Monday--March 27

Rainy today so probably won't get any outside gardening done. My seedlings are coming up nicely. We'll see how many actually make it to the garden.

Found this today at Salon (reprinted from Alternet). This makes me really miss real news reporting which I haven's seen in years. We did get the sensational stories about insurance companies jumping out of the exchanges or jacking up the premiums by hellacious percentages and I did see that traced the problem back to the failure of the federal government to pay the promised funds to backstop their losses but not one line about Marco Rubio and his Repthuglican sabotage.

Scientific American has an interesting explanation for why Trump's lies have no impact on his supporters: they are "blue lies" told about one group but strengthening his own group. The lie that illegal immigrants are "rapists" and violent "criminals" confirms what his base believes. It paints an "us vs. them" picture with us as the good guys ad them as the bad guys.

More often nowadays when we read stories about other countries we notice that, if we didn't know what country was the subject of the piece, we might thing the story applied to the U.S. This one is a case in point though I don't think anyone has studied the situation here in the same way. We have seen stories of 20-somethings moving back into their parents houses (if they had moved out in the first place). But I haven't seen any study which estimates how many years a 20-year-old would have to work to become economically independent. I hope it wouldn't be 18 years.