Taking A Few Days Off

Readers- In all likelihood, there won't be any new content here until Monday the 28th. A very close friend (who was also the family physician who steered us through a very rough year in 2013) passed away unexpectedly, and neither my head nor my heart are in politics just now. I'm going to take just a few personal days to regroup. -Stilton

PS: I will mention that for reasons vaguely related to the above, today I tested the waters to see how possible it is to change health insurance plans between open enrollment periods. I knew the situation would be bad - but it's a lot worse than I thought (and I daresay worse than has been advertised).

Here's the deal: the ONLY health insurance you can buy outside of the open enrollment periods (the next one is in mid-November) is expensive, short-term insurance. Remember all the rhetoric about "pre-existing conditions" being a thing of the past thanks to Obamacare? Nope- if you buy one of these policies (again, the only ones legal to sell right now) none of your pre-existing conditions will be covered.

Obamacare also assures that everyone will get "free-ish" preventive care included as part of their plan; check-ups, tests, office visits, colonoscopies, etc. Unless, of course, you buy outside of the open enrollment period. Then, your still-pricey policy will cover no preventive care whatsoever.

But the fun doesn't stop there! Even though these health insurance polices are legal to sell (and the only policies legal to sell) they don't meet ACA standards for basic coverage - which means that these policies, with premiums up to $1000+ per month - won't qualify to show that you've got health insurance...so you'll still be fined by the government/IRS for not being covered.
All of which makes me wish I had a tranquilizer I could take to reduce my anger about all of this - and makes me miss the good man and good friend who could have actually written that prescription for me.

From the HnC Vault: Roll Playing

Readers- Hope n' Change is taking Easter off, so there won't be a new Monday cartoon. Instead, we're reposting our Easter cartoon and commentary from one year ago which is, sadly, still topical.

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Today's commentary will be short and (not very) sweet, simply because Hope n' Change is feeling tired and pissed off today. And while the roots of these feelings are many, the idiocy du jour is the false flap about whether or not the dreaded sequester cuts were going to cause cancellation of the annual Whitehouse Easter Egg Roll.

But this was all just another distraction; the Easter Egg Roll was never in jeopardy and the story was floated by the Whitehouse simply to give the MSM some puff piece they could use to fill news minutes on-air while ignoring genuinely important stories.

So the networks charged after the "Easter Egg" story like a fat kid diving on a Cadbury egg, while completely ignoring the nearly unreported story that the survivors of the Benghazi terror attack are being hidden from Congress, the Press, and the American people - and for good measure, their being warned not to talk to anyone about what really went wrong in the weeks leading up to that hellishly successful terror attack. Forget the Easter Egg Roll- let's find out Obama's role, Hillary Clinton's role, and the roles of all the other incompetent liars with blood on their hands.

It's an old refrain here, but it's still important and it still burns: the mainstream media is dead in this country as far as showing even marginal interest in anything which could make this administration look bad. Which is, not coincidentally, virtually everything this administration does.

By accepting fluffy, fictitious "news" stories handed out by the administration, Whitehouse "journalists" have shown themselves to be basket cases.

Or in this case, Easter Basket cases.