Reflections on last night’s Democratic debate

Last night’s Democratic debate was very feisty, to say the least. People came out swinging, and some clear patterns soon emerged.

They all attacked Bernie Sanders and that was to be expected because he seriously threatens the status quo and has now risen in the polls to the top. He led in 10 out of ten polls released since Monday. They attacked his Medicare For All policies saying it would cost too much but never answer his response to explain why it is that the US spends twice as much as other developed countries that have universal health care, when we don’t even cover everyone. That must mean that the US is spending be spending about half its health care costs on things not related to providing health care and thus would experience a reduction of health care costs if we switch to something similar to those countries. It also shows that there is a huge amount of money right now that is spent on providing huge profits to the health insurance industry, buying overpriced pharmaceuticals, and ridiculously high administrative cost that would disappear under his plan, and thus it would end up saving the country and people money because they would no longer have insurance premiums deducted from their salaries, they would have no co-pays or deductibles, and most importantly, no worries about losing coverage.
[Read more…]

And people wonder why Sanders gets such an enthusiastic reception

In the clip below from a town hall in Las Vegas hosted by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, in response to a question from a union member about how his proposal for Medicare For All would affect the health insurance policies that they already had, Bernie Sanders gave a clear and detailed response without any waffling. It is such a difference from the equivocating of so many candidates on this major issue. It is quite electrifying. Is it any wonder that we hear that the people at his rallies give him such a rousing response?
[Read more…]

Beware of Catalina

Some of you may have noticed that I did not post anything yesterday. That was because on Monday evening, I decided to upgrade the operating system of my MAC computer to the latest version called Catalina that was released in October 2019 and had got some pretty good reviews. Since the OS I had been using (El Capitan) was pretty old, I felt that I should upgrade since older software is more vulnerable to hacks.
[Read more…]

Going beyond identity in choosing a candidate

One of the interesting things emerging from the current Democratic primary race is the lessening role of identity politics. Having commonalities with a feature of a candidate’s identity, even if that identity has been that of a marginalized group, seems to be no longer sufficient to guarantee a voter’s support for that candidate. Take for example, what happened to Pete Buttigieg at a fundraiser in San Francisco,
[Read more…]

The massive corrupting influence of money in US politics

One of the things that this year’s election has laid bare is the dominance of the oligarchy in the process. This has always been the case but before they were acting discreetly, behind the scenes. But now it is out in the open. There are two people responsible for peeling back the veil. One is Donald Trump. By boasting about his wealth and making it one of his main appeals (though there is considerable doubt as to whether he is as wealthy as he claims), he has made other billionaires think that they too can enter electoral contests by flaunting their wealth. I have seen ads for Tom Steyer where he talks about being a real billionaire “with a b” and not a fake billionaire like Trump and how that will enable him to take him on more effectively, as if what we need is some kind of cage fight between two wealthy people.
[Read more…]

To be filed under ‘Hateful misogynistic stupidity’

I pass on to readers this story of how religion can drive people to make the most absurd rules restricting women.

India’s uncomfortable relationship with periods is back in the headlines.

College students living in a hostel in the western Indian state of Gujarat have complained that they were made to strip and show their underwear to female teachers to prove that they were not menstruating.

The 68 young women were pulled out of classrooms and taken to the toilet, where they were asked to individually remove their knickers for inspection.

The incident took place in the city of Bhuj on Tuesday. The young women are undergraduate students at Shree Sahajanand Girls Institute (SSGI), which is run by Swaminarayan sect, a wealthy and conservative Hindu religious group.

They said a hostel official had complained to the college principal on Monday that some of the students were breaking rules menstruating women are supposed to follow.

The idea that menstruating women are ‘impure’ or ‘unclean’ is a widespread and long-standing belief among particular religious groups, leading to the creation of rules limiting their interactions with ‘pure’ and ‘clean’ people. As the article goes on to describe, this school seems to have gone to great lengths to identify menstruating women and create onerous rules for them to follow, along with sanctions for ‘violators’.

The Nevada caucuses

This coming Saturday, the voters of Nevada will vote for their choice of Democratic presidential nominee. This is going to be another caucus though one hopes that the Iowa debacle will not be repeated. The Nevada Democratic party decided to ditch the infamous app that caused such confusion in Iowa and one hopes that they have put in place measures to guarantee a fair vote. It is really quite extraordinary that the US has elections so frequently but has not been able to create a smooth and streamlined process and instead seems to do things at the last minute and on the fly.
[Read more…]

From the department of “Give them an inch …”

Some people just keep pushing the limits of what are allowed to do and then complain when they are finally told to stop.

A Florida man undergoing kidney dialysis three times a week is upset that he can’t bring a life-sized cardboard cutout of President Donald Trump for emotional support.

Nelson Gibson told WPBF that his family can’t sit with him during his three-and-a-half-hour treatments. To help, he began bringing a picture of Trump as a comfort item.

“It just feels like bringing something from home to make you comfortable,” Gibson told the West Palm Beach area television station.

Gibson said no one complained about the photo. Next, he started bringing a small cardboard cutout of himself standing next to a Trump photo. No one complained about the small cutout, and Gibson told the station that some people even took photos with it.

On Saturday, Gibson took a life-sized cutout of Trump to his treatment at Fresenius Kidney Care in Port St. Lucie. He said that again, no one took issue with this new emotional support item.

But when he returned Tuesday for treatment with the presidential cutout, Gibson ran into a roadblock.

“They told me it was too much and it wasn’t a rally,” he told the TV station.

One has to wonder about a person finds that a cardboard cutout of a politician gives him ’emotional support’ during trying times but, hey, whatever floats your boat, as the saying goes. Maybe he also sleeps with a photo of Trump under his pillow and has another one on his bedside table to soothe himself to sleep.

The real question is why he kept steadily increasing the size of the cutout. Presumably he had thought that the two smaller sizes of Trump served his need for a comfort item during the dialysis sessions. To keep making the item larger, so large that no one else in the facility could miss it, seems to indicate that he was trying to make a political statement and was hoping to goad the people at the clinic to object so that he could claim that he was being victimized for being a Trump supporter.

Trump loves playing the victim and it looks like his fans are following suit.

The anti-Sanders media narrative takes shape

Now that Bernie Sanders got the most votes in both the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, the media has gone into overdrive to try and find ways to explain why those results don’t mean that he is the current leader in the race. The main one is that he only got about 30% of the vote (true) and thus 70% of the people must have voted against him (false), showing that the majority dislike him. The latter is a false inference that implies that all the people who voted for the other candidates would unify behind any single alternative.


[Read more…]