Much like Ruff’s newfound obsession with Scary Go Round, I have recently been keeping up with The Ratings. This week’s money quote:

If I had gone to this ancient tortellini-serving restaurant of yore, would I have been offered such dishes as tiny little Zeus nipples and a lovely bowl of the foreskins of Hades? That’s not what I’m hungry for, ever.

The headline from Drudge reads: Report says Medicare to go broke by 2019

The second Drudge headline reads: U.S. social security system going broke.

Now, granted I have spent the last three days sitting in my underwear eating pizza and playing video games, but hasn’t this been obvious for quite some time now? Social Security has always been funded by the current workers, and there is no social security trust fund. Social Security funding comes out of the general fund, when payroll and social security taxes stop being enough to fund it, the money will have to be syphoned from other areas of the budget. Medicare is even worse, as its structure does not allow it to look for the best open-market prices on things it buys, but rather requires that everything come from certain dealers. As a result, Medicare pays up to four times as much as the VA for the same supplies.

In a world where transfer payments already make up just over 60% of the total federal budget, this has got to stop. Heritage has some pretty intersting ideas on just how.

Jane Galt links to this piece on NYPIRG. One item of note:

…colleges in New York permit NYPIRG to raise money through mandatory student fees, supervise research projects, teach credit-bearing courses, and maintain permanent offices on campuses. No other ideological organization is afforded such privileges. [emphasis mine]

Yikes. On the other hand, it would be funny if ideological organizations were allowed to teach their own classes. In addition to multicultural requirements and the like, we could require a couple of classes’ worth of 100-level blatant, explicitly-labelled partisan rhetoric. (No, before you ask, I do feel this would actually represent a change in administrative policy.) You could test out of it by calling Frohnmayer a fascist, or by calling the Genesis Juice Collective terrorists.

In an attempt to lessen the pain of my withdrawal from 24, I went to see Taking Lives last night. If you are considering doing this for your Kiefer fix, please, please don’t. There were fewer than 2 minutes of Kiefer screen time and the 102 that remained made me wish I had taken my life. I hate to admit it, but no amount of Kiefer can make up for the wretched, ugly-hot, nastiness of Angelina Jolie.

A mysterious contributor known only as “Stan” mentions the great Chris Morris in the comments below, and I wanted to throw some Morrisania into the main thread too.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure I can do Brass Eye justice. It’s a spoof current-events show, but so much more: Morris and company pose as serious journalists and enlist not-terribly-bright celebrities to decry meaningless or wildly implausible events (in the first episode, many concerned individuals are moved by the plight of Karla, an East German elephant so traumatized by captivity that she has completely inserted her trunk and head up her ass.) He also managed to incite a minor panic in the media and Parliament over a new Eastern European drug called “cake”, which was deadly, highly addictive, and predictably made up.

Anyone with an all-regions DVD player will not be disappointed by this, unless they are exceptionally hard to please. (See also: Jam.)

You have been warned.

Also, HAPPY SPRING BREAK I’ll be here the whole time, y’all know where to find me.

John Kerry, a man who doesn’t fall down works hard for the common man from…(wait for it):

Mr. Kerry arrived Wednesday night for a full week of rest and relaxation, and a rare bit of privacy with his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, at their high-altitude retreat.

High atop his mountainside compound!

Read this release by the Conference Board of Canada and this post on it as well.

All right, one more final, then we can all focus on being truly happy.

Hey girl from Luckey’s, yeah, apparently noting my complete and utter disinterest by glaring icily at you and not responding when you spoke to me wasn’t enough. Eventhough you look like my ex-girlfriend if she suddenly gained 200 pounds, and I’d completely ignored your every gesture, you thought walking by might be a good excuse to grab my ass. Typical.

And Dear EPD, just because a guy is walking through Alton-Baker Park at 2am is not a reason to hassle him. Furthermore, “what do you think?” is a perfectly reasonable response to “have you been drinking, son?” And what the hell is with calling me “son” lispy mcspeech-impediment? You’re like 30 at the oldest, and I don’t know too many fertile eight year olds.

If economics isn’t that tough, physics is the science of the insane.

You’d think it would be obvious that this would be hard to pull off without help. The best part is this bit about his 911 call, “It was unclear whether the man was seeking assistance for his injury or help in nailing down his other hand.” I prefer to believe it was the latter. I guess cause I’m sick.

Regarding Steve Baggs’ abhorrent cartoon in the ODE, and the assertion that Spain somehow provoked these attacks by aligning itself with the Coalition of the Willing:

By this logic, terrorism would also have a cure—the withdrawal of those Spanish soldiers from a country where al-Qaida emphatically does not desire them to be….

….Many Spaniards were among those killed recently in Morocco, where a jihadist bomb attack on an ancient Moorish synagogue took place in broad daylight. The attack was on Morocco itself, which was neutral in the recent Iraq war. It seems a bit late to demand that the Moroccan government change sides and support Saddam Hussein in that conflict, and I suspect that the Spanish Communist and socialist leadership would feel a little sheepish in making this suggestion. Nor is it obvious to me that the local Moroccan jihadists would stop bombing if this concession were made. Still, such a concession would be consistent with the above syllogism, as presumably would be a demand that Morocco cease to tempt fate by allowing synagogues on its soil in the first place.

Italics courtesy of Hitch, of course. Sullivan has been pretty dead on in his assessment as well, but I won’t bother linking to something you already bookmark.

And on a lighter note, will the Bill O’Reilly-Frank Rich grudge match end in bloodshed? Or at least a kick ass “Two’s a Crowd” reality television show?