Cinderella wheelchair

A bit of great news. Since I don’t have children and I avoid sugar I also avoid Halloween. So other than noticing the big Halloween displays in neighborhood yards I’m not up on the latest holiday trends. Even so, I was delighted to see an article in last Sunday’s *Detroit Free Press* featuring inclusive costumes. This is cool: a costume that turns a child’s wheelchair into a pirate ship or into a Cinderella carriage.



Comedian Ron Delaney was interviewed by The New Yorker. As part of that he talked about his son who became ill and died while the family was living in the UK. Delaney was pleased with one aspect of the care his son got – he wasn’t on the phone arguing with insurance companies. He spent the time with his son.

So Delaney wants to destroy the current private health insurance system in America. We could eliminate all that overhead paying CEOs hundreds of millions of dollars. And then there is the advertising:

“Your choice! Get the plan that’s right for you” – what the f*** is that? The plan is go to the hospital and it’s covered. There’s your choice. Yeah, I’m a zealot on that one and I won’t stop until you can go to the hospital without fear of going bankrupt.

Rafael is a former kid refugee from Uzbekistan. He tweeted a thread:

Zuckerberg responds to Bernie Sanders' call to abolish billionaires by saying it would harm much needed funding of scientific research and philanthropy. (You know, 90% of which is needed to undo the damage of billionaires.)

How different is this than a mobster taking protection fees from small shop keepers every week to keep them "safe" (from them)?

He continued "Let's just have the government take it all...the government can basically decide, you know, all of the medical research that gets done,"

If you build a democracy accountable to its people without the outsized influence of billionaires, yes, PEOPLE should decide!

The State Department has issued a report on its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. They said there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information in emails sent to or from Hillary’s private server.

The New York Times was one of many news organizations that kept the email “scandal” in search of a crime before the public for 600 straight days before the 2016 election. And what did the Times do with this new report? Put a 649 word story on page A-16. Essentially telling readers nothing to see here.

Eric Boehlert of the Daily Kos community wrote:

Just as important today is how the press is washing its hands of the media malpractice from 2016 and pretending news outlets played no role in helping the GOP market its email smear campaign for 18 months. That campaign consisted of phony Republican allegations that have now been relegated to the trashcan of history.
...
Left unsaid, of course, was the fact that the Beltway press positively owned the email story for more than a year and treated it as one of the most pressing news stories of this decade.

The reason the media did that was so that when one thought of Clinton one also thought of emails. She was defined by it. Boehlert then lists several GOP politicians who did actual email crimes and weren’t defined by it.

Yet rather than addressing that gaping, stunning failure in its 2016 coverage, the news media have opted to quietly move on.