Needed to buy some birdseed, and since it was right off the freeway stopped on my way home by Yamagami’s Nursery to check out the fruit trees.

And boy did they have nice fruit trees. If you wanted cherries or peaches this very year it looks like you could have exactly that.

No Lorings in stock, though; they would have to order and find out if one is available. I texted messages with Richard and came home, for now.

But when the sun was low I picked that spade back up and dug that planting hole a little deeper and now, at last, that spot feels ready for whatever will go in. It will not stay bare for long.

A side note: I know vaccination is a hot topic right now and that there are strong emotions on both sides. Hear me out, if you would. Measles is *the* single most contagious virus known, and if you simply walk through a room hours after an infected person did you can catch it. I have an immunosuppressed friend from my knitting group who got quarantined from work this week because a co-worker had been exposed to someone who’d been exposed to someone who’d been exposed to someone at Disneyland, the disease leapfrogging up the state. That’s an awful lot of quarantining and lost wages and lost time.

Our daughter the microbiology PhD was telling an anti-vaxxer the other day, Sure, if you get German measles you’ll be sick and you’ll probably recover and you probably won’t be one of the unlucky ones who goes deaf or gets pneumonia or meningitis and all that. You’ll probably be okay.

But you don’t do it for YOU. You do it for every pregnant woman. Because it is horrendously dangerous to a fetus in utero at any stage of pregnancy and extremely likely to kill or brain damage them for life. You do it for them. Because you’re a good person.

Ross Douthat at the New York Times wrote THE article about the events in Paris today that most needed to be written.

We are all Charlie.

We got a phone call tonight: having been frustrated by the problem for some time, our daughter was finally appealing to her tall dad to help her with some burned-out lights. They needed to be reached so she could see them and know what size to order and she felt too unsteady to risk trying. There were I think six in her kitchen ceiling and three by now had gone dark.

We went over there and helped her unscrew those bulbs. Then asked, why wait on shipping? There was a hardware store almost around the corner.

It seemed to me it wasn’t just the lights–it was that her injuries having been re-ignited last Friday, she needed to fix something to brighten her day that was within her power. Especially today. But she was not up to going to the shop, maybe multiple shops, to look for new ones, and she hadn’t been about to risk another fall by trying to even start the task alone.

Well, we could go, we offered, glad to help. And so we bought new bulbs, a grand total of $12 for three flood types, in LED no less–boy have prices come down–and came back over. With her big strong daddy again holding her steady standing on a chair, she screwed those new lights in herself.

I turned the switch on on the wall. We looked upwards in great satisfaction. Such a difference!

The darkness is a very small part of the world but it tries to claim great power. It deceives only itself. We are greater and we shine everywhere. Every good person in every religion or none who is trying to live by love. Love for those we know, love for those we don’t, love to all simply because we share our humanity and find it good.

We bring the light. We are Charlie.

Got some bad guys and some good guys for you today.

Back in September, when I caught the flu with all the autoimmune flaring that went with, I was barfing nonstop from the Crohn’s. The lupus was going nuts, too, my blood pressure was tanking, and I needed IV fluids, fast, just to start. (There would be chest and abdominal x-rays too.)

There were a lot of other people around with early-season flu, too, but for whatever the reason, when we called my doctor her nurse emphatically told my husband not to take me to Urgent Care but rather straight to the ER.

This was not a decision made by us. She insisted. She said if we went to Urgent Care they would simply send us over to Stanford, and we knew what the co-pays on the ambulance they would insist on would be, not to mention it would tie up that ambulance unnecessarily.

Turns out Anthem Blue Cross requires in their fine print that you verify with each health care provider before seeing them each time that they are still in contract with Anthem. Doesn’t matter if they were in-network for all the years you’ve had a policy with them, they reserved the right to yank that at any time. Doesn’t matter if you’re in an emergency with no capability of sitting on hold on the phone for two hours. Etc.

Now, by the contract we’d signed at open enrollment, if you go out-of-network in an emergency they’re still supposed to pay such a percentage and even though it’s less, it’s still a substantial amount.

Anthem and Stanford were in a contract dispute. Anthem never notified us in any way, not so much as an email, nor by their terms do they have to, and our trip to that ER was a life-and-death emergency with my already-very-low blood pressure. As far as I’ve been able to tell since, that day we had and we still have no in-contract hospital to divert to, either; I could be wrong on that but Anthem certainly hasn’t offered us any information to the contrary.

So we are paying for insurance to cover things they will not cover despite selling us a policy on the grounds that they would. I’d call that fraud, myself.

So, out of network, painful, but I thought we’d be out about a grand. Someone on the phone at one point said three. Ouch. But we waited for a bill. And waited. And waited, while the two sides hashed it out.

We got a notice finally last week from Anthem, and a day or two later a letter from Stanford.

And this is what Anthem said:

Not.

Covered.

Except this one unclear thing here that was probably that IV and only that IV, or maybe one individual doctor they were not in dispute with. But whatever, so, one thousand paid towards the claim and that was all it was going to be. “Your responsibility”:

Twelve thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars.

Breathe.

Hello? Out of network percentages, at least? How can they…?!

They don’t care.

Then came a letter from Stanford Hospital.

And they said, It is not your fault that we and Anthem Blue Cross are currently out of contract, and your health is more important. We don’t want you to be afraid to get medical care when you need it.

They said they will only charge us what our co-pays would have been had everything been as we expected when we went in there, as if all prior contracts had been in full force.

Multiply that times the whatever number of patients, given that Anthem covers something like a third of all the people in California, and what their bills could be and that Anthem should legitimately be covering and refuses to… Staggering. Just staggering.

I just felt (and these words look so faint on the page compared to how I feel) that Stanford deserves my praise and my thanks as loudly and as publicly as I can offer them.

I’m tempted to talk about how stupid the cuts to the National Institutes of Health’s funding are, but let’s just go straight to the point (even if the research relevant to this post was paid for pre-sequester.)

So: there’s a drug long approved for treating HIV that they knew had interesting characteristics, they just didn’t know what all else it might be applicable to.

And now they know at least one new thing.

Thirty million Americans. That’s how many they expect to have dry macular degeneration within the next five years, thirty million people going slowly blind and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

Till now. AZT and its newer, easier forms can be used off-label right now and they hope for testing to begin soon for this to become an approved use.  Ebola may turn out to be another and if so, they want to know. And they don’t have to spend hundreds of millions to find out safe dosage levels, whether humans can tolerate it at all, etc, etc., since that’s all been done long since.

AZT was first tested not for AIDS but as a proposed cancer treatment, which it failed at. When you do medical research you never learn just the thing you set out to learn. There’s always more to see.

(Like this, for instance. I mean, who would want to miss out on that little moment?)

Maybe I shouldn’t write about Open Enrollment. In some ways it’s worse than doing taxes, isn’t it?

The system I’ve been trying to work through seems particularly opaque to spouses this year: it appears that only the employee is allowed to view the options. Hello, community property state? This does not seem to me the most productive use of his time; why wouldn’t they want the free labor I could give them?

Remember this guy? I did get to see one page that I believe was talking about continuing the employer’s plan we’ve been on.

We finally wouldn’t be making the deductible the first time we fill a prescription come January.

Twenty. Six. Thousand.  And since that’s not enough, and four hundred dollars.

Twenty.

Six.

Thousand.

(Editing the edited comment: finally found that page again. That number was the out-of-pocket maximum for out-of-network. Given that our insurer and Stanford Hospital were out of contract last I heard, we could actually hit that number.)

High-energy days are a wonderful thing.

Got up early this morning, voted first thing, (epic photobomb here. Look at that guy’s eyes!), was glad to see that the ballots were paper and verifiable and wore that little sticker proudly all day.

The cowl and my cousin’s hat and scarf are now in the mail.

I participated in a product testing trial, one of those quirks about living in Silicon Valley where there is always some new thing to prove the merits of and got paid just enough for my time to cover a mango tree with FedEx shipping from Florida. I like the idea of trading a little time for something solid and present and lasting that could grow and produce great fruit for a hundred years, with thanks to Dani from India for the guidance on what variety to get. (Yup, I still want my mango tree. So there you go.)

I headed from there to my audiologist to get the wax out that was blocking up the hearing aids–I once broke an earmold trying to do it myself. Um. Now they’re sending in for a new one. (It’s not just me!) There was a spare on hand that’s not a great fit from when I was very thin post-op but it’ll do fine for now.

There is, so far, a particularly bright spot in the election news here: the one-term Superior Court judge who repeatedly simply did not know the law, who did not understand why people were upset when she asked a criminal defendant before her–from the bench, in court–for a date–she seems to have lost. Her opponent, who by all accounts is very well qualified, spent almost nothing. That he is winning is a great justice. (Update: he did win. Good thing.)

And it is past bedtime and the local newspaper hasn’t updated any election totals in three hours. Time to give it a rest.

Prop 45 is too much power! to give to one man! in Sacramento!

Yeah, that he would be able to say no to Anthem raising its rates 40% without justification? We gave that same officeholder that same power over car insurance rate increases and now Californians have some of the lowest auto premiums in the nation.

The phone rang. Richard picked up the receiver and actually listened to the robocall.

Then he said the candidate’s name to me, questioningly, not sure he’d quite heard it right.

I had read every article over the past month about the various people running but that wasn’t enough: today I spent hours rereading them, sample ballot in hand, going for second sources, researching the propositions on the ballot some more and trying to feel like I would be using my voting to the best of my ability come the morning. It is a sacred responsibility.

Note to this election’s big spenders: I read every flier as it came in the door and only one single one gave me any actual and factual information. Thank you for keeping the Post Office solvent but every dime you spent on those was wasted.

He wrinkled his nose going, Tell me that wasn’t someone I wanted to vote for because I don’t now.

Yeah, I told him, that’s the one running against Tuck. Tuck is supposed to be competent, thoughtful, and honest, vs the guy you just heard who has vowed to waste more taxpayer money to appeal that teacher’s tenure case rather than fixing the problems in the system that got the case filed. Here, I can pull up the article and you can read for yourself.

We both agreed that teachers need to be protected from bad administrators and bad parents, very definitely. At the same time…

We had some of the best teachers you could ever hope for for our kids, but just a very few who…

Let me say it flat out, you have to be able to get rid of the terrible ones. (The one who accidentally blew up her classroom during a sixth-grade demo of science that she did not understand did get, and it is a very good word for it, fired on the spot. No injuries. Other than that, she was actually a strong improvement over a particular one I’m thinking of.)

Then there are the candidates who will be deciding what our new voting machines are going to be: a previous Secretary of State had approved Diebolds that could be hacked in 30 seconds; the one after, a career politician termed out of her previous office, had run on a campaign of fixing the mess but then had done nothing. She updated nothing. She left cities and counties with unusable machines and no means to get out from under and oh look, we have an election again, don’t we, well now didn’t see that coming.

Who we vote into just that one state office impacts all the others. If you’re in California, here’s what the Merc had to say. Vote Pete Peterson over Mr-where’s-my-next-campaign-contribution.

To my American readers, change millions of lives for the better including your own Tuesday. Vote!

Tomato plant pictures: the volunteer that’s a month old and a view of its new buds. Hoping to get Ellen in her much colder climate some quick-grows for next year from this thing.

And then there’s the heirloom variety still going after six months.

Meantime, yup, tried the cranberry juice, tried the vitamin C, but still woke up with a trip straight to the doctor. Thankfully there are still some antibiotics that have not yet been made useless by the unethical feedlot practices of the big bioag producers, and so I am no longer passing blood.

Never mind all that–I was just sick enough to put my feet up and get some serious knitting time in and I’m delighted at how much I got done.  The 45×60″ I want while using size 4s is a very long slog but I can actually tell the difference from yesterday. (Pass the icepacks.)

Kaye at the shop put a bunch of hand-dyed Colinette yarns on the front table, marked way down.

Superwash merino? $2.25?! Seriously?

“I wanted to see what people would do with it.” It had been sitting in the back unnoticed for awhile but now everybody was going through it and stacks of skeins were going home.

Thus this hat, and as I finished up the simple pattern my brain had time to think of other hands around the world, busily creating…

All these years that I’ve bought those sweet little fingerpuppets knit in Peru by women able to put food on their tables for my purchases. All the small children and their tired parents here who have received one of those puppets, meltdowns diverted.

What if…

I was chatting with one of Sahar‘s American friends last night and asked her if she knew Truman Madsen, the late BYU professor who used to run tour groups in Israel in the summers. Turns out she had been in Israel just after he retired.

He was my mom’s cousin, I told her, and my folks went on the last tour he gave. He took Mom into a shop owned by Palestinian women selling their handicrafts (what town was that, Mom?) and Mom picked out a hand-embroidered apron (purple stitches, if I remember right) and then one for each of her daughters. I treasure mine.

Truman’s reaction was to exclaim that her mother had bought the same thing in the same shop!

I know there are talented women in the West Bank and Gaza and I wonder how much of a difference we could make by buying from them, whether we could help make their lives easier–I would certainly think so. (Typing that and going looking…) I found this and oh look! This!

It says their embroidery work is a connection to their mothers and their grandmothers.

As it is, now, to my own.

Five dollars for a small olivewood bowl made in Bethlehem from locally sourced wood, ten for a carved candlestick, beautiful. One to fourteen of those bowls is $30 shipping, the fifteenth kicks it up to $40.

I am suddenly wondering who around here would go in on an order with me.

And I wonder what it must be like to get a package to the postal service there. Any arriving order would surely have its own story to tell.

One of the most important talks I have ever heard in my life. I didn’t quite know what to expect going in but came away going, wow. I want to live up to what I just felt in that room.

I’m not sure I can do it justice, but let me try.

She was born in Jerusalem but is not allowed to live there now. She is Palestinian.  She is Arab. She is Christian–and she is a Mormon. I had badly wanted to hear what she had to say, whatever it might be; how often do we get to hear firsthand the in-person experiences from that part of the world?

It was not a political talk, it was a human talk. She described a little of what it’s like to live where she does–and what it’s like to try to simply go to church. Church was too important to her not to go: church was where she held onto the Spirit of God, to help her follow the promptings of that Love beyond all human understanding. Her circumstances made it so very clear how badly that was needed in the world. “Both sides think the other is” she shook her head, “horrible. But we are *all* children of God.”

She’s the Primary president there, ie the one running the program for the little ones on up to age twelve.

There are four small congregations in Israel, and if you are Palestinian, she said there are people who live 15 minutes from one but they have to travel for two and a half, three hours to go to a much farther one, because to go to the one nearby requires going through a checkpoint and if you don’t have the paperwork that would allow it you simply can’t get there. And you might not be let through anyway. And that checkpoint would take two to three hours, always, as it is.

She told us this: “Picture someone most dear to you. Your spouse, your parent, your child. Someone you love more than anything.”

She let us consider that for a moment. And then she asked us to think of someone who had done something terrible to us, just egregious, someone we found hard to forgive. Then she asked us to picture those two people side by side and asked us, “Can you love them both equally?”

As that sank in, “God does.” And she put up a slide asking, Have you been

Sexually abused.

Seen someone killed in front of you.

Been shot at.

Had a relative tortured.

She told us, gesturing at those words, “I have.”

She told us what it’s like to be a Palestinian at a checkpoint subject to the whim of whoever was on duty at the time. She showed a picture of men lined up, heads down, hands against the wall, with an Israeli soldier armed and dangerous standing over them. They had simply been trying to go to work.

She was at that checkpoint to try to go to church. And it hit her that she could not live her religion and be angry at those soldiers; they were children of God just as much as everybody else on this planet. Love the sinners, all of them, we are all sinners, and she said it was not easy and it most certainly wasn’t instantaneous. It took a lot of prayer, constant prayer, over a long time, sometimes fasting to gain the strength she so much wanted to have.

And then the day simply, quietly, unexpectedly came. She had to go through that resented checkpoint as at so many other times. And yet. That day, she saw an Israeli soldier and found herself completely, utterly loving him as a son of our Heavenly Father, capable of such great goodness, the scene at hand utterly apart from what he truly meant to God. She saw the best in him and felt a love from God for his sake that transformed her.

And that is how she always wants to feel. It is so hard but it is so necessary not to lose sight of that.

She described the prayer of a four-year-old in that Primary: not asking for food, though Sahar knew their family did not have enough to eat, but for Him to watch over her mother.

We make peace one person and one interaction at a time. And that is no small thing.

And poof, just like that it was gone.

Merlone Geier informed Steve Rasmussen today that their shared parking agreement that would allow Milk Pail to stay in business is, sorry dude, so last week: Phase II didn’t get city approval and it was contingent on that and oh well, tough to be the guy who’s not the multibillion-dollar company with major clout, huh.

It was all just a ploy to pressure the City after the Planning Commission had come down unanimously against them–vote for this while we don’t even tell you how we’re going to make this surprise change to the plans happen. Moving the parking structure? You don’t get to know, just do what we say.

Except that.

I keep thinking of that moment in the city council chambers a week ago where their rep called Steve up to make his bombshell announcement that after two and a half years, at long last, “Milk Pail will be able to stay as it is where it is and into the foreseeable future.”

And every face on that council was stunned speechless–and each was one thrilled. Deeply, deeply gratified. Now, it may be that for some it wasn’t for Milk Pail’s sake but rather for the relief of no longer having angry, vocal voters coming after them from now till Fall.

But I think it was about much more than just elections: in that moment, they every single one of them knew if they didn’t before that this mattered to them personally and that they wanted Steve’s business and all that it represented to the community to survive. That they wanted Steve to succeed after all these times of seeing him being the kindest man in the room no matter what, living up to his ideals when it could not have been easy, never showing the least degree of anger, always assuming the best of those utterly set to take him down after all he’d given to the community for so long.

It may well be that their reaction was a surprise to a couple of them. But I saw it and it was real and I saw the relief even in the face of the younger rep from that developer to be finally doing right by that good man.

But now Merlone Geier is back to playing the bully. They know that role so well.

Five local and city newspapers that I’ve found so far from San Francisco to San Jose had trumpeted the saving of this beloved small business and written up how glad the community was.

Merlone Geier has lost. They just don’t know it yet.

A member of the Mountain View City Council finally found out an hour before the meeting last night that no, he did legally have to recuse himself no matter how much he wanted to approve the project. He lived too close to it. That may well be why our agenda item scheduled for 6:30 was finally taken up at 9:00 pm.

Right there is a reason for people who don’t yet know how to knit to learn: portable, useful, gratifying, calming, and you don’t miss a thing while listening to people drone on when they’re in power and you can only hope that they hear what the community has to say.

Stitch. Stay.

They then spent three and a half hours on the Merlone Geier project that threatened Milk Pail. Geier was hoping to get final approval at long last and hoping that that guy would be the swing vote. Didn’t happen.

I wasn’t sure my 66g of Malabrigo Rios would last and it actually wouldn’t have but that my hands gave out by midnight.

When I arrived at City Hall, there was a small rally going on in front. If this passed they had a week to gather signatures to demand it be put on the ballot to try to stop it.

I said to the man addressing the group, when he said he was new at this, that I lived in the next town over and we did exactly that and we did defeat a poorly thought out development. Not only did people gather signatures but they put a copy of the petition online so that you could print it out, sign and mail it, and we won.

One of the women had made a whole bunch of signs and when she asked me if I wanted one that said I (heart) Milk Pail, I exclaimed eagerly, Yes please!

It turns out that opposition to the project had grown to include those dismayed at adding a million square feet of work space with no housing to balance it, further skewing the jobs vs housing ratio that has driven even the most modest studio apartments to $2500 rents here.  They wanted one of the proposed offices to be homes instead to at least ease some of that pressure.

And so we went in and waited.  The chambers were beyond standing room only–there was just no place left to put any more bodies in that room without the fire marshal hustling people out. The mayor asked people to be careful not to let their signs block their neighbors’ view. We were good.

The Council went over their slides and their stats endlessly. A few drawings had changed, the ten-then-eight stories were now to be six, etc.

Finally they announced that Merlone Geier’s representative would speak, followed by Steve Rasmussen, owner of Milk Pail.

The young guy with the slicked-back hair, shiny shoes and expensive suit, his face familiar by now, got up to give Geier’s spiel, trying as always to impress. Up pops a slide: a long list of all the meetings they’ve attended with the city over this.

(Well yeah dude that’s part of your job and part of their jobs. You wouldn’t still be doing this after two and a half years if you didn’t expect to make millions off it.)

But then–at the end he turned and gestured expansively towards Steve and darn if the guy didn’t smile, I mean, really smiled Steve’s way. I realized suddenly I’d never seen him looking anything but majorly stressed before.

Steve got up. He said that Merlone Geier had been helpful (while I thought, Steve, you are the salt of the earth and the nicest guy ever but that’s not a description I thought I would ever hear, not even from a saint like you) and he went on to announce that he and they had come to an agreement on the parking.

Yes it would cover the required number of spaces for his business.

Yes it would be for a long time to come. (Having his daughters inherit his business and being able to continue there for another generation had been a huge issue to the community.)

The Council sat there as stunned as the rest of us. We all clapped. The mayor reminded us we were not allowed to clap during a hearing. Okay, let’s see how loud our faces can smile, then–but the councilmen were grinning bigtime, too.

But Steve offered no details and he sat down and they had to go on debating the project while not knowing just what changes the developer was thinking of doing to make it so what Steve had just said would be feasible. Were they talking about relocating the proposed parking structure? Just rededicating some of the spots still a good hike away? Nobody seemed to ask, or if they did I sure missed it.

The planning commission days earlier had unanimously voted the project down, a complete turnaround on their part, pending the completion of the Concise Plan for the overall area. Etc.  I’m thinking surely all the public pressure in support of Milk Pail played into that.

Two hours later…

One Councilman finally asked the crowd, which at midnight was down by half and everybody could actually sit down in the seats now, how many people wanted this continued rather than put to an immediate vote. Nearly every hand went up.  And he asked Steve what everyone had been dying to know: what were the specifics of this new agreement?

Steve clearly didn’t want to endanger this shaky new truce but he tried his best. It was contingent on this Phase II being approved.

In the end, the vote: item delayed till this date.

So maybe Steve has an agreement and maybe he doesn’t now.

We poured out of the chambers at long last.

In the second picture is Jac Siegel, the one Councilman who after all this I’d vote for if I lived there. Really knows his city and a decent human being.

The senior Merlone Geier representative shook Steve’s hand, and then as he continued on by I said to the guy, with a warm smile in gratitude at their change of heart (however it happened, I’ll take it), “Take good care of him,” (motioning at Steve, now talking to another supporter.) “He means a lot to us.”

The guy went from approaching me, looking at me, to abruptly turning away and avoiding all eye contact as if I suddenly didn’t exist.

It hit me that maybe he was wondering if anyone in *his* business world would say words of support like that about him in such personal terms–maybe that’s not fair of me, but his sudden stricken change of demeanor was memorable. My heart went out to him, not that he would know that.

Steve loved my sign. I told him I really couldn’t take credit for it. The woman who had given it to me had gone home, though, so when I knew he wanted it, absolutely, I’d be honored.

He sent me a short note today thanking me for coming and saying that sign was in his kitchen now.

I took great comfort in that.

City Council meeting till 12:30 am. More tomorrow.

Calvinball is from Calvin and Hobbes, where the one who holds the ball makes up the rules and changes them constantly to keep their personal advantage going.

I’m going to go political today, sorry, and I know not all will agree with me and if you don’t, thank you for putting up with me anyway.

Okay. That Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision? Ruth Bader Ginsberg had some very relevant points to make on the dissenting side.

It looks to me like they established religion of one group of people over another. Hobby Lobby was not a household; they are a large for-profit corporation that invested their 401Ks in the companies manufacturing the very products they denied their employees and they sell goods made by cheap labor in a country with forced sterilizations and abortions, so the hypocrisy is strong in this one.

Here’s John Oliver the day before the case came down, anticipating how it was going to go. He gives credit to Hobby Lobby’s good deeds where they have rightfully earned it and then, in the stand-up comedian style he’s so good at, he tells it to them straight on the rest.

The question I have is, do job applicants now have a right to ask a prospective employer what their religion is? Because it is suddenly very relevant, while the employer sure can’t legally ask the applicant theirs.

Ginsberg brings up Jehovah’s Witnesses and blood transfusions, but they reject more than blood.

On the practical side, if you allow an employer to opt out of providing medical coverage for various cherry-picked items because of the employer’s religion, you have to deal with the outcome that will inevitably happen that someone someday will be in the hospital on TPN, IV feeding for the very ill like I went through five years ago with the infusion alone costing $2000 per day hospital care aside–and as this case stands, their employer in the name of their religion can stick their supposedly insured employee with that whole bill. Because, you know, the employee’s going to hell for messing with their veins but the employer doesn’t want to be dragged down there with them.

Even though the employee paid their premiums. Which were part of their compensation package. And even though this was not an individual denying them, it’s a corporation, ie a fictitious legal entity created specifically to put a buffer between an individual and the company they own.

Apply this scenario to any chemo infusion drug, too, and you see how widespread a problem we suddenly have here just to start.

Corporations are not real people.  This has not been a controversial statement for 200 years and it shouldn’t be now.

Scalia on his more outrageous cases like this claims that the ruling applies only to this one thing right here, but that is never true at the lower court level. Precedent sets precedents and other courts honor and uphold the Supreme Court, apparently more than Scalia does.

That IV case or something very like it is going to happen. They have set themselves up to be overturned.

We can only pray we have a different membership on the Court by then, and soon.

Just for fun: my cousin Dan, a math teacher, got his puzzle published in the New York Times.

While I marvel at the political puzzle of the day, political junkie that I am. Eric Cantor, the man so close and so desperate to be Speaker of the US House, down in flames, defeated in Virginia’s primary today by an unknown with almost no funding.

One commenter on the Washington Post explained his vote between the two Tea Partiers: his neighbor recently stepped into a local shop and did a doubletake and exclaimed, It’s Eric Cantor! (Surely expecting a handshake, because that’s what politicians do on being recognized by their constituents, right?)

“That’s *Congressman* Cantor.”

Interesting times.

If you’ve got a primary still coming up or a runoff, vote! Eighty-six percent in Virginia did not, and by staying home today they made history. And elected a Brat, perhaps this time in name only. (Edited to add, or maybe they painted themselves a Rep. Brat who’ll become an old master at the fine art of politicking.)