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If You're Young, This Is The Only Obamacare Infographic You Need. I Obamadare You To Click On It.

Amen

A Software Developer's Take on Healthcare.gov

As a software developer I have some experience with projects like healthcare.gov. I worked for companies that provided computerized testing.  They had worldwide registration systems and transmitted exam databases and software to a network of autonomous testing centers across the world, where high-stakes exams were delivered under the supervision of proctors and the results transmitted back to our central hub.

The tragedy of software development is that the launch of the health care website is all too typical. That's not an excuse: it's a simple statement of fact.

When Target came out with its site in 2011 it had a ton of problems. Best Buy also had serious issues with its site. When United Airlines and Continental Airlines merged their reservation systems they had terrible problems (United was still having problems as recently as September, when it was charging customers $0 for tickets). Pretty much every online game has launch-day blues, ranging from minor issues to major meltdowns that can take weeks or months to fix. Who can forget the problems that Microsoft has had with every major revision of Windows, including Vista (which had a redo with Windows 7) and Windows 8 (which just came out with Windows 8.1).

And of course, there are the problems that George Bush's signature program, Medicare Part D, had when it came out. Instead of jeering on the sidelines, Democrats helped the Bush administration resolve those issues.

The reasons for these problems are usually the same: late starts, uncertain scope and scale, shifting requirements and inadequate testing. The healthcare.gov site suffered from all of these problems, many of them foisted on the project by its detractors.

Late Starts, Cast-in-Concrete Deadlines
Most software projects don't get started on time, but the deadline rarely changes. This was especially true of the ACA, which had been delayed by legal action for years. The people who claim the developers had four years to write the software are flat-out wrong. Lawyers were still duking it out in the Supreme Court in June of last year, which meant that the software developers didn't even know whether the project would really happen until 16 months before launch date. At that time the justices threw out a major portion of the law -- the Medicaid expansion -- which  affected the design and implementation.

Shifting Requirements
Then there are imprecise requirements. The health care exchange was clouded by uncertainty over the exact scope of the website: the law gives the states the right to create their own exchanges, and many did so. If all the states had created their own sites, that would have dictated a much smaller design for healthcare.gov, relegating it to a simple entry portal to the state exchanges and back-end data processor and validator.

But the developers of healthcare.gov had to wait for all the states to decide what they were going to do -- and many of them didn't make a decision until December of 2012, after the Republican Governor's Association asked the Obama administration multiple times to delay the deadline. That gave healthcare.gov only 10 months after finally learning the true scope of the project. At that point they learned that they had to set up exchanges for 38 states. And only 10 months to do it. Imagine how difficult it would be to design a skyscraper without knowing how many floors it was going to have.

It's rather hypocritical that the Republicans who forced delays in the development of healthcare.gov -- through lawsuits and dillydallying on deciding whether they would create their own exchanges -- are now complaining about its rocky start.

Full-Bore Launch vs. Incremental Development
Websites that people compare healthcare.gov to -- Amazon.com, for example -- have been developed incrementally, and have been up and running for more than a decade. When Amazon began they had few customers and little visibility. They had low volume on launch day and were able to fix their problems in obscurity. They had no deadline other than their own internally imposed one. They could push the launch back without any repercussions. They could grow slowly and incrementally.

The healthcare.gov website was a huge deal that everyone was watching. Its start date was dictated by law. Millions of people and thousands of companies are depending on it. The site got hammered by millions of hits on day one, and it collapsed -- just like thousands of smaller-scale private software projects before it.

Inherently Messy Project
The job this site is trying to accomplish is much messier than ordering a coffee maker. It's not trivial to find out whether people qualify for tax credits, and you can't find out the real cost of a policy without that information. You have to make sure that the person really is who they say they are, and you have to be concerned with privacy and security. Making something simple to use and making it confidential and secure are competing -- almost contradictory -- requirements.


I'm not making excuses for the problems. I'm just saying that we've seen them before, in thousands of private and government software launches. But we've got time -- two more months before any insurance policies issued under the ACA actually go live, and three more months after that for people to sign up.

People should give Jeff Zients his month to get the problems fixed. If we're still having these problems on Dec. 1, then we can go into full histrionics mode. Until then, healthcare.gov isn't all that different from many other software launches that limp along in their early days. Except that the project is beset by millions of people hoping desperately for it to fail and actively trying to sabotage it.

The real reason that this health care rollout is so messy is that it's basically the Heritage Institute and Mitt Romney's plan to keep the insurance industry profitable. Obama didn't originally want an individual mandate; he preferred a public option that would have looked a lot like Medicare, which would have eliminated many of the problems with healthcare.gov.

Thus, the left criticizes Obama for selling out to insurance execs, and the right criticizes him for a socialist takeover of health care.

I guess that's the definition of compromise: nobody is happy.

The Gun Free Zone Lie

The evidence continues to mount that the emotionally fueled and asinine idea that gun free zones are the proverbial honey to killer bees is completely ridiculous. A disgruntled National Guard recruiter shot two military personnel at an armory outside a Navy facility near Memphis on Thursday. Yes, that's right...an ARMORY.

Let's see...that's Kirkwood City Hall, Fort Hood, the Navy Yard in DC, the gun range in Texas where Chris Kyle was killed and now this. Those are just the ones off of the top of my head. A little research shows that there have been many more.

Of course Media Matters did a piece after the Navy Yard shooting that pretty much torpedoed the gun free zone lament. This study and this study point out that there is not a single case from 1982 to 2012 that contains evidence that the shooters chose their targets because they were "gun free" and that fewer that one quarter of mass shootings in public spaces from January 2009 through January 2013 occurred in gun-free zones.

Whether or not a facility is armed is inconsequential. We should be spending more time on the mental health aspects of these cases (and keeping guns out of the hands of said individuals) and zero time entertaining the adolescent feelings of the gun community who don't like being told what to do and where. I wish they would just be honest and admit that they want to be able to carry their gun wherever they want because they have a problem with authority and are fucking children who need to have their toys with them at all times.

More Backdoor Corporate Welfare

In the last election one party chose to portray people who receive public assistance as lazy moochers and takers. But the fact is, the companies that employ those same people are mooching off the government. More than half of fast-food workers are forced to receive some sort of public assistance, according to a study from the UC Berkeley Labor Center. That includes SNAP (food stamps), Medicaid, earned income tax credits, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. The McDonald's employee help line McResources even advises workers to go on food stamps and Medicaid.

The total cost to American taxpayers is $7 billion a year.

And it's not just McDonald's. It's Wendy's and Burger King and Walmart, whose employees also suck up billions of dollars of public assistance annually.

These are highly profitable companies that have grown almost exponentially over the past few decades. Walmart has put thousands of smaller retailers of all types across the country out of business, sending the profits to Arkansas. McDonald's has replaced thousands of independent restaurants with franchisees who are pressured to treat employees like cattle, siphoning billions of dollars of local profits to Chicago. Profits that had previously been spent and taxed locally and contributed to the local economy.

The business models of McDonald's and Walmart are based on paying workers slave wages, forcing federal and local governments step in to make sure these workers and their children are clothed and housed and don't starve. That is an indirect government subsidy to those companies: these people couldn't work at McDonald's and Walmart without government help.

If you buy what McDonald's pretends is food or the cheap cost-reduced junk that Walmart pawns off on their customers, you too are getting a handout from the federal government. Because these companies couldn't provide you these products at the prices they do if they paid their employees what they actually cost the economy at large.

Well, actually they could quite handily: but it would require lowering their profit margins. Other companies, like Costco, Trader Joe's and QuickTrip, give their employees decent wages and benefits and still make a profit. Not quite as much as Walmart and McDonald's, admittedly. But WMT/MCD business practices are costing all of us money, not just the people who buy their stuff.

If we really need the products that those companies sell, we should be willing to pay their actual costs. It's not right that our tax dollars subsidize the incomes of the McDonald's and Walmart employees who actually do the work, while all the profits go into the pockets of the guys at the top.

It Begins (And Ends) With The Parents

Nearly all of the challenges I face as an instructor are due to poor parenting. Parents do indeed really suck and they are getting worse. Even the number of sucky parents are on the rise as our culture becomes more and more cemented in the misplaced and harmful values of the Michael Jordan Generation. It's very clear that parents are just not doing their job.

Never was this statement more true than with the parents of the shooter in the recent Sparks, Nevada Middle School shooting. While it hasn't been fully confirmed yet, the student who killed teacher and vet Michael Landsberry and wounded two other students likely got the semi-auto 9mm from his parents. What the hell were they thinking? And what kind of a fucking country do we live in where a guy who does tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan lives through that but gets shot in his hometown? It's stuff like this that completely disgusts me.

This would be a clear example of people who should not be allowed to own guns and why our laws regarding arms need to be changed. Their license to own a gun should be taken away and they should face criminal charges. I'm wondering if they were "live free or die" types like Nancy Lanza who also thought it would be nifty to let her mentally ill sun have access to her guns.

The facts of this case have been very slow in coming but my takeaways are that it's clear there was some sort of bullying involved (more on that later), the shooter was mentally ill, and his parents are directly responsible. Further, this latest incident has led me to reflect about Newton and come to the conclusion the ideology that bloviates from the gun community is also responsible. This is particularly true in the case of Nancy Lanza who bought their lies to such a degree that she felt she needed a fucking arsenal to protect herself.

It begins and ends with the parents, folks. If they don't do their job, we end up with situations like this. And more and more of them these days are failing miserably.

Good Words

"In theory, lawmakers should hope that government programs work well, and if they don't, work to fix them. Elected representatives should hope that government agencies carry out their missions smoothly, and if something goes wrong, try to figure out what happened to avoid making the same mistake in the future.

Obviously that's not how things work in the United States, where one of the two parties doesn't actually believe in government. Republicans want to shrink government until it's small enough to drown in a bathtub! They think there's nothing scarier than the prospect of a government employee trying to help! With beliefs like those, it's perhaps not surprising that -- with disturbing frequency -- they root for failure in order to score points." --- JULIET LAPIDOS, October 24, 2013

Demons of Progess

A recent discussion on Facebook made me realize that my frustration with conservatives has two levels. The first is that I simply don't understand how they can believe the lies that are peddled to them inside of the bubble. These fictional tales can easily be torpedoed by a simple check of the facts. But that's not even the worst part.

The second level is what really drives me nuts. That's when they very erroneously believe that liberals are the ones that are actually brainwashed. Their media are the ones telling the lies and only conservative media tells the truth. They essentially turn it around (Projection/Flipping) and truly think people like me are the ones that have fallen victim to the "liberal" media. This notion is completely false.

With each level, no amount of reality will persuade them yet I think we are coming to a turning point in this country in terms of information gathering. The conservative bubble isn't going to hold for all that much longer as reality comes crashing in (climate change, antiquated gun laws, poor macroeconomic policy etc) and destroys it. I already know that, while there is certainly liberal bias out there, it's not the out and out lying and propaganda that we see coming from the Right. Liberals, by nature and definition, are very reflective people and recognize the shortcomings of their own views and policies. That's where the over-analysis comes in to play. Conservatives are the exact opposite. They don't reflect at all, are set in their ways, never change and under analyze.

They are, in short, the demon to progress and that's why I can never be one.

Good Words

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." ~John Kenneth Galbraith, 2002

Own It

I thought it was the right move for the president to hold a presser about the problems with the ACA web site but he needs to go even further. Jeffrey Zients (aka Mr. Fixit) should hold daily briefings on the progress towards all the fixes and debugging. In short, the administration needs to own it more than they are right now.

Another thing that needs to be pointed out that people keep forgetting is that this is only affecting about 10 percent of Americans. The rest of us already have health care plans that work just fine and aren't going to change. Even if the problems with the web site persist, most people are not going to care because it doesn't affect them. Look for conservatives to (again) overplay their hand and continue to obsess (see: sore losers) about the law while completely losing focus on what the majority of Americans care about which is the economy and jobs.

One final note on the ACA, I caught this story this morning and am wondering if the fix is as simple as it was for Randall Bennett.

Bennett's solution was to open a Google Chrome browser in incognito mode, which allows users to browse the Internet without recording the website and download history. It also deletes cookies, or information storage, after a window is closed. “I was using it for debugging in my software to try something out, as if I were a fresh user," he said. Bennett said he happened to go back to HealthCare.gov and logged in. The white screen then redirected him to the main page. Now he, his wife and 2-year-old son are ready for Jan. 1, when their new insurance will go into effect.

And he lives in deep red Utah...whoda thunk it?:)

My Trip South

I recently took a trip to the state of my birth, Missouri. It was for my grandmother's 96th birthday and many of my extended family relatives were there. Most were very old and, well, very white. Previous years have included long tirades against President Obama that are clearly being fed directly from the right wing media industrial complex. One year, my cousin Jim from Texas said that if Barack Obama were in the room, he would put a stick up his ass. I didn't think too much of it because Jim hates nearly all politicians.

This year, however, there was a noticeable change among all the conservatives in my family. There was a lot of grumbling about the shutdown and how it personally affected all of them. At one point, someone mentioned immigration and my cousin Jim said, "Well the Republicans will just try and block it. That's all they really do." The room was quiet for a minute and then everyone sunk their heads a little bit and agreed. The rest of the conversation turned to a discussion of how frustrated they all were that the Republicans have no real plan of their own and refused to compromise. In fact, it was a real pile on against the GOP with nary a mention of President Obama except when the conversation turned to entitlements. That's when some admitted that the GOP's ideas for reforming entitlements were not at all desirable. Some even expressed the simple fact that the president was in their corner on this one. Honestly, I was completely blown away by the sea change.

The one thing we can always rely on in this country is for old people to get scared and act out of fear. It's not surprising when you consider that people are nearing their twilight years and have so many unknowns. Of course, that's no excuse for them to act irrationally and like children. In some ways, though, they can't help it because that's how their minds are developing at such a later stage in life. It truly sickens me that outlets like Fox News and the various right wing blogs take full advantage of this and peddle their lies for dollars. It's no lie, though, that the Republicans want to fuck around with entitlements and send more money into the private sector where the already ridiculously wealthy can have even more money. They do so at their own peril as old, white people are now their entire base. Lose them and you never win another election again.

I was also quite heartened to hear that many of my younger relatives signed up for the ACA and, interestingly, had no problems doing it. Some used the web site, others used the phone, and my Uncle John did the whole thing via old fashioned mail. They all asked me if I was going to sign up and I told them what I tell everyone else.

I like the health care I currently have and (gasp!) I get to keep it.

On Stiglitz: Part Nine

The penultimate chapter in Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality illustrates how macroeconomic policy in this country is essentially made for the 1 percent because macroecomic policy, in a broad sense, affects distribution of income. Stiglitz notes that policymakers are not often aware of this and that's why we have the problems we have. People worked hard, studied hard and played by the rules but the best most can hope for in the last decade+ is just to get by. Worse, many were not even doing that as we have seen in earlier chapters in the book. 

A basic rule of economics is that life involves tradeoffs. One alleged tradeoff is the balance between inflation and unemployment. If there is low unemployment, generally speaking, there is inflation because there are more people buying things. If there is high unemployment, inflation is low as there are less people fueling the economy. In some ways, this is exactly what the 1 percent (see: financial sector) want. They make more money if inflation is low so the bondholders interest is for the focus is on inflation, not unemployment. This is where the structural problems with our economy begin. According to Stiglitz, and I agree with him wholeheartedly, there is no such tradeoff.

Imagine, Stiglitz notes, if the focus were on unemployment instead. Finding that right number on the lower end (4%?, 5%?) of unemployment that still keeps inflation low is tricky but if you start from the other side (inflation), the policy that is made tends to benefit the least amount of people...those in the financial sector. If you start from the side of unemployment, or at the very least, look for a balance, you benefit more people and the macroeconomic policy of the country as a whole. This is why the Fed fell asleep in the collapse of 2008. They had no balance, Further, they thought the banks could take care of themselves and needed no oversight. When solutions to the crisis were presented, they focused on inflation (the interests of the bankers and the financial sector) not everyone else.

But the problem, as I have always said, was really with the regulations themselves. The obsessive focus on interest rates erroneously led to the Fed believing that they had some sort of magic "lever," as Stiglitz puts it, that can manipulate the economy.

Lower the interest rate and the economy expand; raise the interest rate and it slows down. And though there are times and circumstances in which the interest rate may have those effects, at other times the links are at beast weak and other instruments might have been more effective. For instance, in response to the real estate bubble , it would have made more sense to raise the down payment requirements for mortgages than to raise the interest rates; one didn't want to slow down productive investments, just to dampen the bubble. Such regulations were anathema to the Fed, with its religious devotion to the price system and the wonders of the market.

Exactly. We're talking about a massively rigid ideology here that sadly, to this day, has not been broken.

Getting back to unemployment, such a high level of joblessness doesn't simply hurt those who are unemployed. It also hurts the rest of us because a natural effect of this is lower wages. People entering the work force for the first time are forced to take a salary that they simply can't live on. Less money goes into the economy as consumer confidence and spending shrinks due to a lack of aggregate demand. The financial sector may enjoy this "labor market flexibility" but the rest of us do not. And it's clear that the economy has suffered due to these magnanimous gifts bestowed to bankers from our monetary policy. This policy, supported by both Republicans and Democrats, has been a disaster.

The Fed's low interest rate policy hadn't led to the resurgence of investment as it had hoped. It did encourage those who were planning investments to substitute cheap capital labor. Capital was, in effect, at a temporary artificially low price , and one might as well take advantage of an unusual situation. This reinforced distorted patterns of innovation that focused on saving labor at a time when it was increasingly in abundance. It is curious that at a time when unemployment among the unskilled is so high, grocery and drug stores are replacing checkout clerks with automatic machines. The Fed was making it more and more likely that, when recovery set in, it would be a jobless one.

My only gripe about this line of thought is that it really isn't a good thing to fight progress. This is the same complaint I have about the Right on issues such as energy, climate change, and education. Our nation has one direction: forward. If low skilled workers are losing their jobs to innovation, then it's time that we retrain them and give them the skills they need to compete in the age of globalization. Other than that, though, Stiglitz is spot on.

How did we get such a crappy monetary policy? Deregulation. I've talked about this extensively so there's no need to repeat myself. Instead, let's take a look at the consequences, via Stiglitz.

This deregulation had two related consequences. First, it led to the increasing financialization of the economy-with all its distortions and inequities. Second, it allowed the banks to exploit the rest of society-through predatory lending, abusive credit card fees, and other practices. The banks shifted risk toward the poor and toward the taxpayer: when things didn't go as lenders had predicted, others had to bear the consequences. The Fed not only didn't discourage this; it encouraged it. It is clear that, from a social perspective, the banks did not help people manage their risk; they created it. But when it came to managing their own risk, the bankers were more successful. They didn't bear the consequences of their actions. 

Stiglitz identifies a common ground here where liberals and conservatives could work together. At the time of the crisis, there wasn't really a choice in terms of letting the banks fail. It would have collapsed the economy. Now, however, we can regulate the industry so that none of these institutions are "too big to fail" or, better yet, too interconnected to fail. In short, Glass-Steagall for the 21st Century. Dodd-Frank is a start but it still gives the Fed responsibility for implementing the new regulations. Its track record thus far has shown that it is less than average in doing this.

At this point in the chapter I realized that Mr. Stiglitz should be the new Fed Chair! Obviously, it's never going to happen especially now that we have Janet Yellin but we do need someone who will kick the inflation obsession.

It should be apparent at this point that the banks should be focusing on banking and not macroecomic policy. How did we get to this point? More importantly, can we ever break free of this framework and have government leaders who are not influenced by the financial sector of this country? Even the evidence that the Fed was forced to reveal, which showed that the large banks were both borrowing substantial amounts of money from them while also claiming publicly that they were in great shape, was not enough to change the system. Indeed, our problem, as Stiglitz notes, is "more ideological conviction than economic analysis." This, of course, comes directly from the NUMERO UNO free market fundamentalist himself, Milton Friedman, a colleague of Stiglitz.

I remember long discussions with him on the consequences of imperfect information or incomplete risk markets; my own work and that of numerous colleagues had shown that in these conditions, markets typically didn't work well. Friedman simply couldn't or wouldn't grasp the results. He couldn't refute them. He simply knew they had to be wrong. He, and other free market economists, had two other replies: even if the theoretical results were true, they were "curiosities," exceptions that proved the rule; and even if the problems were pervasive, one couldn't rely on government to fix them.

Sounds familiar, eh?:) Many of the problems we have with our modern economic policy can be attributed directly to Mr. Friedman. His cult-like worship of the free market has led to far too many people turning brain dead in terms of economic analysis.

Recall that the Fed's main purpose should be focused on inflation, employment and growth. The second of these three has fallen by the wayside as the bankers have more or less taken over the show. So, the government is the problem but not in the way conservatives would have you believe. It's not that it's too big. It's that it simply doesn't function in the way it is supposed to function due to monetarists' obsession with inflation and their complete ignorance of unemployment. This obsession is based on three very questionable hypotheses. First, inflation is the supreme evil. Second, maintaining low and stable inflation is necessary and almost sufficient for maintaining a high and stable real growth rate. Third, everyone benefits from low inflation. Stiglitz wraps up the chapter explaining that none of these beliefs are true and that inflation hawks have been basically telling tales out of school.

For inflation hawks economy is always at the edge of a precipice: once inflation starts, it will be difficult to control. And since the cost of reversing inflation-disinflation, as it's called-is so large, it is best to address it immediately. But these views are not based on a careful assessment of the evidence. There is no precipice, and mild upticks in inflation, if they look as if they might become persistent, can easily be reversed by tightening credit availability. In short, it was simply wrong that the best way to maintain high employment and strong growth as to focus on inflation. The focus on inflation distracted attention from things that were far more important: the losses from even moderate inflation were negligible in comparison to the losses from financial collapse.

So, we need to remove ourselves from the shackles of obsession over inflation. Our monetary policy should strive for the best possible balance between inflation, employment, and growth. We can't continue to make trickle down policy that is made specifically for the benefits of the banks. In a preview of the last chapter, Stiglitz argues that there is no single best policy. Certainly the obsession with inflation has proved that. Further, there is nothing natural about our currently very high state of unemployment or the low level of aggregate demand. It is the result of policy that caters to serve the small number of people in the financial sector in this country and they have scammed us into thinking that any changes will result in another economic collapse.

Therefore, the first step in changing the system is to not believe them anymore.

A Link Between Sleep and Football Dementia?

Scientists have long wondered why people and animals need to sleep. We all know that not sleeping is bad for us, but we didn't know exactly why.

For decades scientists have known that sleep is associated with the consolidation of short-term to long term memory. Recently they discovered that during sleep neurons fire backwards, which they think strengthens the electrical signals of nearby and frees up space in the brain for new memories (sort of like defragging your computer's hard disk).

But a new study has found an even more basic mechanism that explains the need for sleep: housecleaning. While asleep, brain cells appear to shrink and cerebrospinal fluid is pumped through the brain to wash out toxins that accumulate during wakefulness. These toxins are beta amyloids, the proteins that are associated with dementias like Alzheimer's.

Interestingly, dementias are frequently associated with sleep disorders, which could explain why Alzheimer's occurs in the first place. With this information new therapies may be developed to prevent dementias that leave their victims empty husks of the people they once were.

And this may explain other forms of dementia. A few weeks ago PBS aired a Frontline special on concussions in football called "League of Denial." It documents the stories of numerous football players who suffered various forms of dementia after taking dozens of knocks to the head every day they play, from the age of eight or ten until they retire at 30 or 40. That results in literally thousands of minor concussions over a career. Many football players have become confused, short-tempered violent and some have even committed suicide and murder.

When the brains of these players have been examined after death, they were found riddled with the same beta amyloid plaques that affect Alzheimer's patients, though their brains looked otherwise normal. With this new understanding of how the brain normally cleans these plaques out, the exact mechanism for dementia in football players may become clearer.

When you get a concussion, your brain is slammed against the inside of your skull, essentially bruising it and rupturing capillaries, which causes swelling and inflammation. This may in turn prevent the brain cells from shrinking during sleep and interfere with the circulation of cerebrospinal fluid that should remove the beta amyloid plaques.

The NFL has downplayed the effects of concussion on football players for years, but last August they settled a lawsuit brought by 4,500 former players for $765 million dollars. And it's not just football that has this problem, we've known forever that boxing causes dementia, and hockey and rugby have the same problem.

This new science may explain why dementia occurs, but it doesn't provide any solutions for preventing concussions in the first place. No matter how much you change helmet design, the basic problem is the rapid deceleration of the brain when it hits the inside of the skull as the head collides with another player or slams into the ground.

The only real way to prevent concussions is to reduce the overall velocity of the skull, which means eliminating crushing tackles and brutal takedowns. But many football fans would say that changing the rules to minimize concussions would turn it into touch football and rip the heart out of the game. Because, though they say they love watching the skill and speed of the players on the gridiron, what they really love is the brutal hammering the players take.

As we understand the connection of minor brain trauma to dementia, the question now is how many parents will be willing to sacrifice their children's futures so that football fans can watch them get pounded into the astroturf?

Give That Man A Medal

Apparently, someone at the WWII memorial rally (see: co-opted, takeover, without permission) shouted that Sarah Palin was an idiot. That man should get a medal.

Good Words

“The legislature of the United States shall pass no law on the subject of religion.” ~Charles Pinckney, Constitutional Convention, 1787