The godbots descend on the bad news of my heart attack

Now that the word is out that I probably had a heart attack last month, my email runneth over. Most of them are dear friends and family members wishing me the best, a few with questions asking about morbid details, what did it feel like, what’s the prognosis, do I need anything, etc. But there’s been one threatening me with eternal hellfire, a few telling me this is God-eh reaching out to me, and one trumpeting it as God’s punishment, basically for being a progressive and supporting Obamacare. Selected excerpts below:

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I’m as serious as a heart attack

Update: I was given some meds to speed the recovery and mitigate the effects of  a likely mild MI before the cath on Monday. I guess they’ve kicked in, because i feel superb. Better than I’ve felt in weeks. Alert, calm, and just fantastic all around. I can’t help but feel sorrow for the millions of people who do not have the health insurance I enjoy. The year 2014, when Obamacare kicks in, can’t come soon enough for this nation.

So, it turns out I probably had a mild heart attack a few weeks ago. At the time it was stomach pain, like in the upper GI or gall bladder region, and not much else. Nothing like what you read about. At first the cardiologist thought I was ok but he ordered a few tests just to make sure, turns out my ejection fraction slightly off, inverted T wave on part of the EKG, persistent high blood pressure, etc. He suspects a near full block at or near the very tip of the heart, the part that points down. We’re fixing to find out for sure: I’ll be cathed next Monday and there’s a 50-50 chance he’ll angioblast a blockage and/or put in a stint at that time. I am going to try and tweet/blog through some of it just for kicks.

I’m not saying it’s God’s Will or anything …

There was a time I felt halfway sorry for Mark Sanford. Remember? Sanford was governor of South Carolina, he disappeared, supposedly to hike the Appalachian Trail. He’d actually fallen head over heels in love with a Brazilian Argentinian beauty and was down south fornicating, much to the chagrin of his wealthy, proper wife back home. Disgraced, Sanford resigned and dropped off the face of the earth. … He’s baaack! [Read more…]

Obama laying the wood on GOP over debt ceiling

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Round up of President’s remarks: NYT; AP/Google; CBS News; NPR

TPM — “There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills or it can fail to act and put the nation into default,” said Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney. “The President and the American people won’t tolerate Congressional Republicans holding the American economy hostage again simply so they can force disastrous cuts to Medicare and other programs the middle class depend on while protecting the wealthy.”

Fomalhaut B, the Zombie Planet, roams around its star once

Space.com — The latest observations of the odd planetary system revealed that the dusty debris disk surrounding the star Fomalhaut is much wider than previously thought. The debris belt spans a vast region of space between 14 billion and 20 billion miles (22.5 billion to 32.1 billion kilometers) around the star. Stranger still: The planet Fomalhaut b appears to approach with 4.6 billion miles (7.4 billion km) of its star at the closest point in its orbit, then swing way out to a point about 27 billion miles (43.4 billion km) away at the farthest point. Scientists call the extremes of such a planet’s path a highly eccentric orbit. Fomalhaut b’s path, scientists say, sends the planet crashing through the surrounding debris disk during its 2,000-year orbit around its parent star.