Making America Great Again - ACA version

For the past 8 years, the GnOPe has had no coherent goals beyond oppose Obama, and figuring they would be opposing Clinton, didn't work at formulating any platform other than those that have failed so miserably at the state level (Thanks Kansas for being a fiscal crash test dummy.).  So no surprise that other than creating a horrible mess of things (check the analysis at that link), they got no plans. You know in many other countries, if you get sick, you can just go to a clinic and get treated so bad their socialized medicine is. Getting rid of ACA, itself based on a GnOPe governor's plan, will waste millions of dollars and leave millions of people without health insurance.  Great isn't it? Sad.  
Advice - start yelling at your representatives.  

Someone had a horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad week

Someone had a horrible, terrible, no-good very bad week, and it wasn't TPP. Oh, this was a depressing, disappointing week what with the unrelenting crappy weather and all, and bad weather can make you a bit crabby.  But, wow, talk about crabby! TPP's favorite SCOTUS justice, Tony Scalia, is in an extremely bad mood!  Just read his blistering, but poorly reasoned, dissents on the ACA and same-sex marriage! You may search a long time before you find two better-written temper tantrums than these. You really get the sense that Scalia thinks he is actually smarter than anyone else and that his opinions should therefore be respected and deferred to. When you find such an attitude in a colleague (and TPP speaks here from experience), you find them insufferable and generally irritating. How can anyone not recognize and appreciate such an intellect? You cannot have a rationale interaction with someone like that. For our general entertainment a contest of bombastic egotism needs to be arranged so that Scalia can square off against someone who is really in his league: Bill O'Really!  This idea and the SCOTUS decisions in general have really cheered TPP up!

Beans versus nuts

Today's laboratory focuses on beans, legumes.  It's a fun lab with lots of cooking and disecting and eating.  Peanuts, the very name, cause a bit of confusion because they are not a nut at all but a pea in a pod, a dry indehiscent (does split open by itself) pod that grows under ground.  Of course this mornings news was all about nuts of the political persuasion.  Nuts who are obsessed with causing Obama to fail at any cost; nuts who will do any amount of damage to the USA to accomplish this goal.  In making this observation, it occurs to TPP that we might even say "pea-brained nuts" because none of this is very smart.  Indeed, the fear that Obama-care might work has spawned a disinformation campaign of epic proportions.  This however does demonstrate that ideology is no way to govern, and the GnOPe (the G is silent you recall) party continues to pursue their agenda because it's the will of the people, all 22%.  Wonder how many of my students even know what happened?