Let Ball Deep Eat Cake

A few weeks ago, during Obama's big speech on health care before a joint session of Congress, Ball Deep went a little nuts and started freaking out about the effect of health care reform on the deficit, at which point I had to smack him down with a little economic knowledge.

But today there's some good news for Mr. Deep, not to mention basically everyone else out there - the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has scored the Senate Financial Services bill and found the following:

• The plan will cover 29 million people who would otherwise have been uninsured.
• Only 3 million people will be removed from private health insurance.
• 5 million fewer people will use the individual insurance market, the source of a lot of the current horror stories.
• 29 million legal residents will have have insurance who would otherwise not have.
  
• 245 million people will be basically unaffected.
  
• It will not add to the federal deficit.

In other words, Mr. Deep, you can have your cake and eat it too. This is far from the perfect bill in my mind - it doesn't include a public option, there are still a lot of fucked up incentives that will need to be corrected, and I would much rather just go to a single payer system like every other developed nation. But it's a hell of an improvement. And to everyone out there who called this pretty ideologically centrist effort socialism or a government takeover or wasteful spending, here are some words of advice: go find a new hobby. Because your attempts to fuck up the country in your spare time because of paranoid fear and ill-thought-out ideology is pretty fucking annoying to the rest of us.

In other political news, it looks like Schubert and I have the right idea. Now the rest of you, move to the dirty south - you'll be able to buy a house without bankrupting yourself AND we'll be able to live in a Democratic paradise!

Statistics Be Scar Shoulders' Lullaby

SS, you're a consummate shit talker. No one attempts to tear that from your Scottish/Chinese grip, but I like to let numbers talk. BD, I love the way we lost that game. Mark Clayton is straight, he'll get many more throws his way and you better believe he has already forgotten about the ONE drop on their two-minute drill to end the game in an extremely hostile environment. Psst, it was the first loss and it came on the road against the NFL's pride and joy.
Joe Flacco through a season and 4 games:

		G	CMP	ATT	PCT	YDS	AVG	TD	LNG	INT	RAT
2008	BAL	16	257	428	60.0	2971	6.9	14	70	12	80.3
2009	BAL	4	95	151	62.9	1103	7.3	8	72	3	94.3

Eli Manning through two seasons:

YEAR	G	ATT	COM	PCT	YARDS	YPA	TD	INT	RATE
2004	9	197	95	48.2	1043	5.3	6	9	55.4
2005	16	557	294	52.8	3762	6.8	24	17	75.9

Jackal Book Club

Any more additions? I am keeping a Jackal Reading list.

Rusty's website gave me an idea. Let me know if some Jackals want to start swapping some books via USPS. It would be a hell of a lot cheaper than Amazon route. And it would motivate peeps to get through more books if peeps were waiting to have it sent back.

(I know the first post label makes no sense, but it came up as a default and brought back memories.)