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By Joan Walsh, Salon.com

It’s one thing for former George W. Bush flack and Sarah Palin staffer Nicolle Wallace to make a silly and self-serving link between the troubled rollout of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act and her boss’s handling of, wait for it, Hurricane Katrina. It’s another for the New York Times to pick up the cudgel and seriously make a comparison between the Affordable Care Act’s acknowledged problems and the deadly 2005 tragedy.

But that’s what the paper did Friday morning, with Michael D. Shear’s “Health Law Rollout’s Stumbles Draw Comparisons to Bush’s Hurricane Response.” Other media are using the Times piece to make the same comparison. ABC’s “Good Morning America” did a whole segment on it; as I write, the chyron on MSNBC asks “Obama’s Katrina?”

Shear put it this way:

The disastrous rollout of [Obama’s} health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency….

“The echoes to the fall of 2005 are really eerie,” said Peter D. Feaver, a top national security official in Mr. Bush’s second term. “Katrina, which is shorthand for bungled administration policy, matches to the rollout of the website.”

No, Mr. Feaver, Katrina isn’t shorthand for “bungled administration policy.” It’s an actual tragedy in which at least 1,800 people lost their lives. Thousands of others were left stranded without food or water in their flooded neighborhoods, on freeway viaducts, in hospitals and nursing homes, and in the televised hell-hole of the Superdome. A million people were displaced, some of them permanently. Whole neighborhoods remain unrestored eight years later. There was at least $123 million in destruction, twice as much as in Hurricane Sandy.

In the ACA holocaust, by comparison, an undetermined number of people may lose health insurance policies they like. Many more, perhaps millions, have been frustrated by a kludgy website. On the other hand, at least 100,000 have signed up for insurance through the …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Lucy McKeon, AlterNet

Trending on Google and Facebook this past week, what-would-i-say.com is a new app made by Princeton graduate students during last weekend’s Princeton Hackathon that creates Facebook statuses to sound like users based on their past posts. After going live November 10th, the site crashed on Nov. 11 and Nov. 13 due to heavy traffic. But what made this game of algorithmic MadLibs so popular? Might we learn something about ourselves, if not from the statuses, then from the site’s wild popularity?

Here's a sampling of what I would say, according to the app:

lookin straight out of the gun lobby, the idyllic notion of American (and its later variation) lookin straight at times uncomfortable home(preach!)

my first developing a sense of routine, climbing into writing.(I can relate)

hey everyone, thinking about seeing IceT's The arguments made by the model, the enigma(no comment. I’d definitely see it though.)

(my favorite) the lady knows how To Be

Having discovered the status-impersonating robot yesterday, I felt way more entertained/embarrassed by robotme than seemed appropriate. But logging into Facebook, I saw that I wasn’t the only one. (This new trend of posting the results of What Would I Say as Facebook statuses is a meta-appropriate appreciation of the phenomenon, much like if a Miley Cyrus parody video were to influence Cyrus’s next single).  

The “What Would I Say” app is immediately delightful and embarrassing. And that’s key to its of-the-moment success (as is the fact that our own statuses are the main draw; those of others are of little interest).

It taps into the narcissistic pleasure of self-definition—the “I am this, I am not that”/“I like this, I don’t like that” game, mechanized by Facebook but originating in the very real desire to define ourselves as individuals separate from others, and to have these specificities recognized. The app provides you with an uncanny displacement from yourself – a sort of wonderful self-alienation that lets you see yourself from the outside to recognize that inner-stuff you’re so familiar with that it usually goes unnoticed.

It …read more

Source: ALTERNET