With two-thirds of the nation officially fat and $150 billion spent annually on easily preventable health problems caused specifically by obesity, you might think Health Care Reform — any of the hundred versions — would start with “Do not suffocate yourself with fat.” Never mind the expensive cancer screenings that may or may not make a statistical difference, a health-care reform package that actually aims to lower the cost of health care in this country should, obviously, start with full-on socialized government control of the consumer food chain, because PEOPLE ARE TOO DUMB TO NOT EAT 5,000 CALORIES OF CORN-SYRUP NACHO-POCKETZ PER “MEAL,” and they are too lazy to do anything but sit in traffic or watch their programs on the flat screen, and dear god have you seen little children lately? How do you get all the kids to suddenly plump up like Augustus Gloop? Better question: How do you not do this, to babies? Don’t ask Congress, because they’re too busy eating Dove Bars and sacks of Doritos.
We turn, this time with actual admiration, to gutter-trash tabloid The Politico, not least because of the headline “Fat Accompli”:
Congress is no model for healthful living.
Long hours and high stress only help already hefty members pack on more pounds. During heated negotiations over the climate and energy bill last month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wheeled carts of Dove ice-cream bars into meetings to win support through members’ stomachs. And late-night votes last week required clerks to bring piles of pizzas into the Senate cloakroom.
Members of the Senate Finance Committee like to snack on Doritos, potato chips and beef jerky — among other things — while considering the future of health care, and on Wednesday they thoughtfully arranged for at least six dozen doughnuts to feed reporters covering the deliberations.
Later, it is revealed that Pelosi herself steers clear of the Dove Bars and pizzas she sends to her “friends” in the House, to kill them with heart attacks. While the typical portly members of Congress are sleeping off their last few 2 a.m. Hungry Man dinners, Pelosi is “speed walking” around the National Mall, chuckling to herself and eating just a spoonful of brown rice for breakfast-lunch.
Fat accompli: Congress’s weight issue [Politico]
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{ 79 comments }
We’re not fat, we’re just big boned, Ken.
Why do you hate the Fats so, Kin? It’s probable that at least 2/3 of Our Wonkette has teh Fat especially since most of Our Wonkette is composed of filthy hobbit nerds, wonks, and horn-balls.
Obesity is the only thing we can produce any more.
If you don’t like eating vegetables, try putting some bacon and melted cheese on them to improve the taste.
That picture burns my eyes.
It’s getting so bad that you can’t even make a fat joke anymore without half your friends and 2/3 of your family getting all pissed off and offended.
[re=374666]NoWireHangers[/re]: And we have cushy office jobs that allow us to read Wonkette and subsequently cause our fat asses to spread for all the sitting and eating Hot Pockets.
After literally hundreds of sightings of that photo here and elsewhere, I just for the first time noticed something that’s hung on the fellow’s wall in the background: It appears to be some sort of gun. Specifically, it looks like a caulking gun. Fat Caulks. He.
Ah, good to see the junk-food lobby is now in league with the Health Insurance lobby. God I love capitalism!
Wait — you mean the people who voted for tax cuts in a time of war and record government spending don’t know anything about the economy of their personal metabolism either? Or the Chinese are sending them twinkies and ho-hos.
“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wheeled carts of Dove ice-cream bars into meetings to win support through members’ stomachs.”
That was for the fatty Democrats. The republicans each got a 3-ft-high cake with a 12-year-old boy inside.
I still wear size 30 pants. I just cut out the tags and put them in my size 36 McFatty pants. That way I feel better and still getz to eat the Taco Bell. The end.
That man is typing something mean about Trig!
[re=374666]NoWireHangers[/re]: Also, insecure sluts. DON’T FORGETZ TEH INSEKYER SLUTTZ!
Ahhhem. They prefer the term “gravity challenged.”
We don’t want health care reform if we have to lose weight or pay taxes! Why can’t you people understand that! If I have to, I’ll have a crane lift me out of this bed to vote next time. I mean it!
After looking at the almost-pic of William Gaines I’m not thinking about healthcare I’m just missing the old MAD.
No doughnuts for you, missy, until you cut your disgusting hair. You look like Medusa. http://images.politico.com/global/071214_lisaweb.jpg
I work in an office where 3 women have had the gastric-bypass in the last 4 months and another fatty-pig-fatty is scheduled to go.
The one that sits closest to me still eats potato chips and cheetos all day.
It’s kind of discouraging, the ubiquitous fatness. I’m a fat, myself, but in a 1950s kind of way. I’m officially Overweight by gummint standards, which is anything over 25 percent body fat, but I’m way under Obese, unlike half the population. So when I bitch about being fat, people stare at me like I’m crazy, since I’m way less fat than most people my age. I respond to this by eating bacon and drinking LARGE amounts of alcohol.
[re=374675]Noonan[/re]: Not a caulk gun. That is a pickup claw thingie since he can’t bend over to pick anything up.
[re=374680]Atheist Nun[/re]: The republicans each got a 3-ft-high, penis-shaped cake with a 12-year-old boy inside.
There. Fixed.
[re=374689]S.Luggo[/re]: Hott.
Yeah, but all that shit gets washed down with diet sodas and lite beers. SO IT’S OKAY, KEN!@!!
Man, Rush has really let himself go since his OxyContin connection dried up.
[re=374666]NoWireHangers[/re]: can one be a filthy-hobbit nerd, a wonk and a horn-ball, or are they mutually exclusive?
Eh fatties like myself will all die off early enough it is the healthy folks who will turn into zombie old people who need health care forever who are the main problem… so bring on the cheeto tax…I’ll pay AND enjoy the delicious orange dust as god intended food to taste!
[re=374666]NoWireHangers[/re]: and sit at desks all day. DON”T BITE THE HAND THAT FEEDZ YOU KEN, EVEN IF IT IS COVERED WITH TASTY CHEETO DUST!
[re=374674]NoWireHangers[/re]: damn….i didn’t see that.
America will not be fat enough until Hardees/Carls Jr. takes over the country.
Don’t criticize the naked guy. His furry suit has to go to the cleaners sometime!
The story doesn’t seem to mention all the possible weight that congress critters gain attending all those swanky dinners/banquets/cocktail receptions thrown by lobbyists. Eating pate and dining on venison four or five times a week can’t be good for you.
“Pelosi is “speed walking” around the National Mall, chuckling to herself and eating just a spoonful of brown rice for breakfast-lunch.”
I could have sworn Pelosi ate the remains of aborted Christian fetuses. Learn something new every day.
Being in Congress sounds suspiciously like how I recall college to be. Does the health center give out free condoms, too?
I suggest that whatever bill O-man eventually signs have a list of behaviors that will be considered the legal equivalent of carrying a Do Not Resuscitate card. DUI, smoking, riding a motorcycle without a helmet, not using seatbelts, owning guns, eating like demented pigs… Yes, you can “decide” to do these things, but do realize that there are consequences that YOU need to face. ALONE. Without us all chipping in. Shitbrains.
I love this line in the story:
“But totally eliminating personal responsibility is a political loser, especially in many of the conservative districts that have the biggest weight problems. The most obese areas of the country — Mississippi, Alabama and West Virginia — are also places that are traditionally skeptical of government intervention, even if it’s only offering free diet advice.”
Too bad they won’t be able to get any of that socialized health care to help them take care of all that heart disease and diabetes they’re ringing up.
If you ask me, eating pizza in a cloakroom just screams “disordered eating.”
[re=374741]oldguy[/re]: Then what, pray tell, do you expect me to do with my Saturday night?
Socialist.
[re=374741]oldguy[/re]: Owning guns is totally safe, if you’re not a moron or a hoodlum. Kids are way more likely to drown in a bucket than shoot themselves with Daddy’s pistol. Motorcycles, with or without a helmet, are comparatively death traps.
Ok, I laughed at ‘Fat Accompli’.
I’m sorry, Dove Ice Cream Bars are delicious. I would eat them everyday except they will kill me so I don’t. They are also kind of expensive. How are these fats affording all of this food anyways? I am a poor and all I can afford is rice.
I’m not anything like skinny as far as my mom and I are concerned, but that’s because we’re Russian. In America, I have to strip my skirts off of mannequins. Thank you, childhood nutritional deficiencies!
[re=374739]cynbot[/re]: Yes, the health center that distributes free condoms is code-named “the C Street house”.
[re=374759]OffTheRecord[/re]: Unless your are too poor to pay taxes, you are affording all of that food for the fats.
Jesus told me it was ok to be fat. Said he was coming to save me from my fatness.
Jesus also said not to accept any socialized, unchristian medicine. But instead, to listen to the Health Insurance companies. He said “Capitalism = Christianity.”
[re=374771]Roger the Shrubber[/re]: you’re
[re=374765]AxmxZ[/re]: In Russia, mannequin strip skirt off you.
Isn’t this just a sign that we should get ourselves out of the depression by sucking the fat out of 2/3 of Americans (thereby satiating both plastic surgeons and the DC Summer Interns who think DC’s ugly?), and selling soap made from it at inflated pries to the developing nations of the world? Just officially turn America into the Fat Farm it has been moving towards ever since the invention of Elvis’ Grilled Peanut Butter and Banana on Wonder Bread Sandwiches?
“chuckling to herself and eating just a spoonful of brown rice for breakfast-lunch.”
Breakfast-lunch, eh? If only there were some sort of shorter, colloquial term for a meal that combines breakfast and lunch…like Leakfast, or something.
[re=374765]AxmxZ[/re]: I didn’t know there were any Russians around not working at NCBI.
[re=374666]NoWireHangers[/re]:
I may be a filthy-hobbit-nerd-wonk-horn ball but I am svelte. Svelte I say!
[re=374688]shadowMark[/re]: Wow–I’m glad I’m not the only one who looked at that picture and immediately thought, “Huh. Bill Gaines?”
Also, an epiphany: You know what’s needed to pass healthcare reform once and for all? During the congressional recess, we need a highly-publicizable sacrificial victim. Maybe an adorable, big-eyed little kid with something horrifically fatal but treatable, who gets denied treatment by a big heartless insurance company for the most trivial of cost-cutting reasons. And then the adorable dying kid and her single mom (let’s make her a feisty Norma Ray type, spotless work and personal history but laid off due to her job going overseas…) appeal to Obama at a town hall type meeting, and Obama gets on one knee and solemnly promises to move heaven and earth to help… The resulting viral video shames the insurer into covering treatment, but IT’S TOO GODDAMN LATE. The little dead girl’s name gets attached to the reform bill, and it passes. Also, maybe Bill O’Reilly could mock the dead girl’s mom so viciously that even freepers are ashamed…
And then I woke up.
[re=374694]zenferret[/re]: Correct.
And below it hangs the “Footprints in the Sand” poem, paired with a coaxial cable from RadioShack®. The “Ye Olde Englishe”-font sign to the right of the PannicuClaw® looks very familiar, but I can’t quite place it.
Pretty sure that it’s something WingnutJesus-y, though…
[re=374675]Noonan[/re]:
It’s a pressure washer. You know what he uses it for.
There was someone who testified this week who gave Congress a perfectly reasoned, economical, fair and politically viable plan to reform health care. In persuasive aguments, he laid out step-by-step what actions would be required to achieve not only universal health coverage but also substantive and lasting improvements in the health of Americans.
But it was just before lunch, so they ate him.
Hey! How did you guys get a photo of my dad working on a computer? He’s been dead since before PCs were ever made! And why would you print THAT one?
And late-night votes last week required clerks to bring piles of pizzas into the Senate cloakroom.
Oh, please. We all know that the pizzas were just an excuse.
Scientific fact crank solves any portly problem.Stimulus funds for crank ready fruit smoothie bars in every mall.Tax anyone doing more than $250,000 in crank/year.Win Win
[re=374753]Lazy Media[/re]: Like the genius who hid his loaded Glock under the bed so their 3 year old son could blow his head off.
The purpose of guns is to shoot stuff, and there’s very little stuff that needs shooting in the world we live in.
Own all the guns you want. Don’t ask us to pay the medical bills.
Man… that picture…. I just threw up a little….which means I guess I get to eat 7 more grains of rice for lunch! Sweet!
[re=374673]Dave J.[/re]: Why on earth would you be friends with someone who was fat? Gross.
What are the statistics on kids drowning in pails of water?
[re=374675]Noonan[/re]: Much worse. It is a grabber. For reaching places you can no longer bend to. And for holding things. Like toilet paper.
Us skinny poors aren’t any less of a drain on the health care system, if my stack of copays are any indication. Half of us are probably ex meth heads, anyway.
[re=374809]Extemporanus[/re]: Those would be some deep-ass footprints when God is toting that big load around.
I’ve never seen a fat eating a dove bar, probably because for the price of a box of dove bars, you can get a half-gallon of Blue Bell Cookies ‘N’ Cream. The choice would seem to be obvious.
Also, we would all be just as fat as that dude if we weren’t drug addicts.
[re=374898]LittlePig[/re]: Take another look at the Great Lakes. *GOOSEBUMPS!*
you U.S. Americans eat soap?!? damn, it’s worse than I thought.
[re=374884]Humpback[/re]: OK, I grant that the “gun” thing on the wall is a grabber. But where is the grabber that he uses to grab the grabber off the wall?
Did Boner..I mean Boehner…get the study this week showing that tanning beds are worse than just about ANYTHING for skin cancer? The guy is a sickly orange, and Palin…oh wait…shhhhh…let’s not say anything, for the sake of the country.
I’m saving my 20 extra pounds for the up-coming Nobama-induced hyper-inflation, no-job, socialist, not able to buy food diet. Fuck off.
What an attractive man!
I wonder: “Does he have a date for the prom yet?”
[re=374925]Norbert[/re]: This is what I assumed it meant also. Turns out I’ve been washing with ice cream!
Can’t we just throw water on all their hides and drag them back out to sea?
[re=374908]kth[/re]: I told my wife I must be the only drug addict in the world who gained weight on drugs. I have an appetite for frozen confections. I am no longer on drugs, also.
Actually, real beef jerky is a good snack for weight control, in moderation. You can’t make jerky with fatty meat, or it goes rancid, so jerky is always pretty lean and therefore pretty low-calorie. It also forces you to eat slowly, which tricks your mind into thinking you’ve eaten more. As long as you don’t overdose on saltpeter, you could do a lot worse.
I was going to make a joke about Jerrold Nadler, Dove bars and the guy in the photo but I see Nadler’s lost about a thousand pounds.
As I waited for my soy chai at Starbucks this a.m. (could I sound more elitist and effete? Jesus), I watched obese person after obese person getting their venti double whipped cream milkshakes pretending to be coffee, and I started to get depressed. The terrorists don’t need to win–we are going down like the Roman Empire. Sort of like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTH8_elwCpA
[re=374884]Humpback[/re]: AKA Poopy Reach Tool
[re=375217]chapka[/re]: I’ll second this. This nation is fat in part because our snacks rather than tide us over to the next meal make us MORE hungry. Any snack low in carbs is a great move in the right direction. Instead people eat chips at 10-15 empty, hungry in ten minutes, calories a pop. Or disgusting yogurt so soaked in sugar it might as well be ice cream.
Forget the evil heath care lobby, I say arrest everyone in the high fructose corn syrup lobby and that would take us through at least the next decade of health improvement.
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