Great in-depth look at Bernie Sanders’ role in the writing and passage of Obamacare.
A couple months ago I wrote about a controversial study which reported the rising mortality rates among middle aged whites – a trend which broke the model of ever-decreasing mortality rates across racial groups in the United States and all wealthy industrialized countries worldwide. I argued that, whether it was principally cause or effect, it was critical to understanding contemporary US politics. The leading driver of this rising mortality was drug overdose, chronic substance abuse (liver disease, etc.) and suicide. Subsequent critiques of the study appeared to show the trend was somewhat exaggerated in the original study and more concentrated among white women. Still, the overall findings held up.
Since then I’ve been reading more about the rising rates of drug overdoses themselves. The numbers are truly stunning. The number of people now dying from drug overdose is comparable to the number dying annually from AIDS during the peak of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-90s. Now, this isn’t a perfect analog, certainly. Drug overdose goes back either centuries or millennia depending on how you want to define it. AIDS was a totally new disease in the US starting in the early 1980s. But it does provide a sense of scale.
50,000 American died of AIDS in the peak year of 1995. In 2014, just over 47,000 people of overdose.
If you’re watching this Democratic townhall and this question to Hillary about enthusiasm and honesty, at first I thought she was going to bobble it. But, man, she brought it.
Houston grand jury declines to indict Planned Parenthood in infamous “body parts” video sting scandal, instead indicts activists who shot the surreptitious videos.
It looks like the criminal investigation of Planned Parenthood that top Republican elected officials in Texas called for last year has not only failed to yield charges against Planned Parenthood but has resulted in the indictment of the head of the group that produced those anti-abortion sting videos and another activist.
Man who inadvertently /accidentally shot the women sitting in front of him at a screening of the new Benghazi movie says he brought a gun to the theater because he was afraid there might be a mass shooting at the theater.
I see this morning that our friends at Mother Jones have entered their bid to write the definitive Ted Cruz asshole florilegium (TCAF). Here it is. It does lean heavily on recent congressional haters of Ted Cruz. But in fairness it also does go back into the pre-Senate, law school and collegiate days. Here at TPM we’ve opted for an iterative approach, in part because this is our traditional mode of coverage but also because of skepticism about whether, like topics such as ‘democracy’ or ‘modernism’, the literature may simply be too vast to be captured in any single monographic treatment.
I was an early adopter to the belief that Ted Cruz is an odious weasel. But I did not make him out for a bald-faced liar, mainly because I would think that habitual lying would cause too much cognitive dissonance with his self-righteousness. But the new claim that he didn’t know his family had health insurance, I’m sorry, that does not add up. Our Tierney Sneed walks us through the original lie, the holes in the logic of the original lie, the campaign admission that the story was false and now the holes in that admission.
Late last night, Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign conceded that the senator and his family do in fact have health insurance and never lost coverage, contrary to what the senator said at a campaign stop Thursday in which he used his (made up) personal experience to slam Obamacare. Even his campaign’s statement contains some dubious claims that don’t quite match with his Texas insurer told us yesterday. Here’s the story.