Quote of the Day -- From One Helluva Good, Maybe Even Important Article

There is an excellent, even possibly important article at The New Republic today I just saw because of blogger, social media friend Matt Payton over at his blog Matt Payton's Tumble-o-rama I can't recommend highly enough.

Throw the Bums Out

We are in the midst of a world-historic failure of governance. 

Why isn’t anyone in charge acting like they are responsible for it?

Is our only recourse to negligence and misfeasance truly to wait for a chance to vote the bums out?

This is an ongoing catastrophe. 

Every day brings a new reason to feel outraged or numbed by its scope.

Here's the quote of the day:

If Donald Trump loses in November, our political system’s last true believers will think that the system worked precisely as it is supposed to: It held him accountable. But this is an ongoing catastrophe of government as a whole. Every day brings a new reason to feel outraged or numbed by the scope of the disaster. We haven’t begun to grapple with the breadth of it. Governors, big-city mayors, public health officials, and congressional leaders should be resigning in disgrace, firing those responsible, groveling for forgiveness, or fleeing town under cover of night.

Instead, they are mainly just waiting for the worst to be over, until the moment they, too, can put out celebratory posters. That the majority of our leaders seem not to be embarrassed or ashamed of their failures—some may not even think of them as failures—raises doubts about whether good governance is even possible in our political system. Americans have, this year, shown a heroic willingness to take to the streets in protest and riot. If they have not yet demanded accountability and consequences for the officials who presided over this unprecedented failure of the state, it might be because hardly anyone has real faith in the ability of their government—at the federal, state, county, or city level—to accomplish anything but policing and jailing people. That isn’t cynicism so much as resignation.

Go. Read the article. It's excellent. It gives great information and asks great questions.

Attacking the Medical Community in the Middle of the Most Killing Pandemic in a Century

This is where we are now, ladies and gentlemen. This is to where we have devolved, how low we now are.

This Republican Party President Donald "The John" Trump is deriding the doctor and medical professional that is Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Trump spreads anti-Fauci messages 

Trump retweets call to fire Fauci 

amid coronavirus criticism

Then, after attacking Dr. Fauci, that's not enough, he goes after the entire CDC.

Trump promotes tweet that accuses the CDC and doctors of ‘lying’ about COVID-19

Not only does he do that, attack a specialist in pandemics and virtually the entire medical community but he supports, instead, nonsense spread by another talk show host.

Trump retweets game show host Chuck Woolery’s baseless claim that ‘everyone is lying’ about coronavirus

I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, citizens of America:

What kind of a sick, twisted person gathers and then spreads information to go against a medical specialist, medical specialists, in the middle of the most killing national and international pandemic in more than a century?

And the answer, of course, is only this Republican Party President, Donald J Trump.

But then, this is the same man that takes us out of  the premier health organization, the WHO, during, again, the biggest, most killing, national and international pandemic in the past more than 100 years.

The following no way make all this okay but it explains a lot.

The GOP’s Murderous Anti-Intellectualism

Sociopaths Are All That's Left 

of the Republican Party

Thanks, Mr. President.

Thanks, Republians

Quote of the day--on opening one's mind

“All too often, those big ideas run up against the challenge of the everyday: in particular, how to find work that pays the bills. A lot of the time, meaningful work becomes necessary work, and passions are forced to fade. The easy part is knowing that you should follow your heart and do something important; the hard part is coping with the world as it is today at the same time as you invent how it should be in the future.

      

But inventing the future — in spite of the greatest recession since the Great Depression — is exactly what our generation does. If there’s any core attribute that connects you to me to everyone else of our age, it’s this conviction that we do not have to take the world as it is; in fact, it’s up to us to make it what it should be. ...

 

The "money quote"--one thing more and more Americans would benefit from greatly:

      

If there’s one thing you do after graduating today, create some habit that makes it easier for you to get out of your bubble. Follow someone you disagree with on Twitter. Buy a subscription to a newspaper or a magazine that will tell you the most important news of the day. Install an app on your phone that doesn’t just filter the news by your social network, but by what you need to read. Not only will these habits make you a better citizen, they’ll make you a more interesting husband or wife, and certainly a more informed job applicant.”

 

--Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook and owner of The New Republic in his commencement speech this Spring at Georgia State University

Link:  In Looser Tone, Speakers Urge Graduates to Take Risks and Be Engaged

Quote of the day

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery." --John P. Judis, senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Links: http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779; http://www.tnr.com/article/john-judis/92958/obama-lincoln-debt-ceiling;

Let's call it what it is: Wealthcare

Let's not call what we have in America "health care" any longer. Let's be honest.

It's "wealthcare"--health care for anyone and everyone with money.

That's what we have and it's getting worse.

There is a terrific, front-page article in The Kansas City Star today that shouldn't be overlooked, partly because the Star can't do that many insightful articles any more, what with their much-reduced staff but also because it gives great, cutting-edge information on yet another new wrinkle in our health care system.

It's called "concierge medicine" and if you assume that, because it has a French name it's more expensive, you'd be correct.

It works like this: You pay, say, $1,000.00 up front, PER MONTH--that already puts most of us out of this option--then approximately $125.00 more per month. For that you get virtually unlimited access to your own personal family physician.

Want to see him or her that day? Sure.

Need to see him or her that evening? No problem.

For that much money, it shouldn't be a surprise.

Get this--the doctors still recommend you carry insurance, on top of these costs, of course, to cover "hospital visits and specialist's care."

Sure, it's terrific, personal coverage but at what a cost. Holy cow.

Understandably, as it says in the article, doctors are going crazy with our current system of health care because it pays them for procedures. This means that, the busier they are, the more they get paid so the more their practice gets paid.

Let me repeat a familiar refrain: This is no way to run a health care system.

It's crazy.

It's paying the doctors to just fix problems after the fact, instead of helping us all stay healthy ahead of time.

But as long as we keep going back in and paying our insurance premiums, and the doctors work like little rats in a cage and the clinics and hospitals keep their costs down--by denying care, frequently, and minimizing treatments and reducing the amount of time a patient sees a doctor and the amount of time we're actually healing in the hospital--then the system works great.

Except not at all.

This is another, gross extension of this crazy system that's been created here in the US since the 60's, when corporations have taken over health care.

All they see and want is money and profits and the more and bigger, the better.

This makes health care even more a matter of good health for the wealthy and little or nothing for the middle- and lower-classes.

It provides further proof that our system is grossly broken.

We need both the single-payer option so there is only one form for all care--instead of the 1300 different forms there are now, one for each insurance company in the country--and we need the "public option" for health insurance to keep costs for coverage much lower.

At best, with the proposals now going through Congress, we may get the public option. Hopefully, it won't be too watered-down as to be meaningless.

Push for reform, folks.

We need it badly and it will help all of us.

Just not the insurance companies.

Then go read this article in The Kansas City Star, if you haven't already. You need to know what's going on.


Link to original story: http://www.kansascity.com/746/story/1513257.html

Article on "Wealthcare" from The New Republic:
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/wealthcare-0

And go here, to The New Republic, for a large selection of articles on our current health care status: http://www.tnr.com/blogs/the-treatment