Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Campaign 2016

And I wanted to take this opportunity to thank EVERYONE at Capitol Hill Blue.
I don't know where to post this so anywhere will do.
It is BECAUSE OF Capitol Hill Blue's members that my wife, Karen Mitchell Haas, has finally become intensely politically aware and awake.

Truth be told it began about two or three years ago but today it is in full flower.
When we first got together my political involvement annoyed her so much that I actually worried that it might split us up. She even told me that even though she loved me deeply and found me fun to be with, my political rantings drove her crazy.

Well, I am proud to say she is now INFECTED.
She hardly ever types...MS is something that has messed up her hands so when she does type it's with one finger but she reads EVERYTHING, and she is now an avid reader of CHB and has been for a while now.

Don't be surprised if she decides to join someday.

What did I do? ,

And I bet she loves the ACA provision about insurance companies having to take everybody! I sure do. It came along just in time for me. Without it I would be uninsured and looking at $1000000 medical bills for all those MRIs and muscle tests.

When Republicans talk about killing Obamacare it is a matter of life and death for me.

Actually Congress screwed Karen and her fellow veterans anyway.
The ACA says that parents are allowed to keep their kids on their policy till age 26, right?
Karen, as a 100 percent disabled service connected veteran, was allowed to keep Daryl and Brianne on her VA coverage, using CHAMPVA, till they were eighteen.

Then when the ACA passed we were first told they would be allowed to stay till 26 but Congress "forgot" to pay attention to the loophole, thus the VA is actually NOT IN COMPLIANCE with the ACA because the ONE GROUP - - 100 percent disabled service connected veterans, STILL lose coverage for their kids at age eighteen, so we had to buy outside coverage for both kids instead of keeping them on the CHAMPVA plan.

The loophole was brought up in Congress in 2010 and we were promised they would fix the loophole but of course Republicans filibustered and the motion got tabled, and never revisited again.

Brianne is relatively healthy, but Daryl is a "million dollar kid" who would have perished in infancy had it not been for the Clinton efforts at passing the S-Chip program in the 1990's, so Daryl must thank President Clinton for saving his life.

Karen's exposure to spent nuke sub fuel and other radioactive compounds stored at the defunct Naval Radiological Laboratory in Hunter's Point is the cause of Daryl's five major heart defects, which closely mimic "Chernobyl Heart Syndrome", found in parents of children who were living in close proximity to the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986.

In essence, Karen is not only an MS patient, she's also an "atomic sailor" much like the old soldiers who got accidentally dosed during the early nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site or at the H-bomb tests at Bikini Atoll.

We are currently gathering all the names of all sailors and civilian contractors who worked or served at Hunters Point in the last forty years in an effort to launch a class action lawsuit.

I'm guessing that the Republicans will, sooner or later, take a shot across the bow at Veteran's Benefits in a BIG way, and attempt to cut benefits and privatize medical services.
A nice fat class action lawsuit might help defray the loss of both, the way I figure it but I am aware of the fact that these things take time, which is why we started our project back in 2008.

What I gather from your own personal experience, Jeff, is that Republicans love the military when they are warriors taking other country's resources, but don't like them once they come home, treat them differently, and rather could care less about them.

Shameful!

Yeah, no kidding!

And it is hard for me to comprehend how ALL the folks at the Dallas VA can be SO wonderful, because either all of them are liberals, or they are the few remaining GOOD conservatives still living in Texas.

We're really proud of the terrific job that the LONG BEACH VA is doing but I am on record as also praising the Dallas VA for being instrumental in helping Karen in the very beginning and all through our ten years living in Texas.

You'd think that, being in a red state, the Dallas VA would be horrible...the Memphis VA certainly was a horror story! But Dallas stands out as one of the GOOD things about Texas and we still owe them big time for helping Karen.

I have heard nothing but praise for VA Hospitals, in every state. BTW those are federal employees, so I don't think the state matters much. (I'm prejudiced: I met my wife when we were both working in research at the VAH in San Diego.) It can take a while to be accepted, but once you are in the care is very good.

I also have to say: Your wife's exposure at Hunter's Point may have been accidental, but all those sailors off Bikini and soldiers in New Mexico were exposed on purpose. The government wanted to know exactly what would happen to troop effectiveness in the event nuclear weapons were used on the battlefield.

We did a lot of very stupid things back then, mostly because we didn't know any better. Of course, they used to sell Radium Water as a cure-all too!

Why Democrats Should Beware Sanders’ Socialism

Very worth reading, if you think Sanders is the solution.

We are suffering from Republicans redefinition of everything progressive and Liberal as Socialist, but there is a huge difference.

I found the article to be a muddle of theoretical/philosophical musings intermixed mixed with fairly rigid Big S and Big L word definitions sprinkled with a few speculative anecdotal "for instances".

For instance, the proposed tax on financial transactions being a probable depressant on "investing" - for one thing, unlike Mr. Trump, Sanders does not have the superpower to create laws unilaterally that will fix everything, and what are now his rather generically detailed proposals would have to be worked out in the sausage-making process, resulting, in a perfect world, of better crafted legislation.

In the real world, nothing will happen because of the sausage-making process, but at least we would be shifting a bit of our collective consciousness to the fact that much of what happens on Wall Street, that is now naively accepted under the rubric of "investing", might become better understood to be what it really is - a substantially rigged gambling game - harmful to a healthy and productive economy.

Sanders will get virtually none of his grand Socialist, or even democratic socialist, schemes enacted if he is elected President. Raising red flags about what Bernie would do to this country is another fantasy apocalyptical red herring meme, just when what we need is to break free of our ignorance.

I think of Bernie as more of a Socratic teacher who is trying to break down our crystallized cultural thought habits, including our stale definitions of words - like capitalism, liberalism, socialism - and bring us into a more open and solution oriented mode of understanding and addressing our rather yuuge set of problems.