Hmm, carry the two, now round, and ... there. The Congressional Budget Office has finally assigned a numerical value to the Harry Reid Government Rollover Health Care Bill of 2009. It's 42. Or $849 billion. Or whatever. Anyway, now "all eyes," as they say in the grown-up media, turn to the rest of the Senate to see what the next exciting development will be in this epic saga to fundamentally reform ... ooh, look, Sarah Palin made a present for Bill Kristol.
While we wait to see if Reid has enough votes to even get the bill to the floor so the Senate can begin turning it into tort reform, the ability to sell insurance across state lines and tax cuts for the private sector entrepreneurial heroes who are the true creators of all the jobs and prosperity in America, here's a sort of off-topic question: What's up with the Las Vegas Sun website allowing readers to comment on stories, unless the stories mention Harry Reid in the headline?
Sure, Sun poohbah Brian Greenspun totally wants to gay marry Harry, and vice versa, and more power to them. But sheltering and coddling a single elected official is, you know, unfair (unless being "fair" means puffing up and protecting one side while denigrating or ignoring others, i.e., the interpretation of the word at Fox News). And why stop at Reid? Why not protect Rep. Dina Titus from bitter hordes of online kooks and flakes, too? Or every other politician whose appearance in a headline is sure to garner oodles of opprobrium and ill-will from the commentariat, like, say, Jim Gibbons, or John Ensign?
Yes, the Las Vegas Review-Journal and its publisher are waging a clumsy jihad on Reid. But that doesn't, or shouldn't, automatically mean the Sun has to compensate with a ham-handed bias of its own.
Besides, Reid is a scrappy little fighter (his autobiography says so) and the most powerful Nevadan in the whole history of ever (his ads say so). Presumably he can withstand obtuse rants on the internets from assorted teabaggers, Palindrones and staffers from two-bit Republican senatorial campaigns, no?
Not that any of this is your lowly Gleaner's bidness, mind. Just find it squirrelly, s'all.
UPDATE: "The Sun has disabled comments on stories about Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign for the last few weeks," so as to have a "cooling off" period, says a statement the organization posted Thursday afternoon. Makes sense. If the outraged ignorant teabaggers have proved nothing else, it's that they're sure to "cool down" as the campaign heats up.
Anyway, the Sun statement is followed by a comment, posted by a genuine reader, presumably, saying something bad (maybe? who reads these things?) about Harry, indicating that comments have been undisabled. Or reabled. Or whatever. So there, batshit crazy paranoid Nevada wingtards. Don't say the evil commie atheist Gleaner never did anything nice for you.
Btw, the Sun statement says comments had been disabled on Ensign stories all this time, too, though I could have sworn the Nov. 8 Ensign story I linked to above, which currently shows no comments, had 45 comments on it earlier Thursday. That was pretty much why I linked to it, or so I thought. Oh well. Must be my mistake.
UPDATED UPDATE: Oh, I forgot about how Yahoo's cached pages might not be refreshed as regularly or frequently as Google's. So not to be bitchy about it or anything (well, maybe a little) but just, you know, for the record:
Comments