Outsourcing America’s health ca...

“Ola, Amigo! Pack your bags, we’re going to Mexico!” bubbled Dr. Franklin Peterson Comstock III, faux physician...

The tea party’s corrupt values

Remember when I said the tea party has the potential to be the GOP’s psycho ex-girlfriend? Well, Dana Milbank’s latest column — about tea party activists attacking John Boehner, Paul Ryan and the GOP for not tying an increase in the debt ceiling to undoing health care reform and preserving “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” — seems to bear this out. Especially the part where they blame the economic crisis on immorality, in general, and gay people, specifically. Again.

Of course, the irony is that the meltdown and the ensuing recession have less to do with immorality than amorality run amok in the in the marketplace, and the conservatism that allowed it.

Let me introduce myself

I’m Leslie Boyd. As a newspaper reporter for more than a quarter century, I saw and told the stories of real people in real situations who were being held down by systems that worked against them.

In 1983, it was Jeannie Alkema, a woman in Passaic County, NJ, with debilitating multiple sclerosis who was being cared for in her home. Her 12-year-old son suffered nightmares of his mother being put in a nursing home and him being placed in foster care. It was less expensive to care for Jeannie in her home than in a nursing home, but one day she called me in a panic and said the Department of Social Services was going to cut off her home care. Her son’s nightmare was about to become reality.