Browsing PBH By Articles

GOP Haunted By Its Own Stupidity

The Article: GOP’s anti-Obamacare stupidity is about to haunt them by Brian Beutler in Salon.

The Text: All year we’ve watched the running tally of House Republican votes to repeal, defund and dismantle Obamacare climb — 40, 41, 42 — to one and only one effect. Not to actually harm the Affordable Care Act but to exploit and intensify conservative outrage, by misleading GOP base voters about the likelihood and necessity of ending it.

It’s no surprise that those numbers have ticked up more rapidly in the past several weeks. Obamacare’s just days away from opening for business, and once that happens, repealing it or defunding it will entail taking health insurance benefits away from Americans. It becomes a much harder fight.

It’s also why I imagine that quite soon — certainly after the first of the year, when ACA-approved insurance actually kicks in — the GOP will lose its appetite for more and more and more doomed repeal votes.

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Chapter VII: Leaving The Mormon Roommates (Part I)

Note: this is a much-anticipated continuation of an epic several-part series chronicling one East Coast liberal’s swapping the tailored clothing of Jos. A Bank for the even dreamier blue eyes of Joseph Smith. The tale begins here.

The Mormon roommates were at breaking point.

But they didn’t say it. They let Selena Gomez.

The Mormon roommates never said they were angry. Theirs was a ceaseless, passive-aggressive simmer. They kept up their aww-shucks, “Leave It To Beaver” ways for a while. But little by little, it happened. The icy silences grew colder. The eye contact, more fleeting. Until they stopped sharing the Skittles. Stopped holding doors. And started cranking the Disney Channel full blast:

“I’M GOING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!” the Evil Selena Gomez roared.

It didn’t used to be this way. But the parents nagged a little longer and, maybe, a little louder than they should have. And Selena Gomez grew so tired of the nagging. So fed up with the parental whining. She did what any pouty teen with magic powers would do: she split herself in two.

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RIP, Middle Class

The Article: RIP, the middle class: 1946-2013 by Edward McClelland in Salon.

The Text: I know I’m dating myself by writing this, but I remember the middle class.

I grew up in an automaking town in the 1970s, when it was still possible for a high school graduate — or even a high school dropout — to get a job on an assembly line and earn more money than a high school teacher.

“I had this student,” my history teacher once told me, “a real chucklehead. Just refused to study. Dropped out of school, a year or so later, he came back to see me. He pointed out the window at a brand-new Camaro and said, ‘That’s my car.’ Meanwhile, I was driving a beat-up station wagon. I think he was an electrician’s assistant or something. He handed light bulbs to an electrician.”

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How Drugging Kids Became Big Business

The Article: A Toddler on 3 Different Psychiatric Meds? How Drugging Kids Became Big Business by Enrico Gnualati in AlterNet.

The Text: On December 13, 2006, paramedics arrived at the Plymouth County, Massachusetts, home of four-year-old Rebecca Riley only to find her slumped over on her parents’ bed, dead. The medical examiner on hand identified the cause of death as heart and lung failure brought about by the medications she was on. Rebecca was being prescribed Depakote, Seroquel, and Clonidine by Dr. Kayoko Kifuji, a Tufts–New England Medical Center child psychiatrist. She had diagnosed Rebecca with ADHD and bipolar disorder when she was two years old. Rebecca’s death provoked a national debate on how a child as young as two could ever be diagnosed with major mental illnesses and be put on powerful tranquilizers. Katie Couric eventually covered the story in a CBS 60 Minutes segment.

Ultimately, Rebecca’s parents were tried for and convicted of murder due to allegedly overdosing her. But this harrowing outcome didn’t take the national spotlight off the shocking revelation that a toddler could be diagnosed with mental illness and put on not just one but three powerful tranquilizers. None of the drugs Rebecca was prescribed was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use with kids her age—not then and not now. There was absolutely no robust scientific justification for Dr. Kifuji making the medication choices that she made. How could a reputable psychiatrist be so inclined to diagnose a child so young with diagnoses so severe and treat with medications so unapproved? The main answer lies with the spectacular success of twenty-first-century pharmaceutical marketing of psychiatric drugs.

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Why Best Buy Needs To Die

The Article: The Good News Is That They Saved Best Buy by Matthew Yglesias in Slate.

The Text: Best Buy is having a moment. Many observers wrote off the retail electronics chain as Circuit City and Borders liquidated and Barnes & Noble shrank. But in August of last year, French executive Hubert Joly resigned his post with travel management company Carlson to try to turn Best Buy around. By many measures, he seems to be succeeding. The price of Best Buy stock has more than tripled from its $11 low point in December. Costs are down, profits are up, and people are excited about their vending machines. But cutting costs alone isn’t a strategy for a company to thrive. Has Joly actually made the store any good? Is it a place you could recommend that people go to shop? Are the buys the best?

I rode the bus to the store’s Columbia Heights location in Washington, D.C., on Thursday morning to investigate. Intrepid Slate intern Dan Gartland visited the Noho location in New York for more data. My conclusion—Best Buy still basically sucks. It doesn’t have the best prices, it doesn’t have the best selection, and it doesn’t succeed on the level of customer service.

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