Did you know that a Koch brothers-funded "think tank" just said that Sen. Sanders's Medicare-for-All plan would reduce health care costs and boost worker wages? Well, they did! Of course, they didn't, ah, foreground that information -- they foregrounded the ZOMG TEH COSTZ OF TEH $32 TRILLYUNZ!!!!!! scare number, a number that covers ten years of spending and doesn't account for the fact that projections of current health care spending already have us spending a lot more than that. A pair of single-payer advocates also argue that the Koch-backed study underestimates the savings from a Medicare-for-All plan. Still, now you get to tell your right-wing uncle that even the Koch brothers think letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices will save almost $85 billion annually. Hey, they said it.
Ho hum, our Treasury Secretary thinks he may be able to deliver yet another tax-cut-to-the-rich without those pesky people's representatives in Congress having anything to do with it. Every time someone proposes some kind of capital gains tax cut, they say it'll goose up revenues big-time because a lot of people will sell their houses and such, but people sell their houses for a lot of reasons -- many of them even having to do with their family's needs! -- and the "windfall" (if it materializes!) never lasts long. For all that, I wouldn't mind indexing initial house purchase prices to inflation for the purpose of giving working families a capital gains tax cut when they sell their house. But I'd cap it at one property annually and $250,000 in an inflation-adjusted initial house investment, since we don't want to make our economy's addiction to property churning (which basically only benefits banksters) any worse than it already is now.
Jana Winters at the Boston Globe describes the Transportation Safety Authority's "Quiet Skies" surveillance program, in which federal air marshals spy on air travelers who haven't been accused of or charged with a crime. Ever use a laptop on an airplane, or have a "cold penetrating stare"? Then you might have been spied upon by a federal marshal! Don't politicians understand that Philip K. Dick novels are dystopian works, and not operations manuals? The good news: more than a few federal air marshals also think this is all bullshit.
Simon Davis-Cohen writes, in an admirably restrained manner I think, about the FirstNet network, a sort of "internet superhighway" "built specifically for police and public safety." Given the troubles Rekognition is having in, well, rekognizing people, you won't be impressed to learn that a police officer could, one day, take a photo of someone on his cellphone and find out if that someone is in a gang database, and not just because gang databases tend to be full of people who haven't actually committed any crimes. And, seriously, just because it's The Future doesn't mean Americans suddenly don't have habeus corpus rights anymore.
Finally, our distinguished President, proving he's no better than any other politician, claims that our media are "very unpatriotic" for "reveal(ing) internal deliberations of our government." He knows he works for us, right? And that he is not literally America, right? Oh, but he goes on to say "(f)reedom of the press comes with a responsibility to report the news accurately," quickly following with "90% of media coverage of my Administration is negative," as if you won't notice his casual equation of "accuracy" with a lack of "negative" coverage. Maybe Dr. Johnson was right, and patriotism really is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
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