter said in its status blog Thursday that it was "defending against a denial-of-service attack," in which hackers command scores of computers to a single site at the same time, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through.

For Twitter users, the outage meant no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter is down.

The Twitter outage began at about 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT), said Ken Godskind, chief strategy officer at Web performance monitoring company AlertSite.

The site still had lingering access problems midday (local time), though both Twitter and Facebook seemed to be functioning at least intermittently, giving cubicle-bound social media addicts a collective sigh of relief.

On a related note, those same social media addicts had absolutely no idea how to interact with their co-workers, as they'd never actually spoken to them before.

The Next Time You're In The E.R., Say "Hi" To Your Facebook Friends.

If you are a Facebook user, you probably recognize that poll question. The current results on that social networking tool don't match what some actual polls show, but--hey!--it's Facebook! You know, that giant time-sucker on which you play Mafia Wars and flirt with people you hope to someday see naked.

I thought I'd check out some of the anti-government option comments and included them here, typos--and biases--intact:

Derek: At least Obama is almost black though. I remember Dr King say, "I have a dream". Your almost there!!

Jacqueline: NOOOOO! Anyone actually LIKE going to DMV or any other government-run, paper-pushing, impersonal agency where the employees are not there to produce or improve, but just be there?!?

Allison: "DESERVES!!??? no. everyone does not deserve it. its a privillage.

Sally: All people need health care but NOT OBAMACARE.

Dana: Obama=no good

Robby: HELL NO this country is all ready screw what now?

Jeff: Maybe he will call another police officer an stupid for doing his job... That seems to be the right thing to do.

Carrie: Caroline you can when Government takes over the decision for you to get or not to get medical help. Be ready because it's going to happen if they take over.

Adrienne: You think your health insurance sucks now....wait until the Government has control!!!!!!!

Paula: no this is not a communist country but it is headed that way

Denise: Government can't seem to run anything

Julia: IMPEACH OBAMA, BIDEN, PELOSI, & REED! NOW!

Jeff: Sorry the govenment is f***king up!!!

Jason: There is a reason why those in the rest of the world comes to America for treatment of cronic health issues. We have the best medical treatment in the world! Nobody in this country is denied access when they need it. You want to fix our system? Get rid of the ambulance chasing lawyers!

Marcia: I hope it fails, why would I want the goverment to take care of me? Too much government and lack of our freedoms. They can't manage medicare I don't want them managing my care! I don't like anything Obama is doing to this country!

Darrell: Do like me, I had no health care for many years. I went to college, graduated, and its amazing I have a great job with INSURANCE. I am back in school at 46 years old! Get over it, educate yourself, there is NOTHING DUE ANYONE!

Ron: I believe the current administration is secretly shredding our constitutiona nd bill of rights every night . This is not the Country I grew up in and certainly not the ones our founding fathers fought and died for

Eagle: why do i need to do that? i can just walk into one of out ER's. or i can schedule an appointment with my primary doctor two weeks from now.

Patrick: You don't have to have insurance to get health care, just go to the emergency room for free, compliments of overtaxed, hard working, tax paying american citizens.

Jessica: I vote HELL NO in government run healthcare! The next step we are going to need the government for is wiping our asses too because there are too many people sitting on their asses getting hemorrhoids while I pay for their healthcare! How about we spend more time focusing on preventive medicine and stopping the whole referral to different specialists while the whole time the consumer is paying for multiple unnecessary copays?I still believe the American people are smart individuals who do not need the GOVERNMENT holding their hand and telling them what to do in their healthcare decisions! According to our Founding Fathers, this is SUPPOSED to be a FREE COUNTRY!! "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime!"

Talk of our Founding Fathers and Chinese proverbs aside, perhaps Jessica is on to something: I mean, I'm sure we can all learn to perform emergency surgery on ourselves, right?

Your Facebook Status Is Over-Rated.

Facebook: Waterboard Sean Hannity For Charity--Join Now.

Join now.

As Sean Hannity himself says, "For charity...for the troop's families."

The Post Office Took My Picture Down; People Say They Haven't Seen Me In A While.

So I finally got on Facebook.