Lunatic mainstream revisited
by Tom Sullivan
Because as Charlie Pierce observed yesterday, "America is the greatest country ever invented to be completely out of your mind," we're suffering a little insanity overload this morning.
Daily Show host Trevor Noah's emergency appendectomy gave him a chance to experience America's "best in the world" health care system this week. Raw Story:
The host said he periodically fainted from the pain of a perforated appendix, but the nurse told him he was not allowed to faint in the waiting area and should instead go to triage to lose consciousness.
“You’re telling me where I can and cannot faint?” he said.
Noah was finally taken, trembling with pain, to another room for treatment — where he was followed by the same nurse, who brought still more forms and asked how he would be paying for treatment of his life-threatening condition.
“With my life, clearly,” he said.
She decided because she recognized Noah from the billboards that he could pay whether or not he had insurance.
The Affordable Care Act, America's halting first steps from our exceptional, for-profit medicine towards a single-payer model, is headed back to the Supreme Court. It's Round 4. Because freedom:
This time, the issue is the arrangement the Obama administration worked out to spare faith-based hospitals, colleges and charities from paying for contraceptives for women covered under their health plans, while still ensuring that those women can obtain birth control at no extra cost as the law requires.
The groups complain that the arrangement leaves them complicit in making available the contraceptives in violation of their religious beliefs because their insurers or insurance administrators assume responsibility for providing birth control.
The faith-based groups "can't help the government with its contraceptive delivery system," said Mark Rienzi, a lawyer who represents the groups.
But they have no qualms about being complicit in killing off everyone else's health care delivery system.
Alabama School Board District 2 member, Betty Peters (any relation to Betty Bowers?), fears that "radical, left, homosexualists" and the Southern Poverty Law Center (among others) are "filtering informational texts involving sexuality and sexual orientation" to indoctrinate children "into little social activists for social justice." She handed out coloring book sheets to the Coffee County Republican Women on Oct. 21. Trouble with a capital "T", that rhymes with "C", that stands for Common Core:
“This is part of teaching tolerance for transgenderism to four to eight year olds,” Peters said. “The students are given color crayons and two handouts. They students are supposed to color the photos of the clothes they want to wear.
“You will notice these are called outfits,” Peters said. “I have never asked my son or my husband what ‘outfit’ they are going to wear. This is just crazy. I think all this stuff is mainly written by whacky feminists.
Patton: You want to know why this outfit got the hell kicked out of it?
Uh, whacky feminists, general?
Meanwhile, now that middle-class, white America is turning to painkillers and suicide as its economic prospects dim, claxons are sounding in the media:
In this moment, white people struggling with addiction are to be treated with mercy and empathy. A white Republican presidential primary candidate, Chris Christie, has even been recorded sharing a story about a rich white man, a dear friend from law school, whose addiction to pain killers ruined his life. By comparison, black and brown people who use drugs are locked up without mercy or pity by a carceral society that views their pain as criminality.
Black and brown communities were ruined by the Great Recession. Yet their loss was greeted with crickets in the mainstream news media. Black people are recorded being shot, choked to death, beaten up in schools and otherwise brutalized. And yet too many of those in White America engage in excuse-making, and defend the thuggish behavior of its racist and classist criminal justice system.
White America now increasingly encounters those same broken dreams, because the wages of whiteness do not pay the dividends they once did in the not-so-recent past. And this time the mainstream media inaugurates a crisis.
The Donald will save them, right?
Finally, of course, #BrainManBen Carson of the pyramids got caught having fabricated key incidents from his inspirational biography, especially his acceptance to West Point. "West Point, however, has no record of Carson applying, much less being extended admission," according to Politico. Josh Marshall found in Carson's pyramid tale echoes of another crank, Erich von Daniken.
Carson is leading recent polls for the Republican nomination for president.
Do they make a trigger lock big enough for the Pentagon?
[h/t CP]