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Archive of Articles in the "Health Care" Category

Friday Talking Points [365] -- Chaos Reigns!

[ Posted Friday, October 9th, 2015 – 17:19 UTC ]

Two weeks ago, we wrote one of these columns and snarkily subtitled it: "New Job Vacancy: Chief GOP Cat-Herder." This week, we really should have gone with: "Babysitting Experience STRONGLY PREFERRED," but Salon had already used it (we'll explain that joke in a bit, promise). Instead, we chose to feature the word which appeared in too many headlines to accurately count over the past two days, because describing what is going on in the Republican Party these days is pretty downright hard to do without using the word "chaos" in some fashion or another.

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Friday Talking Points [363] -- New Job Vacancy: Chief GOP Cat-Herder

[ Posted Friday, September 25th, 2015 – 15:03 UTC ]

Every so often, when preparing to write these weekly wrap-up columns, I wake up Friday morning and a political bombshell has happened which pretty much wipes out all the political news from the entire rest of the week. Obviously, today was one of those days, as we all learned this morning that Speaker of the House John Boehner will be a private citizen again by Hallowe'en. He'll step down not only from his speakership, but also from his House seat itself, more than a year before the end of his current term. So it looks like the Republicans are going to need a new cat-herder to (attempt to) lead them in the House.

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Friday Talking Points [362] -- Beyond The Debate Stage

[ Posted Friday, September 18th, 2015 – 17:27 UTC ]

This was one of those weeks when one event overshadowed pretty much everything else that was going on in the political world. The event, of course, was the second round of Republican presidential debates, which lasted for a grueling five-plus hours.

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Friday Talking Points [357] -- The Rehabilitation Of Golf In The GOP

[ Posted Friday, August 14th, 2015 – 18:07 UTC ]

We're going to begin today with a wrapup of the week that was in the presidential campaigns, and as befitting his status as the Republican frontrunner, we're going to start with Donald Trump (if you're sick of hearing about Trump, just skip down eight or ten paragraphs and continue reading).

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Marijuana Legalization Fight In Ohio

[ Posted Thursday, August 13th, 2015 – 17:22 UTC ]

Legalizing both medicinal and recreational marijuana will be on the ballot in Ohio this November. But this news is actually dividing marijuana activists once again, which might have some political repercussions for the entire movement. Because of the way the proposed law was drafted, it would create an official oligopoly of only ten growers for the entire state. Ohio has over 11 million people, so each official farm would serve the needs of over one million people. That's pretty unbalanced, to put it mildly, since the other 75,000 farmers in the state would be out in the cold.

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Friday Talking Points [356] -- GOP Debates, Round One

[ Posted Friday, August 7th, 2015 – 17:10 UTC ]

Well, that was entertaining, wasn't it? We refer, of course, to the grand spectacle of the first Republican presidential debates, held last night on Fox News. Since this is all anyone's talking about in the political world today, we are going to follow suit and devote most of this column (with the exception of the awards) to our reactions to seeing all the Republican candidates under one roof for the first time.

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Speed-Dating The Republican Candidates

[ Posted Monday, August 3rd, 2015 – 20:55 UTC ]

I just finished watching the first "candidates' forum" (don't call it a debate!) of the season, where 14 of the 17 Republicans running for president all appeared on the same stage in New Hampshire. The "one person on the stage at a time" format was an odd one, meant to get around the Republican National Committee's strict rules on how many debates they're going to tolerate this time around (it seems the more the public hears Republicans debate, the more it harms the Republican candidates).

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Happy Birthday, Medicare (Or: How Wrong Reagan Was)

[ Posted Thursday, July 30th, 2015 – 16:48 UTC ]

Medicare turned 50 years old today. Only 15 more years, and it'll be eligible for itself!

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Friday Talking Points [354] -- Following The Trump Whirlwind

[ Posted Friday, July 24th, 2015 – 16:57 UTC ]

Two weeks ago, we kind of went out on a limb (the polling evidence was not all that clear when we wrote it) and subtitled our previous column: "Donald Trump, Frontrunner." Since that time, such a statement has gone from being a wild prediction to becoming an equally-wild reality. The first Republican presidential debate is happening in less than two weeks, and Donald Trump is not only guaranteed one of the ten slots, he will quite likely be at the center of the stage, since his poll numbers currently dwarf all the other GOP contenders.

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Candidate Speech Series: Bernie Sanders

[ Posted Friday, July 17th, 2015 – 15:39 UTC ]

Today, we stand here and say loudly and clearly that: "Enough is enough. This great nation and its government belong to all of the people, and not to a handful of billionaires, their Super-PACs and their lobbyists."

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