Stephan: None of these politicians were examplars of integrity and courage, several, in my opinion, candidly were pious self-righteous scumbags. But that makes the point all the stronger. Have you ever in your life heard a group of departing senators from both parties speak in this way? I certainly haven't.
I take this as another alarm bell that America's democracy is unravelling before our eyes.
“All the evidence points to an unsettling truth: The Senate as an institution is in crisis,” retiring Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah
lamented in his farewell speech delivered on the Senate floor.
Sen.
Claire McCaskill, who was defeated in the November midterm elections, echoed that idea when
she delivered her own farewell speech. “I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was worried about this place,” she said. “It just doesn’t work as well as it used to.”
“Something is broken,” the Missouri Democrat went on to say. “If we don’t have the strength to look in the mirror and fix it, the American people are going to grow more and more cynical.”
As senators who were either ousted in the elections or […]
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Sunday, December 30th, 2018
RODRIGO PÉREZ ORTEGA, - Science News
Nearly one-third of American adults sleep less than six hours each night, a broad new survey shows.
Among nearly 400,000 respondents to the annual National Health Interview Survey, 32.9 percent reported this short sleep in 2017 — up from 28.6 percent in 2004 when researchers began noticing a slight drop in sleep time. That’s a 15 percent increase representing “more than 9 million people, which is about the population of New York City,” says coauthor Connor Sheehan, a sociologist at Arizona State University in Tempe.
Analysis of the annual survey results — accounting for the U.S. population’s age distribution as well as respondents’ marital status, income, employment and lifestyle — suggests people have been sleeping significantly less from 2013 onward, especially black adults, the researchers report online November 17 in Sleep. In 2017, 40.9 percent of black Americans were likely to report short sleep, as were 30.9 percent of whites and 32.9 percent of Hispanics, the researchers calculate.
This is the first study showing self-reported sleep declining among minorities over time, says Mercedes Carnethon, an epidemiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago […]
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Sunday, December 30th, 2018
Stephan: Yet another White racist, this time a woman, whose hate just couldn't be contained, so an innocent Black family had to endure being threatened with a knife for living in America while Black. Do you think she voted for Trump? And why do these people always look like rejects from the human race.
White woman racist behaving like, well, a White woman racist.
A racist woman this week was caught on camera threatening a black family with a knife while shouting racial slurs.
The Oregonian reports that 20-year-old Emora Roberson this week filmed an unidentified white woman screaming at her and her family because they supposedly did a poor job of parking their car next to her pickup truck.
After Roberson’s boyfriend, Keysuan Goodyear, warned the woman to back off, she pulled out a knife and continued her racist tirade against the couple and Roberson’s aunt, who had driven them to the local strip mall to pick up a last-minute Christmas gift.
At this point, Roberson took out her phone and started filming the woman, who can be seen holding a knife in the video.
“It’s called self-defense, you stupid n*gger b*tch!” the woman screams at Roberson when she accuses her of trying to stab her boyfriend.
“Who the f*ck are you calling a n*gger?” Roberson shouts back.
“You, motherf*cker!” the woman screams.
After this, slammed Roberson’s car door in her face and […]
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Saturday, December 29th, 2018
Charles Gaba, - The New York Times
Stephan: Every other developed nation has been able to work out some universal healthcare system, except the U.S.. As we come to the end of the second decade of the 21st century the illness profit system we have chosen instead of healthcare is actually deteriorating. Ironically, the states most affected are those that voted for Trump.
The Affordable Care Act is still in effect, and the 2019 open enrollment period just ended for most Americans. The recent ruling by a Texas judge declaring the act invaliddoesn’t change that.
But the Trump administration and Republicans are still undermining the health law.
People who earn too much to qualify for financial assistance for policies purchased through the A.C.A.’s health insurance exchanges or directly from insurers — five million now enrolled, including three to four million enrolled off-exchange — will pay for that sabotage in higher premiums. (Another nearly five million are uninsured and priced out of the market.) In the graphic below, I estimate how much more these unsubsidized enrollees will have to lay out in 2019 than they would have if not for the Trump administration’s actions.
Its sabotage efforts in 2018 included cutting off subsidy reimbursement payments for low-income enrollees (the cost of which insurers pass along to unsubsidized consumers), slashing the marketing budget by 90 percent and gouging the outreach-assistance budget […]
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As departing senators said their goodbyes to Washington, a number of Democrats and Republicans took the opportunity to express concern about the state of the Senate and the political climate.
