The Maid of Honor at my Xillennial cousin's wedding read from the Velveteen Rabbit, as eyes started to well up in the pews. So I can support Dan Brekke's choice.
Trump sees that the US cannot continue to rely on its biggest adversary for all its everyday goods. If they decided to seize Taiwan tomorrow there would be nothing we could do. Even a fully automated factory would generate a hundred good jobs here.
Nostalgia for the Mitt Romney party -- the party of the upper 53% -- will doom the GOP to irrelevance. MAGA saved the Republican Party as the Tea Party had saved it.
Americans do not need government handouts. They need family-sustaining jobs. And not fast-food jobs with government-mandated family sustaining wages. Good jobs. Jobs people can be proud of holding.
By appointing a blue ribbon committee, Reagan started the process that saved Social Security for the next 50 years. It is time to repeat the process but how? And by whom?
In 2008, Obama brilliantly outlined working class issues in what became known as the "bitter clinger" speech. Yet his administration did nothing to help the working class, any more than his predecessors did.
Then Trump internalized the message and addressed the issues Obama had outlined.
In 2019, an immigration judge ruled that Abrego-Garcia was a member of MS-13. The BIA upheld this determination. At this point, AG's attorneys could have appealed this to the Circuit Court, but they did not
Sunday, former DOJ attorney Reuveni claimed A-G's MS-13 membership was not established. How?
I remember learning that, even during the theoretically benign Obama administration, only 20-25% of asylum claimants from the Northern Triangle were awarded asylum. Why was this? People's claims were not credible?
For interest, Norwegian dog trainer Turid Rugaas has analyzed how dogs bark, and in her "Barking: The Sound of a Language," has identified how to differentiate among the five types of barking.
She has also identified the "Calming signals," that dogs exhibit to each other to avoid conflict.
The rabbi reminded me. At her bat mitzvah, my friend's daughter, 1/4 African-American, rather plaintively asked the Conservative congregation not to assume what Jews should look like.
One difference between the US and European countries that have tax-supported health care is that the middle class is taxed considerably more than ours is.
There are only 801 billionaires in the US, and they cannot alone fund all our hopes and dreams.
Barring injury, people can generally coast from 18 to 40 or so without needing much health care. Then it starts ramping up.
Medicare was passed to keep a single hospitalization from bankrupting a retired couple. People paid into the system throughout a working lifetime to make use of it over 65.
Even Israel, with less than 10 million people, has four separate payers. Germany has 96 payers, with 44 private health insurance companies on top of it.
I would think there is plenty of opportunity to make medical care more efficient, and thus cheaper.
I had to have a relatively simple procedure done ten years ago. They kept me in the hospital overnight. I personally interacted with 25 different individuals in a 22 hour period.
There was a period, up to 20 years ago, when rural areas all had factories making such everyday things as screen and storm doors. Farm family members would take jobs there to even out the ebb and flow of farm income. They would get benefits such as... health insurance!
Another change is the ability to block other participants, sometimes simply bc they don't echo one's point of view. In the olden days, people could make coherent arguments, using facts to support their assertions.
Having started my internet discussion life on Usenet, the biggest change is the proliferation of censorship. On Instagram, people type "seggs" because "sex" is deprecated.
