Good morning, John, it is Wednesday, August 9th.

I got home from the fair on Sunday with a bunch of really great fair footage and I was excited just to share my fair footage with you and the nerdfighters. And because I'm a good brother I always watch your videos as soon as I can so I click on your video when I get home from the fair and I see your video and you're all "Hank, Walkin' Tall' Tall, the World's Largest Boar who can't walk, reminded me a little bit of America's health care system." And now I'm all "Crap! Now I have to figure out some way to have some kind of impressive and bizarre analogy between state fair and political issues, so I can seem all cool and smart like my brother."

Ehhhh...

Okay, okay, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this.

John, freestyle motocross reminds me a lot of the cap-and-trade system. You have to ramp it up real fast and then you'll get to a certain point and you'll sort of glide into a nice soft landing in the future. And if you muscle it around just the right way, you can totally do, like, a back flip heel click.

Ah, no, that didn't work.

Okay, American politics are totally like this chicken. They have a really short attention span, a fairly short life span, and at first when you're looking at them they look kind of silly, but then they start to look really scary, and also, it's name is Hagrid. It's name actually was Hagrid but that last part doesn't really work.

Okay, this one's good. This llama is like the Democratic Party. Its head is really big and really impressive, but its body is like thin and atrophied and it can't really seem to get anything done on its own. It's almost like the body of llama only thinks that it needs to be a body every four years. And that once the body gets the head in place, it can completely ignore all of its other responsibilities, when really, its body needs to get involved and start doing things because the friggin' Republican llama is going crazy whit its huge body and its tiny head!

Okay, here's another one. The situation in Iraq is totally like this corn dog, because... Mmmmm, corn dog...

Okay, wait, wait, wait, now I got a good one, I got a good one, this one's gonna work. The Cash for Clunkers program is like the demolition derby, because, well, actually, I think that the demolition derby is Cash for Clunkers, like, it is, it is the original cash for clunkers. In fact, I'm starting to think that we should just have a lot of demolition derbies and kind of forget about this Cash for Clunkers idea. You can give, like, a $4500 prize to every person who wins the demolition derby, and instead of getting one car off the road, you get, like, two dozen, 'cause they're all crashing into each other. And I guarantee you, none of those cars are ever gonna drive again... Problem solved!

Okay, that turned out alright. John, thank you for challenging me to be astute and to explain complicated issues using the county fair. And if I can a little bit of a serious response to your health care video, I would like to say that the biggest analogy between the health care system and the county fair is that they're both tryin' to make money off of us.

And, you know, I'm okay with the fair makin' money; I'm okay with the carnie trying to get me to play the carnival game. 'Cause I can say to that guy, "Hey, guy, how much does it cost?" And then he, in turn, will say to me, "Way more money than it's worth!" and so I'll be, like, "No, I don't think I will play your carnival game."

But as soon as you tie money to a doctor's responsibility to a patient, suddenly, I imagine for doctors, it's difficult to separate making money from making the best suggestions to your patients. And if a doctor says to me that I need a procedure, I'm not gonna ask him how much it costs, and I'm definitely not gonna go around town and try and find a better deal. I'm just gonna do it, because we're supposed to be able to trust doctors.

And that, I think, is the real problem with the health care system. We need to decouple the doctor's responsibility to the patient from the amount of money that he or she makes from that patient. Obviously, this is an extraordinarily complicated issue, and I'm not trying to say that doctors are only out to make money off of us... but there's a link in the sidebar to an article from the New Yorker that goes pretty deep into why Americans' health care budget is so massive. It's a really great article; it's long, but I swear, it is totally worth reading. I hope all nerdfighters read it, and John, I definitely wanna talk with you about it later.

Oh, and there's one more; there's one more I gotta put in here. Political pundits are like fair rides, because just looking at them makes me wanna puke.