Sunday, January 3rd, 2016
Amanda Marcotte, Politics Writer - Salon
Stephan: I don't know. Some days I think it is just too broken to fix. Here is what governance by Republicans looks like. This is a story with a particular focus but really, at a deeper level, it is a story about the state of state governance at the legislative level. The Great Schism Trend has reached a point politically where rational converse is essentially impossible. This is a sample of that reality.
The Republican war on women is mostly focused on trying to control what women do with the parts below the belt, but in New Hampshire, that urge to put conservative men in charge of lady bodies has drifted upwards, focusing on the nipple. Republican men in the state legislature, clearly having nothing better to do with their time than worry about what strangers do with their boobies, recently proposed a bill banning women from having exposed nipples in public.
Republican representative Josh Moore, one of the sponsors of the bill, reacted to Bouldin’s post with some old-fashioned sexual harassment, which he appears to have quickly deleted. Sadly for him, however, one of the commenters on Bouldin’s Facebook page got a screenshot.
Moore, I suspect, does not think he should be forced to wear a hood in public to earn the right not to be tweaked on the nose. […]
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Saturday, January 2nd, 2016
Joseph Walker, - Reader Supported News/The Wall Street Journal
Stephan: This month I got notice that my wife Ronlyn's health insurance policy payment has been raised 30%. When I called Premera to ask why such a large increase was happening I was told, "Well, you know costs are going up, particularly drug costs."
The truth is the American Illness Profit System, particularly the pharmaceutical arm, has gone into a kind of hyper-frenzy of greed. Wellness? Sick children who can't afford their meds? Elderly who will die years earlier because they cannot fill their prescriptions? What do we care. What we want to know is can we squeeze the peasants a little harder? The Congress? We own them, nothing to worry about there.
Here is a portrait of the U.S. reality. It originally came from the Rightwing Fox owned Wall Street Journal; I think that's notable in itself.
Brien Johnson and his wife of Sterling, Va. Brien was diagnosed with mantle-cell lymphoma.
Credit: Lexey Swall/Wall Street Journal
Jacqueline Racener ’s doctor prescribed a new leukemia drug for her last winter that promised to roll back the cancer in her blood with only moderate side effects.
Then she found out how much it would cost her: nearly $8,000 for a full year, even after Medicare picked up most of the tab.
“There’s no way I could do that,” Ms. Racener says. “It was just prohibitive.” Worried about depleting her limited savings, Ms. Racener, a 76-year-old legal secretary, decided to take the risk and not fill her prescription.
The pharmaceutical industry, after a long drought, has begun to produce more innovative treatments for serious diseases that can extend life and often have fewer side effects than older treatments. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved 41 new drugs, the most in nearly two decades.
The catch […]
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Saturday, January 2nd, 2016
Zaid Jilani, - The Intercept
Stephan: The American Gulag is a cancer devouring our society. Think about this, to quote this story: "One in 36 adults in the United States was under some form of correctional supervision at year-end 2014.” No other country in world has a statistic anything close to that.
Here is a portrait of what this metastasized social tumor looks like.
Typical American prison overcrowding. Credit: occupyforaccountability.org
The federal government’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has released new numbers detailing how America’s incarcerated population — already the world’s largest — grew even bigger in 2014.
The bureau’s researchers report that the number of individuals incarcerated grew by 1,900 people over the course of last year — “reversing a five-year decline since 2008.”
It’s not all bad news, though. The researchers also report that there was a decrease in overall adults supervised by correctional systems — meaning included in community supervision or parole. In 2014, there were “about 52,200 fewer offenders than at year-end 2013.”
Their report found that just seven jurisdictions “accounted for almost half of the U.S. correctional population at year-end 2014,” with Texas topping the list with 699,300 offenders. Overall, “about one in 36 adults in the United States was under some form of correctional supervision at year-end 2014.”
Numerous explanations have been offered for this high rate of incarceration. As The Intercept reported earlier this month, one private prison executive offered his own theory at a recent investment bankers conference.
“The reality […]
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Saturday, January 2nd, 2016
Stephan: Texas is an increasingly weird state, principally I think because Whites are becoming a smaller fraction of the population and the White low I.Q. Theocratic Rightists are freaking out about this. Look at the bozos in the picture as examples of the type.
I don't know about you, but if I went into a restaurant or store and saw heavily armed cretins like this I would turn around and walk out. But as a researcher I am fascinated.
This is a classic example of the states as laboratories and, in Texas, we are going to see the NRA plan for society play out. "Good guys with guns" they claim will reduce violence. I don't believe that, history does not support that hypothesis, but Texans voted to put their lives on the line to test the idea.
My prediction: Increased person-to-person violence due to alcohol, meth, rage, stupidity, fire arms incompetence, and accidents.
Open carry in Texas.
Credit: blogs.wsj.com
As of the the stroke of midnight Jan. 1, the Texas landscape will have harkened to the days of the Wild West as the state’s new “open carry” law takes effect. Just as it was 140 years ago — the last time in the Lone Star State when people walked around freely with their holstered guns in plain view — the new law allows for the open display of firearms among licensed gun owners.
Texas becomes the most populous state in the nation to allow for the carrying of guns in the open, to the delight of pro-gun advocates but to to the consternation of those calling for increased firearms safety.
The one dynamic both camps share in common is that the new law has galvanized their ranks.
Beginning Jan. 1, the so-called open carry law:
- Authorizes residents to obtain a license to openly carry a handgun in the same places that allow the licensed carrying of concealed handguns.
- Requires openly displayed firearms, either loaded […]
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Saturday, January 2nd, 2016
Stephan: There is a man-made disaster that is happening as I write and receiving almost no attention. Here is that story.
Credit: Shutterstock
A methane leak in Southern California could be the worst environmental disaster since the BP oil spill, Gizmodo reports.
The leak was discovered outside Los Angeles in late October, at a natural gas storage site owned by Southern California Gas Co. It has been bleeding methane at a rate of up to 110,000 pounds per hour for the past two months.
That much methane in the atmosphere is climate catastrophe: According to the EPA, methane “is more efficient at trapping radiation than CO2. Pound for pound, the comparative impact of CH4 [methane] on climate change is more than 25 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period.” To date, the leak has emitted nearly 74,000 metric tons of methane, or the equivalent of burning 700,000,000 gallons of gasoline.
The source of the leak, according to Southern California Gas Co., is an underground storage container near the upscale Porter Ranch neighborhood hood in Los Angeles. Residents there have “suffered headaches, nosebleeds, nausea and other symptoms from the escaping gas,” reports the AP. Southern California Gas has paid to relocate over […]
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