Hit Any Key To Continue

Those of you of a certain age who worked in corporate or office environments will probably remember a certain piece of "office folk art" popular in most offices back during the dark days of MS-DOS: a big cartoon duck with a giant cartoon hammer about to deal a crushing death blow to a computer displaying the ancient MS-DOS post-crash message: "Hit any key to continue".

This memory from my early working days came rushing back to me as I read the news of the ongoing saga of the FAIL parade that is healthcare.gov -- the poor testing, the history of FAIL in the career of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the cronyism that figured in the choice of the firm to build the Web site. It's comedy gold on a grand scale.

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Yes, We Scan!

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A far healthier turnout than I'd expected was on hand on Capitol Hill yesterday to mark the 12th anniversary of the Patriot Act with a protest against NSA abuse of citizens' privacy under the Obama Administration.

A coalition of groups ranging from Code Pink and ThinkProgress to the Libertarian Party and FreedomWorks came together for an event that was "not about Left or Right, but about Right and Wrong". Now, that's bipartisanship.

Government Shutdown News Network

 
Hey, there, US news media consumers! Interested in finding out what else is going on in the world besides the government shutdown? Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hah, tough shit. Curious about what's up in Greece, the Sudan, or Palestine? Too goddamn' bad, all they've got for you is government shutdown news. Like it or lump it, chumps.

For the past day or two, pretty much every US "news" network has been nothing but wall-to-wall government shutdown babble, and MSDNC... uhh, MSNBC has been the worst of the lot, with continuous Obamacare pimping overlaid with 24/7 government shutdown hysterics, taking a break only to allow one of their resident windbags, Chris "Baby Eater" Matthews, to plug his new book about his days as a flunkie for Tip O'Neill -- at one point, being interviewed by his wife, f'crissake.

All I can say is, thank Allah for Al Jazeera. 

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