May all our readers have a better and even more fulfilling New Year!

If the shoe fits, wear it: "... in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." -- Bertrand Russell
"There's no firewall for stupidity." -- Mike Hamilton
"I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said." -- William F. Buckley, Jr.
"There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true." -- Søren Kierkegaard
Amanda Mayhew is one of the beneficiaries. She earns little enough to qualify for Medicaid under the new guidelines, and she enrolled in August. She has been to the dentist five times to begin salvaging her neglected teeth, has had a dermatologist remove a mole and has gotten medication for her depression, all free.Then a bit later in the article, we learn more:
“I am very, very thankful that Medicaid does cover what I need done right now,” said Ms. Mayhew, 38. “They ended up having to pull three teeth in the last three weeks, and I would have been in a lot of pain without it.”
A nurse practitioner at Family Health Centers had prescribed anti-depressants after Ms. Mayhew had her last baby in 2013 — at the time, she had temporary Medicaid for her pregnancy — but she stopped taking them when the coverage ended. Now she is back on them, and feeling good.Ms. Mayhew is obviously a good-hearted person. In fact, she’s so considerate of others that she’d give up the insurance that has been life-changing for her, if it meant she could save others from the horrifying things that she has heard Obamacare does, like denying cancer treatments to the elderly. It’s not her fault that what she has heard are outright lies — how is she supposed to know that? She got it from “news programs,” supposedly authoritative sources, which might mean a talk radio show or maybe a certain television network.
“That’s been a big thing for me,” she said.
And yet.
“I don’t love Obamacare,” she said. “There are things in it that scare me and that I don’t agree with.”
For example, she said, she heard from news programs that the Affordable Care Act prohibited lifesaving care for elderly people with cancer.
There is no such provision, although a proposal to pay doctors to engage patients in end-of-life planning — such as whether they would want life-sustaining treatment if they were terminally ill — was removed from the law after it sparked a political firestorm over “death panels.” The misperception remains widespread: A poll this month by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 41 percent of Americans still believe the law created “a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare.” An equal number found the law did not.
“If we have Obamacare and the insurance is available to me, I will use it and be thankful for it,” Ms. Mayhew said. “But would I gladly give up my insurance today if it meant that some of the things that are in the law were not in place? Yes, I would.”
We believed that it was a terrible thing that you were uninsured. We fought, at considerable political risk, to get you insurance. And now we’re very pleased that you have it. But we really wish you understood the truth about what the Affordable Care Act does and doesn’t do. Please vote for us.And here’s what Republicans would say to her (if they were being honest):
We didn’t care all that much that you were uninsured. We fought with all our might against the law that gave you the insurance you have now. If we could, we’d repeal it tomorrow and take that insurance away. But we’re overjoyed that you believe the false things you do about the ACA — indeed, we encouraged you to believe things like that, even though we knew they were lies. Please vote for us.Not every Republican thinks that — there were many Republicans in Kentucky who went along with Democratic governor Steve Beshear’s acceptance of the Medicaid expansion, which made the change in Mayhew’s life possible. But every important congressional Republican does say that, as does every Republican who wants to be president (with the exception of Ohio’s John Kasich, another governor who accepted the expansion).
So-called dark-money nonprofits, such as those affiliated with the Koch brothers, could find it much harder to muck around in elections. Under current practices, up to half of these groups' money can be spent on politics. Changes to the Internal Revenue Service regulations governing 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations could shrink the percentage they can devote to election activities such as advertising. Overall, the aim would be to make it more difficult for any nonprofit group to engage in campaign politics; in practice, it would likely be perceived as a disproportionate handicap of conservative donor-backed organizations. These are among the reforms that the administration, regulatory groups or Congress could take on if so inclined (which Congress probably is not).Oh, my sweet Jesus H. Christ on a Vespa, if the IRS were to adjust its regulations so as to end the laughable farce that Citizens For Limited Whatever is actually a social-welfare organization, and not a well-financed exercise in ratfcking, a regulatory adjustment that is only overdue by about 20 years, it would take the jaws of life to get our pals from True The Vote off the ceiling. Not only is this excellent public policy, because it goes at least some distance toward rendering our elections less of a plutocratic puppet show, it's also a remarkable political kick in the nuts. My god, what a wonderful idea this is. Do it now.
Representative Scalise brought into sharp focus the dire circumstances pervasive in many important, under-funded needs of the community at the expense of graft within the Housing and Urban Development Fund, an apparent give-away to a selective group based on race.In a statement on Monday, Scalise spokeswoman Moira Smith said the lawmaker had spoken to "to hundreds of different groups with a broad range of viewpoints" during his career in public service.
In every case, he was building support for his policies, not the other way around. In 2002, he made himself available to anyone who wanted to hear his proposal to eliminate slush funds that wasted millions of taxpayer dollars as well as his opposition to a proposed tax increase on middle-class families. He has never been affiliated with the abhorrent group in question. The hate-fueled ignorance and intolerance that group projects is in stark contradiction to what Mr. Scalise believes and practices as a father, a husband, and a devoted Catholic.An aide subsequently clarified to Roll Call that it was "probable" that Scalise spoke to EURO in 2002 but did not know it was a white supremacist group. The aide said Scalise didn't specifically remember the event, and his office had no record of it.