Hammer Mill Days

What the hell, man. Are you sure this is the way to Neptune? I mean, I don't remember all of these asteroids. For chrissake, I feel like I'm flying through an eighties-vintage arcade video game. Oh, hi. Glad you decided to check in at this moment. Maybe you could help us with a little navigational problem we seem to be having. Our usually capable mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee seems to have gotten us a little off the beaten path between Saturn and Neptune. I think the explanation is relatively simple - Zenite snuff, helpfully provided by our perpetual sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn . As mentioned previously, Mitch is - while brilliant - not the best space craft pilot even when sober. With a nostril full of that hot stuff from the Small Magellanic Cloud, I doubt he could find his way to the zero-gravity can. Anyway, he appears to have followed the wrong lode star or something on that order, and we are now dodging some of the biggest, lumpiest, nastiest looking asteroids I...

I've heard reports today (Thursday) that the Obama administration is looking very seriously at pitching the "public option" component of their health care plan over the side, possibly to gain a couple of (or, more likely, just one) Republican vote(s) in the Senate - votes that would probably be superfluous without the public option anyway. At this moment, I'm hoping this was just a trial balloon put up by an increasingly pusillanimous White House, but my common sense tells me that's not the case. The public plan was the ten-day-old soup bone tossed to the left in exchange for their acquiescence to the administration's decision not to even discuss adopting a single payer system; so, of course, the triangulators we've put in charge of our government consider this expendable, just as they consider progressives a block of votes they can take for granted. Stupid move, if true. The public option is all that's left of meaningful health insurance reform. With...