A long day.

View 815 Tuesday, March 11, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

I have spent the day at Kaiser, and I am exhausted, but all is reasonably well. I have had my last shot in the eardrum, and now we wait weeks to determine if it all did me any good. Meanwhile I will go out to COSTCO and get my hearing aids reprogrammed to see if that helps. I was hoping to do that today, but after the ear appointment I had an eye exam, and by the time that was over I’d had enough.

New glasses coming in a week or so. Cataracts getting worse, and that’s the next thing I need to think about. At some point I’ll have to have them done. Like most people my age, I learned that cataract operations generally leave you worse off than you were when you started. That is no longer true, as witness Larry Niven and his wife and others I know and trust, but it’s still terrifying. I’ll leave that undone for a while.

I mentioned this in mail last night. Of the people previously without health insurance who now have that under the ACA, a large percentage – 30% is reported – are felons going into state prisons who are now, under ACA, eligible for Medicaid. As of not I have yet to hear from anyone who voted for ACA who knew that provision was in the Bill, so there is no one defending: it’s like a act of God or a hurricane, except that I don’t see how it got into the law without someone putting it there. Perhaps someone will step up and proudly claim credit, but so far no one has.