40 thoughts on “Sunday Serendipity”


  2. Oct 17, 2026
    Prime Minister Andy Burnham welcomes President Zelensky to Downing Street to reaffirm Britain’s support for Ukraine when they’re interrupted by President Trump.

  3. 8.8 million early votes already cast. My morning reality check:

    1. Nearly 8% of expected turnout.
    2. Early voting is running ahead of 2022’s reported pace.
    3. Democrats are outperforming Republicans in key state comparisons.

    16 days to go. ->

  9. We Promised Not to Leave Them Behind. Plenty of Americans Still Mean It.

    Promises made and promises broken

    Happy Sunday, everyone. Are you ready for some good news?

    Refugees are some of the most carefully vetted people who come to this country. They wait years, sit through interview after interview, and pass background check after background check. Many of them are Afghans who served beside American troops across twenty years, who were promised that if they stood with us, we would stand with them.

    But this week, the Trump Administration broke that promise again. When the government moves to strip someone of their refugee status, that person used to get thirty days to fight back. As of Wednesday, they get ten. Ten days to find a lawyer, translate documents, and track down records from a country they fled for their lives.

    For these brave people, Washington hasn’t inspired much hope lately. But Washington isn’t the full story. Unlike our leaders, everyday Americans have been keeping the promise on their own, and one family in Kansas City just found out exactly how much that matters.

    Over Labor Day weekend, at the bottom of the escalators at Kansas City International Airport, an Afghan man stood waiting for his wife and children. When his family came down those escalators, a little boy ran straight to him and grabbed his hand. An older son wrapped his arms around his father and sobbed. The man kept saying the same two words, over and over, to everyone around him: “Thank you, thank you.”

    He hadn’t seen them in five years and called it the happiest moment of his life.

    You won’t find that man’s name in any of the coverage, and you won’t find it here. That’s because two of his grown children are still in Afghanistan, where their father’s service to American troops makes them targets for the Taliban.

    He joined the Afghan army in 2006. His job was to keep the convoy trucks running, the ones that carried weapons and injured or dead soldiers between American and Afghan bases. He rode those convoys down roads full of mines, and when the Taliban ambushed them, he fixed the trucks under fire.

    An explosion tore up his face and wrist. He was shot in the hand and the foot. He watched fellow soldiers die in his arms. After he escaped Afghanistan on an American military flight in 2021, the Taliban came to his home twice looking for him, and they shot and wounded one of his sons.

    He was granted asylum here, and did everything right to bring his family over. He paid two thousand dollars a person in fees and documents. His family sold their belongings and rented out a floor of their home to pay for the trip to a U.S. embassy in Tajikistan. The interview seemed to go well. But after several hours, they were given some bad news. The president’s new travel ban had shut them out.

    The man didn’t give up. Last fall, his lawyer asked him whether he’d join a group of Afghan allies suing the government over it. “He said yes immediately,” she said. And this summer, he finally won.

    A George W. Bush-appointed federal judge ruled that the travel ban couldn’t be used to keep the families of people granted asylum away from them. On October 1, an appeals court refused the administration’s request to put that ruling on hold. Five families from the lawsuit are now safely here, and thousands of other families’ cases are moving again. And I couldn’t be happier for them.

    I served in Afghanistan. All of us who did know the truth: we needed allies like this man. They drove our roads, translated our conversations, fixed our trucks, and took bullets meant for us. And in return, we promised not to leave them behind.

    That’s why I spent years in Congress trying to keep that promise.

    When the visa program for Afghan partners ran dry back in 2014, Oregon’s Earl Blumenauer and I passed an emergency bill for a thousand more. Months before Kabul fell in 2021, we brought together more than thirty colleagues from both parties on a bill for four thousand more visas, and I stood with Republicans and Democrats begging the administration to get our partners out before we left. This was never a partisan issue. Keeping your word to people who bled beside you is about the least partisan thing there is.

    Now Washington is breaking that word. But Americans keep picking it up.

    Nonprofit lawyers took this man’s case. An organization that helps Afghan allies resettle arranged his family’s flights. And all across the country, more than a thousand American veterans have signed up for a program run by the group AfghanEvac called Battle Buddies, where they walk Afghan allies into their immigration hearings so no one has to face that courtroom alone.

    They don’t protest. They don’t argue. They just stand there quietly. The group says not a single ally who walked in with a Battle Buddy has been detained or deported. As one volunteer put it: “This isn’t political. This is personal.”

    America’s word has always been one of the most powerful things we have. It’s why people around the world have been willing to risk their lives working alongside us. That kind of trust takes generations to build, and it can be squandered in much less.

    But this father never broke that trust. He fought for us, and then he fought for his family, all the way to a federal courtroom. And a lot of ordinary Americans made sure he didn’t do it alone.

    That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.

    — Adam

  11. Rick and I are leaving in a few hours for a much needed vacation to Cape Cod.
    I am taking my iPad… but I may or may not comment here. I made the decision to deliberately leave it at home when we went to Maine early last month… it felt great!

  17. Today in the Diner…
    Midterm Early Voting Surge, Mike Rogers & Kathy Griffin’s DC Show
    Early voting surges as No Kings protests hit DC and Virginia, Mike Rogers stumbles over Michigan inflation, and Kathy Griffin takes the Warner Theatre stage.

    The latest midterm data is rolling in, and if the early voting numbers from states like North Carolina are any indication, a massive shift might be underway. Over in Washington, D.C. and Arlington, Virginia, No Kings protesters hit the streets to push for early voting and defend democracy against soaring national debt and economic policies. Meanwhile, Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers found himself struggling to show genuine empathy while deflecting questions about grocery prices and inflation on Sunday morning news programs.

    Adding to the weekend’s chaos, comedian Kathy Griffin brought down the house during a packed two-and-a-half-hour set at the Warner Theatre in downtown Washington, D.C., treating fans to an unforgettable night of unfiltered comedy. Between analyzing the latest Cook Report shifting Senate seats toward Democrats, breaking down federal budget deficits, and dodging political dodgeballs, the digital diner is serving up a full plate of political reality. Join the conversation and catch up on everything happening this election cycle.

    Live Chat: https://trailmix.cc/chat
    Website: https://trailmix.cc
    Alerts: https://trailmix.cc/alerts

    00:00 Intro and No Kings Protests
    01:45 Early Voting Surge in North Carolina
    06:10 Cook Report Senate Shifts
    10:15 Federal Deficit and National Debt
    15:30 Kathy Griffin at the Warner Theatre
    17:35 Mike Rogers on Michigan Inflation
    — Human directed and edited. Machine drafted (Gemini Pro).

  18. For everyone to use every time a MAGA spouts some ridiculous memorized blurb about Capitalism vs. Socialism.

    Adam Smith was a moral philosopher before he became famous as an economist.
    His The Theory of Moral Sentiments appeared in 1759, seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations. He believed that commercial society required justice, moral judgment, and institutions capable of restraining harmful behavior. His economic arguments did not assume that individual self-interest automatically produced acceptable outcomes under every circumstance.
    In Book V, Chapter I of The Wealth of Nations, Smith explicitly identifies public works and institutions as legitimate responsibilities of government, particularly when they benefit society but cannot reasonably generate sufficient private profit.

    He discusses roads, bridges, canals, harbors, education, and the administration of justice. He also considers different ways to finance them, including user fees and general public revenue.
    That’s not an endorsement of every modern public program, of course. Nor does it make Smith a socialist in the contemporary sense. It means that the familiar picture of Smith as an advocate of unrestricted private enterprise is incomplete.

    Markets can be exceptionally effective at organizing economic activity without being sufficient to meet every social need. Smith recognized that distinction more than two centuries ago.
    MAGA spouting memorized talking points don’t hold up well.

    A memorized talking point is a rather fragile thing when it encounters someone who’s actually read the book. And Adam Smith is particularly vulnerable to being reduced to a slogan. The invisible hand gets invited to every argument, while The Theory of Moral Sentiments is left standing outside without a coat.

    Still, I suspect Craig’s rule about civility remains useful here. Someone repeating a political slogan isn’t necessarily incapable of a thoughtful discussion, but they do have to be willing to engage with an answer. Which brings me back to something I admire about the structure of Trailmix: disagreement is permitted, even welcomed, but personal attacks aren’t.

    Twenty-one years of keeping that distinction alive is no small accomplishment.
    And now I rather wish we could arrange an actual debate between Adam Smith and David Hume, moderated by Craig, with Kiki the parrot responsible for enforcing the time limits

  22. Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club
    The Hidden History of American Healthcare: How Prudential killed healthcare for all
    Part two of the Frederick Hoffman story. The industry playbook against universal coverage was written in 1917, and it’s still in use…
    Thom Hartmann

    Last Sunday you met Frederick Hoffman, the Prudential statistician who spent his life “proving” that helping Black Americans by giving them access to free healthcare would only hasten their extinction. This week’s chapter is about what he and his colleagues did with that belief once real money was on the line.

    When 200,000 people showed up in Los Angeles to hear President Teddy Roosevelt speak, he pitched a platform that included “social insurance” for all Americans that included comprehensive health coverage. By 1915 the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) was demanding that every state enact comprehensive, universal, government-funded health insurance. By 1916 eight states, New York and California among them, had taken up its model bill, which used government money to cover all medical costs and up to 26 weeks of paid sick leave. The American Medical Association had even endorsed it.

    At the time, no major companies were offering health insurance but death insurance was Prudential’s cash cow, a product a small army of salesmen sold door-to-door nationwide. The healthcare plan Roosevelt and AALL and the AMA were pitching, however, had a small ($100) death benefit to cover funeral costs, and Hoffman used it to get Prudential into the act of killing that generation’s version of Medicare For All in the crib.

    “We, of course, cannot compete with Compulsory Insurance,” Hoffman wrote to his employers. He resigned from the AALL “in disgust” and became the face of a Prudential-funded campaign so fierce that one of the AALL’s founders wrote in 1918 that every piece of anti-insurance propaganda in the country, every flyer or leaflet “no matter who gives them to you,” traced back to “the Prudential Insurance Co. of America, and to Mr. Frederick L. Hoffman.”

    This chapter opens with a costume ball, which led to New York’s 1905 Armstrong Investigation nearly destroyed the insurance industry’s reputation. People were so cynical that Purdential’s executives knew their opposition to health insurance “would be perceived as brazen self-interest.” So they hired Hoffman, who presented himself as a scientist.

    Read Hoffman’s pamphlets with today’s talking points in your ear. Health insurance is “made in Germany,” he wrote in 1917, as American boys were shipping out to fight the Kaiser. It “makes your citizen a subject.” It means “autocracy, paternalism and coercion.”

    Virtually every line the trillion-dollar health insurance industry used against the public option in 2009 and against Medicare for All in 2020 was road-tested by Prudential a century earlier. And it worked.

    In 1920 California’s voters killed health insurance at the ballot box, New York’s Assembly let it die in committee, and the AALL never got another bill in front of a legislature.

    New York shakes up the insurance industry
    Blame the plutocrats’ costume balls for the crisis in the insurance industry at the turn of the century, a crisis that led to blocking a national single-payer health insurance system.

    In 1905, the legislature of the State of New York was provoked by a public outcry to investigate the life insurance business. The New York lawmakers authorized an investigative body led by State Senator William Armstrong, later known as the Armstrong Commission, which held 51 investigatory sessions leading to eight new laws to regulate the industry.

    The event not only cemented the reputation of Armstrong, but also kicked off the political career of Charles Evans Hughes, propelling him to the governorship of New York, the Republican presidential nomination in 1916, and to the Chief Justiceship of the US Supreme Court in 1930.

    And it was a costume ball that triggered much of the public outrage.

    Eight years earlier, in February of 1897, New York billionaire (in today’s money) banker and attorney Bradley Martin and his wife Cornelia had thrown a costume ball at the Waldorf. They’d taken over the entire hotel booking every single room, as The New York Times reported, and “all outside windows are boarded up” to keep the riffraff from seeing in.67

    Mrs. Martin came dressed as Mary Stuart (wearing a necklace once owned by the Queen), her husband as the Sun King, Louis XIV. John Jacob Astor, who would die on the Titanic in 1912, was dressed as Henry of Navarre, while J.P. Morgan was Moliere.

    Instead of a success, though, the party became a scandal; there was such ostentatious wealth on display that New York clergymen, progressive politicians and many of New York’s newspapers condemned the Martins.

    “Some crank” sent a bomb to the Martin’s home, according to the Times, because of all the controversy. New York’s Police Commissioner told the Times, “The sensational articles that have recently appeared in two of the papers have started up these cranks to talking and writing against the Bradley Martins, and undoubtedly Mrs. Martin has been subjected to a great deal of annoyance from them.”68

    The Martins were so offended, humiliated and frightened by the response of the good citizens of New York that they bought the former home of “Diamond King” Barney Barnato, what the Times said was “the most pretentious [home] in London,” and moved to England.

    Like the Roaring 20s and today’s late Reaganomics era, the Gilded Age was marked by obscene wealth and excess, contrasted with low wages and poverty for working people. Thus, when it was reported that James Hazen Hyde, son of the founder of The Equitable Life Assurance Society and a billionaire in today’s money, had not only held a Versaille-themed ball himself but put it on the tab of the company, New York exploded.

    The Armstrong Commission investigation was the result of the tipping point these two events hit, and it reflected so badly on Hyde that, like Martin, he fled the country, going to live in France.

    The Armstrong Commission also found widespread evidence of bribery, or at least inappropriate influence, of politicians by insurance industry executives, and recommended laws barring any employee of that industry from giving money to any politician, a harbinger of the Tillman Act of 1907, which banned corporate money contributions to federal candidates.

    The scandals uncovered by Armstrong also fed a growing movement to provide every New Yorker with health insurance provided by nonprofit mutual companies and paid for by the state and the employers.

    And Frederick Hoffman would help put a stop to it.

    From Scientific Racism to “No Compulsory Healthcare!”
    The “compulsory health insurance” (what today we’d call Medicare for All) movement of the early 20th century was as much (and possibly more) about getting paid sick leave as it was about covering doctor’s visits and hospitalization, because healthcare was so cheap that an unpaid week at work was a bigger hit to the wallet.

    But workers wanted both.

    The most successful effort of the era came out of an organization a small group of progressive economists put together in 1905 and 1906, known as the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL). Their initial efforts were directed at paid sick leave, workman’s compensation insurance, child labor laws and workplace safety standards. To that last end, they were actively using the kinds of statistical analysis Frederick Hoffman had both used and popularized to lay out everything from his theories on race to showing an association between tobacco use and lung cancer. Hoffman joined the AALL to promote their efforts.

    A charitable reading of his motivations was that his statistical research on workplace phosphorus poisoning and lung disease overlapped with their efforts and they were an organization that, at that time, was held in high regard. He did, after all, consider himself – and was, in a very real way – a major force for reform in public health and workplace safety arenas.

    A less charitable motivation is posited in Daniel T. Rodgers’ 1998 book Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age.69

    Rodgers writes, “On the AALL social insurance committee, he became the [Prudential] company’s mole. … Hoffman took credit for blocking the drafting of any resolutions at the AALL’s social insurance conference in 1913. During the framing of the association’s model health insurance bill, he dragged his feet, obstructed, pressed in vain for company initiatives in the medical insurance field, and informed his employers – more and more certain that public health insurance was ‘distinctly pernicious and a menace to our interests.’”

    Despite Prudential and Hoffman’s efforts, government-funded health insurance was gaining popularity in America (and being considered or adopted in Europe).

    In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt made a third-party bid for the presidency, forming the Progressive Party (with its Bull Moose logo) and called for “the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance.” Jane Addams (Hull House founder), dressed in suffragette white, seconded Roosevelt’s nomination to wild cheers and applause; Roosevelt rallies routinely drew tens of thousands of people, and over 200,000 people showed up in Los Angeles to support him and the Party.70

    Roosevelt’s endorsement of “social insurance” including health coverage both reflected and reinforced a growing national sentiment, and in 1915 the AALL called for every state to support a program of health insurance. Prudential hadn’t yet gotten into the business of insuring health (they would in 1925), but they could see the writing on the wall.

    What finally blew up Hoffman’s support of the AALL apparently had to do with a system of insurance that had started in the late 17th century in the UK to cover fire losses and had gradually grown to include other forms of protection.

    It was called “mutual insurance” and was unique from Prudential’s model in that the companies were owned by their policyholders, instead of traditional corporate stockholders.

    In this regard, mutual insurance ran much like employee-owned co-ops, and lived in the nonprofit world both practically and philosophically. They also had lower operating costs, as they didn’t have to shovel wheelbarrows of cash to their stockholders and senior executives.

    America had a tradition of mutual insurance that started in 1752 with a company known as “The Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses From Loss by Fire.” Its founder was Benjamin Franklin and it still exists; the idea of mutual property and casualty insurance companies grew from there across the states and around the world.71

    In 1916, AALL endorsed health insurance provided through a network of local and statewide mutual companies and called for those policies to also cover a small death benefit to cover funeral costs, which would have competed directly with the funeral coverage that was Prudential’s main cash cow.

    Hoffman wrote to the company that, “We, of course, cannot compete with Compulsory Insurance, including a death benefit of, say $100.”72 He then resigned “in disgust” from the AALL and begin a campaign, sponsored by Prudential, to stop nonprofit, state-funded health insurance.

    Hoffman and Prudential weren’t alone in their concern: The Insurance Federation of New York told their members, “This is only the entering wedge; if once a foothold is obtained it will mean attempts to have such State Insurance of all kinds including fire.”73

    AALL produced model legislation that was taken up in 1916 by eight states, including California and New York, the former via a ballot initiative and the latter in the New York legislature. In addition to calling for policies that would pay all costs of healthcare, the AALL’s legislation also called for up to 26 weeks of paid sick leave.

    Picking up steam, the American Medical Association endorsed the AALL’s model legislation as well. The battle was joined.

    Prudential helps kill America’s first healthcare for all campaign
    Hoffman’s Prudential-sponsored campaign to prevent any state from adopting a statewide nonprofit health (and death benefit) insurance program went into overdrive through 1916-1920. He traveled to Germany several times to chronicle, in minute detail, the failings of the Kaiser’s system that had been operating since 1885.

    Prudential, in 1905, had been swept up in New York’s Armstrong Investigation and so, as historian Beatrix Hoffman (no relation to Frederick) writes, “Because of their industry’s public image problems, insurance executives knew their opposition to compulsory health insurance would be perceived as brazen selfinterest.”74

    They needed a front man, and the guy who was famous for discovering the causes of numerous public health crises was perfect. Thus, Frederick Hoffman became the most well-known face of a massive, multi-year effort to stop the AALL’s campaign. And, at that, he was remarkably effective.

    In the years between 1916, when he resigned from AALL and 1920 when nonprofit state-funded health insurance finally died, Hoffman wrote numerous pamphlets trashing the German single-payer government health system, “exposing” corruption in the British efforts at a National Health Service, and arguing that America’s healthcare system would be thrown into chaos and crisis if the AALL’s programs were adopted. And his work was widely distributed, as historian Daniel Rodgers noted: “The Prudential saturated the state capitols with his pamphlets.”75

    His 1917 pamphlet Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance and a subsequent “More Facts…” published two years later were his most widely cited and most consequential. Historian Beatrix Hoffman (no relation) notes that the Facts pamphlet “resembled Race Traits and Tendencies in its impressive presentation of statistics and graphs alongside passionate polemics. Hoffman refuted every figure the Progressives used in defense of their plan, from ‘Misleading Data on German Longevity’ to ‘Misleading Estimate of Cost’ and ‘Disregard of Actuarial Methods.’”

    Appealing to the Daniel Boone mythos of rugged, independent individualism that didn’t require assistance from government, Hoffman wrote, “The ever-present menace to democracy and liberty is the perversion of the legislative function [toward providing health insurance]…”76

    Lawmakers and the public, Hoffman wrote as America was fighting Germany during WWI, were supporting state-funded health insurance “which is unnecessary, and as essentially a product ‘made in Germany’ as any legislative panacea brought forward for the alleged good of the people during a generation or more. The propaganda had its origin in the program laid down by the International Association for Labor

    Legislation, which held its first meeting in Baste, Switzerland…”77

    “The proposed legislation,” Hoffman wrote, “strikes one more blow at self-dependence and initiative and makes your citizen a subject, whether of king or of commission matters little. Self-dependence and initiative, virtues only permitted to a few favored individuals in older forms of government, are again to be taken away from a large number of citizens, in return for a mess of pottage, and the normal cycle of human stupidity becomes obvious. The Constitution promised liberty and happiness, not supervision and comfort; that is, the guarantees were moral, not material.”

    Citing a 1917 report from the New Jersey Commission on Old Age, Insurance and Pensions, Hoffman wrote, “Under any and every system of social insurance the development of autocratic and arbitrary methods of interference with personal rights and liberties is a foregone conclusion.”

    Quoting the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Hoffman wrote, “[T]he State should concentrate its efforts on preventive work rather than on the attempt to cure diseases through insurance; in that the Workmen’s Compensation Act had already taken some of the liberties away from the individual wage-earner, and that health insurance would take more; that the tendency of health insurance would be to pauperize the workers; that health insurance was not suited to American needs; that health insurance abroad was economically unsuccessful; that its cost was prohibitive; that it was an encouragement of malingering, and that selfrespecting labor did not desire it.”78

    Toward the end of the pamphlet, once again warning of the dangers to America of adopting anything resembling Bismark’s single-payer national health insurance system, Hoffman summarized:

    “The German experiment in paternalism and coercion sounds the most convincing note of warning to other industrial countries, where under free institutions, under conditions of voluntary service, savings and self-sacrifice, infinitely better and more lasting results have been achieved.

    “It is devoutly to be hoped that the warning will be heeded by the American people and that they will develop a strong and thoroughly effective opposition to any and every tendency towards autocracy, paternalism and coercion, under the plea of Social Insurance as inherently hostile and fatal to our traditional conceptions of personal and political liberty in a democracy.”79

    Hoffman’s writing and speeches shook America’s political systems, particularly as this German-born “man of science” warned of the dire consequences to American liberty and democracy represented by universal health insurance.

    In 1918, John R. Commons – one of the AALL’s cofounders – wrote that most all the nation’s anticompulsory health insurance propaganda “originates from one source; all of the ammunition, all of the facts and statistics that may come across, no matter who gives them to you, will be found to go back to the Prudential Insurance Co. of America, and to Mr. Frederick L. Hoffman.”80

    Prudential paid to transport Hoffman all across America, from media events to congressional hearings, to a trip to England to document the horrors of their National Health Service system that had gone into effect in 1911.

    He wrote from London, in a widely-read paper, that because of the British National Insurance Act, “The fine spirit of the English working classes, at one time the finest people of that type in the world, is gone, entirely gone.”81

    Historian Beatrix Hoffman notes, “His agitation was tireless, his influence widespread. … His reputation as an expert allowed Hoffman to participate in the deliberations of the health insurance commissions of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Connecticut, and to successfully persuade commission members to vote against the plan.”

    In 1920, in large part because of the Prudential’s efforts and Hoffman’s warnings, California’s voters resoundingly turned down a voter initiative in that state to provide health insurance, and, although New York’s Senate passed the bill, it died in committee in the Assembly.

    While the AALL continued to campaign for state-funded health insurance until their dissolution in 1946, they never again gained enough traction to get their proposal before any state legislatures or the US Congress.

    Having succeeded in killing state-funded health insurance, Hoffman, in the later 1920s, turned his attention back to his theory that blacks would eventually die out, joining the Eugenics Research Association (whose work was later used by Hitler to justify racial separation and his “final solution”).

    In 1929, Hoffman asserted, in the African American publication Opportunity, that “the white race is almost solely responsible…for the health progress which the South has made during the last generation,” and that blacks moving in large numbers into cities would “lead to a thoroughly unwholesome state of affairs which unquestionably will express itself in course of time in a lower birth rate and a higher death rate.”82 Hoffman’s influence lasted long past his death in 1946 (which satisfied his stated desire to live long enough to see FDR out of office). As late as 1984, according to reporting in The Wall Street Journal, Prudential was still collecting premiums from African Americans that were “in some instances more than a third higher” that those paid by whites.83

    What died in 1920 wasn’t just a bill; it was a century of Americans dying or going bankrupt for lack of access to healthcare. The AALL model law covered everybody, paid every medical bill, gave workers half a year of paid sick leave, and had America’s official doctors’ association on board.

    Had it passed in New York and California, the other states would have followed the way they later followed on workers’ compensation and the way Medicare for All spread from Saskatchewan in Canada to every other province within a decade.

    Instead we have half a million medical bankruptcies a year, a life expectancy that trails every peer nation, and senior executives in a predatory insurance industry who literally make hundreds of millions to over a billion dollars in personal wealth each.

    Perhaps most astounding it took until 1984, eighty-eight years after Race Traits was published and thirty-eight years after Hoffman died, for Prudential to stop charging Black customers premiums a third higher than white customers paid.

    When a for-profit industry can’t convince Americans (or politicians) on the merits, it buys a credentialed voice and floods the state capitols and DC. In 1917 it was Hoffman’s pamphlets; in 2009 it was the talking points that a CIGNA executive named Wendell Potter wrote for the industry’s trade group before his conscience made him quit (his story is in the book too).

  23. Jamie
    Not me.
    Back, about 2 weeks after I first got on line in 1999 and started a usenet account. I created the Whskyjack name, got a yahoo email for it, then a few years later as everybody was moving over to facebook, Jack moved too. I then had to come up with a full name and a birthday and other stuff. Hey, if you can’t lie to a computer…
    I have been known to hang out with these folks
    And have been confused by google for a neighborhood leader in this story
    Just keep it under your hat };-0

    Jack

  24. Jack,

    One of my multi-great aunts, married a Fugate

    Sarah Ann Rose
    B:16 June 1818 Tazewell, Claiborne Co, Tennessee
    M. Jehiel Croxdale Fugate in 1840
    D:5 Mar 1892 Tazewell, Claiborne Co., Tennessee, US

  25. TALARICO LEAD HOLDS
    Massive GOP Ad Assault Fails

    Texas: James Talarico’s narrow lead now looks like a durable polling pattern. A CBS News/YouGov survey released today shows him ahead of Ken Paxton 51%–49% among 1,492 likely voters.

    It follows three other October surveys showing Talarico ahead: Marist +2, University of Texas +3 and YouGov +6. Every lead remains modest, but four high-quality polls pointing in the same direction is stronger evidence than an isolated outlier.

    Why it matters: After roughly $150 million in Republican support and attack spending, Paxton still has not taken a lead. Texas remains a toss-up, but the polling evidence now gives Talarico a small, consistent advantage as early voting begins.

  28. The Mall gets the postcards. The Wharf gets the boats, brunch, and a few detours of its own. Come wander Washington’s waterfront with Craig and David in the latest Capital Detours:

  29. https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/abdul-el-sayeds-heckler-tommy-in-video-from-caro-townhall-allegedly-worked-for-sen-josh-hawley-101792341083008.html

    Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abul El-Sayed’s town hall event in Caro, Michigan, on Saturday (October 7 ) was interrupted by an individual who identified himself as only “Tommy.”

    The interaction was shared by Abdul El-Sayed on social media, and it subsequently went viral. In the video, “Tommy” asks a series of controversial questions to El-Sayed, many of which have been a key part of the Republican campaign against him. “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?” he asked.

    Political strategist and independent journalist Marisa Kabas alleged in her The Handbasket newsletter that the real name of Tommy is Thomas Teepell, and he is a long-time GOP associate. According to Kabas, Teepell, a Detroit resident, is the son of Timmy Tippel, a GOP strategist. Timmy Tippell worked for Louisiana former congressman and governor, Bobby Jindal, between 2004 and 2011.

    Thomas Teepell’s links to Sen. Josh Hawley likely comes from his father. The report by Kabas claims that Timmy Teepell joined the political consulting firm OnMassage in 2011 and helped get Josh Hawley elected Attorney General of Missouri in 2016. In 2018, he worked in Hawley’s first successful Senate campaign.

  31. Huh, so even GOPer Mike Rogers thinks folks in general are intimidated by cops and don’t think of them as peace officers or helpers.

  32. Meidas Touch

    BREAKING: Trump’s administration is threatening Europe with “DEVASTATING” retaliation if European countries move to reduce their dependence on Elon Musk’s Starlink.
    Yes, you read that correctly.
    According to the Financial Times, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, Andrew Puzder, is warning of severe consequences if European officials move forward with plans that could restrict Musk’s SpaceX from parts of the European market.
    Meanwhile, Europe is developing its own satellite communications systems, and Ukraine is pushing for alternatives to Starlink as trust in Washington continues to deteriorate.
    So now the United States government is threatening our own allies for daring to seek alternatives to a private company owned by Trump’s billionaire buddy?
    Whatever happened to the “free market”?
    Instead of standing up to Putin and strengthening our alliances, Trump is using American power to protect Elon Musk’s business interests.
    And in the process, he’s giving Europe yet another reason to stop depending on the United States.

  38. Realized I had seen them, but if you do a search for “Capital Detours” only the most recent comes up. You can’t subscribe to them as a separate series outside of the political.

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