Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A snarling mass of vitriolic vicious jackals

Reality always wins in the end.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Word salad with all caps

An army of rabid, anonymous commenters

The house always wins.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

This blog is Obama’s Katrina.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Lighten up, Francis.

This Blog Goes to 11…

Mission Accomplished!

Nevertheless, she persisted

We can agree to disagree, but I’m right.

I personally stopped the public option…

Good luck with your asparagus.

Gastritis Broke My Calculator

Women: They Get Shit Done

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

Wetsuit optional.

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Let’s Talk About How We Treat Each Other Here

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As I’ve told you, we will be moving to the brand spanking new site sometime between 6 November to 8 November, and while most of the stuff is done by the developers and Watergirl, I am still working on writing up a new commenting policy. Much to the chagrin of Watergirl, who wants everything done yesterday (even if she does not yell at me I know she is screaming on the inside- I have that effect on women), I’ve been tossing it around in my head for six months, how I want to handle things, how I want us to move forward, etc. In fairness, that is how I write everything- by letting it bounce around my thick skull for a while and then I just blurt it all out. At any rate, I still have not finished the policy, and will circulate it among the front pagers before implemented, but recent events have led me to believe we need to have a chat.

Obviously, and this is no mystery to anyone here, I don’t read the comments as much as I used to. For years, I responded to almost every comment directed my way, and spent hours upon hours mixing it up. I just don’t have the time to do that anymore, and some times I just get burnt out with it all and need a break. We’re coming up on 20 years as a blog, and I don’t know if you realize it, 20 years for a blog is A LONG FUCKING TIME. Most digital magazines only last a year or two, to give you an idea. So I do what I have to do to stay fresh, or as close to it as reasonably possible. A lot of times I go to write posts these days, and Betty Cracker or Mistermix or Anne Laurie or someone else has already not only addressed what I wanted to talk about, but did a better job than I would have.

I’m rambling. At any rate, I want to talk about how we treat each other in the comments. As always, you are free to say, within limits, whatever the fuck you want in the comments. Obviously there are some things we will not tolerate, like racist, sexist, and other wise bigoted bullshit. But my overall philosophy has been you are, within limits, able to post whatever you want, because it only reflects on you. When you say stupid shit, you’re the one who is standing out in public with your pants around your ankles looking the fool, not me. We’re not going to delete comments, we’re not going to censor you, and if people don’t want to hear your rambling nonsense, well, that’s why we have the pie filter (ALL HAIL CLEEK!).

Having said that, I do want to caution you that it appears we are all strung out from year 67 (that is how long he has been President, right?) of the Trump Presidency and the never-ending cavalcade of nonsense and the ceaseless barrage of mean-spiritedness and overall nastiness, and appear at times to be taking it out on each other. I’d like you to think about how you treat your fellow commenters, and try to, in the words of Melania, BE BEST. There’s no reason for pile-ons of decent people who you just happen to disagree with. Just because you don’t value one person’s insight doesn’t mean there aren’t others who love them. I’m speaking in general, but more specifically I saw MomSense take a heap of abuse and there have been others. There’s just no need for that. It’s not your job to tone police the comments, or to drive off people who don’t agree with you. There’s no need to assume that because someone lurves them some Bernie or has a full on crush for Biden (both positions I personally find mystifying) is just a troll or trying to hurt Democrats or what not. Just stop it with the bad faith stuff.

This place is supposed to be a community and a safe haven. Try to be good to one another. Try to keep that every person typing, even if their screen name is LordFartDaddy, is an actual living, breathing, sentient human being, with feelings and emotions and a life of their own. You don’t know how bad their day has been. You don’t know what they are struggling with on an hourly basis. Try not to fuck with them. Let’s use this space to help each other, help liberal causes, and vent when we need to. Let’s try to be better about not tearing each other down and getting at each other’s throats. And this goes for commenters and front pagers.

Or else I’m gonna have to fuck one or more of you up. Steve hasn’t eaten since noon, people. This is not an idle threat.

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Another year, another look back post

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Six years in, and almost 1,800 Mayhew Anderson on Insurance posts written. Another anniversary and another exploration of the odd esoterica of the US healthcare system completed as I begin writing for a seventh year at Balloon Juice. I need to say the same thing that I said last year:

Writing here at Balloon Juice has been and continues to be an amazing experience. I get to play with ideas that fascinate me, and John gives me the keys to write to an audience…..

One of the big changes since I’ve come to Duke, beyond saying good bye to the persona of Richard Mayhew, is that I’ve changed my writing targets. When I was Richard Mayhew, I had to write at Balloon Juice…. Now, the audience is sometimes all jackals. Other days, the intended audience is a few score of geeks and policy professionals who need to know about some esoteric corner case. I apologize when I take over the blog for those purposes as I feel like I am hijacking your attention to pay the cost of entry into conversations that I want to be in….

But mainly, I just want to thank all of the jackals, the front-pagers and John for a community where I can nerd out on something that I find fascinating. I’ll figure out what Year Six SEVEN looks like, but the first five six have been wonderful.

My writing has become even more narrowly focused over the past year. Part of that has been that I set a goal for myself to play in the peer review space this year. And the very nature of that space requires far more targeting. At this point last year I had a single peer reviewed research project that was almost to the point of acceptance at the Journal of Health, Politics, Policy and Law and a letter to the editor for Health Affairs where I made the point that 2018 is an analytically weird year.

This summer I had a cluster of original research come out and an invited commentary already published. I have an article forthcoming in two weeks where a co-author and I will be looking at one of two topics which will dominate the 2021 rule making process for the ACA exchanges. The two of us have another paper accepted last night  which engages on the other major topic of the 2021 rule making process. We, along with a third collaborator, are again looking at that question from a different angle with a paper that is likely to come out this fall. I had a moment of quasi-maniacal super-villain laughter this summer when I looked at a revised version of Exhibit 3 for that manuscript and realized it will be entered as evidence in future litigation.

This afternoon, I am expecting to get back a second round of co-author edits for a manuscript that uses public use files to show something bloody obvious but not recorded. Insurance is complicated and this project shows some additional forms of complications in a way that no one else has even thought about. We’re using public, downloadable data, and part of our analytical data set has less than fifty downloads (and I am responsible for 6 of them as I lost track of the file a few times). Over the weekend, I need to make edits to the discussion section of a methods paper on matching for a small and unusual population (TLDR: It is really tough to do with reasonable assumptions). We hope to get that manuscript submitted for the first time next week. Another half dozen projects are in various stages of review, revision, and rewriting even as I’m building my 2020 project pipeline that builds on what I did in 2018 and 2019.  Under the most pessimistic assumptions I anticipate having six accepted manuscripts this year, median assumptions are eight or nine acceptances while wildly optimistic assumptions have a bakers dozen acceptances.   I will have four first or solo authorships from this current tranche of papers.

From an academic point of view, that is a wildly productive year especially as a good number of those manuscripts will be landing at very good journals.

But there are trade-offs. I have narrowed my thinking a lot and it shows that a lot of my Balloon-Juice writing is technocratic tinkering. Beyond that, my non-Balloon Juice public writing has crashed. I have only published three blogs at Health Affairs this year. I have not written an op-ed although I am in the process of prepping one around a topic that will be relevant around Thanksgiving. I became very narrow this year.

I needed a year to demonstrate that I can work well within the peer review paradigm. I think I achieved that. I enjoyed myself as I would like to think that I have added some unique value to the conversation and the knowledge that my co-authors, collaborators, colleagues and I are sharing will be meaningful and important in policy development. Next year will also be a productive but hopefully at a slightly less insane pace of production in the peer review universe. I hope I can grab some of those thoughts back from the ultra-specific to slightly broader questions that are more important that describing a particular form of financial plumbing.

I still get tremendous energy writing here.  I would like to de-geekify and make some of my writing more pragmatic over the next year.  I would really appreciate help on that and suggestions as to how to be more responsive to the needs of Jackals instead of merely paying the cost of entry to other conversations. But that is a thought for another day and another post, so onto year seven.

 

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Balloon Juice and the invisible primary

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The invisible primary component of the 2020 cycle is upon us:

The invisible primary is when candidates or proto-candidates assess their strengths, test potential coalitions and reach out to rare and valuable resources such as critical staffers and validators. There will be far more people running for president on the Democratic side who will never file an FEC report because the time between waking up in the morning and deciding that the person in the mirror should be in the White House and the end of the day will be quite informational. Quite a few people will have that thought but an inventory of their ability to access resources will show that there is no chance in hell of them even getting to a three way tie for third place in a delegate poor state.

We’re part of this invisible cycle. Balloon Juice is part of the liberal/Democratic extended party infrastructure. This community is part of the wide web of diverse stakeholders that slowly, somewhat haphazardly filters the field. It won’t be perfect; there will be some cranks and there will be one noters. We are part of the filtering process.

Balloon-Juice raised significant money in the 2012-2014-2016 and most recently the 2018 cycle. We generate analysis that is trusted and disseminated to other allied thought leaders and activists. We’ve shown an ability to push pithy responses (“tire rims and anthrax” and “hookers and blow”) to key analytical problems. The commenters and the front-pagers reactions to policies, positions, events and affects are important feedback for a slice of the activist base.

So as the primary season evolves, just remember that the collective zeitgeist of Balloon Juice is part of the invisible primary — not too bad for an almost top-10,000 pet, cooking, health policy, science writing, national security, screaming into the void blog.

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Jon Swift

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It’s time once again to continue a tradition started by Jon Swift/Al Weisel, the “Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves.” Jon/Al left behind some wonderful satire, but was also a nice guy and a strong supporter of small blogs. (Here’s Jon/Al’s 2007 and 2008 editions.  Our revivals from 2010 through 2017 can be found here.)
 
If you’d like to participate, just reply to this e-mail or write to me (Batocchio9 AT yahoo DOT com) with your best post of the year before 12/25:
 
Blog Name
Title of Post
Link
Author of Post
Brief Description/Pitch of the Post (1–2 sentences)
 
(If it’s not a reply, adding “best post” in the subject line would also help.) 
 
To modify Jon Swift’s 2008 solicitation:
 
I would be very honored if you would participate and send me a link to what you think was your best post of [2018], along with a short description of it.  Please make the hard choice and send me only one link.  I would like to post it before the end of the year, so if you could get it to me before Christmas, I would really appreciate it.
 
One submission per blog, please, otherwise things can get messy. Group bloggers can pick a piece among themselves, but are also welcome to submit their work via their individual blogs, if they have them. 
 
As usual, I’m aiming to find the right balance between “inclusive” and “manageable.”  If you know a few excellent blogs (preferably on the smaller side) that you suspect might not be on my radar, feel free to send me their website address (and contact info, if you have it).
Contact Batocchio <[email protected]>.

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Quick Housekeeping Note Regarding This Weekend

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I will be away on temporary duty from early tomorrow morning through Sunday night. I do not expect, based on the itinerary I was given today, that I’ll have any time to post, let alone comment over the next three days. So try to stay out of moderation as I won’t be here to release your comments.

For those of you who are nosey, which is pretty much all of you, I’m going up to Ft. Bragg. I was given the honor of being asked to give the keynote address at the 100th anniversary regimental dinner for the US Army Psychological Operations Regiment. (they didn’t get my bio quite right…)

Anyhow, it is also the 100th anniversary celebration weekend for US Army Civil Affairs Branch, where I was the Cultural Advisor (under Temporary Assigned Control) in 2012 and 2013. I’ll be participating in some of their events as well. And, of course, it wouldn’t be an Army event if I didn’t have some meetings! All in all, it’s going to be a busy weekend. So you all play nice and stay out of moderation!

Open thread!

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Getchya Fresh News Here!

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The New York Times reported today on a story you saw in Balloon Juice more than a month ago, based on accounts in Finnish media. A wealthy Russian businessman was buying up properties along an important Finnish sealane. The Finnish authorities raided those properties, which had some of the look of preparing for military action. Finnish government and business websites were then hit with a DDoS attack.

Anyhow, welcome to the party, New York Times!

And open thread!

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Five years now

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Five years ago, I made a serious miscalculation.

I was a low level bureaucrat trying to get Exchange networks to work for UPMC Health Plan.

I was exhausted that first fall as we were scrambling with interim solutions for several months after the ACA individual market went live.  We then had to go crazy to ramp up HealthyPA, a convoluted Medicaid expansion waiver program in Pennsylvania.

I was in Pittsburgh living an anonymous life.

I thought I would only have a couple dozen health insurance related posts spanning twenty or thirty thousand words in me.

Now I’m in Durham.

I’m now at 1,550 + Mayhew on Insurance posts and several hundred other general purpose posts.  My health policy word count is closer to a million words than half a million words.  There is a mostly written book somewhere in these posts and I will sooner or later need to convince myself that I can write a book on health policy.

 

Then, I could never be quoted nor would anyone want to hear what I wanted to say besides a couple of co-workers as we slammed espresso shots before another analysis run cycle.  Now, I’m part of the usual quotable suspects when major ACA news breaks out.

Writing here at Balloon Juice has been and continues to be an amazing experience.  I get to play with ideas that fascinate me, and John gives me the keys to write to an audience.

One of the big changes since I’ve come to Duke, beyond saying good bye to the persona of Richard Mayhew, is that I’ve changed my writing targets.  When I was Richard Mayhew, I had to write at Balloon Juice.  I could and would poke a few people here and there that something big was coming down the pipe but I was limited.  Now, the audience is sometimes all jackals.  Other days, the intended audience is a few score of geeks and policy professionals who need to know about some esoteric corner case.  I apologize when I take over the blog for those purposes as I feel like I am hijacking your attention to pay the cost of entry into conversations that I want to be in.

As I have been drafting this post over several days, I’ve talked to reporters from local and national general interest press, I talked to a reporter from the trade press, I submitted a pair of long and very technical pieces to Health Affairs, and a revise and resubmit just went back to the editors of a good peer reviewed journal.  If you spend enough time reading Balloon Juice, you could figure out 85% of the article excluding some of the regression based analysis.

I feel guilty about this at times.

Last week, was a good example.  I wrote a Medicare shared savings post that I was aiming at a few dozen academics and several dozen think tankers, journalists and very targeted policy wonks. It is a very specific, nerdy, and incomplete idea.  It was not worth an op-ed as it it too geeky. It was not a Health Affairs blog or a journal perspective piece as the idea was not polished enough for that purpose, so I went Balloon Juice. And that post got three comments.  And I was fine with that as this was not a general purpose post but a very small part of a very different conversation that I participate in.

I’ve moved away from some general purpose health insurance and ACA blogging and at times over the past year, I’ve chased personal shiny objects down rabbit holes.  And you guys put up with that. And for that I am greatly appreciative as I love writing here at Balloon Juice.  I have a scratch pad and a place to get first drafts (seldom second drafts as you see my grammar and spelling) of reactions and thoughts.  I can dig into something that fascinates me on my own time and my own schedule until it makes sense to me.  I hope that this is not pointless intellectual public indecency as this entire creative process is extraordinarily valuable for me.

Balloon Juice is a very different form of writing than writing a journal article.  Under the best case scenario, a fast journal timeline from “umm, that is a cool question” to publication is a year or more.  It is very different writing than a multi-author Health Affairs blog where commas can become fighting marks while the critical point that I want to make might be the lead melody or become subsumed as a backing bass line.  It is a very different writing process than pumping out a New York Times op-ed where I first truly appreciated the value of a wonderful editor.  That process makes me sound a whole lot smarter by the end.  The final 750 words are a tight 750 words instead of a 5 post, 3,000 word series here.  But I was worn out both times I went through that process.  This is a fun place to write  and it allows me to get into awesome conversations of a variety of stripes.

But mainly, I just want to thank all of the jackals, the front-pagers and John for a community where I can nerd out on something that I find fascinating.  I’ll figure out what Year Six looks like, but the first five have been wonderful.

 

Five years nowPost + Comments (74)

Samwise Open Thread / An Introduction, for the Unfamiliar

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Hello, my pseudonym is Major Major Major Major, and I am, apparently, a blogger.

As many of you already know, I’m a prolific commenter here. (For those who didn’t know that, now you do.) Recent-ish-ly, I’ve been working with Alain on various improvements to the site. These efforts kept hitting the same snag: developing anything for a system you don’t have access to is terrible. So Alain gave me the keys to the production server. Somebody had the bright idea to give me the keys to WordPress too, so here we are.

I know I’m supposed to say something snarky here, but I really do think it’s kind of an honor, so hey, thanks!

Now. Before you complain about the site in the comments, let me say that we are aware there are many issues. We might even be aware of yours! But BJ is nobody’s full-time job, so, well, you know how triage works.

As for posting, I’m going to keep that light. As Alain mentioned, I’d like to start a twice-monthly series where we can all talk about good books to read. I may do the first one on Sunday. If there’s interest, I may also start a feature where we can talk about video games. Let me know. Finally, I may jump in with a west coast late night open thread on evenings where there’s a need.

Bio and pet pics below the fold…

show full post on front page

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That Plutonium In San Antonio And Live Stream Putin-Trump Press Conference

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A couple of reporters who take their job to be spreading maximum fear about nuclear radiation have found a story in San Antonio, Texas.

Staff from Idaho National Laboratory were picking up cesium and plutonium sources from a laboratory and left them in their rental car overnight. The car was broken into and the sources and other equipment stolen.

That was carelessness and should be looked at in the light of other careless incidents in the DOE system. When I’m traveling, I always bring in anything from the car that looks like it might be worth stealing. Even the stuff that is worth stealing but doesn’t look that way.

But the sources probably contain a few milligrams of cesium and plutonium. I haven’t done the calculations, but it probably would take a couple hundred years to accumulate enough plutonium for a fission bomb and cesium for a “dirty bomb” at that rate.

But the article goes on at length about bombs and such, as these reporters often do. It’s a strategy of fear for clicks, or perhaps these two really are terrified of anything to do with radiation. They also hyperventilate at the thought of terrorists taking the long view and waiting a couple of hundred years to get that TERROR BOMB.

IT’S ALL AROUND US! BE VERY AFRAID!

 

There’s not enough happening today, so here is the live stream of the two-president press conference.

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Mother, don’t you recognize your son

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I was thinking of doing a post about songs that mention mothers and it got me thinking of Lady Madonna and that got me thinking of What I Got (because it’s the same tune) and that got me thinking about how I think one of the Sublime albums has the best title of all time and that got me thinking about seeing Cadillac Records and how everyone involved had a great name (you can’t beat Howlin Wolf or Muddy Waters for names and I Can’t Be Satisfied and Killing Floor aren’t bad name either)…and that gave me an idea for a post.

What’s the best title for an album ever?

For me, this is a slam dunk. Forty Ounces To Freedom.

What’s the best name for a band ever?

I know you all think I’m a dad rock kind of a guy but I’m going to get a little contemporary here and go with Hurray for the Riff Raff.

What’s the best name for a song ever?

I think when you get down to it you can’t beat some of the old blues stuff — I Can’t Be Satisfied, Dark Was The Night Cold Was The Ground, Stones In My Passway. I mean, that says it all, right? I also like Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell, though.

Finally, how about songs about mothers?

I’ll go with the one in the title here. There’s one I like even better but it’s a little dark (though very upbeat!) because it begins with a hearse.

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Auf Wiedersehen

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Looks like this second rate blog outlived Red State:

The influential conservative website RedState fired a handful of prominent writers on Friday in a move that appeared motivated, at least in part, by purging the outlet of anti-Trump voices.

The Daily Beast confirmed that among those laid off by RedState and its parent company Townhall Media were top editors and writers Caleb Howe, Jay Caruso, Ben Howe, Patrick Frey (who writes under the pseudonym Patterico), Neil Stevens, and Susan Wright—all of whom are often critical of the president.

Fired staffers learned about their dismissal either through their email accounts being locked or via a memo from Townhall general manager and vice president Jonathan Garthwaite. “[W]e are having to make changes to RedState effective today,” the memo read. “Unfortunately, we have reached the conclusion that we can no longer support the entire current roster of writers.”

RedState was founded in 2004, and soon after conservative pundit Erick Erickson was hired as its editor in chief. The site quickly grew into an influential blog among both Republican lawmakers and conservative activists. But the shedding of staffers on Friday marks a new chapter in its history and for some of those let go, it is a reflection of the drift that the conservative movement has taken during the Trump era.

It’ll just pivot into a more pro-Trump website and continue to serve as an important cog in the wingnut puke funnel. Basically, the owners wanted it to be more like the puddle of choad that is Ben Domenech’s Federalist.

Auf WiedersehenPost + Comments (237)

Sandinista!

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The big thing in American politics is a generational divide where older Americans vote like racist, xenophobic idiots and kids vote like socialists. How did it happen? Well, old people have always been stupid. Trust me, when I was seventeen I was a sharp as a tack and now, well, you read my posts. And I’m not even a fully fledged old yet. I don’t care how much hot teen blood Peter Thiel drinks, he’s going to struggle with the daily jumble when he’s a 120. But olds weren’t always this right-wing and the kids weren’t always commies.

I was reading once that the CIA had a theory about blowback, that they knew there was a pattern where they whacked countries with propaganda/coups/right-wing strongmen and ended up with strong socialist movements (or Islamic fundamentalist movements in the case of Iran) coming to dominate the country.

Do you think that’s what happened, or is happening, here? That the American right, with an assist from corporations, an Aussie media mogul and Russia, has whacked us with an endless stream of propaganda (that works brilliantly on the old) and two near-coups (2000 election and 2016 election), and that the end result is a sort of Sandinista generation?

Sandinista!Post + Comments (197)

We never got if off on that revolution stuff

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It’s been kind of a brutal week politically. There’s something to remember though: things will change politically when the baby boomers die off and millennials become the dominant political block in our country.

I don’t know that well how baby boomers think, but I do understand how my generation, Gen X, does, to some extent. And I think millennials see the world very differently than my generation does. It’s fair to say that I, and many of you, grew up in a world where Broderism, and worse yet Reaganism, was pushed on us by the media in a way that is not that different from what goes on in North Korea. I try very hard not to be both sides person, but the truth is…it’s hard not to have it in the back of your mind sometimes. It was pushed into our heads for so long. And also too, my generation always felt (correctly) that the world is a shitty place that we’d never be able to change. In a lot of ways, we are, to quote the boomers’ biggest obsession, like a dog that’s been beaten too much.

And a huge proportion of people over 60 have been completely brainwashed by Murdoch media.

A lot has been made about the how the kids at Parkland have reacted eloquently and angrily to the school shooting. They think it’s outrageous that we don’t have gun control but they don’t think gun control is a lost cause, and it’s not in their lifetimes. (It will be quite a while.)

I truly believe that the current political situation is just a phase. It’s a damaging one, unfortunately, but it will end. The group of people my age and older are a lost cause, but the next generation, whatever problems it may have, lacks the political pathologies that have taken our government into a ditch.

We never got if off on that revolution stuffPost + Comments (95)