Hammer Mill Days

Ever see that episode of Lost In Space when they're rushing to get the piece-of-shit Jupiter 2 spaceworthy before the planet they've been living on for an entire television season explodes beneath them? Yeah, well ... that's sort of where Big Green is right now. No, a stereotypical t.v. gold miner named Mister Nerim is not fracking the Cosmonium out of the living rock beneath us (at least, not yet), but it's nearly as bad. Our corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (also known as Hegephonic) has arranged for an interstellar tour to support the release of our most recent album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , which - while it hasn't done squat down here on earth - is selling briskly on Aldebaran, I hear. (Great music always finds its audience. And, well, ours does, too, if it travels far enough.) Of course, Hegemonic subcontracted the tour arrangements to some underworld figures, as they typically do. That has its upsides, like ... I do...

So the government's Affordable Care Act web site doesn't work. Does that surprise anyone? It's a big, honking, outsourced engineering project that has had the budget axe swinging over it for the past three years. It's been under constant threat of being defunded or declared unconstitutional, subjected to incessant political attack in Washington and around the country by a party dedicated to disabling it anyway that they can. The fact is, the most dysfunctional part of the Affordable Care Act is Medicaid expansion, not because it doesn't work but because half of the states in the union have refused to participate, even with 100% funding from the federal government. We hear so much about the Web site being a piece of shit (and rightfully so), and yet I don't see anyone on the right wringing their hands over the fact that something like 7 million people, the vast majority of whom are working poor, will have no access to health coverage simply because the governor...