The National Health

When Bernie Sanders says he thinks we need a revolution in politics in this country and then says the United States should define health care as a right not a privilege, he really is talking about a revolution in values.

When you hear any politician, any Congressman, Senator say the United States has the best health care system in the world, the envy of the world, with foreign doctors coming here to learn the most advanced techniques, you know one thing for sure: That politician hasn't the faintest idea of what he or she is talking about.

Yes, foreign doctors come here to train, from Pakistan or India or third world countries, but we send plenty of American doctors to Europe to work with and learn from English, French and German doctors. CT scans were developed in England, laporoscopic surgery was pioneered in Europe. And most Europeans will say the United States may have the best medicine for the richest 10% but for 90% of Americans, medical care is far inferior to European and particularly Scandinavian health care.

When Bernie Sanders says every other industrialized nation offers universal health care and asks what is wrong with America for not being willing to do this, he is suggesting we ought to have a radically different set of values than what we have had in the past.

I really don't know whether you get better care in England or France or Germany vs the United States, but I do know when I watch "Prime Minister's Questions" from Parliament in London, at least 25% of all questions relate to complaints about health care, about a clinic which hasn't been built or refurbished. 
Clearly, the reason so many Senators and Congressmen don't want an expanded government role in medical care is they know that would put them in the position of having to answer constituents' health care complaints, and they already get enough phone calls about Medicare and Social Security--Health care is one more responsibility they do not want anything to do with. 

Not my job! 

Congressmen right now have lots of things on their plates: constituent services, fundraising, committee meetings, dialing for dollars, political meetings, fundraising, trips home to the district every week, dialing for dollars--the last thing they want is the nightmare specter of actually having to solve real problems for real people, like how to get Mrs. Jones the CT scan her doctor says she needs but the federal health care system denies.

Reading about healthcare systems in other countries, it's clear they have faced all the same problems we have faced when it comes to providing services for which there is greater demand than capacity to provide.  Just as we have found in the USA, when access to healthcare has been freely provided the service providers are quickly overwhelmed by demand so in France and Germany, steps had to be taken to reduce access.  

Just as the public abuses the 911 emergency call in number, calling for a ride to the hospital for a routine clinic visit, calling an emergency number for non emergency reasons, the public, given access for free, will always abuse and drive a service into uselessness. 
For years, patients have had free access to their physicians on the weekend for "emergencies," and they have abused this service by calling for prescriptions they hadn't bothered about during the week,  because they knew they could always call the on call physician on the weekend, or patients who haven't been seen for a year calling to have their blood pressure medications renewed at night, after office hours, or patients calling demanding antibiotics for what they insist is a sinus infection, because they don't want to pay the co pay and take time off work to see the doctor during office hours.  

So, the public can drive providers into defense mode. Charge $5 for the after hours phone call and you cut down on that emergency need for the prescription by 80%. Suddenly, not so much of an emergency.

The French have explicitly decided that health care ought to be offered free to all citizens, to all human beings who seek care within their borders, and they have decided doctors' first responsibility is to the patient, not to the government or the health care system, but this has caused them to face the results of this generosity--systems which are quickly overwhelmed and the money runs out.

In Germany, the average citizen can expect to pay 10% of his annual income on a health care assessment tax--how many people in the USA making $200,000 would be willing to pay $20,000 for their health insurance, even if drugs are included? 

Americans will vote for an aircraft carrier with a smile, but they howl bloody murder about their Medicare taxes. 

France has faced the same problems distribution of physicians we have in the US-- getting doctors to live and practice in rural areas, which are typically economically depressed and not at all where people who have been trained in big city hospitals want to live. So, as in the US, the French have found rural hospitals closing, and a deficit of doctors in less desirable towns and communities.  

As doctors' salaries have fallen into the $80,000 range, the medical workforce has changed to 2/3 female physicians, who are often the second salary in their family and who refuse to work long hours or to be on call who say they have more important responsibilities at home with their children.

Both France and Germany have had to deal with poor people and the unemployed, whose healthcare cannot be supplemented by employers, and have had to level taxes upon the well insured workers who have both government and private insurance and who are taxed to support those with only bare bones government insurance.

In England, France and Germany, health care facilities are often operating in the red and special efforts have to be made to shore up these public institutions.

So, when Bernie speaks in dulcet tones about the wonders of universal health care elsewhere in the world, he does not dwell on the problems in those systems. 

By many objective measures, these countries succeed in providing more care than we do, but they pay more for it. They have decided to spend money on health care. They do not have our defense budget. They may economize in other areas. But even if health care is a right, it is definitely not for free.

Flint and the House Oversight Committee: Republicans Rampage in Alternate Reality

"Oh, you should resign."

Definition of chutzpah:  The man who murders his parents and asks the judge for mercy, on the grounds that he is now an orphan.

Mark Twain:  "Consider a pack of jackasses. Now consider the United States Congress. But then, I repeat myself."

If  they say he should resign, we say you should resign

Yesterday the House Committee on Oversight (what a name!) had before it the governor of Michigan, a Republican who likely  ignored the lead in Flint water, and who many Democrats have called upon to resign.  Republican members of the committe, not to be outdone, demanded a Democrat from the EPA testify, so they could point accusatory fingers at her and demand that she resign!

This is one of those moments when you'd like to see a little Donald Trump in some Obama appointed official. What you would have give to have seen that EPA Democrat simply junk that stupid deferential tone government officials adopt when testifying before Congressional committes, that pseudo tone of respect and civility. Who needs civility when you are dealing with barbarians?

Here's the script I'd have written for her teleprompter:

Just once, say what is really happening

"Mr. Chaffetz, you accuse the EPA of having failed to protect the citizens of Flint, which is the height of irony in that you and your Republican colleagues and candidates at every opportunity have  called for the abolition of the Environmental Protect Agency,  which you consider anti-business, and you and your Republican colleagues have attempted to eviscerate the EPA, have limited its authority, have defunded it. Disband the EPA: This is the hymn every Republican from mayor to Senator has sung in unison.

 And now we have a perfect example of how important the EPA is, or could be, you howl with indignation the EPA:  the very agency you so revile,  did not save a Republican governor and his administration from itself, from the very policies and philosophy which drives your hatred of the EPA.  

You have day in and day out complained that protecting the environment is a waste of  money and no Republican wants to spend money to protect the environment, or the people whose lives depend on it, especially if it benefits poor people or people of color.

So now you have been caught aiding and abetting the poisoning of the well, and you complain that the EPA didn't do a better job protecting the citizens of Flint from your own policies. 

Where were the police, where was the security after I did my best to remove them? 

Where do I begin with such hypocrisy? How do I answer such absurdity?

At long last, sir, have you no respect for truth, no respect at all?"

Or words to that effect.
Wouldn't that have been just so gratifying?

Much as I love President Obama and his people, they just are too reserved for the current tempestuous times; they simply wimp out and quake when attacked. That's the one thing missing. 

I cannot imagine Mr. Trump accepting the vitriol spewing out from the Republicans across the hearing room floor.
I cannot imagine Mr. Obama or any of his kith and ken speaking like this.
That is disappointing. 
If only.

Trump is Not a Problem

Okay, here's Mad Dog's forecast:  Donald Trump will not become President. 
In fact, he will not get the nomination. 

He will  simply lose interest.

For the Donald, running for President has been like opening presents on Christmas day for the average four year old: The real fun was in the wrapping and once he's got that off, playing with the boxes the toys came in, but the actual stuff inside, not so much fun.

My over riding read on the man is he is really just doing this because he enjoys the attention, but he really does not want to be President.  
He may not have realized this yet, but sooner or later he'll sit down and watch a few episodes of "West Wing" and he'll realize he really is not interested in the actual problems of governing.

He'll arrive at the convention and he'll look for a way not to win which will be maximally dramatic and the most fun. 

Then he'll go home and throw a party for himself, maybe on some roof tops in New Jersey.

He could, of course, storm out and run as a third party candidate, saying the Republican Party done him wrong, but on some level he'll be relieved he doesn't have to take the job and he can play the Sarah Palin card, and simply grab the limelight whenever he wants it because as a potential future candidate, people will still be interested in him.

That will mean he can continue to be as outrageous as he pleases and 40% of the American public will continue to love him, which would never happen once he actually became President, because as soon as you become President you will start disappointing people.

So that's Mad Dog's take, and he's sticking to it. 
No Trump.

That's the good news.

The bad news is we may well have to deal with President Cruz.  

Dirty Secrets: Corruption and the American Way

When Bernie Sanders rails about our "rigged" economy,something deep inside me  resonates with that, likely for reasons Bernie cannot know, except in the general sense, but from the specifics of my experience, a rage wells up. He has tapped into that.

The best Congress money can buy

When I ran a small business (a solo practice of medicine) I tried to buy health insurance for my secretary.  This was an eye opener into the deep seated corruption/perversions pervasive in the American way of doing business, a corruption abetted by the government agencies we would expect to restrain misbehavior.  

As we tried to choose among the different health insurance companies (back in the early 1990's) we tried to be intelligent consumers, and we read through the thick directories of participating physicians and saw her doctors listed in Blue Cross Blue Shield of the National Capital area,  and we thought, great, she can keep her doctors if we go with this plan. 
But then we phoned the doctors' offices listed, and one by one it turned out her physicians no longer participated;many had stopped accepting this company's insurance years before.  So we went on to the next company and then to the next: same story with each.  

"This is false advertising!" my secretary said. "They tell you if you buy this insurance you get this benefit, care from Dr. X or Y or Z but you do not. You actually have only three or four choices and none of them are doctors I'd want to see on a dare."  
When I phoned the insurance companies they said, well, those doctors once did participate but have stopped and the companies said they  simply hadn't had a chance to update their catalogs of participating physicians. No chance, you understand over the past 10 years.  They did not update their catalogs every year because it was too expensive, they said. But clearly, when they did, they never bothered to delete physicians no longer on their "plan;" they only added names.

It isn't your father's healthcare any more

It was institutionalized bait and switch.  Every health insurance company in the Washington, DC area published bogus catalogs of participating physicians which listed every doctor who had ever had a contract with those companies, even though those doctors had bailed out years before. Every company, in effect, was claiming it offered you wide choices while in fact offering only very narrow choices.

So I called the department of Health and Human Services to protest this was a form of deception and all the companies seemed guilty of it and I was bounced around various agencies and none of the government employees wanted to hear about it. It was like talking to cops who didn't want to take the rape report because it was just so much paper work for them.

Only one thought counts

Corruption is not new

Another instance:  Examining my 20 page office phone bill I discovered a $15 monthly charge from a company I did not recognize. Calling the number provided, it turned out to be a company which was charging me for internet services to the office, and this fee  was part of my phone bill. 
Trouble was, we did not have internet services in those days and I had never purchased this, never authorized it. 
Calling the company collecting the charges they claimed my secretary "Donna" had approved of the contract.  Donna, of course denied every having talked to them and said she would never approve such a thing and would have put that on my desk. "Oh, but we have a recording!" the company man said and he played back a recording, obviously doctored,  in which you hear Donna's voice saying, "Donna," and then the company man asking if she wants to approve this contract and then you hear Donna's voice, shopped in, saying, "Yes." Of course, what they had done was to call the office and ask who they were speaking to, and recorded that and then some other "yes" and there you had it.

So I called the FCC and a variety of government agencies and they said that the phone company was powerless to remove the charge from my phone bill and there nothing anyone could do about this case of fraud. In effect, the government, the phone company, a utility, were complicit in the scam. They knew this company was engaging in theft but wanted nothing to do with the complaint. 


More recently, I confronted  a more complicated but no less noxious example of how the rich bilk the poor and good people just stand by and let it happen.

I sent a patient to Walmart with a prescription for insulin. There are only 2 companies who make insulin: Lilly and Novo. Walmart has done a huge service to the nation by buying insulin, pasting the Walmart label on the bottles and selling the insulin deeply discounted.
  But recently, Walmart switched from buying from Lilly to buying from Novo. When you write a prescription with your electronic medical record program you cannot order insulin as just "insulin." You have to order it by the brand name, Lilly insulin called "Humulin" or Novo insulin, called "Novolin." 
It's as if you send your kid to the grocery to buy milk and he calls back and says, "They won't sell me milk. They insist I pick Hood Milk or Stoneyfield milk."  
"And you say, 'Any milk will do.' And the clerk at the register says, "You have to choose a brand."
For some years I had written "Humulin" because I knew that's the brand Walmart sold. But I forget Walmart has switched to Novolin recently, and write for Humulin and when the patient arrives at Walmart, she is handed her two bottles of insulin and she has her precious $50 in her hand, but she is handed a bill for $300, which is about half of her monthly rent. 

The fox is very clever and knows many things

I get a frantic phone call from the patient . I call the pharmacist and the pharmacist says, "Well, you ordered Humulin."
 I say, "But until today that was $25 dollars a bottle." 
"Well," the pharmacist says. "We switched to Novolin, and you didn't write for that."
"So you couldn't just give her the Walmart insulin you knew I wanted and she wants?"
"Not if you wrote for Humulin."
"And you know they are exactly the same insulin, just made by different companies. It's like Market Basket milk vs Hannaford's milk."
"They are not designated bio-identical by the FDA. We have to follow FDA rules."

So I phone the FDA and I'm told:
1/ In the first place:
The FDA has not determined the two are "bio-equivalent" or "bio-identical" whatever that means.  The FDA spokesman would not comment on my assertion there's not a whiff of difference between the NPH insulin made by each company.
 Insulins do differ by "type" depending on how fast the insulin works, how fast it dissipates: R insulin starts working quickly and disappears quickly; NPH starts slowly and hangs around all day. But both Lilly and Novo make NPH and R and they are exactly the same.  You can use a 1/4" wrench and whether it was made by Sears or Home Depot, it works the same.


2. In the second place, the FDA lady tells me: 
"The state of Massachusetts writes the applicable laws which prevent the pharmacist from substituting,  so stop phoning the FDA to complain. This is a state issue."
"But the pharmacist told me it was an FDA rule."
 "Well, the pharmacist was wrong. Everybody blames the federal government for everything."

Tea party Republicans in charge: You're on your own

"This is what makes people angry about government," I told the FDA lady.
"Well, I can't help that," she said. "Anyway, it's the companies who make the insulin."
"And it's the companies who make the rules, apparently," I said. "And the FDA hasn't stopped the states from screwing things up."

A hedgehog

So Bernie Sanders is on to something when he talks about how what is "legal" in America is all too often,  immoral.
 It used to be legal to refuse to serve a Black person who walks into your restaurant or who tries to sit at your soda fountain. 
It used to be legal to own another human being.  
Those laws never made it right.

She fights alone

Did the cream rise to the top or was the game rigged?

Elizabeth Warren has tried to make an issue about what is done to "consumers" daily by big corporations but she cannot change things from the Senate. And she cannot change things alone.

The image of the executive offices at Lilly and Novo, lined in mahogany, occupied by men in thousand dollar suits, who have second homes in Hilton Head or wherever, who live lives of luxury, while my patient stands at the counter at Walmart, clutching her $50, which is a lot of money to her, and suddenly, she is faced with a bill for 6 times that amount, which is half a month's rent, because of some "rule" which was made to protect the profits of drug company executives, just makes my blood boil.

Big guys sucking the blood from the little guys, draining them pale.

Doesn't bother me to see our country go from white to brown. Doesn't bother me to hear a cacophony of languages around me at the mall or on the street. Diversity is just fine with me. Makes us stronger.

What bothers the hell out of me to see people who were born poor and who stayed poor but who worked hard and did the best they could to be treated this way by rich people.

Pretty clear who the cops work for and who the law does not protect

These are just three instances in which corporations injure the little guy and the government stands by like cops watching protesters beaten to a pulp by thugs.


You just want to say, "At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency. Have you no sense of decency at all?"

The hedgehog knows only one thing, but he knows it very well

Demographics are Destiny in New Hampshire

Plaice Cove

Tomorrow, I will participate in that peculiar  New Hampshire rite called the "warrant vote," which involves walking into Winnacunett High School, where an election worker will hand me a paper package no thicker than the Encyclopedia Brittanica and I will get to vote on whether or not Mrs. Lamprey should be allowed to plant mums on the other side of the sidewalk in front of her house, which is actually town land. 

In the Live Free of Die state I seem to have more say over my neighbors than I ever had in the anonymous environs of Montgomery County, Maryland, where none of my neighbors seemed to care what I planted or where and where my neighbor demolished his house and erected a McMansion which towered over my house and cast it into shadow over mine and I never got to vote on that.

New Hampshire's demographics tell a lot about what ails the state. There are 1.3 million people living in the state.  It's population is the 2nd oldest in the nation and its rate of aging is tops.  Of that 1.3 million people over 500,000 are over 50.  Many of these people are making less money than they did 5 years ago.

A State Rep Who Knows What Good Is

In Montgomery County, Maryland, there was one school district. In New Hampshire there are 289.  In Montgomery County a single police force policed the 1 million inhabitants. In New Hampshire, Rye, Hampton, North Hampton, Stratham, Exeter each has its own police force. Towns so small you hardly know you have driven through them have their own police and fire departments. 

There are 54,000 people between 15 and 17 in New Hampshire. There are 110,00 people between the age 50-54 and 95,000 between ages 55-59. 

Which is to say, there are a lot more folks around or approaching retirement than there are high school age kids in the state. People over 65 are 150,000 which is roughly three times the number of high school age kids.

Where there's art, there's hope

The wonder is that high school kids get any money at all in New Hampshire, and yet New Hampshire spends $15,283 on each student while Montgomery County spends $15,421, which does not sound like much of a difference, but that places Montgomery County 3rd in spending behind only New York City and Baltimore. What all this means is the dollar amount spent in New Hampshire is not all that different from other municipalities around the country, but the resources available to a kid at Winnacunet or Exeter cannot compare to what kids at Montgomery County schools have. Which is to say, the money somehow seems to buy more outside New Hampshire.

The hedgehog knows one thing, but he knows it very well

The public high school down the street from me in Montgomery County was built 50 years ago, then demolished and rebuilt 25 years later. Nobody bothered to ask the taxpayers; the county has a schedule for infrastructure.   Now there is a warrant article about refurbishing the middle school in Hampton and the town gets a vote.

The high school in Montgomery County has courses in music theory, a jazz band, an orchestra, a wind ensemble, a marching band and a music program which might match up with Julliard in ambition if not realization.  There are advance placement courses taught by recruits from the Bronx High School of Science faculty and 97% of graduates go to college.

When my son went there,  roughly a third of the teachers were uninspiring and just waiting for retirement, a third were stars and the rest somewhere in between. The curriculum was increasingly directed and delivered from the central planning and curriculum office in the County.  It was by no means a perfect  school system, more competition than cognition, but it was a system which delivered a lot more for the buck than we see here locally in New Hampshire, likely because sometimes economies of scale work, but mostly because the demographics of the county are much younger and the citizens fully committed to the idea of bragging about what great schools they have.  It is true ads for real estate feature the phrase, "Whitman School District" or "Churchill School District." 

I am not sure why New Hampshire prefers to atomize government. Does having a local police department, fire department and high school actually improve quality or does it mean that local selectmen or school board members can distribute favors with more discretion?

I do know that even in a senescent state, still, one of the most important things going on is the care and feeding and education of its young. I suspect local government with local control is not always better. Sometimes, it means local parochialism can be enforced to the detriment of kids who have to go out and compete in a more global world. 

In the South, local control wasn't such a good thing.

Spotlight

Thomas McCarthy in "The Wire"

Keeping the line between fiction and non fiction clean is hard to do in the 21st century of electronic reality. 

When Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood, he claimed he had developed a new genre, the non fiction novel, using the "techniques" of the novelist in reporting a real story. Of course, he did nothing of the sort; he simply interjected himself into the story of the murder of the Clutter family in their Kansas farmhouse.  He did not, as far as I know, actually change or fictionalize what happened, nor even construct imaginary scenes. He simply spent enough time with the murderers to get their side of the story in a way which allowed for more details to emerge than one ordinarily gets from murderers. 

Emerging from this came two astonishing films: "Capote" and "Infamous," both realized oddly at almost the same time, decades after Capote wrote his book. Both are well worth seeing. 

In "The Wire," David Simon and Ed Burns fictionalized true stories and circumstances as they knew those stories through long years of seeing these events  unfold, for Simon as a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun and for Burns as a street cop and detective.  Watching "The Wire," you knew the characters were fictional, but you also knew they were real, amalgams of real people Simon and Burns had known, their language, the rhythms of speech, the humor, the settings all conveyed a truth which non fiction can never approach, when you are trying to get details right rather than the stuff which you know has to be happening underneath, which is what fiction can reach. Movies which depict real events and real people cannot go to motivation the way non fiction can.  Capote, in the end, could never really understand the murderers he got to know, because he never knew them the way Simon and Burns did.

Arguably the most detestable character in all five seasons of "The Wire" was not a drug dealer or a street thug or even one of the derelict mothers, but a white reporter for The Sun, who was detestable because he chose to be morally bankrupt, where most of the other stained souls drifting through "The Wire" were reacting to the very poor hand they had been dealt. The character of the reporter was played so well by Thomas McCarthy, just looking at him, at his naked ambition and his cowardice and his emptiness, you came to loathe him.

Oddly enough, it is Thomas McCarthy who wrote and directed "Spotlight."  Maybe not so oddly. Maybe he learned something from David Simon and all the folks, the refugees from The Sun who populated the cast of the 5th season.

"Spotlight" is extraordinary in its verisimilitude. You quickly stop thinking of the actors on screen as anything but the actual reporters. It's so much more gripping than "All the President's Men" with Redford and Hoffman.  In that Watergate film, the editor presiding over the mission is Ben Bradlee. In "Spotlight" it's the editor's son, Ben Bradlee, Jr., but the real conflict belongs to the editor who runs the Spotlight project, who has missed the signs of the infection 20 years earlier and now has to face his own culpability. 

The most extraordinary  moment in this extraordinary film comes at the front door of a priest's home, when Sacha Pfeiffer interviews a priest who admits he abused young boys, but he explains earnestly, trying to make her understand, it wasn't so bad because he found no pleasure in it and it wasn't rape and he should know the difference, because he had been raped himself, presumably by a priest, when he was young, so he is not so terrible and in fact, should be pitied, not condemned. 

Shacha Pfeiffer

I've heard Sacha Pfeiffer interviewed about that moment and she said that was the epiphany for her, when she understood just how sick these priests, and there were 249 of them in Boston, really were. 

Of course, "Spotlight" is not "The Wire."  In "Spotlight" you never actually see the priests--apart from that one at the front door, and apart from Cardinal Law, who protected them.  You never understand what made them so depraved. In "The Wire" you see life from the point of view of the street thugs, the murderers, the drug lords and the hoppers and their actions make perfect sense.  "Spotlight" does not attempt to explain what made the priests the way they are, other than by clinical testimony about the prevalence of their disease, the "what" of the disorder, not the "why."

The art of the Spotlight movie makers allowed making something engrossing out of  the sheer drudgery of compiling evidence, getting lists of victims, documenting and confirming their stories, identifying the hundreds of priests who fondled, engaged in fellatio, preyed on young boys from poor, damaged homes.

They also managed to get across the points that:  1. The rule for celibacy was the necessary if not sufficient condition for this phenomenon. By mandating priests be celibate, the church in Rome virtually created a magnet for men who had significant pathologies connected to their own sexuality.  And, of course, the attitude of the church toward sexuality-- that it is God's intent that sex be for procreation, not for pleasure--has cemented the mold which churns out perversity.  2. Throughout the United States and worldwide, priests either simply find willing adult women (about 50% do this) or prey on children, mainly boys (about 6% do this.) They choose boys, not always  because they are homosexuals, but because boys are less likely to talk. 

It is a wrenching, exhilarating film, full of anger and pathos. But it is more than Best Picture. It is an important social document, an important truth, about the Church, the relationship of the church to the legal system, the role of a free press and the virtues of a motivated group of reporters. It is a document about how dogma and practice can debase an institution which purports to embody the Holy Spirit. If ever there were an argument that it is hubris for any human being or any work of human beings to be the vessel for the Word of God, this is it. People are simply too human, too weak to be the container for the Word of God.

One of the most affecting scenes occurs when one of the reporters in the Spotlight organization (and they were all raised Catholic, if not currently practicing) says he had stopped going to church, but when he was a child, he actually liked going to church and somewhere in the back of his mind, he always thought he just might return to the church.  But now, seeing what the church has become, this lapsed Catholic really has lost his faith, and it makes him sad. 

Of course, there is the statement that the church is composed of fallible human beings but nothing they do on earth can change the sanctity of the faith.  As a priest tells his congregation: "There are facts in this internet age, but does that threaten my job security? No, not really. Because there are facts and there is faith."

Of course, the irony of this film is the facts as they are revealed destroys faith, at least faith in the church, if not in the Holy Spirit.

Spotlight Crew/Cast

One of the nicest touches is the arrival of a new publisher, who is not from Boston, not Catholic--Jewish in fact.  His arrival is set up, not just in this film but in all the films about the news business from "Newsroom" to "The Wire" in which the guys at the top are always sleazy and concerned about the bottom line and not threatening the relationships which protect profit. 
This new guy holds his cards close to his vest, but when it comes right down to it, he insists on not just getting the priests but exposing the system which protects them, on going after the head of the snake. He is the outsider who comes to town to clean up a mess which were fetid and allowed to fester because everyone in town looked the other way.

 And it is this man, who saw immediately the connections,  who ultimately tells the Spotlight editor who missed the story for 20 years, "We are all of us, most of the time, stumbling around in the dark. But eventually, something shines a light on the truth and you guys did some very fine work here."

Hillary Wins in the Deep South: Is that a Problem?

Must be I'm behind in my reading of Politico, Salon and Reddit Progressive, but am I the only one to notice that while Hillary piles up delegates to the nominating convention by winning in South Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana, Bernie keeps winning in places like Kansas.?

What I am asking is: Is this not a problem for Democrats in November? 

There is no way Hillary Clinton will win any of the Southern states she has won in the primaries this  November. What she has proven is she has great loyalty from oppressed, ignored and politically powerless and politically irrelevant Blacks in the deep South. It's nice she has the loyalty of the disenfranchised, but they cannot put her in the White House, not this election, not while the Electoral College winner take all system is in place. It was put in place for this very reason, after all, to be sure this nation does not have too much democracy and elites in power locally can manipulate the outcome of elections to their pleasing.

You will say, well, Bernie has no more chance of winning Kansas than Hillary has of winning South Carolina, but somehow the fact he has appeal in places like Kansas suggests his appeal is broader than hers. You know the group she appeals to, and it's less than 12% of the population, at least in the South, where she is currently winning.  But Bernie is appealing to some other groups, presumably white, rural and who knows who they are?

I don't know what that means. As we say in New Hampshire. I'm just saying.