Medicaid expansion complicates Republican moves to end Obamacare

One of the features of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) was the Medicaid Expansion provision that enabled those people who were too poor to qualify for the tax subsidies of the main plan but not poor enough to qualify for the standard Medicaid to be able to get access to health care. However the US Supreme Court ruled that while Obamacare was constitutional, states could choose not to accept the Medicaid provision and many Republican controlled states refused to do so because of their ideological opposition to Obamacare, even though it was almost cost-free for them, since the federal government would pay the entire cost for the first few years and almost the entire cost subsequently. Thus the poor in their states were sacrificed because of the Republicans’ hatred for anything associated with Obamacare.
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Will ridicule succeed where all else fails?

We have seen in the current Republican presidential race that there seems to be nothing that can bring a candidate down once they have captured the allegiance of a significant portion of the party’s large and nutty base. Donald Trump and Ben Carson exemplify this. They can flat out lie, make the most idiotic and unrealistic policy proposals, exhibit xenophobia and race-baiting, and their poll numbers stay up month after month despite predictions from the pundits that this time, they have gone too far and their numbers will come down.
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The ugly Sri Lankan-American

There was one ugly incident during my recent holiday in Sri Lanka. We traveled around by two coaches and stayed at hotels. Naturally, when the 75 of us descended on a hotel all at once, the hotel receptionists were really busy trying to check everyone in as quickly as possible. I tended to wait in the lobby until the crowd dissipated before going to the counter but at one hotel, I saw one of our party who is not a close relative of mine and whom I did not know growing up in Sri Lanka (let’s call him K) gesticulating angrily at the receptionist for some time.
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The US media provides cover for the US government, again

The US government still continues to defy calls for an independent investigation into the attacks on the MSF hospital in Kunduz that destroyed the main facility and killed so many, and the US media are not putting any pressure on them to do so. What is worse, as Glenn Greenwald points out, some in the media are pre-emptively exonerating the government by declaring that the attack was an ‘accident’ or ‘mistake’ when there are many indications that the attack on the hospital was deliberate.
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The curious case of Benjamin Carson

While I was traveling, I read various foreign newspapers and many of them had articles about Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson. While they were generally baffled by the rise of Donald Trump as a leading presidential contender, Carson’s rise to the top seemed to leave them utterly astounded. There is no question that he is the most fascinating candidate in the field because there is something really weird about him, and I am not just talking about the way he speaks, with his eyes often closed and giving the impression of one who is either sedated or stoned.
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Giving criminals a second chance

Take a look at a graph created by Dara Lind using official prison statistics about the number of prisoners in the US per 100,000 adult US residents. The rates now are nearly seven times what they were for nearly an entire century, from 1880 to 1970, when it suddenly shot up when ‘law and order’ and ‘get tough on crime’ became the way to win votes.
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