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10/30/2003 Archived Entry: "When the cockroaches take over the world ..."

PROOF THAT THE OVERALL LEVEL OF INTELLECT WILL RISE WHEN COCKROACHES TAKE OVER THE PLANET.

From Augustwest,charmer of the Red Dog, comes this item:

EUGENE, Ore. - Roughly 40,000 poor people have been dropped from the Oregon Health Plan this year because of their failure to make monthly premium payments, some as low as $6 a month.

The departure of more than one-third of the 88,000 poor people from the state-subsidized Oregon Health Plan Standard program has far exceeded the expectations of many state officials.

Advocates for the poor say the premiums are too expensive for some people and the government may have overestimated the ability of people to mail a check.

"It's an enormous barrier," said Ellen Pinney, director of the Oregon Health Action Committee. "Let alone the $6, there is the whole issue of writing a check or getting a money order, putting it in an envelope with a stamp and putting it in the mail to this place in Portland that must receive it by the due date." ...

(And there's more, believe it or not. The story actually gets worse from there.)

From Debra, Webmistress of the Dark and secret Simpson's fan comes this one:

In an interview this week with National Public Radio, Matt Groening recalled how the news channel had considered legal action, despite the fact that "The Simpsons" is broadcast on sister network, Fox Entertainment.

According to Groening, Fox took exception took a Simpsons' version of the Fox News rolling news ticker which parodied the channel's anti-Democrat stance, with headlines like "Do Democrats Cause Cancer?" ...

While the lawsuit never materialized, Groening said some action was taken.

"Now Fox has a new rule that we can't do those little fake news crawls on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it's real news," he said.

And I'm not even gonna mention the item Sunni sent yesterday about Ohio cops arresting a nine-year-old boy and his mother because the kid was waving a toy gun over his head while waiting for Mom outside a beauty parlor and Mom objected to her little boy being hauled off to jail without anyone even trying to find or notify her. (Not to mention without any use of common sense or reasonableness.)

Posted by Claire @ 01:16 PM CST
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