A couple of things on my mind this afternoon:

1.) Bin Laden reappears on tape, and the sheeple all cower in Bush's direction. Right now the shifting sands at the polls now have Bush with a 6% lead. Fuck. Never mind that if you vote for Bush you vote for Al Qaeda's preferred US presidential candidate. From the referenced communique, from the Al'Qaeda cell in Spain responsible for the Madrid train bombing:

"Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilisation."

"Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected."

So there you have it. A vote for George W. Bush is a vote for Osama Bin Laden.

Baaaaaaaa sheeple. Baaaa baaaa baaaa sheeple. Go gently to democracy's slaughterhouse. Bush lied to you. Bush could give a shit about whether or not he catches Bin Laden. Instead of fighting the real enemy we are hip deep in shit in Iraq.

Come on people: WAKE UP!!!!!

In less incendiary topics, the current No on Prop 72 ads give scare stories about what kind of horrible Government-run health care plan will be foisted on people if "Pay or Play" is approved by voters. OK, two things:

1.) "Pay or Play" is not a Government-run health care plan. It is a mandate that all employers with 50 employees or more pay for health coverage for their employees with no more than a 20% employee contribution to the plan, or pay into a State of California insurance pool that will buy insurance for those employees. Employers with 20 to 49 employees will only have to participate if a tax offset is passed by the State which will make paying for the insurance a cost that the company can write off their taxes 100%. And employers with 19 or fewer employees will not be asked to either Pay or Play...they are exempt.

2.) And what if Prop 72 was a Single-Payer health care plan for everyone in California? There is a horrible misunderstanding afoot about the establishment of a Canadian-style Single-Payer health care plan in the US: Single-Payer doesn't mean "socialized medicine." Single-Payer doesn't mean the kind of dysfunctional system that existed in the UK in the 1970s. Folks: Get the FAQs about Single-Payer here. We could do much worse than what these doctors are advocating, and have been since long before the Clinton health care brouhaha of 1993.

Anyway, here's the non-partisan analysis from Smart Voter on Proposition 72. There is a link on the page to the full text of the measure, in PDF format. Read it for yourself. This is a bandaid measure. If we really got serious about fixing our broken health care system we should listen to these doctors' orders, but since neither party has the political cojones to do so, this is as good as it gets for now.