I say yes, you say no, OR People are Strange

RetiredLibby

And regressives STILL don't want to feed them.

IllinoisLady

http://links.upworthy.mkt5937.com/ctt?kn=13&ms=ODQzNDc4NQS2&r=NTQ5MjcwNjU1MTMS1&b=0&j=MjI1MTA3OTYxS0&mt=1&rt=0

Here is someone caught smack dab in a bold-faced I didn't even think of checking lie.

Jackie

bluedahlia

The ONLY mistake Obama has made is not to implement single payer.  Take the insurance companies out of healthcare!

bluedahlia

I love Jim....

What have they done to the earth?

What have they done to our fair sister?

Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her

Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn

And tied her with fences and dragged her down

bluedahlia

Jalak Bali (Balinese Starling).

bluedahlia

bluedahlia

Orange-breasted sunbird

bluedahlia

bluedahlia

I just finished watching all 5 seasons of Breaking Bad.  What a show!!!!!!!!!!  Anyone else watch it?

suzieq60

Blue - Steve loves it - I should buy it for him as he missed a lot.

I just finished watching Downton Abbey - they've only shown 3 episodes of the new series here so far. I got it from the UK - loved it.

QuinnCat

I'm in nesting mode for new kitten.  Part of nesting included the final hours needed to organize my 2011-2012 medical bills, insurance statements and medical reports associated with breast cancer (the latter two for the IRS).  Bouncing off what Blue said about Single Payer.  I have 2 very large binders of insurance statements and bills.  I have one small binder of medical reports (oncotype, brca2+).  I have DAYS invested in sheet protectors and sorting for the insurance statement and bills.  All I thought about was if we had Single Payer, I would have one small binder of medical reports and a LIFE.

lassie11

 I have one file with some health reports. And that's all. Sorry if it is rude to report what a single payer system is like.

To be fair, I have to send some things on to the extended health insurance plan about once or twice a year.

alexandria58

Here in vermont with snow drifts around my house, some of them as tall as i am.  It's very beautiful, but cold.

Bren-2007

Morning Buddies,

Going to be beautiful today ... Yay!  High of 71 F.  Too bad it's not going to last and is going to get really cold again next week.  I can't wait to get to San Diego where the weather is wonderful and you can count on sunshine!

Alexandria .. The snowy VT countryside sounds beautiful ... just tired of the cold these days.  Did you have to shovel all those snowdrifts by your house?

Blue .. I didn't see all the seasons of Breaking Bad, but the first one was a hoot.  Loved it!

Kam .. You must be getting so excited about your kitty coming.  Is it today that he flies in?  For some reason I thought it was on a Saturday.

Well guys .. I still can't figure out this damn iPhone.  Going to the Sprint store in Danville today to see if someone can help me.  It doesn't like my passwords for Google, Facebook, Safari or sending emails.  It readily took my credit card number just in case I wanted to download an iTune or buy an app.  I can't figure out if I use my regular passwords for these accounts or if I use the Apple ID password.  I am really confused and frustrated with this thing.  I wish I had got the Samsung ... at least I would be familiar with the OS.

Hope everyone has a great weekend.

hugs,

Bren

GatorGal

good Saturday morning, ladies!  Having my second cup of coffee having spilled the first one in my bed.  Nice to have a lazy day.  My beloved sister is visiting from North Carolina.  She is a night nurse and went 32 hours without sleep, so she is sleeping in.  I am waiting patiently for her to wake up so we can make plans for the day!  Brenda, I love my iphone and find it very easy to operate.  Maybe because it's just like my ipad!  On e you get used to it, you will love it.  I use the same passwords I have always used.  Don't know why yours doesn't recognize them.  That is strange!  Hope they can simplify things for you at Danville.  You can always google your questions.  There is a utube video for how to do just about everything these days.  Kam, have fun getting to know your new kitty?  Alexandria, glad you made it to Vermont safely.  Don't think I would enjoy being that far north right now.  I want warmth!!  Anyway, have a great weekend everyone!  I hope the big storm they are talking about piddles out!!  

Glen a

IllinoisLady

Beauty of a morning here, but possible snow tonight.  It won't be much,, nor will it stay long, but I was hoping we had seen the last.  We have had large snows in April, but they are the type that start to melt quickly and are gone so fast you barely notice.  Still, it has been such a strange and harsh winter.....I'd like to think nary one more flake would show up.

Bren, I am nearly hopeless with electronic things....still surprised that I have managed the computer.  I think I mentioned before....until I got my diagnosis I had never attempted  'blogs' of any kind though several people wanted me too.  My Space was the blog to be on then.  Once I knew what I was in for, I signed up on a couple of cancer blogs ( this one being the over-all one )  and I guess because I "needed" the connection so bad, it just took right off for me.  Since I retired from selling real estate ( got my license just after all my chemo and rads -- more at the time to prove to myself that I could still mentally function ) I don't even have a cell phone.  I retired from real estate so I wouldn't have to use one. 

I'm in on the single payer insurance.  Of course, since I had two insurances already....I did not have to sign up for ACA though I would have in less than a heart-beat had that been the case. 

Kam....just a little thought about nesting.

Hope you all have a gorgeous day....like the beauties above.

Jackie

lassie11

Bren - I sent you a pm and then looked again at your post. There is no password necessary for Safari or google and once you get your e-mail settings installed there shouldn't need to be a password for that either. You are very close to making things work!

pupmom

Chicky just posted that she's back in the hospital but is recovering. Something about a dex crash. (?) 

(((Chickadee))) get well soon!!

Anonymous

thanks yorkie

Alexandria, we didn't get much snow, but I can't even begin to describe the cold.  It's in the 30's today, and it feels WARM in comparison to what it has been.  Now that is so strange, when anything about about 25 starts to feel warm.

Obama never had a chance for single payer.  Remember 1993 ;(  And Max Baucus, Lieberman ( insurance capital in Hartford CT) made sure it wouldn't happen.  Think we're still at least 10 years away from single payer, but it's gotta happen.

lassie11

Good luck dislodging the insurance companies! They certainly would miss the huge profits they are making. I see that as the greatest stumbling block to single payer in the US.

Anonymous

you've got it nailed, lassie.  They are MEGA powerful, add to that the pharmaceutical  industry - way back in the days when Medicare Part D was passed in a Republican administration ( after Clinton, b4 Obama ) the Congress REFUSED to allow the government to NEGOTIATE medical prescription costs.  Hard to believe, but still true.  Almost every other major institution DOES negotiate, but not the Fed Gov. for Medicare.  It pays what the pharmaceutical industry tells it to pay, and of course, it's passed on to consumers.

The co-pay for Tier 3 GENERICS is about $45. per month. CO-PAY.  That is a medication like Singular ( generic) or Simbicort ( generic) - you can tell I have asthma.  Tragic really, and this administration couldn't touch it, or we wouldn't have ACA.

Every elected official in Washington DC is MORE INTERESTED in getting re-elected ( and that means mega campaign donations, MEGAH!) than in anything else. Each party, no exceptions.  American politics is only about MONEY.  Makes me laugh when I hear folks complaining about the "lack of Democracy) - HAH, what Democracy?  Hasn't been true in USA for generations, if ever.

Bren-2007

Lassie .. you're the greatest!  You and Glenna set me on the right path.  Hell .. you guys helped me more than the folks at the Sprint store today.  I stood in that damn place for TWO HOURS and all it  accomplished was messing things up even worse.  I was able to redo/re-input my stuff when I got home and thanks to your helping me out ... it works!

Going to help Tim set his up tomorrow.  He's ready to run over the thing with his semi today!  We're just not gadgety people.

Yorkie .. thanks for the note about Chickadee.  I'll check the Stage IV thread and see if there is more info about how she's doing.  Bless her heart ... she has been through the wringer lately.

Jackie .. I didn't know you were a real estate agent in another life.  That's a tough job, but fun.

Gorgeous day today.  Wish everyday was like this!  Can't believe rain/snow is forecast for tomorrow.  I've got all the windows open right now and it feels so good.  I even noticed some of the Red Bud trees were just starting to bust out.

hugs to all,

Bren

IllinoisLady

((((((Chickie))))))

Jackie

QuinnCat

Hi all - I'm pooped with a capital P.  I'm doing all of things at my house that should have been after 34 years of working!  Pick up the kitten tomorrow at noon PDT.  Poor baby will be on the road 8 hours by the time he's done.  Have his room all prepared with tree, toys, new litter box and no Emma scents (or very few).  I'm going to be very careful about this introduction as my last experience was a disaster that took 2 years to overcome.  (Sometimes it works easy, sometimes not.)  We will see how much stamina I have to tolerate Emma's meows from the other side of the door!  I'm going to sneak PL in thru the back door

Jackie - that mama cat looks like PL's mama.  As I said, he's not the perfect devon for me, but I'm sure he will be a joy.  This will be my first male cat ever!

I've got to review above about the Iphone.  I know how the Cloud works, theoretically, practically, I don't have a clue how I interact with it off of my Iphone.  Spending more time on right brained stuff these days.

{{{{{ Chickadee }}}}}  - I hate to hear she's had such a rough time lately.

To all of the Canadians - what a treasure you have in this Toronto physican schooling one of our Republican Senators on how Single Payer really works rather than the way he wanted to portray it to work.  Classic.  This woman was fantastic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYOf6hXGx6M   (had to type this in - hope it works)

IllinoisLady

Watched the video -- also not only good, but I was able to view one with a smile turning right into a smirk and one who did not.....Way to go Canada.  Also great when you can avoid appearing like that hmmm, shall we say a jerk with a smirk.   I am proud of you Canada........and as always proud of Bernie Sanders.

Jackie

suzieq60

Kam - Can't wait until you get your kitty - we want photos asap. Sounds like you are going to keep him in one room at first - good, then keep him inside for a week or more if you can.

alexandria58

Kam, by now you should have your kitty. Enjoy!!

Sun- I'm in my house in Vermont, looking out the window at piles of snow five feet or deeper, and we got another two inches or so last night.  Yesterday, the temperatures weren't so bad.  today, different story.  But I've got a fire going, a cup of coffee, my computer, and good books.  later, I'm going to do some editing.  Life is good.

Anonymous

For all those going to watch a St. Patrick's Day Parade, and for all of us who celebrated yesterday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/paul-ryans-irish-amnesia.html
NY Times
Paul Ryan’s Irish Amnesia

Timothy Egan
MARCH 15, 2014
(Note, etching shown in hard copy won't copy here. Hyperlinked if you want to see it.)


An Irish girl guarding her family’s last few possessions after eviction for nonpayment of rent, during the potato famine. A wood engraving from The Illustrated London News, April 1886. Credit Print Collector/Getty Images

Patrick’s Day, I went time traveling, back to the 1840s and Ireland’s great famine. On one side of the Irish Sea was Victorian England, flush with the pomp and prosperity of the world’s mightiest empire. On the other side were skeletal people, dying en masse, the hollow-bellied children scrounging for nettles and blackberries.
A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”

And there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence.

There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs.

But you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy.

The Irish historian John Kelly, who wrote a book on the great famine, was the first to pick up on these echoes of the past during the 2012 presidential campaign. “Ryan’s high-profile economic philosophy,” he wrote then, “is the very same one that hurt, not helped, his forebears during the famine — and hurt them badly.”

What was a tired and untrue trope back then is a tired and untrue trope now. What was a distortion of human nature back then is a distortion now. And what was a misread of history then is a misread now.

Ryan boasts of the Gaelic half of his ancestry, on his father’s side. “I come from Irish peasants who came over during the potato famine,” he said last year during a forum on immigration.

BUT with a head still stuffed with college-boy mush from Ayn Rand, he apparently never did any reading about the times that prompted his ancestors to sail away from the suffering sod. Centuries of British rule that attempted to strip the Irish of their language, their religion and their land had produced a wretched peasant class, subsisting on potatoes. When blight wiped out the potatoes, at least a million Irish died — one in eight people.

“The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine,” wrote the fiery essayist John Mitchel, whose words bought him a ticket to the penal colony of Tasmania.

What infuriated Mitchel was that the Irish were starving to death at the very time that rich stores of grain and fat livestock owned by absentee landlords were being shipped out of the country. The food was produced by Irish hands on Irish lands but would not go into Irish mouths, for fear that such “charity” would upset the free market, and make people lazy.

Ryan’s running mate in 2012, Mitt Romney, made the Tory case with his infamous remark that 47 percent of Americans are moochers, “dependent upon government.” Part of that dependence, he said, extended to people “who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” Food — the gall!

You can’t make these kinds of heartless remarks unless you think the poor deserve their fate — that they have a character flaw, born of public assistance. And there hovers another awful haunt of Irish history. In 2012, Ryan said that the network of programs for the American poor made people not want to work.

On Wednesday, he went further, using the language of racial coding. This, after he told a story of a boy who didn’t want his free school lunch because it left him with “a full stomach and an empty soul.” The story was garbage — almost completely untrue.

“We have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In other words, these people are bred poor and lazy.

Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes — 19th-century England. The Irish national character, Trevelyan confided to a fellow aristocrat, was “defective.” The hungry millions were “a selfish, perverse, and turbulent” people, said the man in charge of relieving their plight.

You never hear Ryan make character judgments about generations of wealthy who live off their inheritance, or farmers who get paid not to grow anything. Nor, for that matter, does he target plutocrats like Romney who might be lulled into not taking risks because they pay an absurdly low tax rate simply by moving money around. Dependency is all one-way.

“The whole British argument in the famine was that the poor are poor because of a character defect,” said Christine Kinealy, a professor of Irish studies and director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University. “It’s a dangerous, meanspirited and tired argument.”

And it wasn’t true. The typical desperation scene of the famine was the furthest thing from a day in the hammock. Here’s what one Quaker relief agent, William Bennett, found in a visit to County Mayo in 1847:

“We entered a cabin. Stretched in one dark corner, scarcely visible from the smoke and rags that covered them, were three children huddled together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and ghastly ... perfectly emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently in the last stage of actual starvation.”

For his role in the famine, Trevelyan was knighted. The Irish remember him differently. At Quinnipiac’s Great Hunger Museum hangs a picture of this English gentleman with a dedication: “For crimes against humanity, never brought to justice.”

Irish Alzheimer’s, goes the joke, is to forget everything but the grudges — in the case of the great famine, for good reason. What Alexis de Tocqueville called “the terrifying exactitude of memory” is burned into Ireland’s soil. But more than forgetting, Paul Ryan never learned.

alexandria58

Well written, rant, Sunflowers, and a good history lesson.  In Paul ryan's honest, we should revive Jonathan swift's A Modest Proposal, just redo it for urban America.

IllinoisLady

Sunny -- enjoyed the piece immensely.  Though you printed down below --- it opened for me, but did it rather slowly.  So many of these things the Ryan's of this world seem to think are fine.....should be lived out by them for at least 6 months....then revisited for any veracity they may find...........or maybe more to the point, a huge change of heart.  The last lines of the article are so very true......you only recognize the parts of anything ( even much of your own history ) by what fits your scenario now.  No wonder so many people find Ryan, Cruz, Palin and that bunch repugnant. 

One word describes my outside world this a.m.  Ick. We are having a chilly temp and rain.  Maybe a few flakes mixed in later.  Knew it was coming but I have to admit to some resentment.  So tired of  the long winter though this should be much, much gentler than anything to date.  I hope the spring-like mode will sure return.

Jackie

p.s.  Kam....keeping little newbie in place for at least a week will so help the overall transition.  Hopefully, both will end up anxious to have their meet and greet and the pecking order event will be rather gentle.