Who wore it best?

Keep this handy for next week

Still not ready for prime time

Is Scott Baio's understudy still on TV trying to spin his failure at healthcare reform into a foolproof guarantee of tax reform or has he finally moved on to leg day?

I've been folding laundry and listening to show tunes all night and I just wanted to know if it's sane -- er, safe -- enough to turn the TV on again.

Fucking whiny sociopathic worthless piece of shit man-boy failure

No. I'm not done being furious about this.

The ACA -- like any early-generation social program -- has its flaws, but it's designed to allow for those flaws to be addressed and corrected as they manifest themselves. The ACA has given millions of Americans -- including me -- reasonably affordable access to vital healthcare that was actively denied to us in the catastrophes of our country's supply-side healthcare model.

For you to actively -- HATEFULLY -- mischaracterize any sick HUMAN BEINGS the ACA may have failed as "Obamacare victims" to make them pawns in your divisive political propaganda instead of working to fix whatever failed them so they can get the medical attention they need is so beyond immoral and unethical that it should bring us all to our knees. And I'm so beyond tolerance for this administration that I'm not afraid to say I actively wish catastrophic medical victimhood on everyone who conceived of and works to perpetuate this moral terrorism.

Who's the "loser" now?

I just got home from rehearsal to find our petulant, inarticulate man-boy president going on record on the national "fake news" he whines pathetically about but he knows he'd die without to call the Democrats "losers" because HE couldn't get his dangerously hasty piece-of-shit legislation passed by his own rank-and-file majority party.

Unless he's claiming credit for momentum from Obama's economy, nothing is ever his fault. His entire fake presidency has been a bubbling swamp of failure, blame, desperation, hyperbole, ignorance, lies, diplomatic embarrassment and narcissistic waste of taxpayer money.

Still proud of your Trump vote, anyone?

The Art of the Fail

GOP House. GOP Senate. GOP "President." Eight years of whining and criticizing and blaming and grandstanding in which they had ridiculously abundant time to craft viable, bipartisan legislation to replace the whipping-boy Affordable Care Act that their hatred for has nothing to do with the fact that Barack Obama is black nope nothing at all.

Instead they sat on their whiny, incapable hands for eight years and in the 26 days between their dear leader declaring that "nobody knew that health care could be so complicated" and today's GOP-controlled Art-of-the-Deal flaccidly-aborted-at-the-last-minute non-vote, they hastily cobbled together a criminally and intellectually and morally incompetent replacement proposal whose most celebrated feature was that it used less paper than the Affordable Care Act did.

THEY FAILED. CATASTROPHICALLY. AT THE ASTRONOMICAL EXPENSE OF OUR CONFIDENCE AND OUR RESPECT AND OUR TAX DOLLARS. They wasted almost a decade of time and resources and money and bipartisan goodwill and public trust whining impotently about how (they barbarically hoped and prayed) the Affordable Care Act was failing and solemnly lying that they were going to "fix" it.

And our petulant, inarticulate man-boy president immediately -- IMMEDIATELY! -- blamed the Democrats for his controlling party's catastrophic failures today and dismissed this entire colossal waste of time and money and potentially lives as an inchoately threatening lesson in "a lot about loyalty."

He's been an Art of the Failure at almost everything he's done in his pampered, self-aggrandizing life. And now he's dragging our entire country down his narcissistic, intellectually bankrupt rabbit hole with him. And there's very little of consequence we can do but wait until he uses his favorite big-boy word and implodes. And it's looking to be an excruciatingly long, painfully slow self-immolation.

The Art of the Deal

How tall ya feeling NOW, Paul? How big are your ignoble accomplishments? How towering is your integrity? Where do you stand in the public's estimation? Why is your hat on backwards?

Why I loathe my CPAP

1. It honestly doesn't make me feel any different when I wake up every morning.
2. My bedroom light switch is clear across the room so I have to lay out the headgear on my bed in a way that I can find it and put it on right-side-up in the dark, cross the room to turn the lights out, come back to my bed and feel around for the headgear and put it on right-side-up in the dark, and crawl into bed without inadvertently yanking the whole thing off my head so I have to get up and turn on the lights and start all over.
3. The nose pillows -- as I shit you not regarding what they're called -- rarely form a workable seal on my nostrils so the machine usually ends up sending a tickley jet of air whooshing up my face.
4. Nose pillows.
5. It's impossible to breathe or not feel like I'm being waterboarded when I have a stuffy nose as the nose pillows struggle to obstruct my nostrils.
6. And I really don't want to think about where any stray snot may end up when I jam those nose pillows up into my stuffy nose.
7. Gross. I just thought about it.
8. Nose pillows.
9. Sometimes I wake up in the morning with the headgear around my neck and the nose pillows spraying what I'm sure we can all agree is by now aerosnot all over the sheets.
10. Twice I've awakened with the snot-spraying nose pillows in my mouth.
11. Twice.
12. In. My. Mouth.
13. I bought the bedside table at Gordmans, which we desperate-discount shoppers all know just filed for bankruptcy so of course I can't return it and get my $21.87 back.
14. That fancy Target-brand distilled water cost 97¢. Also unreturnable.
15. Nose pillows.
16. In. My. Mouth.
17. I can't just lie and say I'm using my CPAP when I'm not because the damn thing records every time I turn it on and off, how my breathing pressure changes as I sleep with it on, and how many apnea episodes I have in my sleep. Then every day it sends all that information wirelessly to the woman who sold it to me so she can adjust the pressure remotely and confirm with the insurance company that I'm actually using it.
18. For. Real. Just like a microwave.
19. I wonder if Gordmans has any of their other breakable furniture or prison-track blingy gang attire on clearance yet.
20. Nose pillows. In. My. Mouth.

It's not "listening" when you tell people what to say

Clearly, "regurgitating" is too hard to spell for you and your crackerjack research team.

Does anyone else smell the frantic, catastrophic stink of desperation here? Our puerile, inarticulate man-boy president can't make up delusional lies fast enough to defend the so-far indefensible Trumpcare so he's actively recruiting people to do it for him.

And not just any people. He's recruiting people who don't find any red flags in the unambiguous statement that man-boy "held a listening session" SOLELY with "Americans who have experienced significant hardship" from the Affordable Care Act. People who think "share your Obamacare disaster story" is an objectively balanced way to confirm or deny man-boy's assertion that the Affordable Care Act is a "complete failure."

He's "polling" his base as a pretense for telling it what to think. It's spiral-down-the-drain circular stupidity. It's manipulative demagoguery for the willfully ignorant. And it's driving the discussion in terrifyingly real time about the future of our nation's healthcare.

Insurance and incompetence in a bro hat

Take a Valium and then read the article here

So there's a vicious, defamatory, hopefully humiliating story circulating about how Paul Ryan (as in Speaker of the House Paul Ryan who not too long ago had glamour shots taken of himself curling Barbie weights with his skinny arms and saggy workout costume and backward bro hat as illustrated in the photo below) made a huge PowerPoint presentation today (where he'd done research and used his economics-major training to form his thesis and taken the time to make slides and charts and graphs and presumably practiced beforehand in the mirror before his child tied his tie for him) where he used a chart with infection red for sick people who leech the economy into catastrophic typhoid implosion and blue-blood blue for non-sick people who are forced against their will to not be sick but still bear the crippling financial burden of having their already-paid insurance money pay for all those infection-red leeches who selfishly choose to be sick to explain point-by-unwavering-point how he (presiding United States Speaker of the House Paul Davis Ryan Jr. who has bachelor's degrees in economics and political science from Miami University and who is proudly called the Republican party's "Great Wonk" presumably for his vast and detailed understanding of even the most obscure details of national policy and economics) quite literally and unquestionably does not -- does NOT -- understand the rudimentary financial elements of health insurance.

In non-Jakebabble: Paul Ryan today (admirably) explained exactly how insurance works ... as his argument for how insurance doesn't work.

No, really. In his desperate, not-partisan-at-all effort to discredit the entire Affordable Care Act, he twisted the space-time continuum, mathematically eliminated the entire collective history of global economic learning, and used the very existence of something as immutable proof that it didn't exist.

Either he's actually too stupid and lazy to know how insurance works or he's engaging in intentionally deceptive demagoguery -- elaborately premeditated lying, actually -- to manipulate other people who are too stupid and lazy to know how insurance works.

And just in case you've forgotten: Paul Ryan and his family get free healthcare. Which may be the reason he's not too caught up on the nuts and bolts of insurance the way we commonfolk are.

AND BEFORE I FORGET: Here's Paul Ryan in his saggy workout costume and backward bro hat. Please do not laugh at him derisively. The poor man doesn't understand insurance, much less how not to look like a gym douchebag.

Sean Spicer is not aware anywhere

You're the PRESS SECRETARY. It's your job to NOT be "not aware" about major current events that you know damn well you'll be asked about when you actively invite questions from the PRESS at your own PRESS CONFERENCE.

It's almost like you don't know how to do your job. Or you're hiding something. Or you don't know how to do your job of hiding something convincingly. I'm gonna go with option 4: You're just here for the free healthcare.

Make yourself more aware than Sean Spicer here

I bet if it were made in China, Trump would put his name on it

Read the story here

Trump sure talks about his pal Nobody a lot

Kinda like when he used to pretend to be his own press agent so he could talk about himself.

Math is HARD

Read the article here

I'm sorry. "Nobody" knew that healthcare was complicated? Or is it actually just willfully ignorant, intellectually lazy demagogues who didn't know? Because I knew. And everyone else seemed to know. Didya ever think it might be just YOU who's this stupid?

I have a preexisting condition. Rick Santorum doesn't care.

Read the article here.

Scamming?

I'm bipolar depressive, and I've been bipolar depressive since long before I was finally diagnosed as such seven years ago. So I definitely, unquestionably have a preexisting condition. And when I learned years ago that because of this I was de facto uninsurable if I lost my job, it terrified me.

And then I lost my job.

Scamming? Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, I can get insurance despite my preexisting condition. My insurance is not subsidized through the ACA marketplace; I pay the hundreds and hundreds of dollars in monthly premiums, the thousand-plus-dollar deductible and the chokingly high co-pays entirely with my own money. I'm on four medications that cost over $1,000 a month. I see a psychiatrist once a month to regulate my meds. I see a kidney specialist every few months to monitor the potentially fatal side effects of my meds.

Scamming? Despite your 9-months-of-payments accusations, Rick, I am faithfully making a full 12 months of payments for a full 12 months of coverage. I SPEND ALMOST HALF MY SALARY FOR COVERAGE ON THE COMBINED ELEMENTS OF MY MEDICAL CARE, WHICH WOULD PROMPTLY BANKRUPT ME AND THEN FORCE TAXPAYERS TO PAY FOR MY EXORBITANT MEDICAL EXPENSES IF YOUR CONGRESSIONAL ILK REPEALED THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT FOR NO QUANTIFIABLE-AS-OF-YET REASON BEYOND YOUR PARTISAN GRANDSTANDING.

And YOU accuse ME of scamming the system -- without a shred of evidence to support your lies, no less. You have a staggering amount of nerve, Rick. A staggering amount of repulsive, hypocritical, selfish, hateful, lying nerve.

YOU are the one who is scamming. You're scamming the religious community with your "faith-based" campaigns to destroy the families of gay people, immigrants and now sick people with preexisting conditions. You're scamming your vast low-information base that looks to you for moral and political guidance on matters regarding public policy, the common good, witnessing for Christ and basic human decency. You're scamming Trump's all-caps FAKE NEWS with your insistence that you bring value to the public dialogue on anything beyond your self-righteous narcissism.

You are a catastrophic moral and intellectual failure as a human being. And that fact is compounded by your desperate attempt to distract the country from your ethical bankruptcy by condemning me and every other taxpaying citizen who is dutifully and faithfully and responsibly managing preexisting conditions through the financially essential and morally right Affordable Care Act, which you -- again, without even hinting that you have or are willing to supply a shred of supporting evidence -- dismiss in blanket-statement Trump style as "a failure."

There is a reason you have been publicly vilified for well over a decade, Rick. And no feigned persecution complex can exonerate you. You are beyond contempt. You are beyond pillory. You are beyond malice.

And you'd better pray you're never beyond uninsurable.