Frank answers his own question, has yet to realize it.

Frank's been on a real quoting spree recently. Perhaps he's run out of independent thoughts. That, or he really thinks his "365 half-witted cluster-fucks of pseudo-political ramblings of the day" calendar is the shit. Nevertheless, here's what we got today:

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"The mystery of government is not how Washington works, but how to make it stop."

--P. J. O'Rourke

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Frank doesn't live in Washington. Frankly (haha, get it?) he thinks the place is the dumps - that's where the government resides, that's where taxes are raised, blah blah blah. Therefore, it seems fitting that Frank would finally initiate his attempted overthrow of the US government. Just imagine Frank leading his militia of redneck Packer fans to the White House.

Keep in mind, Frank, that the folk advocating anarchy are going to be the first people to lose their house under its realization. I don't see you as an exception to the rule.

The most disconcerting facet of Frank's little quote is the fact that he's figured out the mystery, but doesn't seem to have realized it. As a result of bullshit political bickering (I'm looking at you, Lasee), Wisconsin's state budget was overdue by several months this year. Political gridlock. Government stopped, because of Lasee and his band of ruffians. Mystery solved. Well played, Lasee.

Now that you've figured out that mystery, maybe you should figure out that mystery of the hallway in Brown Deer High School. You know, that one you thought the black students were having copious amounts of sex in, the one that white kids weren't allowed in. Remember that one? Me too...

How do you solve a problem like Lasee?

Tuesday, November 20, 2007
"Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. You can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients."

--Ronald Reagan

Wednesday, November 21, 2007
"We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex--but Congress can."

--Cullen Hightower

Where does a critic even start? You can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients? What's that mean? You can't have a government control administering health care without requiring people who need health care to become socialists? Well Frank, if that's true, and you're paid by the government, and some poor souls are your constituents, doesn't that make them socialists? What about people who go to the post office to send mail? All de facto socialists, according to Lasee according to Reagan.

Now the second quote, Frank, I'd think you'd see as a good thing: If Congress was totally ignorant of the ways our lives could be more frustrating and complex, certainly they wouldn't take that into account when they're making decisions. I think what you meant to quote from someone else is: "We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex, and Congress cannot either, so our lives keep getting more frustrating and complex!"

That being said, I do understand Frank's trying (hard but pathetically, and through the voice of another) to imply that legislatures intentionally make people's lives more frustrating and complex. For example, Dr. Lasee recently went into a school outside his district to convince them to stop allowing black kids to have sex in a school hallway. Now, those kids will have to have sex somewhere else. Moreover, instead of calling the police should a kid show up at school with a gun, Lasee proposes trying to get five school administrators together to put their thumbs against a safe to release the gun and shoot the kid. Frustrating and complex much?

Frank quotes Hill

From Franky's Funhouse:

"I have a million ideas. The country can't afford them all."

--Hillary Clinton

Frank Frank Frank. If I didn't know it was you totally misunderstanding the quote, I'd be curious whether someone from your position would agree or disagree with that (obviously realistic) statement. But you got your panties in a bunch and, instead of reading the words 'million', 'them' and 'all', I bet you saw "I have ideas. The country can't afford them." Would you rather she said "I have a million ideas, I think the country can afford them all, and I'm gonna try to make that work"? Hillary says something fiscally pragmatic, and Lasee jumps down her throat.

You've managed to turn a nearly tautological comment (if the US Government tried to enact every idea for reform I have, we wouldn't be able to) into an implicit exogesis on your inability to interpret even simple quotations just by posting it on your blog. C'mon Frank: Don't you have any staffers that aren't miserable at thinking you could throw on the case?

If only Lasee could read

Bill O'Reilly has started messing with his liberal blogger law school critics by trying to get them kicked out of law school.

My only question is, Frank, when do you try to get Dr. Nugz and I kicked out of law school? We started Seriatim for other reasons, realized it was insufficient to keep up with the ridicule you deserve, and started YLfB to make fun of you. I took the picture from the front page of your blog, added a tongue in Microsoft Paint (with which I am amazing) and captioned it by saying that you're sticking your tongue out out of disgust with the general populus of the state you govern.

Dr. Nugz had an idea: "Of course, it'd mean he would have to hire a lawyer, and he might not feel like punching someone right now." Frank, if you're reading this, you should email some UWLS administrators right now* and tell them to kick JP and Dr. Nugz out of school. I wouldn't bring up your recent attempt to defund the entire institution, though.

* Please BCC us, too. Post a comment and I'll send you the addy.

** Sweet Benny is a news source of no equal.

He tries so hard...

Earlier this week, Frank was lambasted by this fine blog for, rather idiotically, quoting some dead guy on an issue Frank couldn't quite understand. As my colleague JP noted yesterday, Frank tried to circumvent this criticism by 'attributing' bullshit from someone, rather than outright quoting them. After being admonished for this rhetorical sleight-of-hand, Frank is now trying to pass the buck on one of his potentially well-meaning, yet still mildly retarded, constituents.

It turns out that somebody in the world subscribes to Frank's weekly newsletter. Even more surprising, it seems that this person decided to write his/her thoughts to our favorite incompetent legislator. Frank, clearly impressed by the level of intelligence and thought displayed by the comment, posted the drivel on his blog. We're left with this:

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"I think we have a responsibility to provide health care for those who cannot afford it. This does not mean everyone who does not have health insurance. If a person /family spends their money foolishly we should not have to pay their bills.If they buy a new car instead of buying health that's too bad for them. Let them sell their car and house if they were so foolish to waste their money.

Every man, woman and child has the responsibility to provide for themselves! If they do not do so , we should not have to pay for them.

I am tired of hearing people claim we owe them something for nothing. We owe them the right to work for it and NO MORE!"

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It hurts. Hurts bad.

It appears that Frank and his band of imbeciles have figured out what's wrong with the system. Those that are unable to provide health insurance for their family have obviously spent their money on foolish shit - like cars, drugs, bitches, diamond-encrusted goblets, etc. For some reason, I'm not quite sure the world-view espoused by Lasee's minion is entirely accurate.

Note the obvious double-bind that Frank and his creature placed themselves in. Our society has a responsibility to pay for the health insurance of someone that can't afford it, unless they spend their money foolishly. Frank's policy thus far has been to provide health insurance to nobody, to leave it an entirely personal affair, regardless of finances. If Frank adopts the message provided by his minion, which he has presumably done given its publication, Frank now desires to give poor families the luxury of going to a doctor, provided that Frank is allowed to go through your financial statements from the past several years to determine whether or not you spend your money on stupid shit. You can say a lot of things about Frank, but he's going to make sure you'll never be able to call him consistent.

Let's talk about the foolish shit Frank doesn't want poor people spending their money on for a bit. If you're too poor to afford health insurance, Frank wants you to prove it to him. Sell your house, sell your car - do what you've got to do. Wait, what? Sell your house??! That's right - sell the fucker. You're not poor enough for our 'responsibility to provide health care' to kick in until your family is, quite literally, living in a cardboard box in an alley. Compassionate conservatism, anyone?

If y'all would be so kind, please point your attention to the second paragraph of the message. According to these cretins, the responsibility for health insurance coverage is on the shoulders of every man, woman or child that wants it. That's right - if you're 6 years old, and want to see the doctor about your boo-boo, Frank wants you to get a job, save your money, and buy the necessary insurance.

Quite obviously, child-labor laws must piss Frank off to no end. He's telling us that every child has a responsibility to fund their own health insurance. This is difficult, because children in Wisconsin can't work until their 14, and can't hold any meaningful employment until they're 16. What does that mean for little Billy, the able-bodied 11-year old who needs to go to the doctor, but can't afford coverage because the asshole Democrats wont let him get a great job at the foundry? It means - fuck you, Billy.

Maybe your parents shouldn't have blown their money on that house you live in. That'll teach 'em.

The Attributable Lasee

Frank Lasee reads YLFB. For serious. He posted another quote today, but with a few differences from his normal parroting that are obviously a result of the criticisms on this blog. From the horse's mouth:

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.

From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.
--attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler

First, after all of the crap we've given him for quoting people, Frank's decided instead to "attribute" this retarded little blurb to Alexander Fraser Tytler, an 18th century Scotsman. When you check out Mr. Tytler's wikipedia entry, they do in fact make reference to the nugget of idiocy with which Frank chose to associate himself:

"The following unverified quotation has been attributed to Tytler, most notably as part of a longer piece which began circulating on the Internet shortly after the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election[1]:"

Ah, it was a chain letter! Now we're moving back to traditional Franky, who apparently still thinks that quotes from chain letters are appropriate bases for legislative policy. Why does Frank like chain letters so much? As Howie beat into my head, let's go to the definitions. From wikipedia:

"Although no state or federal laws currently exist banning chain letters; they are viewed as a general nuisance as that frequenly multiplying letters clog up the postal system and do not function as correspondence mail, but rather, a game."

Now we're in LaseeLand: Viewed as a general nuisance, clogging up the system, treating something serious as a game. If ever there were a better metaphorical representation of the Lasee era in Wisconsin, it'd have to involve some sort of defecation.

To spend just a second on the "content" of the attribution, can anyone out there think of one democratic government that has spent itself into dictatorship? Dr. Nugz and I pondered this question at some length to no avail. Moreover, how would Franky reconcile the quote, which says politicians must spend money to help the people, with his continued term of office despite screwing everyone over all the time? Is Frank implicitly asserting that his nuisance-y legislative game that's clogging up Wisconsin is keeping us from a dictatorship?

By the way, the point in the quote, "[a] democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government" reminded me of The Onion article proclaiming that political scientists have discovered a new form of government! C'mon Frank, treating a democracy like an atom with a half-life is something only the genious' at The Onion can come up with nowadays, and they don't even write chain letters.

Much ado about Franky

JP: oh yeah, lasee's quote
Dr. Nugz: Oh shit, for sure.
Dr. Nugz: Seems the perfect tie-in for a talk about his illegitimate child.
JP: even after reading it, it doesn't really say anything to respond to
JP: heh
Dr. Nugz: I'm not sure - do you think he's trying to tell us that we can't blame him for his mistakes, we should blame the entire organ of government?
JP: i'm actually surprised that he'd quote someone talking about washington; is he suggesting that in wisconsin we have a particularly accountable system, where he gets all the shit on him?
Dr. Nugz: He's talking about shifting responsibility as an act of shifting responsibility.
JP: and by quoting someone pointing out that it's happening in washington...
JP: where's lasee in here again?
Dr. Nugz: Maybe he thinks life in Wisconsin and in D.C. are the same?
JP: or maybe all governments are the same
Dr. Nugz: You know, the rough, rugged political scene in Madison. It'll kill ya....
JP: with his expertise in fashion design, you'd expect him to know better
Dr. Nugz: With his desire to put thumbprint-coded safes full of guns in public schools, you'd expect him to not know better.
JP: well, i don't know, maybe everyone else was just artfully evading responsibility for not having more guns in schools
Dr. Nugz: Ha, and Frank became the patsy. I could see that - seems like the kind of guy everyone would set up for a fall.
JP: true, always sticking his nose out there for the little guy
JP: i'm just gonna post the im
Dr. Nugz: Even if the little guy isn't even in his voting district, and gets Frankie looking up to see whether or not 6th graders are having sex in a public school hallway that black students aren't allowed into. Maybe everyone is just setting him up for the fall on that one too.
JP: writing a post would make it seem like we could encapsulate his stupidity in one coherent block
Dr. Nugz: That's the problem - you just can't square a circle.

Lasee quotes to avoid being quotable

If ever one of Franky's puppet-like attempts at individual thought via quotation really hit it on the head, it's this one:

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."
-Milton Friedman

Like most people who aren't able to conjure up and defend a point themselves, Frank resorts here to summoning the authority of Milton Friedman, a figure whose name people believing that money should be in the hands of the capital like to invoke in response to the argument that deregulation generally screws the working class. Unable, apparently, to come up with a hyperbole as poignant as a sand economy, Franky thought he'd pull the double whammy of bad argumentation. I can see him doing it right now: "If I quote Milton Friedman merely making a ridiculous, bald-faced assertion, then, not only will this blog post contain a ridiculous, bald-faced assertion, it'll also encapsulate my [Ed. note: pathetic] inability to construct even a bad argument on my own!"

When you read this and realize we got that moment on tape, post a comment and we'll tell you where we hid the spycam.