Gavin Grimm & Transgender Issues

The Washington Post today details the transition of a young teenager who identifies as a male despite being born as a female and his choice to use bathrooms designated for males.
Suddenly, the issue goes to the Supreme Court because some people objected and the local school district accommodated the objections by ruling that students must used bathrooms for the designated biological birth gender.
Then North Carolina enacted a law declaring the same.
And counties, mainly in the South, have refused to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples.

All these decisions have one thing in common.  The legal powers accommodate the objections of one or more individuals who do not like or approve of the choices of someone else.  The legal authorities are trying to dictate deeply personal behavior mainly on the basis of their own religious views.  These laws or actions are not preventing people from doing any action that could be considered illegal - just objectionable to their own view of propriety. 
It is no different than the old laws, again mostly in the South, that forbid interracial marriage.  The Supreme Court ended those laws long ago.

The current personal choice issues, also based in civil rights, relate to the Trump campaign.  Trump's motto, "Make American Great Again",  is code for making America Christian, as well as as white, again. 

Trump may reach a segment of voters, but that group is trapped in the past and Trump's call to them shows his pandering and lack of leadership.  The irony is that Trump knows this perfectly.

Voter Polls Being Purged

 Reporter Greg Palast and Dale Ho of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project have reported that 27 Republican led states have instituted a major effort to reduce voting rolls.  They are taking lists of duplicate names in two states and summarily removing them from voter rolls.  The potential voter will not know this until they go to the polls to vote.  And the average voter won't know that they could still file a provisional ballot.  This purge is controlled by Republican state officials, so you can anticipate that it will predominantly effect people of color.  Examples included names that were either Latino or names predominantly indicating an African American person.

What is wrong with the Republican Party?  They can't win honestly, so they will try deceit, rather than identifying principles that can lead them to victory.  Not to mention that these tactics could help to elect Trump - even while there is a notable silence from mainstream Republicans on Trump's candidacy.

New York Times - Thank You !

Here's a link to The New York Times list of Trump insults:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/28/upshot/donald-trump-twitter-insults.html?WT.mc_id=2016-AUG-FB-MC8-AUD_DEV-0804-0831&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=AUDDEVGate&_r=0

Who do these insults appeal to?

Make America Great Again

Michael Eric Dyson, not only African Americans understand the code as a subrosa way of saying racist things, like Make America White Again.  The question is how an individual responds to the code.  Same as the code Trump initiated with the so-called question of Obama's birthplace.  I can't get inside the heads of the Trump supporters (thank goodness!) and I don't if some or all of them realize what the code is all about.  But many thinking whites do.

Mylan

So now the price for the EpiPen, the life saving immediate response for severe allergic reactions, has been raised about 400%, from about $100 to $500. 
This will make it prohibitively expensive for some people. 
The pharmaceutical company, Mylan, is the exclusive manufacturer of this project, ie, Myland has a monopoly.
Mylan recently dramatically increased the salaries of their top executives.
The EpiPen is mostly (not exclusively) used by children.

Thankfully, there will be multiple hearings in Congress - because this price increase affects so many, many families.  Unlike the Shkreli price increase that affects a relatively small group of people, however, essential that drug is.

Here's the thing.  Without the EpiPen, the cost of treatment for allergic attack will increase astronomically - the ambulance, the emergency room, possibly significant hospital stay.  If the victim of an allergic attack, without the EpiPen, even survives.

Can you say tin ear?  A widely used essential drug, in a Presidential election year.  How stupid, as well as insensitive, can a company be.