More Sections

Popular vote loser Donald Trump is doing one thing very well: keeping fact checkers fully employed and well-supplied with material. This week, it's the cost-sharing reduction payments that he keeps threatening to yank from health...

Listen to the outgoing message. (202) 456-1111 Just as you might imagine, the outgoing message blames the Democrats for the shutdown and all but calls us traitors to the military. I hope this backfires yuuuugely. Disgusting.  

According to Jake Johnson's fine article on this site,the Pentagon currently withholds from Trump many of the military options for North Korea out of fear that Trump would pick one, for whatever reason,...

OK Democrats, in another two months it’s going to be time to put up or shut up. We got the House over the finish line, and we did it the old fashioned way, we worked our collective ass off for it. We won like any political party does, by making promises. But this time is different, because voters believed those promises for the simple reason that a lot of the people making them weren’t lying politicians for a change. We ran on healthcare. This was a dream issue to run on, for several reasons. For one thing, once you give people stuff, they tend to like it. It was always known that the ACA would be a slow developing program, 4 years to implement completely, with the real meat and potatoes coming in the last two years. Republicans could run against it only until it started working as intended. Once it did, people in states that had it wanted to keep it, and people in states that didn’t have it wanted it. And the GOP came off looking like schmucks. Healthcare was the overriding political issue of 2018, no matter how badly Trump wanted it to be about barefoot brown people going us all leprosy. But you know what? 2020 is going to be all about healthcare too. And the Democrats, specifically the Democrats in the House, have the chance to hone that issue, and jam it up the Republicans ass with a telephone poll. This doesn’t have to be like 2009 all over again. The Democrats don’t have to create some massive, intricate overhaul of the system. We already did that in 2009. The beauty of the ACA was that when it was implemented, it became an interwoven part of the healthcare system. This is why the GOP couldn’t just repeal the ACA, even the health insurance companies knew that if they did, the old system would collapse,  because the structure of the system had been fundamentally changed. Hence, the GOP tinkering with the individual mandate, support payments, and junk policies only destabilized the system, making it a ripe issue for Democrats. The Democrats don’t need to try to do everything at once, in fact that would be a mistake. The more complicated something is, the harder it is to explain, and the easier it is for the GOP to misrepresent it, we found that out the hard way in 2009, with all of that “granny death panel” nonsense. There are several things that the Democrats can do immediately, but do them one at a time. First of all, small simple things are easier to explain, and their benefits ore apparent. Second, a steady stream of bill passages on healthcare will show that the Democrats are making good on their word. And third, every parent knows that if you hide the strained peas, you can con the kid into thinking that every spoonful is the last one, making it easier to get it into their mouth. First things first. Pass a bill that restores the original pre-existing conditions language of the ACA. The GOP will have a hard time fighting that, since so many of them swore fealty to covering those in their own campaigns. And since they’ll have a hard time fighting it, add in language that restores the original individual mandate, and […]

The print above is “Two Birds” by the marvelous surreal artist M.C. Escher. (You may remember his famous hand sketching another hand with a pencil, and all those terrific staircases?)  In any event, as you notice, it’s the same image repeating itself. Now, take a look at the other image. Why is she touching a wall with what appear to be large dots? — Colleen Scanlon (@ColleenScanlon) April 27, 2019 Good question. Possible answers: She’s telling the dots not to bully each other, but to “Be Best?” These are magic mushrooms, and if she touches the right one, it will turn into her hubby’s dick, dance away, and throw itself down the sinkhole on the White House lawn? If you take too many opioids, your arms will fall off and you’ll be left with one arm growing out of your stomach to do everything with? If you answered, number three — you’re close. Yes, April 27 is National Drug Take Back Day, and this is the photo op that accompanies it, Melania doing God alone (or maybe Stanley Kubrick?) knows WTF. Because we sure as hell do not. National Drug Take Back Day is touted by the White House as a pro-active measure in curbing opioid addiction. The concept is that most people who abuse opioids are getting them, with or without permission, from a friend or relative. Now, some people may get off on the wrong foot by swiping Mom’s left over pain killer from knee surgery, granted. Kids will be kids. And, it’s not a bad idea, ever, to do a regular inventory of drugs in the household and clean house by throwing them away. Hear, hear. I have no problem with that. My point is that it is naive in the extreme to think that the opioid crisis in this country originates from the family medicine chest, or can be stopped there. It is either deliberate obfuscation on this part of this administration to say such a thing, or, alternatively, they don’t have a clue and feel that they have to say something and this is the best that they can come up with. Be that as it may, here are a few facts to look at, to get the origins of the opioid crisis in some kind of a realistic context. Stat News, Boston Globe Media: The widespread abuse of the potent opioid fentanyl appears to be largely the result of illicit manufacturing of the synthetic drug as opposed to the misuse of legally prescribed versions of the painkiller, according to two US government studies released Thursday. That represents a dramatic change in the way opioids have traditionally been abused, and means public health officials will likely have to adjust their response to the two-decade-long crisis. The number of drugs containing fentanyl seized by law enforcement jumped 426 percent from 2013 to 2014, and then almost tripled from 2014 to 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. The number of synthetic opioid deaths nationally went up 79 percent from 2013 to 2014. But the number of prescriptions for fentanyl from 2010 through 2014 has remained flat. In Ohio, which has been particularly hard hit by fentanyl overdoses, prescriptions for fentanyl actually declined by 7 percent from 2013 to 2014. So, street drugs, not wrongly written prescriptions, are powering the opioid crisis. More specifically, the […]

With the recent scandals around Trump’s firing of FBI Director Comey, sharing classified information with Russia, and evidence thatTrump was trying to obstruct justice, the number of signatures on the online Impeach Trump...

Exactly one year ago this week, candidate Donald Trump promised he would 'hire the best people' in his administration. We’ve seen time and time again what an absolute failure he’s been at delivering on that promise. He’s chosen one incompetent...

Michael Cohen was busy like a beaver doing business through his shell company, Essential Consultants, both before and after the 2016 election. He signed a contract with Novartis for $1.2 million for health care policy consulting work, which it turned out, he couldn’t even do. But Novartis paid up, just the same. CNBC: Drug giant […]

Donald Trump is not even one turn of the screw away from crawling into the White House bunk and muttering about strawberries. When Trump ran into Christopher Ruddy on the golf course and later at dinner Saturday, he vented to his friend. “This...

On Sunday, North Korea exploded their largest nuclear device so far, a device which the North Korean government described as a hydrogen bomb capable of being mounted on a missile. If that’s true, it represents a very significant advance in North...