Reconciling With Defeat

The most challenging blog posts to write are the ones about political processes that I know nothing about. Having to admit there is something I do not know always creates a hurdle to actually sitting down and writing a piece, which was the case with this post.

Since the election, my friend Maya and I have been developing a project to encourage, among other things, the protection of Obamacare. We were informed by someone that our strategy may not work for Obamacare, since it was likely to be repealed through a process called reconciliation. Cue me furiously Googling to find out what exactly reconciliation is and how it can relate to Obamacare.

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Hiking Up (Prescription) Drug Mountain

We all remember when Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals raised the price of Daraphim from twenty dollars a tablet to seven hundred and fifty dollars a tablet. Shkreli's defense was that the drug is used very rarely, and he had to charge a lot to make a profit. To editorialize, it almost seemed like Shkreli was excusing his actions because "only 300 people in the country have this disease," this disease being toxoplasmosis.

He's not wrong, toxoplasmosis is very uncommon. It's almost exclusively contracted by people with severely weakened immune systems, such as those suffering from end-stage AIDS, chemotherapy, and people who have recently received organ transplants.

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Good Trouble

Welcome one and all to the brand-new, official, real life website of West Wing, Best Wing! Like the Italian sculptors of yore, I have found myself a patron who gave me the funds necessary to make this blog official.

For my inaugural post, I was going to write about abortion. On Monday, the Supreme Court will be handing down a decision on Whole Women's Health v. Hellerstedt, and their decision on this could impact abortion laws across the country. But then I remembered that I've already written that post. Several times. And I promise to write another one explaining the decision when it is released on Monday.

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Sexism in Politics

"Medicare-for-all will never happen if we continue to elect corporate Democratic whores who are beholden to big pharma and the private insurance industry instead of us."

I understand what Paul Song was trying to say here, that money in politics prevents politicians from passing progressive policies. I see what he means so clearly, that I was almost ready to write off his use of a word that his almost exclusively directed at women, and used to demean women. At a rally for Bernie Sanders, Paul Song casually and tangentially called Hillary Clinton a whore, and to be very honest, it didn't really shock me all that much.

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