and then I read some nooz….

A Colorado woman is suing the city of Denver and the state because their crappy computer Medicaid program meant her son couldn’t get the life saving asthma meds he needed, and he died. I am familiar with the Medicaid prescription run around. It sucks. I was lucky that I just needed meds that make me function, not that keep me alive.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. When Medicaid works, it’s like being on the NHS in the UK. You don’t have to worry that you don’t have the co-pay to go to the emergency room if you get hit by a car or that the out of pocket expenses from your monthly prescriptions cost most than your grocery bill.

Medicaid sucks only in that it’s a poor people program, and you all know what they do to programs that are only for us poor folk.

So that was enough to take me from “w00t w00t it’s Friday!” to “fucking government fucking assholes killing kids fucking fuckers but at least I live in a blue state”

Yeah, so much for progressive cities.

San Francisco, worried that their citizen-killing cops might start a protest riot ala London, jammed (or had companies jam) cell phone service where the protest was supposed to happen. Democracy at it’s finest!

And now I am going to go down a bottle of Advil because I have an abscessed tooth and my work health insurance doesn’t kick in for another 3 weeks. Sure, I’ve got Medicaid still, but that doesn’t pay for dental for adults, and barely pays for dental for kids- that is if you can find a dentist who actually takes it.

Arthur, quoting himself:

Equality was not granted, to the extent it was, primarily in recognition of an unspeakable, deadly injustice that whites had committed, although a few whites were aware of that. For the most part, equality was granted, to the extent it was, because the cost for failing to do so had become prohibitive.

We must make the cost of continued economic, political and social state sponsored terrorism prohibitive.

I am with Arthur on violence. I don’t care for it. But I can’t condemn people for resorting to violence as self-defense when all other options have failed.

For example:

Yes, said the young man. You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?

Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.

More neighborhoods in London, as well as in Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool tonight.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the countries experiencing mass riots and/or protests are the ones that have enacted the roughest austerity measures. Ours have been bad, so far, but the worst is on it’s way. When you demolish the tiny safety net, you also demolish any good will the people might have had for a government under duress. At the same time, you stretch the police system to the brink.

And I have to wonder, since the fact that austerity and chaos go together is like peanut butter and chocolate- an old and oft tested remedy- what do the tacky little men in tacky blue suits think is going to happen when you cut and cut cut at the poor and the newly poor? I can’t believe they are really too stupid to know that their actions will have consequences. They are nothing if not opportunists. So what opportunity do they think this will create?

If you haven’t heard, the neighborhood of Tottenham in London erupted in riots yesterday. It was sparked, as these things so often are, by police officers killing a local. This problem, the problem of giving a tiny fraction of the underclass a badge and a gun and some power and turning them loose on the populace, is so old there is a phrase for it in Latin- Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Or who guards the guardians?

It helps if you think of the police* as serving the same function that the Tea Party does. While the rhetoric may be all “patriotism, protection, freedom and justice” the result it generally more “kill the poor, rape the women, keep property in the hands of the wealthy”.

*Sure, there are some police officers who aren’t rage-aholic little dictators with batons. Some. But the psychology of the group as a whole often mitigates the best intentions of the few.

From Aeryl in comments. A welcome back to Zombie Labor status.

is that I no longer think I have to ignore street harassers.

Case in point:

Thursday morning I am walking from the bus stop, down a hill, into work. A guy stops at the bottom of the hill and does the creepy look up shit. I know what’s coming, so I snarl at him.

Of course I get the “oh baby, you should smile. You’re a beautiful woman. If you smiled then the world would know it.”

So I screamed, yes screamed, in the angriest voice I could muster without proper caffienation “Oh yeah cause I wanna fucking smile at creepy strangers on fucking street corners. Fuck you!” I did make the older woman next to me, waiting for the light to change on the corner, a little nervous. But fuck that shit. I am done. If I am not smiling at you it’s because I don’t know you and don’t want to know you.

Next time, the douchenoodle who keeps telling me “God loves you, you may not think so but he does” is getting a “God’s a fucking fairy tale, invented by tiny minds who don’t want to take responsibility for their own lives”.

Religious street harassers bug me just as much as the other kind. I am done. I am over it. I am (almost- if I live to be 80) middle-aged and I can tell shitty strangers that they can fuck off if I want to.

First, dear gawd I miss you all. I am sure that sooner or later I will settle into this whole working thing and will have the time and energy to write on a more semi-regular schedule. But for now- damn I am tired.

So here is a tiny post.

The S&P lowered our credit rating. Boo fucking who. The S&P is like a food critic for vampires. (So is Moody’s, for that matter). It’s all a bunch of bullshit. We get an austerity plan and we get a stock market crash and we get bad marks on our government credit from a bunch of assholes who can’t do math.

And it would be lovely to think “Oh the system is just temporarily broken. All we need to do is reform it”. But it ain’t broken. It’s working exactly as intended, skimming little bits of money off the bottom (though it don’t feel so little to us bottom folks) to feed the snarling vampires at the top. And the less money we have to skim, the more snarly the vampires get. Every morsel of food we put in our mouths makes the vampires mad because that grocery money could be better put to use in buying them gold plated toilets or deepening the money pool they like to dive in ala Scrooge McDuck.

Austerity is bullshit. The debt ceiling is bullshit. The national credit rating is bullshit. The stock market is bullshit. The government is bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit.

You can’t vote out vampires. The only way to fix this is a stake through the heart of the system.

(Yes, I am putting too many damn metaphors in one post with the bullshit and the vampires. I am tired y’all.)

Thank you flying spaghetti monster for finding me an almost living wage job with benefits just in time for obama and the dems and the reps to rend the tattered social safety net to shreds with the Great Compromise. Oh what a shitty piece of work that is.

(As a reminder I still have 4 days to get through till payday. If you’ve got 10 bucks to spare please throw it in the paypal pot so we don’t have to ration toilet paper)

So yesterday was attempt #2 at girding my loins for the current War on Women (aka getting an IUD while I still have medicaid -those things cost between 750 and 1000 bucks- and before this country takes the skids right into Handmaid’s Tale territory).

Unfortunately, even a dose of misoprostyl (one of the handy forms of medical abortion) to “open things up down there” didn’t work. My innards are shaped like a snail. I knew something was up when the doc asked “how long ago did you give birth?” My response “the Kid’s 16 and he was a c-section. I never dilated” did not encourage her. Thankfully, she’s not a macho cowboy. She poked around for a few minutes and declared that it was time for a specialist.

Bonus, they gave me the actual IUD to take home with me since they can’t give it to another patient. It comes in what looks like and extra long cigarette carton.

We then talked about meds and pain and stuff. She made me dial my Vitamin D way the fuck down. I even told her that if it’s a choice between daily pain or killing my liver- the liver should DIE! She didn’t find that as funny as I thought she would. I took a quarter of what I normally take last night, and today I can feel the owies setting in. Grrr.

She also prescribed potassium and magnesium. And the regular drinking of tonic water. “So I can tell people when I have my nightly cocktail that it’s FOR MY HEALTH!” She said that it didn’t have to have the alcohol, just plain tonic works fine. I gave her a look that is halfway between a Whatchoo talkin about Willis? and a Dorothy Parker, she relented “okay okay, have your vodka tonics.”

(So of course I came home and had rum and cokes instead, because I am broke and the Boyfriend left a professional alcoholic sized jug of rum here. Someone tell me rum has therapeutic value!!!)

The boyfriend and I had this interesting little email convo last night about politics and economics and how do you judge something when you don’t know all the behind the scenes machinations of 12 dimensional chess players. Here are a few snippets.

“I hate 12 dimensional chess as a metaphor. It means the people who use it think us citizens are to stupid to understand what’s going on. Yes, politics is complicated, but it’s also very simple. Judge politicians by what they actually do, not what they say. It’s easy to (as Chris Matthews said about Obama) get a tingle up your leg when someone makes a passionate speech. It requires not much more work to look at what actually gets done.”

Boyfriend wanted to talk about Obama’s big compromise, which the Republifuckers rejected, and if that makes Obama either a bad negotiator or a brilliant tactician who just made Reps look like the douchenoodles they are. I think neither.

“Both Dems and Reps are talking austerity with the debt ceiling. Austerity has been proven (over and over again) to be a bad fucking move in the middle of a recession. Even Nancy Pelosi is using the fucking “shared sacrifice” meme.

So, if both parties, even if they differ over how much pain should be delivered upon the bottom 80%, are talking about austerity, then some form of austerity is what we are going to get. There isn’t another option being discussed and Obama has flat out said he won’t use his constitutionally granted executive power to make the fed continue printing money. That is how I judge them by their actions, because their actions show what the agenda has been set to. “

And just a friendly, but desperate, reminder. I have 10 days till I get a paycheck. I haven’t been able to buy more than 50 bucks worth of groceries at a time this month, so the cupboards are stark. And all the bills are past due (internet may be the first thing to go). If you’ve got something you can throw in the pot, royalty will smile on you and probably offer you a title. Would you like to be the Duchess of Badassery? Lord STFU? Baron von Snarkitude? Seriously, it’s pretty grim around here.