Ready, Blame, Fire!

Now that healthcare reform reform has been cancelled, two groups of people are celebrating. Those who love Obamacare the most, and those who hate Obamacare the most. In this way, President Trump has brought opposing political factions together in a way which we would like to call united, but will more accurately label as "schizophrenic" and probably dangerous.

At this point, it's moot to debate the relative virtues or failures of the proposed GOP bill, but we are going to take strong exception to the idea that if the healthcare system is allowed to completely collapse in the next few years (which Trump is touting with Caligula-like glee), that America's sick, dying, overcharged, and uninsured will blame the out-of-power Democrats for having created Obamacare, rather than the fat and happy Republican legislators who stood around this national bonfire roasting marshmallows and making s'mores.

Put another way, when Obamacare fails the voters will not reward the party that did nothing (even if the reasons were good), but will instead flock to the party that promises a quick and all encompassing fix - namely, a single-payer "Medicare For All" plan. That's going to be the Democrats, which is hardly surprising: Obamacare was designed to fail after destroying the free market health insurance system, thereby leaving fully socialized medicine as the only viable alternative. And the Dems knew human nature well enough to understand that this would assure their party power.

We really hope we're wrong about this, but ask yourself - if you were the patient in the cartoon above, who would you blame? The bad doctor who misdiagnosed you, or the good doctor who says he'll watch you suffer or die just to teach the bad doctor a lesson?

BONUS: NO TAXATION WITHOUT MEDICATION

Per Friday's post, we're still working on our taxes (yes, that's really our desk in the picture above) and things have just taken a turn for the worse.

Once we finally had all of our data entered into Quicken, all we had to do was fire up our TurboTax program and get cranking on the job of finding out how much of our money the government would steal.

But wait! It turns out that this year's edition of TurboTax won't run on our old Mac operating system (note to Intuit: you suck), meaning we're going to have to upgrade to a newer, fancier operating system which we already know won't really work on our old computer.

To accomplish this without destroying our sanity and life's work, we have to create a "partition" on our internal hard drive (basically just a dedicated space) in which to install Mac OS 10.10, which is code named after a ravenous jungle cat or a mountain prone to landslides or some damn thing.

But to find enough room to create that partition, we first need to find tens of gigabytes of existing data to erase from our hard drive - a process which in itself takes hours.

If you're waiting for this to pay off with a big punchline, well - sorry. We're just venting about the fact that we're having to jump through 17 flaming hoops just to do a task we hate in order to pay the government's ransom demands to keep us from having to grab our ankles in a prison shower.

AND AS LONG AS WE'RE COMPLAINING...

Remember two weeks ago when we were complaining about how long it takes us to adjust to Daylight Saving Time? Well, we still haven't adjusted - making every daily chore more difficult and exhausting.

We're taking caffeine pills to wake up, we're taking melatonin to get to sleep, and we're taking the Lord's name in vain to express what we think of government interference in our lives.

Uncomfortably Numbers

There are plenty of newsworthy things to talk about today, including radical Islamic terror, the impending (or not) House vote on Obamacare repeal, Trump's surveillance accusations, mainstream media burying the story of illegal aliens raping a 14 year-old girl in a school bathroom, and Chuck Schumer declaring that the Democrats will filibuster Neil Gorsuch's nomination for Supreme Court Justice in hopes of being rewarded with 72 virgins in the afterlife.

And why aren't we talking about these juicy topics? Because instead of keeping up with the news, we've spent the entire day working on our freaking taxes.

And we aren't even up to working on the actual, impenetrably baffling tax forms yet - a task which must be postponed until we've made a run to the liquor store. Rather, we're still at the beginning of the process, doing our once-a-year data entry of receipts into an ancient accounting program that we don't clearly remember how to use anymore.

As Life's grand parade passes us by, we're sitting scrunched at a desk squinting at every credit card charge, cancelled check, and crumpled receipt which passed through our underpaid hands in 2016...then peck-peck-pecking the numbers on a keyboard, hands cramping, until we want to scream.

The whole process is a white hot pain in the rear, but it's very important to make sure that everything in our tax return is completely accurate and above board. Because 12 years from now it's entirely possible that an older but no wiser Rachel Maddow may be waving our returns at a TV camera.

BONUS: Since we didn't have time to be particularly witty today, enjoy this clip from the wonderful TV series "Black Books," in which Bernard Black visits his accountant at tax time...

Comeytose

We're not at all sure that "ignorance is bliss," but we've decided to at least give it a try when it comes to anything whatsoever that FBI Director James Comey has to say, now or in the future.

As we understand it (and trust us, we're not trying very hard) Comey just testified that there's no evidence whatsoever that Russia hacked the election, hacked election results, or attempted to influence the election any more than they've been attempting for decades.

However, the man who downgraded treasonous security breaches to "extreme carelessness" when Hillary snapped her fingers was perfectly willing to announce, with great seriousness and theatrically cocked eyebrow, that his agency (at the insistence of Democrats) is actively investigating any ties between Russia and Trump's campaign...even though there may not be any.

Are there salient details that we're missing here? It's entirely possible - and we just don't care. Comey is a self-interested political hack who has destroyed the credibility of the FBI, and his meaningless pronouncements only serve as fresh fodder for the fake news mills (yes, we're talking about you, New York Times).

For the good of the country, we'd like to see Trump appoint a new director to the FBI as soon as possible. And to prove there are no hard feelings, we suggest he also appoint Comey to be director of the STFU.