It's okay, Mehlman, even before you overshared your "journey," it was a Shatner / Common People / Animated Trek kind of night. h/t Dangerous Minds.

Open thread below.

If nothing else, this small snippet of debate between Rush Limbaugh and Williams Shatner casts some light on how right wing lunatics look at health care:

SHATNER: Here’s my premise, and you agree with it or not. If you have money, you are going to get health care. If you don’t have money, it’s more difficult.

LIMBAUGH: If you have money you’re going to get a house on the beach. If you don’t have money, you’re going to live in a bungalow somewhere.

SHATNER: Right, but we’re talking about health care.

LIMBAUGH: What’s the difference?

SHATNER: The difference is we’re talking about health care, not a house or a bungalow.

LIMBAUGH: No. No. You’re assuming that there is some morally superior aspect to health care than there is to a house.

SHATNER: No, I’m not moral at all. I want to keep the subject, for the moment, on the health care thing.

There's a somewhat mind-numbing economic analysis here which undertakes to ask the question of whether the health care market is somehow different from any other market, while leaving moral questions aside.

Here's my problem: I don't see how you can leave moral questions aside. Health care is NOT some kind of free-wheeling profit-driven economic market. Or at least, it shouldn't be. Morals ARE a substantial part of the health care debate. Trying to create an argument for distribution of goods and/or services according to demand where the demand can only be met by those with the means to meet it is an exercise in intellectual floggery.

Of course Rush blathers on at the end about how this is his business, this argument about health care, and he has the knowledge to hold the high ground in the argument.

I wonder. Did he gain that knowledge from dabbling in the free oxycontin market or somewhere else?

OMG Shatner is everywhere. Via Monkey Muck. Open thread below...

REPORTS of Captain Kirk beaming back up onto "Star Trek" again are getting stronger.

A trailer for the new season of UPN's "Enterprise" showing William Shatner reprising his famous role as the maverick starship captain was shown to a select few at the CBS Television City Research Center in Las Vegas last week, according to sources.

In several interviews, the producers have made no secret of their zeal to land Shatner for next season. Shatner himself is said to have come up with a Kirk storyline and approached Berman and Braga with it.

http://nypost.com/entertainment/26638.htm