Month: March 2017

Freedom XIV

Have a great weekend. We certainty will as we chuck the political BS for a few days.

We leave you with the following…

And an orator said, “Speak to us of Freedom.”

And he answered:

At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom,

Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them.

Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff.

And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfillment.

You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief,

But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.

And how shall you rise beyond your days and nights unless you break the chains which you at the dawn of your understanding have fastened around your noon hour?

In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle the eyes.

And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free?

If it is an unjust law you would abolish, that law was written with your own hand upon your own forehead.

You cannot erase it by burning your law books nor by washing the foreheads of your judges, though you pour the sea upon them.

And if it is a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed.

For how can a tyrant rule the free and the proud, but for a tyranny in their own freedom and a shame in their won pride?

And if it is a care you would cast off, that care has been chosen by you rather than imposed upon you.

And if it is a fear you would dispel, the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared.

Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape.

These things move within you as lights and shadows in pairs that cling.

And when the shadow fades and is no more, the light that lingers becomes a shadow to another light.

And thus your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.

Khalil Gibran, 1883 – 1931

 

Trump And His Uber-Wealthy Administration…

Starting Friday evening, the White House will begin to release financial disclosure forms filed by about 180 members of the Trump administration who are either commissioned officers or paid more than $161,755.

Already, the administration is bragging that its members are way wealthier than those who worked for former president Barack Obama — a point of pride that doesn’t quite match the president’s campaign pledge to “drain the swamp” of wealthy GOP donors, lifelong political operatives and those who are simply out-of-touch with everyday Americans.

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It’s no secret that Trump, who brags about his immense wealth, has filled his administration with fellow uber-wealthy people. The billionaires include Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose family started a marketing company; Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a venture capitalist who has focused on buying businesses in distress; and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive, hedge fund executive and Hollywood financier.

Trump and GOP hypocrisy in a nutshell.

The rest complete with video HERE .

 

GOP and Health-Care Mandates

 

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“You’re just looking for a handout,” mothers! Photo: Universal Pictures

America’s conservatives and republicans are interested in ideology and selfish interests. Not the he general welfare of the American people. They haven’t been for the last 40 years. It’s just becoming more pronounced.

BTW, selfish interests are NOT the same as rational self-interest.

The single most unifying idea to change Obamacare among conservatives is to eliminate the law’s “essential health benefits.” These burdensome mandates of which treatments insurance has to cover make Obamacare too expensive, conservatives say. Their problem is that the list of required essential health benefits includes actually only, well, essential ones. If the list did include any frivolous treatments, like cosmetic surgery or some goofy alternative-medicine quack scheme, that’s all you’d hear about. But it doesn’t. So the single example conservatives come up with, over and over, is maternity care. Today it appears in Charles Krauthammer’s column:

Even more significant would be stripping out the heavy-handed Obamacare coverage mandate that dictates what specific medical benefits must be included in every insurance policy in the country, regardless of the purchaser’s desires or needs.

Best to mandate nothing. Let the customer decide. A 60-year-old couple doesn’t need maternity coverage. Why should they be forced to pay for it? And I don’t know about you, but I don’t need lactation services.

The thing to understand is that mandating covering maternity care doesn’t affect the total cost of insurance. It only changes the distribution of the costs. It’s not like Charles Krauthammer’s insurance forces him to actually go through childbirth. It merely means that his premiums help pay for other people’s maternity care.

If health insurance could sell plans that did not cover childbirth, then young women of childbearing age would be the only people who bought plans that covered it. And having a baby would be extremely expensive. Indeed, in the unregulated market that existed before Obamacare, it was common for women to buy insurance they believed covered their childbirth but in fact did not. In 2009, Sarah Wildman described her not-atypical experience of getting a $20,000 bill from her insurance company for a standard delivery.

And it is true that, if we let Krauthammer buy insurance that didn’t cover maternity care, that change would, on its own, reduce Krauthammer’s premiums. That reform would make sense if you think of having a baby as some kind of yuppie extravagance. This notion was, not long ago, considered so self-evidently absurd that it could be the premise of a Simpsons joke:

Homer Simpson: I can’t fake an interest in this, and I’m an expert at faking an interest in your kooky projects.

Marge Simpson: What kooky projects?

Homer Simpson: You know, the painting class, the first-aid course, the whole Lamaze thing.

Now the entire Republican Party is Homer Simpson.

Truer words have never been spoken.

Continue reading HERE.