Good news this morning for those who depend on EpiPens. Well, not good news good news, but better news than yesterday anyway. Mylan, the pharmaceutical company which manufactures the EpiPen epinephrine autoinjector, announced today that they are lowering the prices of the medical device. Mylan is also expanding its voucher program for low income/uninsured…
via The Latter Days of a Better Nation, Part IV — Stonekettle Station
Damn good read. Do yourself a favor and click on the link above.
(538) As I have argued elsewhere, we should be concerned about politics being treated this way. I can hate the Yankees, feel wronged that Tom Brady is benched for a few games, and make the absurd claim that I would be very upset if my sons married Yankees fans. In sports, irrational partisan feelings are permissible because the stakes are so low. Irrational partisan emotions clearly exist in politics, too, but in politics we should be ashamed of them.
It’s an interesting read.
When it comes to the mess that is Mesopotamia and Persia, I am pretty much uninformed. However, I still attempt to read up on what is happening. Since the Legacy Media is still ignoring the facts in almost all of their created content (yeah, not news, but created content for ratings and revenue), I look for people with foreign news connections. Over at The Agonist I find some gems with decent links and sources that give me a better understanding of what’s happening outside of our boarders.
And, I’m sure you’re wondering, where is all this going?
(The Agonist) Since the start of the attack on Syria in 2011, Turkey has been a key transit point for foreign jihadists, supplies, and weapons headed for rebels fighting to bring down the Syrian government. Jihadists enter Turkey and get bussed to the Syrian border. Along the way, many are trained at facilities like that in Adana, Turkey. The Turkish military has done nothing to stop this.
Way to have the pulse of the electorate.
(Bloomberg Politics) “If you’re getting high in Colorado today, enjoy it,” Christie, a Republican campaigning for the 2016 presidential nomination, said Tuesday during a town-hall meeting at the Salt Hill Pub in Newport, New Hampshire. “As of January 2017, I will enforce the federal laws.”
The nation has moved on. The war on drugs is a war on American Citizens. How, exactly, does he plan on winning an election by declaring he would resume the war on the vary voters he hopes will vote for him?
From Mustang Bobby I’ve learned that Fox News is going to let the entire Republican presidential field take the stage in their two debates.
(CBS News) Fox News announced another change to its August 6 Republican presidential candidate forum on Tuesday, removing the requirement that candidates clear at least one percent in an average of national polls to qualify for the second-tier debate.
To what end? Is this because their core audience was threatening to turn off the TV if the entire Republican Clown Car wasn’t allowed on stage? Is their core audience even in the economic range needed to adequately support higher ad fees? Does the “get off my grass!” crowd even leave their homes to buy stuff for fear their lawns will get trampled? Or perhaps it’s an effort to get the younger, more hip, and more loose with their money crowd to watch the Keystone Pols?
You know, it just doesn’t seem to be a viable commercial move on the part of Fox.
Oh, wait. Fox ain’t commercial, they’re propaganda. My bad.
Okay, I ought really be shoveling the 4 foot drift blocking my one and only egress from my apartment, but instead I wondered over to Ian’s blog. After reading this post I left this comment.
If Obama were truly a dictator you could lay the blame for the increased income disparity at his feet. However, he has to contend with another branch of the government. A branch of government that has not even allowed him to hire the people he wants to work in his branch of government.
I’m not a rabid Obama supporter; I believe he is wrong about drone use, as well as not getting behind reigning in the NSA fast enough. However, as an American I’d rather it be recognized that more people than Obama are responsible for crafting and implementing the laws in our country. Had Obama had to deal with a progressive, left-leaning congress, perhaps we would be seeing less of an income disparity.
It’s really an irritating habit of people (inside and outside of the US) to speak of President Obama as some sort of all powerful leader when the rules of being the President of the United States were purposefully written to prevent just that from happening. And as the Constitution of the United States was written by imperfect people (hence the “more perfect union” statement), it’s rather dubious to demand that a leader be perfect.
In other words, I’m more interested (and by FSM what I find interesting is to be what you find interesting, or else!) in reading how under our current government income disparity has increased. Much of what caused today’s problems were laid into law long before 2008. In fact, it appears that the stimulus package championed by Obama prevented the worse outcome of previous economic laws from happening.
Granted, it would have been nice if it did more, but Obama worked with the congress he had, not the congress he wanted.
I, for one, am grateful (note the proper spelling SPK*) that we are complaining about a lingering recession and income disparity instead of the depression (or possibly worse) that was on its way due to the incompetence of the previous incarnation of the Government of the United States.
Huh. GOTUS. That’s weird.
This was cross-posted from “The Agonist” where that “inside baseball” dig has more meaning.
(BBWW) At any rate, the Koch brothers, for whatever reason, are phobic about publicity and they go to great lengths to hide their connections to seemingly independent and grass-roots movements. I’m sure they have their reasons; not everyone likes the limelight. But you would think that if they believed their causes were noble and good for everyone in America, they wouldn’t go to such great lengths to keep it under wraps.
Modesty is one thing, and anonymity is admirable when you want the focus to be on the result rather than the benefactor, but it almost sounds like they know what they’re doing is nefarious and that they’d be ridiculed or even prosecuted if the bread crumbs led back to their lair.
I couldn’t have written it better myself.
(Booman Tribune) I love the writing here. But I don’t really think of it as a slow, almost imperceptible process. Certainly, you can trace the long, slow progress from Goldwater to Gohmert. But there have been sudden tectonic slips that have jolted the crazy forward.
I think one of the less appreciated legacies of the Bush administration is that they made Republican ideology incoherent. One moment the GOP was calling for the liquidation of the Department of Education and planning to let Medicare “wither on the vine,” and the next moment they were giving us No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D. One moment they were closing down the government because they wanted spending cuts, and the next moment the vice-president was telling us that Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter. One moment Bush was campaigning on a more humble foreign policy and the next moment, if you weren’t with us, you were against us. The Bush administration was awful from every perspective you might wish to view it, and that includes the movement conservative’s perspective.
But movement conservatives were nonetheless willing to go along with the Bush administration and defend it with the harshest, coarsest, most vituperative language and rhetoric. As they unlearned logical consistency, they also lost the ability to think clearly. Logic became a kind of threat.
So, that was the first real tectonic slip. The next came in late August and September of 2008 when, first, Sarah Palin was selected as John McCain’s running mate, and then the economy completely collapsed. It became almost immediately clear that Sarah Palin was a colossal moron who had absolutely no business on a presidential ticket. It also became clear that John McCain had no idea how to deal with the financial crisis, as he suspended his campaign, unsuccessfully tried to skip a presidential debate, and called for an emergency meeting at the White House where he had nothing to say.
This forced the conservative movement to defend both McCain and Palin is ways that no sentient human being should ever defend other human beings. I believe the experience caused permanent collective brain damage to the entire Republican community. Arguing that Sarah Palin should be a stroke away from the nuclear football will do that to a brain, and a political party.
The final straw, however, was the decision to oppose every single thing the president tried to do. They turned him into a monster when he was never a monster. He became the Kenyan socialist usurper. That was a decision that Mitch McConnell made before the president was even sworn into office. And the result was that the Republican Party started rejecting their own ideas and labeling them communist plots to destroy the country. At that point, with all the bad habits already ingrained, the party just lost control of its base.
They hadn’t governed according to their “principles,” and they had ramped up the fear of the Democrats to such a height that the base decided that they were facing some existential crisis.
Basically, the big steps were ideological inconsistency followed by epic failure which both required people to defend the indefensible which broke people’s logical brains and respect for the truth which then caused them to respond to manufactured fear with rebellion against their own puppet masters.
You will have to go read his post to learn what writing he loves. It is a pretty good metaphor he linked to, but I liked his step by step analysis of the decent of the Republican Party into madness.
This cannot be stressed enough; the Republicans in the House of Representatives changed the rules in a naked grab for power and control with no thought of actual leadership or benefit for the country.