Author Archives: oinsketta

American Politics 101 (part 67)

This is what it comes down to in the great state of Mississippi which has NEVER elected any sort of racist to Congress, going back to the days of slavery (and what if they did?  what if they did?!).   They are having a run-off election tomorrow.  

Mississippi flag.png

I went to have a look at the predictions for that vote, where a black Democratic candidate, Mike Espy [1] is running in a tight race with short-time incumbent Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, appointed by Mississippi’s governor in April 2018 when Mississippi’s long-serving senator, 81 year-old Thad Cochran [2]  left the job due to health concerns.   This popped up in the middle of the first page of search results:

Screen shot 2018-11-26 at 1.00.17 PM.png

read all about it

The president, who won Mississippi by a comfortable margin of almost 20%, is down there whipping up enthusiasm for his candidate at big rallies in Biloxi and Tupelo.   He has touted Hyde-Smith’s loyal support for all his initiatives at the rallies and made this powerful argument in an ad Hyde-Smith’s campaign is running:

“If Democrats get control, they will raise your taxes, flood your streets with criminal aliens, weaken our military, outlaw private health insurance and replace freedom with socialism,” Trump says in an ad paid for by Hyde-Smith and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Jeez, what a nightmare!

Let the best ad team win!  [3]

 

[1]  from Mike Espy’s Wikipedia page (the Republican ad campaign is hammering corruption charges against Espy):

Corruption trial and acquittal[edit]

Espy trial[edit]

On August 27, 1997, Espy was indicted on charges of receiving improper gifts, including sports tickets, lodging, and airfare. Espy refused to plea bargain and on December 2, 1998, he was acquitted of all 30 criminal charges in the trial. Independent Counsel Donald Smaltz presented more than 70 witnesses during the trial and spent more than $20 million preparing and trying the case.[28]

During testimony before the jury, the prosecution’s star witness told Smaltz: “God knows, if I had $30 million, I could find dirt on you, sir.”[29] During the trial, Smaltz protested that the defense was injecting race into the trial in what he saw as an appeal to a mostly black jury.

The defense rested without calling any witnesses, arguing simply that the prosecution had not proved its case. The jury deliberated less than 10 hours before finding Espy not guilty on all charges. One of the jurors said, “This was the weakest, most bogus thing I ever saw. I can’t believe Mr. Smaltz ever brought this to trial.” At least four other jurors echoed this view, though less pointedly.[30] Barbara Bisoni, the only white juror, said Smaltz’s case “had holes” and that race never entered into the deliberations.[30]

[2]  from the Thad Cochran Wikipedia page:

Anti-lynching law[edit]

On June 13, 2005, the U.S. Senate formally apologized for its failure to enact a federal anti-lynching law in the early 20th century, “when it was most needed”. The resolution was passed on a voice vote with 80 Senators cosponsoring. Cochran and fellow Mississippian Trent Lott were among the 20 Senators who did not join as cosponsors.[30] Cochran said, “I’m not in the business of apologizing for what someone else did or didn’t do. I deplore and regret that lynching occurred and that those committing them weren’t punished, but I’m not culpable.”[31]

[3]  In Mississippi federal elections race lines are rarely crossed (no black senator from there since Reconstruction) in a state where blacks make up 37% of the population (highest percentage in the country).   The black candidate in the recent Senate election got more than 90% of the black vote, the white candidate got about 85% of the white vote.   The key, for white politicians in Mississippi, is making sure whites get out to vote.   The opposite goes for black candidates.   Nothing to see here!

Foamy Urine

One from the Don’t Worry About It Department:

My urine had been foamy.   Not just bubbles, but real foam, like soap suds, or the head of a draft beer, or the top layer of a root beer float, to be most precise.   The urologist laughed when I mentioned, in passing, that my urine was foamy.  “Your urine is foamy?” he said with a big smile, like I was pulling his leg.

The first nephrologist told me I had permanent. irreversible scarring on my kidneys and would need a lifelong regimen of drugs, and regular visits to his office, to maintain the functionality of my kidneys.   When your kidneys go you die, of course, but, then again, whatever you do, you die, so there’s that, plus, I’d already lived to sixty, no mean feat.  The doctor was philosophical.  

He made his dire diagnosis with certainty, without having to run any tests, merely by noting the swelling from my knees to my ankles, bilateral edema, and, of course, the foamy urine, proteinuria.  The foaminess of the urine turns out to be an indication of protein being passed in the urine.  Normal kidneys do not allow protein to pass through their filtering system into the urine, the body has more important uses for protein than pissing it out.

Fortunately, the medical insurance I had at that time refused to pay this doctor, so he cancelled our follow-up appointment, when actual tests would have been done.  I found another nephrologist and had tests done.

There was a lot of drama the next year or so, and three or four other nephrologists, the second discovering elevated levels of anti-PLA2R autoantibodies in my blood work.   The presence of these antibodies correlates highly with the presence and progression of a kidney disease called idiopathic membranous nephropathy.   That doctor, though I liked him, was not on my new insurance plan, so I had to take his paperwork to another nephrologist.  

The third one argued vigorously about the meaning of “idiopathic” (which she eventually had to admit does mean ’cause unknown’) and urged me to undergo an immediate kidney biopsy and begin the twelve month immunosuppressive protocol without delay.   The kidney biopsy confirmed that I had this rare disease with the unknown cause.   The good news was that the biopsy also showed no scarring of the kidneys, organs which, in my case, continue to function in the normal range.

The last nephrologist I saw recommended that I have a short course of treatment borrowed from cancer treatment, infusion of a powerful immunosuppressive agent called Rituximab, or Rituxan.   It is tolerated well (far fewer debilitating side effects)  and requires only two infusions, as opposed to the twelve month course of infusions that has long been the standard treatment for this disease, a regimen that includes intravenous steroids and other powerful, potentially harmful chemicals designed to shut down the immune system, every month for a year.   Rituxan is expensive, the doctor told me, but apparently my health insurance in 2017 would cover it.  

When I showed up for the first round of infusions I was asked to sign a paper that included a paragraph where I stated that I’d been informed of the price of the treatment and agreed to pay any balance the insurance company refused to pay [1].  I asked the woman at the desk what the price of the treatment was.   She said she had no idea, and no way to find out, actually.   I asked her how I could possibly sign off on the paragraph I pointed to.  

“Cross it out, baby,” she said nonchalantly, and I did.  “They’ll tell you the price upstairs,” she told me, photocopying my papers.   

All they knew upstairs is that Rituxan is very, very expensive.

A few months later I learned the price when the insurance company sent me the EOB (everybody in America knows what an EOB is– Explanation of Benefits).   The EOB stated that the list price for the two small bags of immunosuppressive infusion was $88,000.   My insurance company had paid a small fraction of that, maybe 10% or 15%.

Since the infusions a year ago my blood and urine work has been heading steadily in the right direction, though my urine continues to be foamy, indicating that it still contains protein, and the numbers are still far higher than normal.  The last time I saw him the nephrologist suggested that, just to be safe, we do another round of Rituxan.   I asked if we could hold off on this, as I was just getting back toward 90% of my health and fitness levels from before the infusions had induced persistent asthenia (weakness, lack of energy).   He told me there was no harm to wait, that we should check in three months from now, which is currently about three weeks away.

It suddenly occurred to me, since I have only a few weeks to select my health insurance for 2019, that I ought to see the nephrologist before the enrollment period ends, to determine whether he still recommends another $88,000 round of treatment.  If so, I need to be sure the insurance I buy will cover it.   In 2018 I’m paying a fraction of what I paid in 2017 for my current insurance, based on my 2017 income.  My current appointment, December 18, is three days after the deadline to purchase health insurance for 2019 or be ineligible for a year.   Fair is fair.  He had no earlier appointment available but would discuss my blood and urine test results on the phone as soon as I could get them done.  I had them done last Tuesday.

Of course, none of this is anything a patient should have to worry about, which tier of the health insurance hierarchy he or she is on and what medicines and treatments are covered on each tier.    This is a profit-driven American sickness. Under the Affordable Care Act, the tier of medical insurance you may purchase is based exclusively on your income.   Your income level determines the level of medical care you may buy.  To purchase a QHP (“qualified health plan”) like I had in 2017, your income must be something like a minimum of 200% of the official poverty income.  If your income is only, say, 167% of that number, you will be required to buy what is essentially pay-as-you go Medicaid.    Medicaid famously does not pay for cutting edge treatments when far less expensive old standbys are available.

In other words, if you want to pay 10% or more of your annual income for health insurance, to ensure you can continue a medical treatment for what used to be called a “preexisting condition”, you are prevented by the ACA from doing this.  You must have an income sufficient to purchase a QHP.   If your income says you are too poor to do that, well, whose fault is that?

I no longer get bogged down in the philosophical issues [2].  If you are poor enough to be subject to a law that singles out poor people for a little extra nonconsensual sex, well, whose fucking fault is that?   I can howl at the moon, or figure out the odds of getting the medical treatment I need, to hopefully qualify for insurance, at more than ten times the monthly premium I am paying now, that will pay for a treatment that will only weaken me for three or four months, instead of for a year or more.

I called my insurance company to find out if the well-tolerated cancer drug was in my plan.   They really couldn’t say, beforehand, whether Rituxan is covered under my current plan.   The first rep told me it did not appear to be covered under my plan.   I gave her a svelte version of my rap about corporate “personhood” and the psychopathic self-regarding myopia of such “persons”.  She was sympathetic (I find most people are, if you remain calm and speak very succinctly) and asked me to wait for a rep who could actually answer my question.  The second rep was also sympathetic, but not the expert in pre-auth I took her to be.  She was not sure why the first rep had connected me to her.  I told her I wasn’t sure either, though it had been very nice talking with her.   She asked me to please hold for a third rep, someone who could definitely answer my question, hopefully.

For once the muzak was not oppressive.  It was an anodyne little jazz combo, led by a guitar, playing a completely innocuous, if uninspired, loop of jazzy blues in G. Better than most of the nerve challenging, blood pressure spiking shit the Mengeles out there use for hold music.

The third rep was the most sympathetic of all, and only 40 minutes into my call.   She told me that Rituxan was clearly on the list of drugs not covered by my plan, but that, if the doctor received a pre-athorization, based on medical necessity, it would be covered.  Although, sad to say, she had to check with another expert to be sure and hoped I wouldn’t mind holding.  “In for a penny, in for a pound,” I said cheerfully.

Fortunately, the little jazz combo was still playing that short bluesy loop in G, and I nodded along and made marks with ink, this time with a brush, for about ten minutes, at which time the third expert was on the line with a fourth.   They gave me the number the doctor needed to call at the third party that handles such things for the insurance company.   Tell the doctor to press 1 for “preauthorization” and then 5 for “medical necessity”.  If the doctor can prove Rituxan is a medical necessity, your insurance will pay for it.  If not, take what is behind door number two.

After submitting a few vials of my blood, and a small screw top jar of my foamy urine, I walked over to the doctor’s office where I left Deirdre with a note containing the pertinent numbers from the paragraph above.  She assured me she would follow-up once the labs came back, and that I would get a call from the doctor about the test results.

One last thing for me not to worry about.  Unlike in December 2016 when I was able to merely state my income, for purposes of paying a premium ten times more than I’m paying now for insurance that covered the treatment I need, there is apparently a brand new requirement.   To purchase a QHP you must submit a copy of your 2017 tax filing, showing the income that qualifies you to buy a qualified health plan.   I’ll cross that fucking bridge when I come to it, yo.

 

 

[1] The practice of trying to make the patient pay the balance, the difference between the rate the insurance company has agreed to pay and the sticker price billed by the provider, is called ‘balance billing’, apparently.   Of course, if a provider accepts insurance, the negotiated rate is all they are entitled to be paid. Balance billing, while not ethical, proper or strictly legal, is common.  Of a billion balance billing bills sent out, I’d imagine many millions are paid by conscientious consumers who don’t want to damage their credit rating.   Columbia Doctors recently sent me this kind of bill for $250, only 900% more than I actually owed for the visit.  Balance billing, you dig.  They can do this because there is no government agency in New York State that one can really complain to about this common practice.  Caveat emptor, bitches!

[2]  Though it has not been easy to come by this fragile new dispassion.  You can read some of my selected struggles with this merciless American health insurance and pharmaceutical industry-authored scheme  here.

 

 

 

Thoughts on POTUS for Black Friday

I know, POTUS probably hates that name, thinks it should be White Friday.  Yeah, yeah, some animals are more equal than others, yeah, yeah.

I watched a clip of Sarah Silverman playing a demonically frank version of Sarah Huckabee Sanders holding a press conference.   She plays the part with joy, calling on her favorite reporters by pet names like Dummy and Pencil-neck.   It’s less than two minutes and worth a gander, you can click here to see the whole bit.

At one point she answers a question about the president’s character this way:

“He wasn’t shown love in his formative years and he was taught that his only value was money and, you know, he didn’t earn his money, he was constantly given it, that’s why he started gold-plating everything and wearing suits that matched his cars.   He never really emotionally grew past eight years-old.  His mother had this odd disdain for him and because of it he, you know, reenacted the trauma through copying her hair.” 

This sent me to the internets where this is one of the first images my search retrieved:

Mary and Donald.jpg

And for my fellow armchair psychologists, I submit this family photo of the Trump siblings, the offspring of uber-weatlhy alpha male Fred Christ Trump (son of a sketchy German immigrant who made a lot of money here) and born poor Scottish immigrant Mary MacLeod Trump.  

Trump siblings.jpg

Notice the age and size difference between Fred Junior, the ill-fated heir apparent of the Trump real-estate empire, and the younger brother and future president, born forth in the five pup litter [1].    Donald looked up to his older brother (a wonderful and beloved man, according to the young Trump, though his candor and care for others actually killed him, a cautionary tale for the future president) and bullied his little brother.   Mary, their mother, laughed about that bullying years later, when her second youngest was famous, saying Donald was always Donald. Nothing a military academy could fix, apparently.

Now, the most powerful man in the world, he gets to abuse everybody, in his endless quest to selflessly take all that is broken and make it whole again.

Rump and Dad.jpeg

 

[1]  Yes, I know litter mates cannot be born years apart, just go with it.  This is a guy who, as president, publicly referred to football players respectfully protesting as “sons of bitches.”   Good for the goose, good for the gander.   USA!   USA!!!!

 

Thanksgiving Cliche scene

We had a great Thanksgiving at the home of Sekhnet’s family, a very warm and interactive bunch.   It actually made us all feel thankful, including the great feature of their home being only 18.3 miles away and therefore not our usual hours in traffic drive for family, vegetable side dishes and dessert on turkey day.   Toward the end of the day I was sitting in an alcove with a couple around my age and noticed that the pillow behind the woman’s head had little black eyes and a black nose.   The eyes blinked.   It was the family dog.   Her husband had been absentmindedly petting the same dog when we chatted earlier.  She began singing the praises of this affectionate pipe cleaner of a dog.    The dog was indeed a wonderful creature.

I told her Ricky Gervais’s great bit about dogs being better than people.   Gervais is an atheist, but he says that when he dies, if he finds out he’s wrong, and there is a God, the first question he’s going to ask God is “why did you make chocolate deadly for dogs, you bastard?”

“Ricky Gervais is an atheist?” she said, and then we got into a conversation about Netflix, which is where I saw the routine.  They don’t subscribe to Netflix.   A friend had recently told her about a BBC documentary she had seen on Netflix about three generations of Trump and said it was great.  It was.  I began describing some highlights, in the most neutral possible way, as it became clearer and clearer that the woman was horrified by our fake reality TV president.   The man sat on the couch across from us glaring silently.

This appeared to be shaping into an instance of the Thanksgiving day cliche in our tribal America: a few drinks, a big meal, a violent argument about politics that tears another family down the middle.   I watched the man glare on the couch across from us while his wife got more and more animated in her denunciations of Trump.  In the next room at least two of the family members there had actually voted for the vile lying psychopath.  I was aware of being dangerously close to the high voltage third rail of American life in our third century.   Finally the woman said “Gary did work for Trump, tell ‘im,” and the glaring husband spoke.

He’d been one of the contractors on Trump Tower and had been screwed by Trump, during the course of the job and at the end.  “He’s a bully,” he began and then described the details of what a scumbag he was to work for.  “We had a contract, laying out everything we had to do, the prices, every detail.   Working for him was a nightmare, because he treated everybody like his slaves, then when the work was done he just goes ‘ah, I don’t like this work so much, I’m only going to give you…’ and he pays pennies on the dollar.   You want to spend thousands taking him to court, be his guest, he loves nothing better than sending an army of lawyers after workers he screwed.”

I agreed that the man is no damned good and referred to the many businesses in Atlantic City that had literally gone under after Trump stiffed them as his imbecilically self-toppled casino empire came crashing down.  They’d been delivering steaks, dry cleaning, maintenance, electrical work for years, extending mountains of credit to our deadbeat grifter-in-chief and then — poof! 

He nodded, glaring. still angry decades after working for the man who is now, by a narrowly engineered Electoral College win, the president of these disgraced and divided United States.   What can one really say, in the end, about an insatiable, broken, destructive person like this scary clown with the nuclear codes as his last card to play if all goes badly for him?

We concluded our chat and I excused myself to go into the next room and got a cup of coffee, which I drank sitting near a smiling woman who had voted for the man who promised to make America great again, and saved them a bundle on their taxes.

 

The Price of Shame

Monica Lewinsky, the onetime White House intern infatuated with Bill Clinton, has a great TED Talk called “The Price of Shame”.   In it she discusses her public shaming when details of her sexual affair with the president came out, including his semen on her blue dress, his penis in her mouth and his unlit cigar inserted tenderly into her vagina.   She was publicly humiliated and cyber-bullied as a result of these disclosures.  Her talk is excellent.

A friend of mine, also moved by her talk, tried to book her to speak at his local temple.   It turned out the temple did not have the budget to afford her speaking fee.  One of the prices of shame, apparently, if your shame has high enough public titillation value, is $20,000 to $50,000 per appearance.

I shit you not. 

Current Events

It just occurred to me that during elementary school we were regularly assigned something called Current Events as part of our homework.  The assignment was to read a newspaper or magazine article, stand in front of the small class of mostly well-to-do children (my small, boutique public school was at the time the top rated elementary school in New York City, according to my mother) and give an oral report on “current events”.

My father always took an interest in these current events assignments, often clipping out candidates from the New York Times, which he read front to back every day.  He taught me the importance of attaching the date to every artifact of “current events”.    He impressed on me that newspaper reports are the first draft of history, among the first sources historians study to get the full story many years later.   The date of an article is significant as more information becomes known and it’s sometimes fascinating to follow how a story changes over time.  

For instance, a few days ago Trump’s pick for acting Attorney General, Matthew Whitaker, was not commonly known as the former CEO, (and apparently sole employee) of the Koch-funded (the rest of the donor list is “dark money”) Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (“FACT”), earning about $1,000,000 [1] donated by secret conservative donors in the three years preceding his appointment as AG Jeff Session’s chief of staff.   Whitaker just amended his financial disclosure form to include this income, according to recent reports. [2]   So an article written two weeks ago about possible conflicts of interest would not have included this interesting bit of conflict of interest for America’s current top law enforcement officer.

As I tapped in “current events ” in my previous post about Trump and the Muslim Brotherhood (the president is a lifelong secret member, people are saying) I flashed on myself at eight and nine years old, standing in front of the class, a thin scroll of newspaper clipping hanging from my hand, as I reported on current events.   My next thought was about the oral book reports we occasionally were called on to deliver.  

I was infatuated with baseball starting in third grade, the baseball bug bit me hard.  I studied the Hall of Fame, learned the history, memorized stats, followed the box scores in the paper every day, read many baseball biographies.  One day, in third grade,  I stood in front of my small class to deliver my report on a great biography of baseball immortal Jackie Robinson I had just read.  I was saving a big laugh line for the end, as the format called for talking about one dramatic moment in the book.   The moment I chose was when young Jackie Robinson was chased off an angry white guy’s lawn with words to the effect of “get off my property you little nigger.”  

Never having heard the word, it struck me as hilarious, easily as funny as Commie, another word I’d never been exposed to, until a friend of my mother’s described in horror one of the hate letters she got (they were proponents of school integration) that had a big red COMMIE written on the envelope (yeah, people were jerks in 1964).   For years afterwards my mother gave me shit for laughing uncontrollably every time my friend Rob or I called somebody a commie.

“Get off my property you little nigger” did not turn out to be the hilarious punchline I’d imagined it would be.  Nobody laughed, though I thought I’d delivered the line pretty well.   My teacher, Miss Mary Richert, regarded me with undisguised horror.   The little school had just been integrated that year, we had four black kids in our class, Bryan, Felice, Rani and Gayle.   Bryan was, in fact, my closest friend in third grade.   I don’t recall their reactions, odd to say.  Bryan certainly didn’t seem to hold it against me.   A week or two later our permanent record cards were being angrily amended by Miss Richert, in view of the whole class, furious that we had stayed behind in the gym to continue playing after the rest of the class marched back upstairs for math.

The notations Miss Richert wrote on our permanent record cards, Miss Richert, a teacher who clearly loved both me and Bryan, have haunted us both to this day, casting a very dark shadow over both of our lives, and I know I speak for Bryan too when I say this.

[1] New York Times and Washington Post reported the earnings at $1.2 million,   CNN put the figure at $900,000.   Either way, a comfortable three year salary for a man charged with actively opposing Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

[2] CNN reported, nine days ago:

During his tenure, Whitaker was one of only two people on the payroll, and he made a total of $717,000 from 2014 to 2016. Funding for that salary and all of FACT’s work has come from mostly untraceable donors. Over a three-year period, FACT received $2.45 million in contributions, and all but about $450 of that came from a fund called DonorsTrust, according to IRS filings. Contributors to DonorsTrust are mostly anonymous, except for well-known conservative financier Charles Koch.

“In other words,” wrote the Center for Responsive Politics, “an organization ‘dedicated to promoting accountability, ethics, and transparency’ gets 100 percent of its funds from a group that exists mainly as a vehicle for donors to elude transparency.”   source

yesterday’s update from CNN

The Muslim Brotherhood

The president used a throwaway line in his latest comment on the Saudi murder, in its consulate, of a Saudi journalist living in America and writing for a prestigious American newspaper, suggesting the murdered man had ties to terrorism.  POTUS engaged in his usual double-speak, claiming once again that it’s possible we will never know what happened to Jamal Khashoggi or who ordered his murder and dismemberment, no matter what the CIA learns through it’s now more than month-long investigation.  The CIA investigation indicates that Muhammad Bin Salman likely had something to do with this “tragedy”, and he very well might, OR, he might not!     

POTUS mentioned, though he didn’t say this is why the journalist deserved to be murdered, that he’d heard the dead man, Khashoggi, had been considered by the Saudis an enemy of the state and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.   It’s possible, you dig, that he was a terrorist who advocated the murder of millions, universal Sharia law and that he hated our freedom, I’m just saying.  It’s also possible he left the consulate or started a fatal fistfight with the hit team sent to kill him and many other things are also possible and, shit, we’ll never know.   (And, it goes without saying, once more, that whatever happened to Khashoggi has nothing to do with the brutal Saudi war on the civilians of Yemen and the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis, as the world’s lying press calls it.)

My understanding of the Muslim Brotherhood (the above wikipedia link aside) is that it’s a militant fundamentalist organization that came of age in the prisons of Egypt where secular dictators imprisoned and tortured members of the radical religious right.   The Muslim Brotherhood, apparently founded in 1928, whose membership included  the military officers who overthrew Egypt’s last king in 1952, produced at least one influential writer and philosopher, Sayyyid Kutb.  I remember learning about Kutb after 9/11, though I see no mention of him in the wiki on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Kutb had apparently been horrified, when he was here as a college student after World War Two. at the materialistic, over-sexed consumer culture of America.     Returning to Egypt, he devoted himself to religious interpretation and making a political philosophy out of fundamentalist Islam.   His jihad was now to protect pious Muslims from this increasingly global corruption.    His books were influential and he was a close adviser to Gamal Abdel Nasser after Nasser took power in a military coup.  He wound up sentenced to death for his alleged role in a plot to overthrow Egyptian dictator/president Nasser, whose repeated high government job offers he had refused.  Nasser commuted Kutb’s sentence, leaving him in prison.  Years later Kutb was released, soon after arrested again, tried and hanged, this time for alleged involvement in another plot to assassinate Nasser.  The author of more than twenty influential books, Kutb wound up a martyr.

Among those influenced by Sayyid Kutb was the Egyptian political dissenter, Muslim Brotherhood member and physician Ayman Al-Zawahiri.   Al-Zawahiri also spent time in Egyptian prisons, was also tortured, was also a long-time member of the Muslim Brotherhood.   Later he would be second in command at Al Q’eada, sitting at the right hand of  Osama Bin Laden. [1]  He is assumed to be alive and currently commanding Al Q’eada, whose brand has taken a serious market-share hit since the killing of rock star terrorist OBL.

To my knowledge President schitt-breath is unaware of even this much history of the Islamist organization.   For his purposes it is enough to know it sounds bad, Muslim Brotherhood.   It sounds far worse than an inexperienced young medieval monarch rashly ordering the killing and dismembering of a political critic he hated — in his own consulate.  In spite of a long history of financial support for the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia now hates the Muslim Brotherhood [2].   Put it like this “Muslim Brotherhood” versus $450,000,000,000 from the Saudis for munitions, plus over ten million well-paying American jobs with full pension and benefits, unlimited calorie-free full-fat ice cream and plenty of great sex on demand.  USA!    USA!!!!!

 

 [1]  Recall the confusion on the lips of every talking head in America when they reported that Obama had executed Osama bin Laden, almost every one of them bungling the tongue-twister, interchanging Osama Obama Osama, Oh, mama!

[2] wikipedia:

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia helped the Brotherhood financially for “over half a century”,[23][200] but the two became estranged during the Gulf War, and enemies after the election of Mohamed Morsi. Inside the kingdom, before the crushing of the Egyptian MB, the Brotherhood was called a group whose “many quiet supporters” made it “one of the few potential threats” to the royal family’s control.[201]

Three short summaries

For those who don’t like to wade through long posts, here are capsule distillations of three recent ones I struggled to get right (and edited numerous times for clarity before and after posting):

I was hurt for weeks over an inability to salvage my oldest friendship.  I finally composed a question to put the final pieces to the troubling puzzle in my hands.   I asked the guy what my final unforgivable act was.   He told me: my wife told me you recorded our last conversation, she told me you said you were mad enough to punch me in the face, she told me you said I was a pussy and she won’t be married to anyone whose so-called friend regards him as an unmanly coward.   link

I pondered the two most common approaches to anger: getting angry and repressing anger.   I concluded that the advantage to feeling anger, and sitting with it long enough to understand why you were angry, is that it gives you the possibility of having less anger in your life.   Repressing anger cannot lead to that place.  I provided an illustration or two of each approach.    link

An aggravating medical situation persisted for an additional week as I waited for test results that would determine whether I needed to worry about late stage bladder or prostate cancer.  The cause for my aggravation turned out to be a failure of technology (Samsung phone will not display T-Mobile voicemail notifications) and poor office follow-up with the doctor.   I learned, a week belatedly, that the doctor had promptly left me a compassionate voicemail with all the info I needed, but the message was not readily available on my phone.  His staff took days to follow-up with him and I didn’t get his subsequent voicemails until days after that. Things escalated unnecessarily as I kept receiving bureaucratic stonewalling, instead of empathy and help and the doctor kept leaving me messages I didn’t get as messages from the insane patient grew increasingly hostile.   Everything was finally resolved amicably during a short talk with the doctor.   link

That post, which began with a sentence claiming “we were both right” now begins, more precisely:

A completely avoidable misunderstanding, made possible by a design flaw and human error.  The first party did exactly the right thing, the second party was continually misinformed, by day seven both parties were right to be indignant, both parties were right to think the other a complete asshole.

Sometimes things actually shake out that way.   Both parties wind up angry, and both have good reason to feel angry, based on what they are each being told about the other.  Cutting out the unreliable “middleman” is really the only way to resolve this kind of difficulty.

 

I’m Not A Baby– YOU ARE!

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There is, of course, no law, rule, custom or practice requiring senate confirmation of special counsel investigating possible fraud, corruption and other high crimes and misdemeanors.   The senate has nothing to do with it, schitt-head.  

If there was such a law, lifelong Republican Robert Mueller would have obviously been voted down 51-49 as would any so called “independent” counsel who had not given a public oath of impartiality and personal loyalty to the man being investigated (as the original framers of the constitution clearly intended it).  

The attacked representative parried the tweet neatly:

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By the way, according to the president, the jury is still out on whether Saudi crown prince Muhammad Bin Salman ordered the execution of a journalist he hated.  The CIA rushed to judgment, recently concluding, based on all available evidence, that the order came from him.  After only six weeks!   SAD!   Presumption of evidence and schitt!!!!