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The Current Situation

Glenn Beck and American Healthcare’s Amazing 16-month Comeback

glenn_beck_january_2008What a difference 16 months makes! (And wow, does the Daily Show have an amazing video archivist!)

Last night, the Daily Show did the public a great service by airing two clips. The first was from January 2008 featuring faux journalist Glenn Beck talking about how terrible the care he received at the hospital it was and how it reflected the sad state of the American healthcare system. In true Beck-ian fashion, his piece was called Beck from the Dead.

glenn_beck_may_2009The second clip is from May 2009. Sixteen months later, the American healthcare system has become, in Beck’s own words, “the best in the world”. Now that the Socialist Kenyan Usurper is driving a movement to bring universal healthcare to the United States – the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn’t provide it to its citizens – it’s now the best system in the world, which the lefties are trying to dismantle. It’s quite impressive how it went from terrible to “best in the world” in so little time.

You really have to watch the clip to see Beck say one thing and then say the exact opposite thing afterwards, with the same fire and conviction. If you’re in Canada, you can watch the clip on the Comedy Network’s site; if you’re in the U.S. the Daily Show site has the clip.

It’s ironic that a show that purports to be a comedy show that just comments on current events is doing a better job of telling the truth than a network that purports to tell you the truth but ends up doing unintentional black humour.

Gawker sums up Glenn Beck perfectly in a couple of paragraphs:

This should serve as yet another bright, shining example of how much of an utter fraud Beck is. You gotta give the guy some credit though — he’s a charlatan’s charlatan, a near-perfect modern television bullshit artist who fully understands how the slightest glance, vocal inflection, or codeword can plant a seed deep down inside of a feeble mind and germinate.

But still, it’s hard not to watch this clip and come away feeling that he’s an even bigger piece of shit than you probably thought he was previously, because it’s just so goddamn obvious that the man will do or say anything to dig his hook even deeper into the sad dolts who tune into to his show each day seeking guidance.

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The Current Situation

At Last, a “Town Hall” Protest I Can Get Behind

Protestor at Town Hall holding sign that reads "Obama: Bring back Arrested Development"

And it’s spelled properly, too!

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The Current Situation

Monday Morning Comics

wackos

more-on_tours

wwjd

bureaucrat

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Geek The Current Situation

My Question About the Twitter/Facebook DDOSing

Matt Damon as Jason Bourne

When I read that Twitter and Facebook were attacked for the sake of targeting one guy, my first thought was “Who is this guy, Jason Bourne?”

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The Current Situation Work

The Tragedy of the Coffee Shop

blocked_outlet

Over at my Coffee and Code blog, I write about a topic close to home for me: cafe owners in New York, fed up with laptops users lingering but not buying anything, are shooing them away.

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Music The Current Situation Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

The Toronto Garbage Song

The Toronto Garbage Strike of 2009 may be over (as might be David Miller’s reign come election time next year) and garbage collection is resuming today, but that’s no reason not have a song about it. The Toronto Star posted a story today about The Toronto Garbage Song (a.k.a. Flush Your Garbage), which was written and posted to YouTube by Ian Kelk.

This isn’t the first strike song to gain exposure through the internet. London Underground is still my favourite. It’s a reworking of The Jam’s Going Underground by British comedy singing duo Amateur Transplants (Adam Kay and Suman Biswas).

Here’s a homemade video that someone made for the song – be warned, it’s a little sweary:

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The Current Situation

FOX News Doesn’t Know Where Iraq Is

In a comment to an earlier article of mine showing FOX News’ tendency to mislabel badly-behaving Republicans as Democrats, “RODAN” pointed me to this map of the middle east shown on FOX News in segment where Neil Cavuto interviewed John Bolton on Monday – note the country marked “Egypt”:

FOX News' map of the middle east, putting Egypt where Iraq is.

The problem is: that’s not Egypt, that’s Iraq! Here’s a real map of the middle east:

Map picture

You’d think that with their obsessions with terror, Muslims and safeguarding the nation, not to mention the presence of a former representative to the U.N. present, they’d know where Iraq was.