Thank God for the good folks at Popular Information, who remind us that we should ignore anything we hear from the Koch network about their intention to “break with Donald Trump.” “What is not mentioned in any of these stories (about the Koch break) is that, for years, (Charles) Koch has repeatedly announced he was reorienting his political strategy away from far-right Republicans, including Trump – with no discernible change in his actual political activity. After each media-assisted rebrand, Koch quietly resumed business as usual. The reality is that few individuals have spent more money to legitimize Trump and his allies than Charles Koch.” Plus there's data! When I first heard about the "break," I believe my initial reaction was (checking my notes) “drama drama drama drama drama drama drama drama drama,” since that’s how we should regard any disagreement among Republicans, but it’s always nice to have data behind it.
Neall Pogue at The Conversation describes “How evangelicals moved from supporting environmental stewardship to climate skepticism.” I suspect they were sincere, but I also suspect that evangelicals of the ‘60s and ‘70s used environmentalism to do battle against (then-) infrastructure-obsessed liberals, but this view persisted into the ‘90s; Mr. Pogue doesn’t say so, but I also presume that Republicans catered to the religious right’s racial and sexual prejudices to the point where they could sway them on environmental issues, too. Thus Jerry Falwell started calling us “tree-huggers” in 1992, and I was thinking I can’t be too mad, resorting to ridicule as often as I do. But of course there’s no good reason to hate “tree-huggers” more than, say, the corporate welfare queens who are Republicans’ real constituency. And if tree-huggers make you feel guilty, just remember that folks who don’t have work or food also don’t have the luxury of guilt.
ProPublica tells us the story of the man whose health insurance corporation wouldn’t cover his ulcerative collitis – and his struggle to expose that corporation’s inner workings. Trigger warning: by the end of this article, you might think that Victoria Kavanaugh, Dave Opperman, Vikas Pabby, and Nady Cates are four of the worst human beings who ever lived, though if they lived in a universe that actually rewarded good works and not just love of money, they’d be much better versions of themselves than they seem to be here. You may also feel more than a little disgust at how right-wing news outlets can trumpet their “Universal Health Care Horror Stories” with impunity while stories like Christopher McNaughton’s story – or, for that matter, Nataline Sarkysian’s – don’t seem to impress our “liberal” media the way they used to. You can safely blame that on love of money, too.
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