About the Fourth of July

It's Fourth of July and our democracy on life support. Regardless of your political leanings, this would be a great day for everyone to declare that it is not acceptable that big money is buying elections and dictating the way of discussing and deciding important issues across this nation. Instead of celebrating the distant past with each other today, let's take a long painful look at the ubiquitous corruption of our government and declare that this is the perfect year that we will bring back the kind of country that the Founders would appreciate. If you truly believe in family values, do it for the nation's children. Let's start with a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizen's United so that we are better able to have meaningful conversations and candidates. Here's one place to begin today's journey. Alternatively, this is a good day to celebrate the Anti-Fourth-of-July.

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A big difference between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders

We should be electing leaders. Hillary is not a leader, as illustrated by Daily Kos:

Bernie was skeptical of a centrist Bill Clinton running for president in 1992, and immediately after Clinton won the election and appointed Hillary to lead health care reform, Bernie set to work attempting to convince her of the virtue of a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system. As you can probably also imagine, he wasn't successful. Still, please do read what follows. The dialogue between Hillary and a Harvard Medical School physician supporting single-payer -- accompanying Bernie to his meeting at the White House -- is important for the record.
They got their meeting at the White House that month, and the two doctors laid out the case for single-payer to the first lady. “She said, ‘You make a convincing case, but is there any force on the face of the earth that could counter the hundreds of millions of the dollars the insurance industry would spend fighting that?’” recalled Himmelstein. “And I said, “How about the president of the United States actually leading the American people?’ and she said, ‘Tell me something real.’ ”

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The extent to which partisan thinking dominates politics

How much does it affect how you think about legislation that it was sponsored by YOUR political party? To a shocking extent, according to this article by The Hill.

We presented respondents with two different education plans . . . [H]alf the sample was told A was the Democratic plan and B was the Republican plan, while the other half of our national sample was told A was the Republican plan and B was the Democrats’ approach. The questions dealt with substantive policy on a subject quite important to most Americans — education — and issues that people are familiar with — class size, teacher pay and the like. Nonetheless, when the specifics in Plan A were presented as the Democratic plan and B as the Republican plan, Democrats preferred A by 75 percent to 17 percent, and Republicans favored B by 13 percent to 78 percent. When the exact same elements of A were presented in the exact same words, but as the Republicans’ plan, and with B as the Democrats’ plan, Democrats preferred B by 80 percent to 12 percent, while Republicans preferred “their party’s plan” by 70 percent to 10 percent. Independents split fairly evenly both times. In short, support for an identical education plan shifted by more than 60 points among partisans, depending on which party was said to back it. Thus, policy positions were not driving partisanship, but rather partisanship was driving policy positions. Voters took whichever position was ascribed to their party, irrespective of the specific polices that position entailed.

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The real risk of terrorism – compared to other risks

What is the real risk of an American dying of terrorism? This article presents numbers that put things in perspective. The numbers are based off these statistics offered by the CDC.

Comparing the CDC numbers to terrorism deaths means: – You are 35,079 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack – You are 33,842 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack – You are 4,311 times more likely to die from diabetes than from a terrorist attack – You are 3,157 times more likely to die from flu or pneumonia than from a terrorist attack – You are 2,091 times more likely to die from blood poisoning than from a terrorist attack – You are 1,064 times more likely to die as your lungs swell up after your food or beverage goes down the wrong pipe.

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