via Roger Ebert

Immediately an image popped into my head (i’m sure one is popping into your head now as well). So I went on a Google image search for a comparison image, but I found that someone had beat me to the comparison (of course they had). I found the following image:

The internet can be a wonderful thing.

Image show where the ball lands and Cuzzi's line of sight. No way he can't get this call correct.

I’ve never thought that sports was fixed, until tonight. Watching the ALDS, Twins versus the Yankees, I saw an umpire make a call that was nothing short of amazing. A ball that was clearly a fair ball was called foul by umpire Phil Cuzzi. Cuzzi was well positioned, had a clear view of the ball and called a ball that landed at least 12 inches inside the field of play a foul ball. Cuzzi had such a good view of the play, the ball was so clearly fair, that it was just simply amazing. All I could think to myself was that it was an intentional call. An intentional call to steal a hit from the opposing team. A call that directly affected the outcome of the game. A call so blatantly wrong that it has made me question whether baseball is fixed.

I want an investigation into this call. I want Phil Cuzzi suspended from post-season play. I want to hear him explain that call and how he got it so wrong. I ultimately want to see Phil Cuzzi fired. For the sake of the game. For the integrity of the game.

No one in Washington, from the President to Congress has wanted anything near to the “public option”. Many have stated, including Craig Crawford of CQ Politics, that Obama was never a supporter of health care reform on that kind of scale. And looking at what Senator Baucus unveiled neither was his committee. Simply put, the public option or any other significant health care reform was never going to happen. It was a figment of dreamy Liberal minds. The reality that our politicians, especially those in the Senate, are fully in the back pocket of the health insurance lobby. They were bought and paid for long before this round of the health care debate.

You may say to yourself, “Obama wanted health care reform, he said so.” Sure he did, or should I say sure he had to say so. If you haven’t figured it out yet, Obama made that promise to Ted Kennedy in order to get his endorsement. See how quickly the public option left the debate once Ted was six feet under?

Face it folks, you have been flim-flamed, hoodwinked, we didn’t land on the Prudential rock, the Prudential rock is about to land on us (I know it is a stretch, but Prudential does sell health insurance). The reform debate has been nothing but a dog and pony show to get you to believe that this was a hard-fought battle to get a compromise that we all could live with. The President gets to say he got health reform passed, and so do the Democrats. They get to say that they did all they could to make this a bipartisan effort. They compromised the bill, even though the Republicans didn’t even ask them to do it. We have a bill that purportedly has everything in it that the President wants, and as the rest of us are finding out, everything that the insurance companies want as well.

The insurers get to have all of us forced into buying coverage from them under threat of penalty. They get to discriminate against who they choose, they get to force the sick into waiting six months to be covered at all. They get to charge whatever they want to whomever they want. We also get the priviledge of being taxed on this coverage. It’s a win-win for everyone but us.

Have you thought about what other system this sounds like? If you said it sounds like how your car insurance works, you’d be correct. We’re all forced to pay under penalty of law. We get red-lined if we live in the wrong place. Get charged up the you-know-what if we have the wrong type of car. If we use our insurance, we are guaranteed the cost will go up, and if your insurer wants to drop you on a whim, it can. Sounds like a great way to run a health care system too doesn’t it?

So thank you Democrats, Republican, and President Obama. Thank you for acting like you really had concern for the American people. Thank you for putting on one of the most well acted dramas in American politics. Truly, theater for the masses. And thank you, finally, for sticking it to the American public one more time on behalf of your corporate overlords. Bravo!