Grateful Dead

For those who might have missed it, a motorcycle race was happening on the West Side Parkway in NYC last weekend when a road rage incident started somehow. A man in an SUV ran over a biker, and then swerved and hit another and then hit another. The bikers slowed the SUV down and stopped it. Then they smashed the driver window and pulled the guy out of his vehicle and beat him in front of his wife and one year old daughter. Now we find out that at least two of the bikers were undercover cops. There is only one level of deep undercover that would have superseded their duty to stop this beating. Cops caught up in blood-lust?

The one thing Congress agrees on is that the furloughed Federal workers will get their back-pay. If you didn't go camping you should have. It's not you or your wife's fault that the government is bent on going over the edge in a Thelma & Louise.

Well, Wayne La Pierre and the NRA have outdone themselves with this one. They now somehow believe that arms control treaties are a back-door to get gun control passed at home. This kind of paranoia is clinical. Somehow the US negotiating an international arms control treaty is going to lead to a secret agenda of gun control in the US. This is truly unbelievable and irrational thinking. With each shooting the NRA becomes more and more desperate for a scapegoat to blame. Guns can never be the problem. Therefore everybody and everything else is the problem. The gun safe is the altar on which the sacred gun is kept. The acolytes bear the rags and range of gun oils and greases that eternally preserve it. In a dim room the single shaft of light illuminates the elegant lines of the handgun. Bow down before it. Wayne is watching. He has video and audio.

With all possible credits included, such as tobacco-free and others, we are able to hold down our out-of-pocket premiums to $1935 a year for a family (2-12 people, all must be provable by birth certificates, marriage certificates, bills & leases/mortgages) A PCP (Primary Care Provider visit is a $25 co-pay; a specialist is $35; an emergency room visit is $100 the average generic prescription co-pay is $7. Knock-on-wood, we've only had one overnight hospital stay for which there was no out-of-pocket (and no procedures, just things such as saline and other medicines for food poisoning.) The Affordable care Act has 4 levels of plan that pay from almost 100% of deductibles and has high premiums to the bronze level that has lesser amounts of premiums and higher deductibles with much fewer choices -- from what I've heard. My employer has not added an extra deduction to my paycheck to pay for the ACA as some scumbag employers have done. Call me a socialist if you want, but if you're a company owner with more than 50 employees, just buy a new car every 4 years and only take 4 weeks of vacation a year and don't take an extra deduction from your employees. Just one person's opinion. Is it affordable? I guess it depends on how sick you are, how much you use your insurance and how much money you make... I hope the young and the healthy partake of the plan. Otherwise the ACA will do what is known in insurance circles as the "Death Spiral" where there aren't enough premiums to pay for the older users (which is now officially the first wave of baby-boomers starting to retire). God help us all if this doesn't work!

...deducts $60.47 {non tobacco rate} a week from my check for me and one dependent.$30 Office Visit $60 Specialist $250 Emergency Room $50 Urgent Care $10/$40 RX Tier 1/RX Tier 2 $80/25% RX Tier 3/RX Tier 4 20% Inpatient

anybody check the prices and what you get for it yet? doesn't seem very affordable to me.

Yes, Anna, the Koch conglomerate is a low-key sinister presence most notable for bank-rolling advertisements and commercials for/from right wing "public interest" groups. If I go camping, it will be in the Ozarks, possibly near Lake Tanneycomo. I hear the trout are jumping. Today is pug day: my son lets my wife and I enjoy their little ankle-biter, Homme. We take long walks and tease the heck out of him so he's worn out when we hand him back to AJ after his workday is over. Have the Republicans blinked yet?

Please shut up, Sinéad O' Connor.

considering. And you know this whole scenario has gone way too far into weirdness when the drum beating, war hawk John McCain actually sounds like the voice of reason for the Republican party. Thanks, John. It's nice, every so often, to be reminded that I don't necessarily need mushrooms in order to feel like I'm hallucinating :))) *** I put that picture up about two weeks ago and it finally takes?

Just a typical day in Washington DC that was over-reported by every major news network. The BBC interviewed many Americans who decried the militarization of the nation's, and especially the capitol's, police force. All of the shots fired are being attributed to overzealous LE. The atmosphere in the city is reported (probably over-reported) as tense amidst the 3rd day of a government shutdown.