It's almost inconceivable that an ostensible public servant could introduce a health plan in which people were asked to choose between phones and health. And yet that's exactly what Congressman Jason Chaffetz of Utah managed to portray a few days ago. You see, to Chaffetz the issue isn't why people can't afford a $10,000 visit to their friendly local ER. The issue is that they're greedy, and that they'd rather have an iPhone than be alive.

Of course that's absolutely absurd, as is the GOP plan to replace Obamacare. The notion, obviously, is to pass on costs to those who can least afford them. Subsidizing insurance by age rather than need means that someone as wealthy as Bill Gates could be eligible for huge benefits while a single mom in Brooklyn will be more or less on her own. I'm sure that makes sense somehow, to someone, but who it is I have no idea. Of course Chaffetz himself has a government health care plan, and if it's good enough for him, why not offer it to all Americans? 

And how on earth can cutting Medicaid support help America? Medicaid is beneficial for states, and ultimately saves money. Clearly the priority of the GOP is not a healthy America, but rather a more wealthy insurance company. And don't forget the uber-rich, who will get a huge tax cut benefit even as our poorer friends and neighbors get cut.

I honestly don't know how Chaffetz or Ryan can get up in the morning and face themselves in a mirror. Were I the motivating factor for a plan like this, I'd take the first opportunity to leap from a tall building. Nonetheless, these guys suffer no such scruples.

If you feel like buying an iPhone, you can get one brand new for as little as $399. I'm not sure what drugs Chaffetz is taking, but I've yet to hear of the health plan you can buy for $400, even if you're the healthiest 22-year-old on God's green earth. In fact, I think you'd be fortunate if you could find a halfway decent plan for $800 a month. As a matter of fact, I have very good health insurance as a NY City employee, and there've been months when I paid $800 in co-pays. With $30 doctor visits and lab fees, $50 visits to Urgent Care, $150 to ER and $200 to hospital admission, those dollars can really mount up.

Despite that, I know how lucky I am. What I really don't understand is how anyone could vote for a lying sack of crap like Jason Chaffetz. I mean, I suppose he must have qualities other than his outright contempt for poor people, but what on earth can they be to remotely compensate for that? The man is a loathsome reptile.

It's disgusting that he insults poor people, as though they're greedy. This guy has a great medical plan, makes almost 200K a year, has a whole lot of his expenses paid by we, the people, and wants to begrudge poor people the small comfort of a phone. I don't understand for the life of me why people vote for these morally bankrupt windbags. I read a whole book called What's the Matter With Kansas and I still haven't got the slightest idea.

But the real sinners are the ones who write the propaganda to keep slugs like this one in office. I hope there's a special ring in hell for those people, because their job entails making life hellish for real working Americans here on earth.

Nothing like watching the GOP Convention.  It turns out that we teachers are to blame for almost everything. The whole narrative about money moving more and more to the 1% is completely false. Otherwise, how could Donald Trump Jr. say this?

The other party gave us public schools that far too often fail our students, especially those who have no options. 

It has nothing to do with the fact that politicians, likely as not Republicans, have cut funds to enable tax cuts for the likes of Junior and his orange Daddy. But the real whopper is below:

Growing up, my siblings and I we were truly fortunate to have choices and options that others don’t have. We want all Americans to have those same opportunities.

Well of course they had choices and options with a Daddy who's known mostly for being rich.  Make no mistake, neither Daddy nor Junior is proposing that we be rich, and if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. The vouchers the Donalds love so much are not going to enable the riff-raff, i.e you and me, to attend the schools their kids go to. You'll have a choice of a crumbling public school or maybe a Moskowitz Academy where your kids can pee themselves.

Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class, now they’re stalled on the ground floor.

There he may be right. In Detroit the schools are rat-infested and falling apart. In Chicago a Democrat, Rahm Emanuel, closed 50 schools because he could. Kids understand what it means when you send them to a place that looks like a pile of trash. When I started teaching in the trailers, I started wearing suits to work. I wanted to send kids the message that even though Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinks this pile of junk is good enough for you, I think you're important.

Now maybe it's a Trump family tradition to plagiarize, and Junior just wants to get in on it too. Maybe it's OK for them, and maybe it's OK for Republcians, as Chris Christie says, if you keep it at seven percent. Maybe he got away with it in his elite private school. Could he have paid off the teachers? Who knows? Were Junior in my class, I'd give him an F. Maybe someone did and that's why he hates us. Anyway, let's see what other words of wisdom he has:

 They’re like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers, for the teachers and the administrators and not the students. 

Yes, teachers are having a big party. There's nothing we love better than being observed and rated on a checklist. And best of all, we get judged on test scores! What teacher doesn't love being judged by a system that has no validity whatsoever? All we care about is ourselves, and that's why we took this gig! We're all fabulously wealthy, do nothing whatsoever, live in mansions and drive obscenely expensive cars. Okay, that's a joke. I'm not describing teachers, but rather the Trumps. 

You know why other countries do better on K through 12? They let parents choose where to send their own children to school.

You know why other countries do better in K through 12? Because, unlike us in the US, 51% of their kids do not live in poverty. Because they have nationalized health care. Because they have day care that parents don't have to work second jobs to pay for. In fact, we made one minor move toward health care for all, and Orange Daddy wants to kill even that.

That’s called competition. It’s called the free market. And it’s what the other party fears.

That's called an outright lie. No country has a successful voucher system and those who've tried it are not jumping up and down about it. In Finland, regarded by even Bill Gates as the best public education system, everyone goes to public schools. There are not even the elite private schools that Junior went to. I'd argue that if folks like Junior had to go to public schools, there would be none that look like those in Detroit.

They fear it because they’re more concerned about protecting the jobs of tenured teachers than serving the students in desperate need of a good education.

Wow. What planet is this kid living on? I live in New York, supposedly a bastion of liberalism, and we have a Democrat Governor who pushed an evaluation system specifically designed to fire more teachers. When that system didn't work as designed, he called it "baloney," and proceeded to push a new system, which hopefully will fire even more teachers. That's what Democrat Andrew Cuomo considers a victory.

Every teacher I know is acutely aware of this. That's why we're all so fidgety. We don't mind doing our jobs. Let me tell you something--this guy is stereotyping teachers just like Daddy stereotypes Muslims. In fact it's not teachers who are stalling the progress of the middle class. This started with Saint Ronald Reagan, and now Republicans are all about cutting taxes for the wealthy.

Who picks up the slack? We do. We teachers pay what people like Trump and Baby Trump used to pay. Our children pay what they used to. If Baby Trump gave a golly gosh darn about folks like us he'd have been out on the streets working for Bernie Sanders instead of driving his Lamborghini to gala luncheons.

It's absurd and obscene that we who devote our lives to helping children are vilified by the same people who make it impossible to fund their schools. It's even worse that their remedy for public schools is making it easier for zillionaires to profit from them.

All over the news, all over Facebook and Twitter, there's talk of Donald Trump and the much-maligned crusading reporter Megyn Kelly. Didn't she ask the tough questions? Didn't she challenge Donald Trump over his misogynistic rhetoric? Didn't she provoke him into spouting yet further offensive verbiage?

She did challenge him over his remarks about women, and she did get him to say whatever it was about her bleeding. And all over social media, there is outrage. How dare Donald Trump allude to menstruation? On the one hand, he's banned from some big GOP speaking occasion. On the other are people going after Megyn Kelly. How come she went after Donald Trump and went easy on the others? That's an interesting question, but absolutely none of the Fox talking heads asked the most interesting and obvious question. (I'll get to that.)

Another thing Trump said was that he gave to various and sundry candidates. He was challenged because he's donated to Hillary Clinton in the past. But at that point, Trump said something remarkable. He said he was a businessman, and when pols asked him for money, he gave. He said that a few years later he might ask them for a favor. Very Don Corleone, if you ask me. Except Don Corleone was portrayed as helping ordinary people, giving them power society may have unfairly denied them, in return for some unspecified favor in the future. Trump gave money to people who were already among the most powerful in the country.

In the clip I saw, Trump said he gave money to most of the people on the stage. One of them said no, while a few of the others asked him to give them money. They probably couldn't help it. Politicians in the United States spend so much time asking for campaign money it's a wonder they have time to do their jobs at all. And it's no wonder that so little gets done in the name of We, the People.

Then Trump said something truly remarkable. He said the system was broken. Sure, it's pay for play. Sure, he plays the game. Sure, he uses the rules as they are laid out. But Trump's utterance, and others like that, are the real reason GOP bigshots don't like having him around. He isn't supposed to say things like that. None of the other hopefuls wander around telling the truth. They all pretend to represent us, while Trump's right out there, in front of God and everybody, saying the system is for sale to the highest bidder.

So why am I attacking poor Megyn Kelly? It's because neither she nor any of her allegedly pro colleagues, as far as I know, followed up on that statement. Wouldn't it be appropriate to say, "If the system is broken, how can we fix it?" Wouldn't it be appropriate to ask that of not only Trump, but of every person standing on that stage? Isn't basic fundamental democracy something worth protecting?

Not to the talking heads of Fox News, and not anyone in MSM of whom I'm aware. As far as I know, the only candidate talking about Citizens United, which empowers the Koch Brothers to create and empower anti-union slime like Scott Walker, is Bernie Sanders. As far as I can tell, the great minds at Fox don't even think it merits a second thought.

The larger problem is that the rest of the media, like the NY Times, which is supposed to be better than Fox, is still harping on Trump and Kelly and whether this will be the thing that finally stops Trump's momentum. So far, just about every odious thing he says gives him a bump in the polls. Can Fox stop Trump from wandering around telling saying his unedited opinions, which sometimes turn out to be true?

Time will tell. Thus far, they've been pretty good about steering the national conversation to places that continually move working people backward. Thank goodness Ronald Reagan got rid of that inconvenient fairness doctrine that said issues actually had to be discussed from both sides. I remember the club owner in the Blues Brothers saying, "We have both kinds of music, country and western."

Sometimes, in these United States, I feel like we get both sides of the issue--right and ultra right. Make no mistake, I like Donald Trump about as much as I'd like some loathsome reptile I found crawling under my bed. But Fox likes him even less, because they simply can't afford to have him running around telling the truth, and focusing on issues that We, the People are simply supposed to ignore.