Losing your parents to Fox News

The average age of people who watch Fox News is 68. That means that many people’s parents and grandparents get their news almost exclusively from a cable news channel that deliberately sets about feeding a demonstrably false narrative aimed at pursuing an agenda that is a mix of enriching the wealthy, despising the poor and working class, ginning up viewership with fake controversies, making the audience feel that they are constant siege by hostile forces, and advancing the interests of the Republican party and its Tea Party base.
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Fake Obamacare victims

It is no secret that the Republican party and their Tea Party base hate the Affordable Care Act with a passion. The House of Republicans is soon expected to pass for the 50th time the repeal of the Act. In trying to drum up opposition, they have resorted to spreading stories about ordinary people who have been harmed by Obamacare by finding that they have to pay higher premiums and so forth, and running ads purportedly featuring such victims.
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The Medicaid expansion horror show

There are lots of things to dislike about the Affordable Care Act. The one thing that is undoubtedly good is the expansion in the eligibility criteria for Medicaid (that along with Medicare is the closest thing the US has to a single-payer system) so that people who earned a little too much to qualify for it earlier but earn too little to get the subsidies could not get access to affordable health care.
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The Indian headshake

When I came to the US for graduate school, the teacher in my electromagnetism course in the first semester (who later became by thesis advisor and friend) was an excellent teacher who wanted us to understand a difficult subject and looked at us for cues as to whether we were following along as he proved various things on the board.
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The F-35 boondoggle

Nowhere is the power of business to drive US government actions more glaringly obvious than the way that taxpayer money gets spent on weapons systems that are not needed and sometimes don’t even work. The defense industry has long ago figured out that if you spread out production facilities around the country and especially in places where key politicians are from, you can be pretty confident that the system will never be eliminated, even if the military itself does not want it.
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