A thousand points of blight

I can't suss out all the contributing factors to last night's rather surreal dreamscape, but I'll try.

- Giving David Tennant one of my chiropractic hugs, against which he tensed up as I reached his mid-upper back... maybe the article on thoracic spine mobility I read on T-Nation yesterday morning. Relax, Dave, it's going to fix you right up. Barrowman loved it. ;-)
- Two people sailing over the sunny desert landscape on flying couches (Nine/Ten's companion Rose Tyler on a very fancy floral patterned divan, and an unoccupied corduroy number)... no fucking idea. It was a mishmash of the sail barge landscape from Return of the Jedi, the Saturnalian sand-worm landscape from Beetlejuice, and the beginning of the last HhGttG book, where a sofa bobs along through improbability, distracting and subsequently carrying Arthur and Ford to contemporary-ish London.
- Helping _project_mayhem move to a new apartment in downtown New Orleans, which was a mishmash of Canal street there, and Canal street in lower Manhattan, where he was going to share space with two young women I know from, I believe, Denver, and "Jewish Dude," who was, in fact, a guy I'd gone to high school with, and with whom I shared a surprised and vigorous handshake, since we haven't seen each other in twenty years.... uhhh. NFI.
- Being pursued by slow-moving and slow-infecting zombies, with a dark-haired woman (possibly a teacher or other professional) and a tall guy with an unruly mop of black hair who was the janitor at her office. He got bitten first, and when he turned, he bit her before I could beat him to death with a baseball bat (because, dream physics, I couldn't get a good swing or strike a solid blow until it was too late, of course). She, in turn, made some kind of very poignant plea as she began to turn, to kill her before she did all the way, but I can't recall the two words she said.
- Following that, there was a fancy schmancy picnic in some kind of underground bunker among the survivors... like, fucking barbecued chicken and brie on toast points, gingham tablecloths, and everything. WHAT THE WHAT.
- I was in some kind of physical struggle that was intense enough to make me wake up when, straining against my sling, my bicep said "OW, YOU STUPID FUCKER, I'M NOT UP FOR DOING THAT YET."

So, uh, yeah. That's what my neural noise sounds and looks like these days.

Newts of the Day

In summary, Esquire pretty much sums up what I'd be saying about the obstructionist do-nothings in the House of Reprehensibles: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Shutdown_Blues

If there is an argument to be made against the half-assed solution that the ACA represents, it's that it's half-assed, and not a true single-payer program. Every other argument against it sounds like variations on the theme of "fuck the poor people," and that's not how I roll, nor a society in which I am proud to participate.

I have seen numerous arguments in several flavors of stupid this morning from people trying to denounce or cripple the ACA (it's illegal, it's Obama's fault the budget isn't being passed, death panels, ad foxium), and the only one with a modicum of traction was "It's got 14th Amendment (Commerce Clause) problems."

On the subject of the personal mandate, let's pry the lid off that:

Do you have to have car insurance, if your car is under lien? How about homeowner's insurance if you're still paying off your mortgage? Pretty much anywhere you live, you are required to carry insurance because some third party is owed money on something of value in your possession... that is, yes, required by the states (so, in the States' Rights argument (which I was refuting, becase a Bookface commenter was drawing parallels to the ACA and the grounds for the Civil War, because hyperbole sometimes gives Hitler the day off), you would be OK with the states requiring this, but not the central government?). Those insurance requirements aren't for your protection, they are to protect the debts you owe.

Put it like that, and who benefits from someone's good health? The individual, obviously, but not their creditors if they need to pay for treatment out of pocket on plastic or with a home equity loan or incur some other debt... their employers benefit as well, because they're healthy and working, but not the insurance companies who have to pay for a portion of the costs. At the end of the day, tens of millions of individuals and millions of small businesses benefit a lot, and a small number of huge, wealthy companies don't (except for outfits like Wal*Mart, whose employees will be able to use the ACA to purchase the insurance that their shitty employment practices deny them).

Maybe I'm missing something, but the party that likes to quote the Bible and claims to be doing God's work sure as fuck seems unhappy about the possibility of taking care of the sick and the poor. Some asshole got nailed to a tree because he was in favor of that. I feel that's probably too good for the opponents... but if they survived and got tetanus, at least their stigmata wouldn't disqualify them from being insured, as a pre-existing condition.