Too much MUCH

I have so many links, I don’t know where to start. In no particular order…

The US voted *against* a UN resolution condemning the death penalty for LBGQT people and blasphemers! Get your stones ready, ladies.

No, I have no idea what they’re thinking but I’m agin’ it.

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Tom Petty wrote a touching piece for The Rolling Stone about why he stopped using the Confederate flag at his concerts back in the 80s. Very thoughtful and full of conviction. He will be missed for more than his music.

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The Nobel for chemistry was announced today for the technique of cryo electron microscopy of biological molecules. It’s bittersweet news for me because I used to work in this are in protein crystallography and drug design. I *love* discovering new proteins. They’re beautiful. But I don’t do this work any more since pharmageddon. But I’m going to check out RCSB for the structures if they’re available and download the papers if I can from the pirate site.

Did I say that out loud?

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Bruuuce!

I love this song even though it doesn’t apply to Pittsburgh anymore. We are like a phoenix. This city is awesome.

Wednesday: What’s Going On?

The Republicans are holding hostage the lives of 9 million children whose participation in CHIP is threatened because Republican lawmakers didn’t get the funding bill passed last Saturday night.

Check this site to find out if your state is affected. In Pennsylvania, funds run out this month, maybe as early as this week. California is in the same status as are many blue states.

And what is holding things up? Republicans want cuts somewhere else. This is disgusting behavior. The bill to fund CHIP should come with no strings attached.

No, don’t even. This is not negotiable. The funding of Childrens’ health care is not negotiable. At all. Call your senator. Pat Toomey in this state. They’re going to try some other tactics to ram through budget cuts and compromises in this bill and it will *almost* sound reasonable to people who don’t have the time or inclination to research what they’re being asked to give up. But the answer to those items is unequivocal. Pass the funding for CHIP first because time has already run our for our kids. THEN we’ll talk.

Maybe you don’t have kids or grandchildren or cousins or nieces and nephews on CHIP but *I* do and delaying this is like putting a gun to some poor kid’s head and asking us to hand over our Medicare so Republicans won’t blow the kid’s head off.

That gun metaphor is intentional because delaying this is going to result in the death of some poor children.

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Trump is going to Las Vegas today. I hope Las Vegas gives him their “warmest” welcome.

This morning, I heard some woman on NPR say that mass shootings by crazy white guys with an Arsenal are just something we have to get used to.

Which makes me wonder why we are so irrationally afraid of Muslims. Most of them aren’t planning to go all jihad on us and murder us in our beds. Why the travel ban? Why can’t Fox News viewers stop peeing the bed about it and get used to it?

It’s not even remotely the same thing since there are a LOT more crazy white guys with guns in this country but we’re just supposed to let them get away with terrorizing the rest of us. And no one’s screaming bloody murder about THEM.

Let’s have a little consistency.

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Jeez, can they throw him into the ocean??

This is what the orange lying racist (not MY president) said today to the American citizens in Puerto Rico who he dedicated a GOLF trophy to:

President Trump told Puerto Rico officials they should feel proud that hadn’t lost thousands of lives like in “a real catastrophe like Katrina,” and also said the devastated island territory was throwing the nation’s budget “a little out of whack” during his first visit there since Hurricane Maria ravaged the island nearly two weeks ago.

Trump’s remarks Tuesday came as he touched down in San Juan amid harsh criticism of the administration’s slow response to the natural disaster, and after he praised himself earlier in the day for the “great job” and “A-plus” performance he said the administration deserved for its response to Maria.

“Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you at the tremendous — hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here, with really a storm that was just totally overpowering, nobody’s ever seen anything like this,” Trump said, before turning to a local official to ask how many people had died in storm. “What is your death count as of this moment? 17? 16 people certified, 16 people versus in the thousands.”

95% have no electricity. Only about half half clean drinking water. Some parts of Puerto Rico are still inaccessible. Who knows what rescuers will find when they finally get there??Has he ever heard of lawless desperate people and cholera?? Or does that only happen in Rwanda?

He is an disgrace. He *should* be an embarrassment to anyone who voted for him. This person should come with a warning label for dangerous levels of stupidity and a possible choking hazard.

It’s unforgivable.

Tuesday: surveying the damage

The death toll continues to rise in Las Vegas and we still don’t have a motive. But yesterday’s mass shooting was NOT the worst in American history. That dishonor belongs to the Mormons who on September 11, 1857 committed an act of terrorism on a wagon train and massacred 120 men, women and children at Mountain Meadows, Utah.

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[House Republicans are planning to hold CHIP hostage by tying its funding to aid for Puerto Rico and raising Medicare rates for wealthier Americans. In other words, this is means testing Medicare. Oh and they’re going to shorten the enrollment period for Obamacare. Now, I was no fan of Obamacare for a myriad of reasons, not least of which that for the vast majority of people who were forced to buy it, the rates were too high, the deductibles ridiculous, the networks too narrow and the subsidy cutoffs bizarre and senseless. The worst part is it separated Americans workers into two classes: those who have employer based coverage with negotiated rates and the poor suckers who had no such protection from the free market. I have been in both classes and I have to say that based on the evidence, there is no substitute for having your employer go to bat for you. None. Let’s not try to pretend here. Currently, there is no reasonable solution for the crappy national health insurance policy we are stuck with except Medicare 4 All. But Republicans are determined to practice exploitative profit mining for their donors because some people are just not rich and irresponsible enough.

Warning: This bill is intentionally packed with stuff on Medicare so that we will forget that it is about funding for CHIP, which didn’t get renewed last Saturday. I am warning any provocateurs out there that any attempt to highjack the comments section to talk about Medicare instead of CHIP will not be tolerated. That might be the strategy but I’m not going to let it happen here. I am not Mark Zuckerberg and this is not Facebook.

I hate these people. They all need to lose their jobs.

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Weirdest Headline Today:

Semen-contaminated flutes might have been given to children, California school officials warn

No, that is not from The Onion.

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When we all get there, this will be the opening act:

The NYTimes curated a list of Tom Petty’s best songs. I’m going to download as much as I can today for my sound track at work and block the world from “draggin’ my heart around”

Nooooooo

This week is just getting worse and worse and it’s only MONDAY!!

Tom Petty is dead at the age of 66.

😱😭😫

So many good songs. Thank you, thank you.

Yeah, it sure feels like it.

Monday: Ave Verum Corpus

I feel sorrow for the families of the human beings who were gunned down in Las Vegas last night and for our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico who think we have abandoned them.

We have got to do better than this as a country.

Today, some Mozart to soothe the soul.

“The greater part of the truth is always hidden, in regions out of the reach of cynicism.”

—JRR Tolkien