MetaFilter

Hitting the shows the day after his announcement, Buchanan...told NBC’s Today, “David Duke, I think, has been reading a lot of my past columns and if he keeps it up and keeps stealing my themes I think we’re going to go down to Louisiana and sue him for intellectual property theft.” [...] And if Duke was pretty good at TV, Buchanan was an absolute master. He knew how to dominate panels, to deal with interviewers, he gave reporters total access, and he went to every campaign stop mic’ed up so they’d get everything. [...] At a mall in Manchester, Buchanan sat down next to a man in fatigues who was unemployed and apparently homeless. Buchanan said if the cameras intimidated him, he could send them away. He said they did; Buchanan didn’t send them away. He asked if the man was on welfare, which the man claimed not to be. Buchanan wished him good luck and a merry Christmas and moved on, cameras in tow. A few weeks later he called for the chronically homeless to be jailed.

With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections. I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I'd urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.

Owsley County, one of the nation's poorest places [prev], neatly fit the trend. Nearly 1,000 of its 4,508 residents got health insurance after Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear established Kynect two years ago and expanded Medicaid to include people up to 138 percent of the poverty level, which is $16,105 a year for an individual. Newly insured people started to visit the Owsley County Medical Clinic on the outskirts of Booneville. They desperately needed medical care. Even by Kentucky's lax standards, Owsley has high rates of obesity, smoking and poor nutrition, and as a result, greater than normal incidences of cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Some patients wept with relief as longtime ailments finally were treated, clinic officials said. [...] The community's largest-circulation newspaper, the Three Forks Tradition in Beattyville, did not say much about Kynect ahead of the election. Instead, its editorials roasted Obama and Hillary Clinton, gay marriage, Islam, "liberal race peddlers," "liberal media," black criminals and "the radical Black Lives Matter movement."