Our Administration declares in a legal filing that it supports the complete destruction of the Affordable Care Act, and not just the destruction of the (very popular!) provisions it has spent the last two years fighting. And I must ask: are these guys completely tone-deaf? If they succeed, not only will they reactivate the issue that drove voters to hand the House back to Democrats, they'll prompt even more Americans to support Medicare-for-All as a way of being done with all the headaches. Constantly diddling the rage glands of your votaries has to backfire sometime, particularly when your votaries comprise no more than 25% of the electorate.
Be sure you're sitting down when you read this Fortune/Kaiser Health News report about how our national push to move from written health records to electronic ones has too often resulted in bad software and missing information leading to illness and death. And then wonder if maybe we shouldn't have made all the electronic health record software private. I mean, today's "conservatives" would scream if our government simply hired all the people needed to make electronic software work, but that would more likely have headed off the whole our-software-just-loses-data problem -- and if not, you'd know whom to fire.
And stay seated: our Defense Department exempted some 5,000 pages of documentation describing Google's work on a government drone project from the Freedom of Information Act, on the grounds that their work comprises "critical infrastructure security information." There are things we'd want to know, after all -- like whether Google's AI is any less sucky than anyone else's AI, how well it detects what it's supposed to detect, or whether we, as civilized people, should even allow it to do what the Pentagon wants it to do -- but to say that TEH PEEPULZ WILL DIEZ!!!!! if the information gets out, as yet another Administration official with "acting" in their title does, should strike you as more than a bit hysterical. Also, too, 5,000 pages!
In a peripherally-related note, Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) blocks vote on that resolution the House unanimously passed calling for the release of the Mueller report, citing unnamed "national security" concerns. Saying you won't do things like that because of "national security" is rather like admitting you can't win the argument without resorting to scare tactics. Mr. McConnell is running for re-election to the Senate in 2020; if Democrats can't beat him, they have no business calling themselves a major party.
Finally, in another peripherally-related note, our President has taken the Mueller report about as well as you'd expect -- by (among other things!) whining that "(i)t’s a shame that our country has had to go through this," and "(t)o be honest, it’s a shame that your president has had to go through this." One more time: the President is not America, and in a sane, moral, and healthy society, no one would give one rat's hind quarter about "what the President is going through," since the President signed up for the job. Our Founders must be spinning in their graves.
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