Open Thread For September 13, 2017
Sanders Will Introduce Universal Health Care Bill. 15 D’s On Board. Sanders leads, Hillary whines about him. BTW, I checked. Neither Carper nor Coons are among the 15. Vouchers, anybody? How about phone calls instead? I’ll start.
Which reminds me. Carper’s refusal to even consider single payer can be, what are the words I’m looking for, a powerful campaign issue. It lays out the question as starkly as possible: Whose side are you on, Tom?
Potters No Longer Deadbeats. For The Moment. Finally paid off that $119K lien right before sheriff’s sale. Hey, what were they gonna do? Live in his insurance office? At least, he can still run in the 1st RD. Any word on a challenger?
WH Says FBI Should Definitely Investigate Comey. For, um, leaking unclassified information? That’s not a crime as long as the First Amendment exists, but, whatever. The big story is that they’re really trying to neutralize Comey. Don’t think it will work with Mueller.
Supreme Court Delays Redrawing Of Texas Districts. 5-4 decision. Russian judge gives Texas a Perfect 10. Gorsuch will be the longest-lasting legacy of Trump. A stolen seat.
US Congress Votes To Limit Civil Asset Forfeiture. Trump had rolled back Obama protections. Strong bipartisan support for the measure. If Congress can do it, there is no excuse for the Delaware General Assembly to allow this form of legalized thievery by cops for cops.
Route 9 Library A Difference-Maker? Maybe. I hope that, even though it was a Gordon innovation, Matt Meyer pushes to enable the full potential of the project to be realized. It could be a boon to an under-served part of the County. Perhaps Tom Gordon’s most positive legacy.
What do you want to talk about?
Mr. Carper is a lucky man. Had Republicans put up anyone rational against him, he would have lost a long time ago. Dems do themselves no favors by not challenging Tom in a primary. This is the issue to run on.
There’s an old word for what we call civil forfeiture:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highwayman
Thoughtful piece by Josh Marshall on Facebook’s role in our widening understanding of Russian ratfucking:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebooks-heading-toward-a-bruising-run-in-with-the-russia-probe
These Republican Trump supporters are a threat to civil democracy. They stand for nothing by bigoted paranoia. Can you imagine how these resentment driven freaks would have reacted if Obama coordinated with a hostile foreign power to win election? Conservative, Republican and Trump supporter all spell treason to me.
Bernie Sander’s Medicare for All Plan is the only one that dismisses the connection between healthcare and employers. For that reason ALONE, I support Bernie Sander’s Medicare for All proposal.
Called our two senators about the Sanders bill. Each one talked about “Strengthening the ACA through bipartisan” bullshit. I told them both that I was tired of this bipartisanship crap, the “Delaware Way” and all the other crap they trot out as reasons they won’t work for the people.
Thanks, Jim. As we’ve noted here before, Carper weakened health care availability.
Opposed enabling the Federal government to use its purchasing power to drastically lower prescription costs. Virtually singlehandedly killed an amendment that would have permitted the reimportation of drugs, which is why France pays 1/4 the price that America pays for the SAME Astra Zeneca drugs.
That has always been Carper’s idea of bipartisanship. Yo, Third Way apologists, if someone stands up to this corporate whore, will you be with us or against us?
carper is much much closer to a yes vote than coons ever will be
Carper got way more money from the industry than Coons. Id say carper is closer to becoming a republican than voting for affordable health care for us lowly peons.
Now comes word that some of the online racists were Russian bots, too:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/russian-trolls-tea-party-news-twitter-account
Wasn’t hard at all to get Hillary boosters to turn on the fake Bernie bros, and clearly it wasn’t hard to goad rednecks into overt racism. So is anyone worried yet about the Russian infiltration of these proprietary social-media platforms, beyond their effect on elections? The country is on the verge of civil war, and the Russians are fomenting it by organizing anti-immigrant rallies and faking racist rage via Facebook.
In a sense it’s chickens coming home to roost, as America does this every day all around the world. But that doesn’t mean we should let them do it.
https://elections.delaware.gov/index.shtml
This is a cool site I just heard about. Check it out.
Maybe one of you will stop blathering this cycle about Carper, file to run, and take him on. You could get him to talk about the issues you care about and run on a platform of whatever you wanted. You could see how easy it is.
Jim C–If you ran and won, we could call your office and give you ideas about how to vote. How fun would that be?!
Any takers?
El Somnambulo–Nobody makes you buy AZ’s drugs. If you don’t like the price, don’t buy them. That goes for all health care. If you think someone else will spend over a billion to invent a treatment for some strange cancer and not want to recoup their money, you are nuts. If you want free medicine, go where it is or live a happy and healthy live and hope you don’t get sick. I heard if you drink a few tablespoons of apple cider vinegar each day you will live for like 100 years.
Or, maybe start your own drug discovery company, have a few thousand bake sales, raise money for research, find your own team of scientists, and spend 10-15 years taking it through the discover phase and FDA trials. You might need a building, but the Bear library maybe could double as a lab with a few hoods and burners. Oh, and hope it works and you don’t have to start over 5 times after spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Maybe the scientists who have spent 20 years in school that you want to hire and have lots of student debt (different subject for a different thread) will work for you for free in order to advance the cause.
Face it man, AZ isn’t the enemy. Not an ally either. They just are.
People in France pay 1/4 the cost of Astra Zeneca drugs than Americans do. Why?
Because Tom Carper and a few other corrupt D’s, including New Jersey’s Robert Menendez, abandoned the other Senate D’s at a time when the D’s had the majority and (a) opposed enabling the Feds to use their purchasing power to negotiate prescription prices for Medicare and Medicaid, and (b) specifically opposed the reimportation from other countries that pay less for the same drugs precisely BECAUSE Carper and his ilk kept drug prices artificially high.
Astra Zeneca still makes money in France despite the fact that their markups are far less hideous.
Hey, Carper has a choice. He can continue to represent the spate of drug and insurance companies who have funded his campaigns, or he can possibly face a challenger who will make this an issue.
Seriously, do you believe your own shit here?
Nikola: AZ, like most pharma companies, profits off the basic research paid for by taxpayers — and, as El Som notes, they return the favor by charging us the highest prices in the world.
That’s not “they just are.” They just are because the rules are rigged to let them be.
“If you think someone else will spend over a billion to invent a treatment for some strange cancer and not want to recoup their money, you are nuts.”
Yet that’s exactly what we do as taxpayers. So who’s nuts?
As recently as 8 years ago the pharmaceutical industry declare that their research and development costs had been eclipsed by the budget for marketing and advertising. Think gifts to doctors, free samples, lobbying and those absolutely expensive and tasteless commercials that currently abound on your television. Most industrialized companies forbid that type of product shilling on their airways. The admission that they were spending exorbitant amounts of money to convince the average American that the blue pill will cure your cancer/lumbago/bad-breath and lack of sexual imagination hearkens back to the old west “snake-oil” salesmen who at least were ridden out of town on a rail. More importantly, to the discussion of protecting that “dwindling” profit margin of poor AZ, Phizer and a host of others is the reality that American taxpayers (you, me and many of those poorer people who must choose between affording medication or food) actually subsidize (PAY) over 35% of research and development costs for these conglomerates. When any honest thinking person considers the tax breaks and the tax-evasion gimmicks employed by these (moving facilities overseas, merging with overseas companies) price-gougers their contribution is well over 35% of costs. Please do not be blinded by the obscenity of these practices and overlook the immorality and cruelty that this industry wallows in.
Representative John Kowalko
Exactly^^ And don’t forget how they change one molecule of a drug to keep the patent or buy out competitors.