Buffalo in the spotlight.... this is never good:P

[captainsblog]

Twice yesterday, across my Facebook threshold came news broadcast to far and near, originating from our very home.

The silly one was this: I've seen these billboards (and related t-shirts, tv ads, etc.) for at least a year now, but George Takei just communicated it to the entire Federation:)



It's a little less funny now, though, since they've been my health insurance provider since this past February- and after the whole kidney kerfuffle, I'm almost wondering if they sent me a red shirt for the whole business and it just got lost in the mail.

----

Then we made the Huffington Post, among many other national outlets, on account of a quote from our former King County Executive, now running for Congress, who said this in an extensive interview about Obamacare:

GOP congressional candidate Chris Collins knows health care is expensive these days, but he argues it's for good reason: People are no longer dying from deadly forms of cancer.

"People now don't die from prostate cancer, breast cancer and some of the other things," he told The Batavian in an interview that was flagged Tuesday by City & State NY. Collins was discussing his desire to repeal Obamacare.

Within a day, both local bloggers and his incumbent Democratic opponent had seized on the gaffe, calling Collins out for his insensitivity to victims and survivors of these still-deadly cancers.  It's since gotten verbose and a little silly, with the author of the original Batavian story giving the King a pass for having

misspoke[n]. More likely, he meant to say. "Fewer people die from prostate cancer, breast cancer and some of the other things." 

So now we have a journalist doing copy editing for his subject. That is so many different kinds of wrong, I can't begin to count them, much less catalog them. And I'm sorry, but when the opposition to the Affordable Care Act has done so much, for so long, to lie eight ways to Sunday about what is in the bill ("death panels," getting between "you and your doctor," etc., etc., etc.), their spokesparrots don't get the customary rights to gaffe forgiveness.  Had the King's opponent said this, it would be all over Foster Freiss attack ads on 20 different tv stations by now.

Just think- we have over four full months of this fun before the election.  Maybe I'll want  Independent Health to send me one of those red shirts by the time it's all over.

Comments

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

There are only two possible choices: either the representative is as dumb as a bag of hammers, or he's a lying sack of spit.

Love the Red Shirts, though. It's why the security chief on Babylon 5 was named Garibaldi...

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

It's one of those trick SAT questions. The answer is (c)- Both I and II.

And I never knew that about B5. Never watched the series, despite many pleas from many fans to suck my brain into JMSLand.

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

OMG! You never saw B5?

It's almost 20 years ago that a friend of mine (and CVirtue and the Professor), who in real life was a critic for a local newspaper, told me that I absolutely positively had to see this show.

I tuned in and caught the fourth episode, "Infection", arguably the weakest episode of the whole series. It was standard Roddenberry stuff - a living weapon created by an extinct race who built it to wipe out the enemy THEM, which was anyone who wasn't pure US. Despite David McCallum's guest role, I didn't like it. I didn't watch it again until my friend told me that I would hate myself forever if I failed to tune in for the second season. (If I'd tuned in a week later, I would have seen "Parliament of Dreams," a great religious story at a time when the Enterprise didn't even have a chaplain.)

It took a couple episodes, but I fell in love. And stayed there. Straczynski was a brilliant writer who loved the genre, respected the audience, and had a great story to tell - a five year story with a beginning, middle, and end. The network gods fucked with him, of course, but the story got told, and it was wonderful.

I've got 'em all on DVD if you ever want me to make copies.

[thanatos-kalos.livejournal.com]

I second the suggestion of B5-- one of my fav series, excellently written and performed; even the weaker eps aren't bad. (Apart from one bit quite late on which was...well, you'll know it when you see it).

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

You mean the one where they all walked into Al's Bar, nothing made sense, and Will Robinson never returned to the Jupiter II?

[tilia-tomentosa.livejournal.com]

What is the red shirt about? *confused foreigner look*

And oh, that Collins guy has become so infamous that even I managed to read about that speech of his last night - in a gay blog, no less. :D

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

It became a stereotypical scene in the original Star Trek series: Captain Kirk (gold shirt), Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy (blue shirts) and Expendable Crewman Jones (red shirt) all beamed down to the planet surface. You could bet the house on the fact that, if anyone was gonna be killed down there, it would be the guy in the red shirt. Hence the Babylon 5 tribute, naming a character after Garibaldi, from the Italian "Red Shirt" movement.

(Yes, Lt. Uhura in the icon wore a red shirt, as did Scotty, but they rarely left the ship.)