Glibertarians.com 2019 Archive

Category: Health Care

  • Economics Corner with Paul Krugman and Winston’s Mom

    What?  I’m on?   I’m sorry.  Let me get a clean pair of skivvies, I’m not quite ready yet…

    So here is the column of bullshit from last week.

    “If you live in the Midwest, where else do you want to live besides Chicago? You don’t want to live in Cincinnati or Cleveland or, you know, these armpits of America.” So declared Stephen Moore, the man Donald Trump wants to install on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, during a 2014 event held at a think tank called, yes, the Heartland Institute.

    The crowd laughed.

    Moore is an indefensible choice on many grounds. Even if he hadn’t shown himself to be extraordinarily misogynistic and have an ugly personal history, his track record on economics — always wrong, never admitting error or learning from it — is utterly disqualifying.

    His remarks about the Midwest, however, highlight more than his unsuitability for the Fed. They also provide an illustration of something I’ve been noticing for a while: The thinly veiled contempt conservative elites feel for the middle-American voters they depend on.

    This guy again? Stephen Moore.  Stephen Moore?  Stephen Moore!  Motherfucking STEPHEN MOORE.  How many moore of these columns are you going to dedicate to STEPHEN MOORE

    Seriously, did he sleep with your wife or something?

    This is not the story you usually hear. On the contrary, we’re inundated with claims that liberals feel disdain for the heartland. Even liberals themselves often buy into these claims, berate themselves for having been condescending and pledge to do better.

    But what’s the source of that narrative? Look at where the belief that liberals don’t respect the heartland comes from, and it turns out that it has little to do with things Democrats actually say, let alone their policies. It is, instead, a story line pushed relentlessly by Fox News and other propaganda organizations, relying on out-of-context quotes and sheer fabrication.

    Conservative contempt, by contrast, is real. Moore’s “armpit” line evidently didn’t shock his audience, probably because disparaging views about middle America are widespread among right-wing intellectuals and, more discreetly, right-wing politicians.

    Hey dumbass.  Everyone makes fun of Cleveland.  It’s an easy target, plus people there cheerful and have pretty good humor about it..  Contrast this with Chicago where walking in the wrong neighborhood will get you shot by the locals, or some asshole says you have weed and the cops break down the door of your business looking for kickbacks and shooting my workers.

    …and lets be real, I hate fucking cops.  They think they can get everything for free…

    …and he’s making me defend Cleveland.  Christ, what an asshole…

    Let’s be clear: There is a real economic and social crisis in what one recent analysis calls the “Eastern Heartland.” This region suffers from persistently low employment among working-age men and has seen a surge in mortality from alcohol, suicide and opioids — “deaths of despair,” in the phrase of Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

    What lies behind this crisis? The view of most liberals, as far as I can tell, is that it reflects declining economic opportunity, changes in the economy that have favored metropolitan areas over rural communities. On this view, declining opportunity has led to social disruption, in the same way that the disappearance of urban industry undermined inner-city communities a half century ago.

    Those industries didn’t disappear, they went to Texass.

    Many conservatives, however, blame the victims. They attribute the heartland’s woes to a mysterious collapse in morality and family values that somehow hasn’t affected coastal cities. Moral collapse is the theme of books like Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America,” and of innumerable articles. One widely read essay in National Review went so far as to label the troubled Eastern Heartland “the white ghetto,” whose people are too indolent to move to where the jobs are.

    So who, exactly, doesn’t respect middle America?

    When it comes to politicians, of course, what they say is much less important than what they do. So what do the policy choices of liberal and conservative pols say about how they value the heartland?  Some Democrats, notably Elizabeth Warren, have been offering real proposals to help rural areas. They’re probably not enough to reverse rural and small-town economic decline, which would be hard to do even with plenty of money and the best will in the world. But they would help.

  • Are You for Eighty Six?

    A Chronicle of the Insurgency, Part One:

    Are You for Eighty Six?

    by Tonio

     

    The editors have prudently insisted that I warn my readers that they may find some material in the following story to be deeply disturbing and offensive. You, dear reader, should be both disturbed and offended that such stories have to exist, that the source material is all too real and not just the febrile rantings of a madman.

    Angelica Cortasio-Ortez heard the corridor door open and through the slit in the stall door she saw a fat chick in a pussy hat enter the restroom. Angelica was trying to pee, not because she had to but because it was an excuse to escape the office for a few minutes. She should be sulking in her own private bathroom but she was not allowed to actually use it – couldn’t use it at this point. She had assumed that the locked door in her office which none of her keys fit was a maintenance corridor or something; nobody had told her she even had a bathroom until the cleaning lady had opened it one evening when she was working late. She had called the after-hours maintenance number and when she finally reached a person he told her that he’d enter a “door needs re-key” ticket but that it wasn’t an emergency. The next morning she arrived to find the door unlocked, but blocked by construction tape. She had cut through the red “Caution / Cuidado” tape only to find that all the fixtures had been ripped out overnight.

    The fat chick entered the stall next to Angelica and locked the door. She then heard the seat go up and found that strange. But she shouldn’t judge; not all women peed sitting down, after all. Upon learning of the destruction of her private bathroom she had called the Superintendent of House Office Buildings and the smarmy little man she got on the phone told her that the bathroom had been condemned as unsafe after the office had been assigned to her.

    “Of course we would not have assigned you an office with an unsafe bathroom, Congresswoman; the final inspection from when the last tenant vacated listed everything in good order. But mold grew in the room when the suite wasn’t occupied. We can’t expose you to unsafe conditions. We’ll get you a new bathroom as soon as possible once the shutdown is over… No, I’m afraid there are no more available executive grade offices available.”

    Angelica fumed to relive the moment, her hands involuntarily forming into fists and shaking up and down in unison. She bet her eyes had what the old white men called her “crazy look.”

    The fat chick was doing a lot of moving around in her stall, like she was changing clothes or something. All of a sudden the moving stopped and the stall walls shuddered. Angelica could no longer see the fat chick’s feet – she must be doing a toilet squat. Never a good sign.

    “Everything okay,” asked Angelica tentatively.

    “Yeah, sorry. I’m doing a medical abortion and the vaginal suppository has made me really crampy. Normally it’s a lot easier than this, but I should have known that this one would be difficult. I’ve got an interview in a couple of minutes and want to get this done beforehand.”

    And in that few seconds Angelica had learned more about the fat chick than she knew about people she had known her entire life. She felt an instant kinship with the fat chick and wondered whether she was the one interviewing for her personal assistant position. No, that would be too coincidental, like something in bad fiction.

    “So, this is going to get really nasty really soon and you should leave if you’re done.”

    “You’re sure…”

    “Totes.”

    “Where are you interviewing,” asked Angelica standing up and doing a show flush.

    “Congresswoman Angelica Cortasio-Ortez,” said the fat chick emitting a grunt and a long fart.

    “I work in that office, I can tell them I saw you here and that you’ll be a couple of minutes late. I’m sure she’ll understand” said Angelica.

    “Thanks,” said the fat chick. “Tell them Moira Flaherty will be just a few minutes late.”

    “Good luck Moira.” Angelica fled the bathroom with due haste as a cacaphony of sounds erupted. She made it into the corridor and as the door closed was sure she heard a cry and a splash, followed by the sound of something being beaten with a shoe.

    This was what the patriarchy made women endure – aborting in anonymous public toilets, little better than the back-alley abortions the crones had told her about. There should be numerous warm, safe public walk-in abortatoriums staffed by caring women. With onsite childcare, of course. Women should also have mandatory access to abortion doulas in times of need. Her breathing quickened as she imagined herself leading America down a shining path towards full health equity for women.

    She decided to take the steps down to her office. The elevators went to the basement, at least one of them anyway, but it was generally quicker to take the steps unless you had a cart or something. Hers was the only congressional office in the basement of the House Rayburn Office Building. They had moved senior staff out of their offices to make room for the freshman class of congresspersons, and the lottery had assigned her the office formerly occupied by the Head of Housekeeping.

    Angelica walked past her receptionist who waved her down and handed her a pink square of paper, a phone call memo. Incredibly old-fashioned, but her staff had quickly learned that their computers were unreliable. The receptionist was talking to someone through her headset, answering one of the many misdirected calls.

    “This really is Congresswoman Cortasio-Ortez’ office… We get a lot of calls for housekeeping… There is a problem with the House switchboard… Then I suggest you contact the Superintendent of House Office Buildings… You, too.”

    She walked into the private part of her office and found Ella, her chief of staff. “Moira Flaherty is going to be a few minutes late. I ran into her in the restroom, she’s aborting. Can you get someone to have a pot of tea ready in my office when she comes in?”

    “Poor thing. Of course, Congresswoman.”