monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Here's a link to the article entitled "How American Politics Went Insane":

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/

It's quite a long article. I've only had time to skim through it. It looks interesting. At least that's my opinion.

Can you provide a link to this article layman?

This month alone, a Muslim woman wearing a head scarf told police in Lancashire her car was struck by a bag of vomit. Worshippers at the Omar Faruque mosque in Cambridge found strips of ham attached to their vehicles. Several Muslim families have reported receiving letters warning, “You are no longer welcome in this country.” Scores say they have been spat on.

But Fuller's piece is not "corrosive" or "hateful".

As I said, he's hardly a mainstream writer who shapes popular opinion.

I wish I could get a copy. Also for the Jesus' wife story... :-)

Health Subsidy Cuts Could Hurt the Middle Class the Most

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Jane and Abe Goren retired here five years ago to escape the higher cost of living they had abided for decades in the suburbs of New York City. They did not anticipate having to write monthly checks for health insurance that would exceed their mortgage and property taxes combined.

Ms. Goren, 62, is paying nearly $1,200 a month for coverage through the individual insurance market (her husband, 69, is on Medicare) and accumulating enough debt that her sons recently held a fund-raiser to help. For next year, her insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, has proposed raising premiums by an average of 22.9 percent, a spike it is blaming squarely on President Trump.

For months, the Trump administration has refused to say whether the federal government will keep paying billions of dollars in subsidies that lower out-of-pocket health insurance costs for nearly six million low-income customers under the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Trump’s hedging has created deep uncertainty in the individual insurance market, the impact of which may become clearer on Wednesday, the deadline for insurers to say whether they plan to sell next year on the federal marketplace created under the health law and to file rate requests.

North Carolina has more than 300,000 people benefiting from these “cost-sharing” subsidies, which reimburse insurers for absorbing the deductibles and co-payments of low-income customers. The Affordable Care Act requires that these customers’ out-of-pocket costs be lowered one way or another. If the federal government stops reimbursing insurers, many insurers have said they will make up for it by raising premiums.

Paradoxically, that will primarily hurt not poor customers but millions of middle-class people like the Gorens, who earn too much to qualify for premium assistance under the law and will bear the full brunt of any rate increase.

Across the nation, individual market customers like them are seeing signs of big premium increases, which insurers are largely attributing to the possibility of losing the federal cost-sharing subsidies and of Mr. Trump’s not enforcing the health law’s mandate that most people have coverage or pay a penalty. Mr. Trump has repeatedly pointed to such increases as signs that the markets are in “a death spiral” and to bolster support as the Republican Senate leadership rushes to vote on a bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act next week.

Maryland’s largest insurer, CareFirst, has asked to raise rates by an average of 52 percent, for example, while Virginia’s largest insurer, Anthem, has proposed an average rate increase of 34 percent.

Pennsylvania’s insurance commissioner said rates would rise by 8.8 percent next year if the cost payments continue; if Mr. Trump ends them, rates will soar by 36.3 percent. While some insurers and state regulators have discussed limiting the sharpest increases to plans for people who receive premium subsidies — allowing unsubsidized customers to get lower rates outside the marketplaces — it remains to be seen how widespread such actions would be.

Some insurers are pulling out of the marketplaces completely: Several dozen counties in Ohio, Missouri and Washington State have no insurers signed up for next year.

In North Carolina, Blue Cross and Blue Shield said it would have sought an 8.8 percent average increase, instead of 22.9 percent, if not for the uncertainty.

Several Muslim families have reported receiving letters warning, “You are no longer welcome in this country.”

But, one way or another, the hand which was offered in friendship to Islamic migrants in Europe, has been bitten off.

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a muslim.”

Quote:

But, one way or another, the hand which was offered in friendship to Islamic migrants in Europe, has been bitten off.

Yeah, Gunga. If it wasn't so long a phrase, I might just starting referring to muslims as "the thing that wouldn't leave." They've overstayed their welcome, sho nuff.

Mark Twain wrote:

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a muslim.”

“Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself."

When Russia is ready to war with them again, I hope England and France will not find it good breeding or good judgment to interfere. …And how they will pay for it when Russia turns her guns upon them again! It is soothing to the heart to abuse England and France for interposing to save the Ottoman Empire from the destruction it has so richly deserved for a thousand years' …”

Five thousand Christians were massacred in Damascus in 1861 by the Turks. They say those narrow streets ran blood for several days, and that men, women and children were butchered indiscriminately and left to rot by hundreds all through the Christian quarter; they say, further, that the stench was dreadful. All the Christians who could get away fled from the city, and the Mohammedans would not defile their hands by burying the ‘infidel dogs.’ The thirst for blood extended to the high lands of Hermon and Anti-Lebanon, and in a short time twenty-five thousand more Christians were massacred and their possessions laid waste.

I have never disliked a Chinaman as I do these degraded Turks and Arabs. A Syrian village is the sorriest sight in the world, and its surroundings are eminently in keeping with it... Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently - the eternal “bucksheesh.” [begging for handouts]... they were infested with vermin, and the dirt had caked on them till it amounted to bark. The plows these people use are simply a sharpened stick, such as Abraham plowed with...They never invent anything, never learn anything.

Mark Twain’s evaluation of the backwardness of Muslim lands would be too candid for many sensitive ears today. The onus of political correctness nowadays stifles honest observation and truthful judgment regarding low-classed people. It is now the custom to deny inferiority by using euphemistic, white-washed language that speaks of depraved savages as being merely deprived.