Trump Administration uses "consumer information and outreach" money to make scare videos of folks allegedly harmed by Obamacare. And some of their other adventures may have broken the law (against advocacy by Executive branch agencies); I bet I can guess how much the law-and-order Trump Administration cares about that. This is beyond "let Obamacare collapse under its own weight," of course; this is heaping hundreds of anvils on top of Obamacare and then saying look, it collapsed under its own weight!
Nate Silver writes a pretty excellent piece of fiction, in the style of an AP report from an alternate universe in which Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election. Click through and read the whole thing, but in the meantime, I will say this much: the piece maps pretty well onto my hunch that had Mrs. Clinton won, politics-as-usual would have gone on, meaning Democrat capitulation to Republicans and that particularly shallow brand of "liberal" media sensationalism we've all come to hate. Not that he's meant to, but Mr. Trump has done one good thing: he's woken a lot of people up, and some of these folks, praise the Lord, actually work in the "liberal" media.
Thomas Adam at The Conversation describes how higher education devolved from a tuition-free "public good" available to everyone who could benefit from it, to a "vehicle for individual enrichment" with the high costs we've (sadly) come to accept. For once, the change happens before the Reagan Administration, which I guess is of some comfort, and doesn't involve privatizing a public good so much as personalizing it. I still won't call the obviously-better-way-to-do-it "free" college, since we would still pay for it, but if we make college a "public good" again, we can make it more about our communities than ourselves. Selfishness is evil, after all.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) releases hold on Mr. Trump's nominee to head up the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel after said nominee finally agrees that yes, you can perform oversight on the Executive branch even if you're not a Committee Chair. After all, a Representative or Senator works on behalf of their constituents, not on behalf of the President or their party. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. Sen. Grassley's own 40-plus year career of Congressional oversight has yielded many good works on behalf of the American people, but I just hope he doesn't excuse such ignorance coming from the OLC because Mr. Trump's new at this.
Finally, The Straight Dope explores the question "How Have Most Human Beings Died Throughout History?" You may have heard differently, but almost 90 percent of everyone who's ever lived died before 1850, so one way to approximate an answer (in the absence of forensic breakthroughs) is to see how most folks die in lower-income countries that best approximate pre-1850 conditions (throwing out causes of death like HIV, which didn't exist back then). The answer? Lower respiratory infections like the flu. Recall that a flu epidemic wiped out at least 50 million people over 60 years after the 1850 cutoff and you'll appreciate the power of that answer.
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