Oh good

Congressman and former vice presidential candidate Paul "Ayn Rand" Ryan was in West Virginia recently campaigning for Shelley Moore Capito in her bid for the seat of the retiring Senator Joe Rockefeller.


According to Ryan, Capito will help get rid of the Affordable Care Act, which  has brought Medicaid coverage to around 134,000 working West Virginians since Jan. 1, not counting another 40,000 or so who got coverage under the ACA in other ways. In fact, the law that Capito will presumably get rid of has made WV one of the state's with the lowest rate of uninsured residents, as noted in yesterday's post and resulted in huge savings for the state's largest hospital system..


Nice. Let them eat Atlas Shrugged.


FIGS, ANYONE? Here are the latest musings of my friend the  Rev. Jim Lewis at Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

Love and death

Many Goat Rope readers from West Virginia are doubtless familiar with my friend the Rev. Jim Lewis, a "retired" Episcopal priest and tireless fighter for justice. And if you know Jim, you also knew Judy, his beloved wife with whom he shared a strong connection for 59 years.

With absolutely no disrespect intended to Jim, Judy was the toughest one. Judy recently passed after a decades-long battle with cancer.

Jim regularly publishes his "Notes from Under the Fig Tree," which I have frequently linked here. The latest edition is a very moving tribute to Judy.

Whether you knew her or know Jim or not, it's a very moving meditation on love, marriage, death and all those things. It moved me and I'm not easily movable. You can read it here.

It reminded me of some lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 116:

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickles' compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
  If this be error and upon me proved,
  I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

That's all for today.