Stephan: This is what worries me: We have not had civil stress and violence in the U.S. in living memory; we don't expect it, and most people seem incapable of really believing our current situation in this country is as bad as it actually is. All living Americans are used to the fundamental structures of our government operating without much controversy. How often have you and your family discussed poll workers over a family dinner? How often have you worried about the integrity of your local election?
For most of our lives, the big concern about government has been racism, which is America's foundational sin. And then we elected an utterly corrupt, woman molesting, liar, and mafia-like criminal, Donald J. Trump. And that led to MAGAt world, and the deliberate attempt by one of our political parties, the Republican Party, to destroy our democracy. As Jeffrey Berman's new book, Holding the Line, lays out Trump only surrounded himself with men and women whose corruption and criminality was equal to his own. Working from inside the government they created a government of historically breathtaking criminality and corruption. Donald Trump, William Barr, and a host of Republican Congress members need to be indicted, tried, and if found guilty convicted and sent to prison. Something akin to the Nuremberg Trials would be appropriate. If we do not fix what has happened, it will happen again.
Credit: David McNew / Getty
In his widely-praised speech two weeks ago in Philadelphia, Joe Biden (finally) issued a clear and direct public warning about the Republican-fascist movement as an existential threat to American democracy.
In an interview Sunday on “Meet the Press,” Vice President Kamala Harris expanded on Biden’s warning, connecting the 21st anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the much greater internal threat to America’s future now represented by the Republicans and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
Recent public opinion polls also show that a large percentage of Americans are beginning to accept that the MAGA forces pose an extreme threat to the country’s democracy.
But why has it taken the country’s leaders, and Americans in general, so long to accept this clear and obvious fact? The rise of the global right and its assault on democracy in America, Europe and around the world should not have been a surprise. This crisis was decades in the making. The end of the Cold War was not in fact the “end of history,” and did not […]
Nurses at Children’s Minnesota and United Hospital in St. Paul were among some 15,000 nurses in the Twin Cities and Twin Ports who walked off the job on September 12, 2022 for a three-day strike. (Photo: John Autey/MediaNews Group/St. Paul Pioneer Press via Getty Images)
About 15,000 nurses in Minnesota walked off the job on Monday for a historic three-day strike after months of failed contract negotiations during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I can’t give my patients the care they deserve.”
Members of the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) last month voted overwhelmingly in support of what the union says is the “largest private sector nurses strike in U.S. history.”
Nurses with MNA argue that hospital executives who make millions of dollars per year “refuse solutions to short-staffing, retention, and better patient care.”
Strikers carried signs highlighting their frustration. Messages included: “Patients before profits,” “Put an end to corporate healthcare,” and “The frontline is fed up with excuses!”
Chris Rubesch, MNA vice president and a nurse at Essentia Health in Duluth, toldThe Washington Post that “I can’t give my patients the care they deserve.”
“Call lights go unanswered. Patients should only be waiting for a few seconds or minutes if they’ve soiled themselves or their oxygen came unplugged or […]
Stephan: When you stress a system both its strengths and weaknesses become obvious. Every engineer and physician knows this. What Covid has shown us is how dysfunctional and corrupt the American illness profit system is. I look at data, and that is what it says. It's not the doctors, nurses, technicians, the whole hands-on contributors. They are heroes, it is the system in which they are being asked to operate, and the fact that profit is the system's first priority. The Johnson & Johnson story is a classic example of the corruption of Congress, as permitted by the Citizens United decision. Casey Cep, in this article illustrates what I am talking about.
We have got to create a society that has wellbeing not profit as its first priority or we are not going to get through climate change. The current health care system on the basis of data is the worst in the developed world. It is inefficient, unbelievably expensive, and produces poor health care. Anyone who reads SR regularly should know the data. And we all know stories of how unpleasant it is to live under for many people.
Credit: The New Yorker
God gives you only one body, Deane Berg always said, so you’d better take care of the one you’ve got. A physician assistant at the veterans’ hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, she knew that spotting between periods wasn’t unusual for a forty-nine-year-old woman, but she went to the doctor anyway. Her two daughters had already lost their father to lung cancer, so Berg wanted to stick around.
Just perimenopause, the doctor concluded after a cursory examination. Probably a blood clot, the nurse practitioner told her when a subsequent ultrasound showed something on an ovary. “It’s not going to be cancer,” the gynecological surgeon said before removing both ovaries on the day after Christmas in 2006. But, when Berg went for her follow-up, she read the words on the pathology report before the surgeon had a chance to break the news: serous carcinoma. She cried, and the surgeon did, too. She would now need a full hysterectomy, chemotherapy, and a great deal of luck. Every year, around twenty thousand women are given […]
Stephan: This story is about tourists from China, but a similar story could be told of the potential tourists of other nations. It is all part of the diminishment of U.S. status in the world.
Violent crime in the U.S. is a top concern for Chinese tourists considering travel there, according to new data from Morning Consult.
Why it matters: When Chinese tourists begin to venture back out into the world after COVID, U.S. gun violence may still keep them away, sending tourism dollars elsewhere and cutting back on opportunities for cross-cultural exchange.
Details: In a survey of 1,000 Chinese adults, 57% of respondents cited violent crime as a reason they might avoid travel to the U.S.
An even higher proportion of Chinese who expressed a prior interest in traveling to the U.S. were concerned about violent crime. 35% of respondents said they were interested in traveling to the U.S. — and of those, 93% said fear of violent crime might dissuade them from going.
Respondents who had heard about the Uvalde school shooting in May were more likely to say gun violence was a reason to avoid travel to the U.S. than were respondents who had not heard of it.
Between the lines: Gun violence in the U.S. is shocking and newsworthy, but that’s […]
Rick Pluta, Reporter - npr | Michigan Public Radio Network
Stephan: Here is some good news about our democracy. As this article describes the MAGAt Republican attempt to stifle Michigan voters from putting an abortion ballot on November's election has come to naught and voters will be able to have their say. Democracy has prevailed.
Friday, the Michigan Board of State Canvassers, acting under an order from the Michigan Supreme Court, put a question before voters this November on whether to protect abortion rights in the state constitution.
Michigan voters demostrating for ballot on abortion. Credit: Jeff Kowalsky / AFP / Getty
Last week, the question was sent to the state Supreme Court after Republican canvassers argued the amendment’s spacing and formatting would confuse voters. The group behind the amendment, Reproductive Freedom for All, appealed the decision to the state’s highest court. Thursday, the court decided to move it along.
“Ultimately, the system works. It may be put under great stress at times, but it works,” said Republican Michigan Board of State Canvassers Tony Daunt, who followed through on a promise to vote to certify if that’s what the Michigan Supreme Court ordered. Daunt took issue with criticism leveled against the two GOP members for voting not to move the amendment forward. He said the issue of the petition forms had never been addressed before and the court decision set a precedent that future […]
