July 30, 2018

Study: 'Medicare for all' projected to cost $32.6 trillion

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/study-medicare-bill-estimated-326-trillion-56906940

So under this worst case scenario study, if we cut out the middle man (insurance companies), it amounts to $3T/year to cover everyone for everything. That equates to $10k per person. Right now I pay $16k per year for a family of 3. But on top of that I pay thousands in copays and deductibles and even then it does not cover everything. Paying $10k per person to me means instead of paying $16k in premiums, plus thousands more in copays and deductibles, and arguing with my insurance every time I need referrals to specialists or coverage "out of network," I will now just pay $14k more for the three of us pand never stress about any of that. Sounds like a deal to me.

And this study assumed doctors and hospitals won't take less than they are getting now, which seems highly unlikely. If there are no more uninsured, hospitals won't have to jack up the rest of our costs to cover them. If we want European style single payer health insurance, we must pay European style taxes. I'm fine with that. People would still save money in the long run, and most important, we would finally end the uninsured/underinsured crisis and the horrific human death and misery caused by it.

We have to be real about what the tax increases will be and be prepared to justify them. I am convinced we can justify the increases. Sadly, must politicians aren't. When it came time to finance Vermont's single payer law with tax increases, ALL of Vermont's politicians ran for cover, and VT single payer died. Same thing will happen with national single payer unless we get real about the tax numbers and get a backbone to argue for them.

July 12, 2018

Officer resigns amid probe over lack of response to man harassing woman for wearing Puerto Rico shir

An Illinois police officer being investigated for his inaction as an intoxicated man berated a woman wearing a shirt with the Puerto Rican flag has resigned, the Forest Preserves of Cook County said Wednesday.

The man who was tormenting Irizarry, identified by police as Timothy Trybus, 62, has been charged with assault and disorderly conduct. He was intoxicated at the time, the Forest Preserves of Cook County has said.

In the video, Irizarry, who rented space in the park for a birthday party, is heard telling the man who is yelling at her and coming closer, to get away from her. She tells a police officer who is watching the scene "Officer, I feel highly uncomfortable, can you please grab him?" but the officer turns and walks away.https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/officer-resigns-amid-probe-over-lack-response-man-harassing-woman-n890781

July 11, 2018

Politician Goes Into A Diner, Is Confronted With Free Baklava

Things aren’t fraught for all politicians in the restaurants of America. Take Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.). He bought takeout recently at a Greek diner and the friendly owner added a free baklava — “one of my favorite desserts,” Lieu said.

The owner thanked him for what he was doing in Congress. “I guess that’s what happens when one opposes ripping kids away from parents,” he tweeted. 

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5b441af6e4b0c523e261ee76


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Love me some Ted Lieu!! How could you not? I wish Ted Lieu was my Representive, but I have that traitorous sack of poo, Dana Rohrabacher. Hopefully not for long, once Democrat Harley Rouda boots "Putin's favorite Congressman" out of the 48th Distict of CA!

July 8, 2018

The 'civility debate' isn't about manners. It's an old-school power play.

The so-called "civility debate" is the newest front in a wider conflict that has less to do with manners, or ensuring a polite discourse, than in protecting the powerful from being forced to engage with politics on someone else's terms.
...
At its heart is a unique form of cultural illiteracy and status anxiety. The ability to hand-pick when and in what context to face the consequences of your work is a privilege, deep-seated and treasured by those who possess it. Dinnertime interlopers who challenge this expectation are protesting more than a government official or policy -- they are fundamentally rejecting it.

Simply put, the most powerful among us -- elected officials, their benefactors and high-ranking staffers, allied consultants, and some heavyweight analysts -- have traditionally enjoyed a certain self-enforced privilege: the freedom to actively seek out and in most cases find a break from politics.
...
Lately, though, these usually unmarked boundaries are being defied more often -- and increasingly by people, unlike Dershowitz and his island frenemies, who are never invited into the conversation, even when their fate is the subject. Now, with cell phones to record the confrontations and a few easy channels to make them go viral, there is an easy way in.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/06/politics/no-escape-from-politics-civility-debate/index.html

July 6, 2018

Is this the US president most like Trump?

Mr Trump has likened himself to Andrew Jackson, the seventh US president. It's difficult to imagine Old Hickory, as he was known, excusing himself from military duty on the grounds that he could not march long distances, as Mr Trump did during the Vietnam War, citing bone spurs.

The parallels between the 45th president and the 13th - unlucky for some - are arguably more compelling.

Fillmore launched his career in the 1820s with the Anti-Masonic Party, hawking a paranoid rumour that ruling Freemasons were murdering whistleblowers.

Mr Trump paved the way for his White House bid by peddling a conspiracy theory, too - that President Barack Obama was not a US citizen.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44688337

July 2, 2018

Anthony Kennedy, You Are a Total Disgrace to America

The worst part is that by retiring in the middle of the Robert Mueller investigation, Kennedy is letting Trump pick one of his own jurors. He obviously had to know he was doing this. And what are we to do if the Supreme Court holds sometime in the near future by 5-4, with Kennedy’s successor in the majority, that the president is indeed above the law?

And now we learn that on top of everything else, Kennedy may just be corrupt. So his son Justin, if last week’s New York Times account is correct, in essence kept Donald Trump in business for the better part of a decade, overseeing $1 billion worth of loans to the Trump Organization via Deutsche Bank, where he worked. Justin and the Trump kids are buddies, it seems. Justin and Trump himself are palsy-walsy.

This is grotesque. There was once a time in this country, 40 and 50 years ago, when a connection like this might have led an honorable associate justice to recuse himself from every case involving the administration that came before him. Or if not that, at the very least a justice would have cared enough about appearances that he would have tried to stay on until 2021 to see if the country elected a new president, someone who wasn’t arguably saved from bankruptcy and humiliation by his own flesh and blood.

But not only did Kennedy not do that—he chose not to risk the possibility of the Democrats winning the Senate this fall and pulling a Mitch and doing to his successor what McConnell did to Merrick Garland. A jurist who cared more about his legacy would have waited--indeed would have hoped that the Democrats took the Senate, perhaps forcing President Trump to put forward a nominee who was more moderate and who would follow Kennedy's own example on abortion rights and gay rights. But no.


https://www.thedailybeast.com/anthony-kennedy-you-are-a-total-disgrace-to-america?ref=scroll


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Maybe Kennedy wants Trump to appoint a scumbag like Cavanaugh who will hold a President can pardon anyone, including himself. That way his son Justin, who works for a notorious money laundering bank and who personally resided over giving Trump $1 Billion, will be protected from going to jail with Trump.

Even if that is not Kennedy's motivation, a judge is ethically bound to avoid all appearances of impropriety. Kennedy has disregarded these ethical norms. He is indeed a disgrace.

June 28, 2018

Hey, Democrats: Pack The Supreme Court

t is time for the Democratic Party to stop pretending that the words of men like Kennedy matter as much as their actions. The Supreme Court, Congress and the executive branch of the U.S. government are instruments of political power. All three are currently being used to advance the ideology and agenda of international fascism. House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Anthony Kennedy all protest that they themselves do not personally harbor these terrible beliefs. Nevertheless, they find themselves professionally compelled to assist those who do.

Two months ago, the idea that the United States should abolish Immigrations and Customs Enforcement ― the militarized deportation enforcement agency ― seemed outlandish in Washington. On Tuesday, New York candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won a seat in the House of Representatives pledging to do just that. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) has penned Abolish ICE legislation and is now courting co-sponsors. Two years ago, Medicare for All seemed like a pipe dream. Now it’s a standard agenda item for aspiring Democratic politicians, along with a federal jobs guarantee and ending private prisons. These ideas are animating the party faithful because they’re directed at people. They address actual problems facing real, flesh-and-blood humans. They are not scientific abstractions about the ideal functioning of perfectly modeled markets, or the procedural flow of the bureaucracy or the tenor of the discourse at leading think-tanks.

The court was founded in 1789 with just six justices and has included as many as 10 ― from 1863 to 1866, when a Republican legislature intentionally shrank the court size to seven justices to prevent President Andrew Johnson from making any appointments. In 1937, with the Supreme Court habitually striking down President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s efforts to save the country from the Great Depression, FDR floated the idea of expanding the court to as many as 15 justices. The history of “court-packing,” as it became known, is unbecoming. But lawmakers keep coming back to variants of the idea because it works. Even after FDR retreated from his proposal amid a profound outcry from Southern Democrats, the justices sitting on the court got his message and began issuing more sympathetic rulings on the New Deal. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and John Roberts will not be so malleable. Democrats will have to follow through. But members of Congress are not elected to be polite. They are elected to exercise power, a fact well understood by McConnell ― who blocked Obama nominee Merrick Garland. The Senate majority leader didn’t hesitate to demand the speedy confirmation of whomever Trump picks to succeed Kennedy.

The choice between court-packing (in 2021) and international fascism should not be difficult. Democrats can’t get their ends ― a decent society of mutual respect and shared prosperity ― by ignoring the means of power. Playing nice with fascist enablers in Washington will not stop fascism.

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5b33f7a8e4b0b5e692f3f3d4

June 24, 2018

Switzerland goal scorers could be suspended for 'controversial gestures'

FIFA has been asked to impose two-game bans on Switzerland's Xherdan Shaqiri and Granit Xhaka after the pair made a strong political statement following their goals in Friday's 2-1 victory over Serbia.

After Xhaka scored early in the second half to pull Switzerland level with a fierce left-footed strike, he put his hands together in a "flapping eagle" gesture that is a symbol of Albanian nationalism.

When Shaqiri prodded home the winner in the final minutes, he followed suit, with images of the action being beamed around the world.

The gesture, with thumbs locked together, is widely understood to imitate the two-headed eagle that is featured prominently on Albania's flag.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/soccer/worldcup/2018/06/23/world-cup-xherdan-shaqiri-granit-xhaka-gesture-switzerland-serbia/727828002/

Come on guys! We get it that you're Albanians who hate Serbia, but if you're going to play for the Swiss team, act Swiss and stay neutral! We don't need to refight the Kosovo war at the World Cup!

June 17, 2018

Study: People Are Getting Dumber

Ole Rogeberg, co-author of the study and senior research fellow at the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Norway said studies conducted in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia have all demonstrated this similar downward trend.

"The causes in IQ increases over time and now the decline is due to environmental factors," Rogeburg told CNN. "It's not that dumb people are having more kids than smart people, to put it crudely. It's something to do with the environment, because we're seeing the same differences within families."

He explained that these environmental factors could range from nutrition, changes in the education system, less reading and more time spent online to changes in the media environment.

Researchers analyzed the IQ scores of brothers who were born in different years and found that rather than being similar, as expected because of genetics, the brothers' IQ scores were often significantly different. The study also showed that parents with higher IQs tended to have more children. This disproved a long-believed theory known as the dysgenic fertility theory, which states that unintelligent people have more children, leading to the "dumbing down" of society

https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2018-06-14/study-people-are-getting-dumber

June 17, 2018

Police Shoot Man Holding Knife to Woman's Throat, Killing Him and Critically Injuring Her

Responding officers repeatedly told the man to drop the knife but he did not let go of the weapon, according to Shepard, who said the police fired nonlethal rounds.

Hamilton confirmed the officers talked to the man and fired bean-bag rounds. But police felt the woman’s life was in imminent danger, so they ultimately opened fire with live ammunition, Hamilton said.

“There wasn’t an opportunity to de-escalate the situation,” Preciado said. “Whenever someone is assaulting someone with a sharp weapon … officers are forced to take action.”

The gunshots struck the man and the woman; both were hospitalized in critical condition. The man, who has not been identified, died at the hospital.

http://ktla.com/2018/06/16/police-shoot-suspect-in-van-nuys-3-people-hospitalized/

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Ok, the bean bags didn't work. So LAPD is out of pepper spray? WTF? They couldn't pepper spray this dude? With a face full of pepper spray, he would dropped the knife and grabbed his eyes. Sure she would have been pepper sprayed too, but she wouldn't be in critical condition in a hospital with bullet wounds. And the mentally disturbed suspect would still be alive, and could have been placed in treatment instead of a grave.

What the hell is going on with police training?