Last night, Stephen Colbert exposed FreedomWorks' latest lame attempt to derail Obamacare.
Nation, I hope you're ready, because you have to lock your lungs and batten down your colon, because Obamacare is coming. The individual mandate takes effect on New Year's Day, which means when the Times Square ball drops, it will immediately be checked for lumps.
Worse, folks, worse, this bloated bureaucratic program that will never work has started working.
MSNBC (7/19/2013): The Department of Health and Human Services announced that in 11 states and Washington, D.C., premiums in the health care marketplace required by Obamacare are turning out to be nearly 20% lower than projected for 2014.
OK, maybe so, but you're not going to live any longer, because let's face it, most Americans are going to blow those savings on cronuts. It's a death sentence.
And Obamacare is being implemented despite the best efforts of House Republicans, who have voted to symbolically repeal it 39 times. I don't know why it's not working. Maybe they need to load more emptiness into their gestures.
Now the key to implementing Obamacare is the so-called individual mandate, because to keep premium costs down, officials say "they must register 2.7 million healthy people between the ages of 18 and 35 in order to counteract the costs of ensuring seniors and people with health problems."
Well, don't fall for it, young people! You don't need insurance! You're going to be young and healthy forever! I mean, just look at me, I'm 19! I mean, look at this awesome skateboard move! (audience cheering at his skateboard moves) That's called popping a YOLO.
Now fortunately, the godfather of the Tea Party movement, FreedomWorks, recently announced a "Burn Your Obamacare Card" campaign. That's right, younglings. Protest this government overreach by lighting your insurance card on fire. But be careful, because if you burn yourself, you don't have health insurance.
Now, there's only one small problem with this "Burn Your Obamacare Card" plan. There are no such things as Obamacare cards. But FreedomWorks isn't letting a little thing like not existing get in its way, as their Vice President of Public Policy Dean Clancy explained:
DEAN CLANCY: FreedomWorks is going to design the Obamacare card ourselves. We're going to put that online, we're going to share it with people in the hopes that they will burn it, tear it up, mark on it.
Yes, burn it, tear it, mark it, but first, print it, cut it, and laminate it. FreedomWorks is opening up a whole new world of fighting symbols of injustice that don't exist. You know what? They should rent a bus, order themselves to sit at the back of the bus, then refuse to sit at the back of their own bus! Fight the power! (audience cheering)
But the point is, burning things is always an attention-getter. And FreedomWorks' special events manager Emilia Huneke-Bergquist explained why burning this card was so natural:
EMILIA HUNEKE-BERGQUIST: Back in the day, the Selective Service Act decided that each and every male in the U.S. was going to need to carry a draft card. And as the Vietnam War got really heated up in '64 and '65, citizens everywhere decided to burn their cards in protest of the actions big government was taking. And so here we are about 50 years later, we're facing a new kind of government mandate under Obamacare. And so, we've decided that we're gonna torch our own cards.
Yeah, people forget that about the Vietnam War. Those hippies were just fiscal conservatives protesting a big government program. I don't want to see a whole generation forced to fight infection in some nearby county hospital, only to come home in one piece with something to live for! I mean, keep on truckin'!
Well I say if these young people truly want to resist Obamacare, they need to do what Vietnam protesters did in the '60s, and move to Canada. Bonus: I hear they have a great health care system up there that doesn't cost that much!
Stephen also
covered the GOP insanity in the North Carolina legislature.
Meanwhile, John Oliver looked at the latest in
where Edward Snowden is, and then transitioned into the House vote last week on
defunding the NSA program.
John then looked at Anthony Weiner's
falling poll numbers.
Stephen had on
The Lumineers, who performed "
Stubborn Love" and "
Submarines". John had on
Mark Leibovich to talk about his new book about the D.C. culture, which went long. Here's the whole unedited interview in three parts.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Oh, if you're wondering about why this was posted so late, it's because my computer's in the shop with some kind of virus that killed the Internet connection so badly, no IP address even exists to reset. And then I tried using my old computer last night, posted one comment, and while I was defragging it, it turned itself off and turned back on with a "read disc error" message that asked me to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart it. I did, and it brought me back to that screen with the exact same message. I did this several times before giving up.
So bottom line, I now have no computer at home. And there's no way in hell I was going to type up that entire transcript on my phone last night.