Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia is raising the monthly health insurance premium on my current health insurance plan to $338 for 2017. That's a 27% increase from monthly 2016 payments. I should probably be thankful it's that low. My 2016 premiums represented a 100% increase over 2015.

Perhaps you're thinking that $338 isn't a lot of money each month. If you can afford better, good for you. However, the Affordable Healthcare Act has destroyed insurance for self-employed professionals like me. The insurers are complaining that they're loosing money on individual plans, and I can understand why. No independent can afford their rates.

I don't think I'm being unreasonable. I don't mind paying for health insurance coverage; I've done it for years. But I don't see why the monthly amounts have grown so out of line with what I can afford. (Especially when it still won't pay for hospital visits!) We're not experiencing rampant inflation, and there doesn't seem to be any shortage of services. So what's driving these impossible costs? Perhaps its a liquidity crisis. We can't save anything for the future if we have to spend every penny paying for right now.

In the past year, my insurance has been billed for $479 worth of doctors fees. Comparing that number against the $4,056 or more I'll have to pay in premiums in 2017, it's clear to me that my best economic option is to cancel my insurance and pay the "individual shared responsibility payment" — the government's name for the ObamaCare penalty tax. At my income bracket, the government will penalize me $695 for the whole year. That leaves enough leeway for eight doctor's visits next year, and I'll still come out ahead!

So if you see me grab my chest and collapse, don't call an ambulance. There's no way I can afford that.

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"Am I interrupting you? What are you doing right now?" my father asked when I answered the telephone.

"Nothing important. I was just reading an article from Ezra Klein about why Hillary Clinton's private reputation is so good but the American public hates her," I said. "He calls it The Gap."

Dad laughed. "Of course they'd publish that now. They just can't believe that the American public could be right about something."

I said, "Your response indicates that you believe there's no point in ever investigating this reputation gap. Don't you think there's value in examining the difference in someone's public and private personas?"

"I'm open-minded, but it's just election year spin. If they really wanted to investigate that gap, they'd do it next year."

I shook my head, though dad couldn't see this through the phone. "This is the ideal time, from the news industry's point-of-view. Capitalize on everyone talking about her during the Democratic National Convention."

"Have you been watching? There's been open revolt from the Sanders supporters. This party is tearing itself apart. I haven't seen anything like this since McGovern in 1972."

"What about last week? A week ago today, delegates at the RNC tried to pass a resolution to end-run Trump. Is this so different?"

"That's not the same thing," Dad harrumphed. "These people are angry at a party leadership that openly schemed to give their preferred candidate the nomination."

"What's new about that? Isn't that what the Republicans did in 2012 with Romney? That's what parties do, manipulate things to get their choice candidates elected."

"It's not fair! It's against the rules!"

I remained unswayed. "What rules? American political parties can do whatever they want with their candidates."

Dad practically growled. "Well, since we're not talking about facts, and I can see I interrupted you, I'll just let you go." Click.

I admit that I edited that conversation from my memory of the telephone call, but I think both Dad and I come out looking better in my version than reality. (He refuses to admit his own bias — he wants to Make America Great Again® — and I'm intentionally argumentative. About everything.) Frankly, we behave better when we don't talk about politics. Or government. Or sports. Come to think of it, maybe we never behave better.

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The contentious 2016 Republican National Convention is finally over. When they stopped chanting for the death of their opponents and booing a call to "vote your conscience" long enough to say they want to Make America Great Again®, I had to assume they were talking about this.

Because heroin.

Should society survive the coming apocalypse, I personally hope that this is what we'll all remember about the dumbest political convention in memory. It might not be the song they want, but it's definitely the song they deserved.

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Life sucks.

My health care situation has me depressed. The day after I got the news that my health insurance was useless, I got my premium bill in the mail. Thanks for literally nothing, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia.

Vince Dooley came out in support of Donald Trump yesterday. Maybe it's time for a coaching change. (Of course, I'd probably be just as irritated if Dooley came out to support Hillary. What a shitty election season.)

Mom and I drove past the site for the new Culver's in Newnan. I postulated that I was probably over-excited for their burgers, which probably weren't as good as I remembered. Mom said that if I was badmouthing Culver's I really must be depressed.

Have I mentioned that life sucks?

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I received a letter from my local county Voter Registration office this weekend informing me that my registration had been denied because I was a convicted felon. Oh, well. I wasn't really planning on voting anyway. My only problem with this news was that I'm not a convicted felon.

I went to the office and asked them what I could do to prove to them that I'd never even been arrested. It's often said that it's impossible to prove a negative, but the fine people in Coweta County said they'd just take my word for it. It was that easy.

What wasn't so easy was the answer to the question "why did someone report that I had a felony conviction when I don't?" Apparently, the Georgia county Voter Registration offices are required to ask the other Georgia county Superior Courts if any voter registrants are felons. But the chain of communication is — shall we say, one sided, and when it breaks down, tracking down the error is — shall we say difficult?

To validate whether this error might cause me future trouble, the Coweta County Voter Registration had me call a number in Athens that they admitted might be wrong. (The state of Georgia doesn't just not help its county offices communicate, it actively interferes by giving the counties directories with bad information.) The nice lady I reached at the Athens/Clarke County Voter Registration Office told me that the number I had called was wrong by one digit, and gave me the right number for the Athens/Clarke County Sheriff's Office. Then she realized that I really probably wanted to speak to the Clerk of Courts, which was a different telephone number also different from the original number by just one digit. No wonder compiling those state phone directories is so hard!

I finally got a representative of the Clerk of Superior Court in Athens on the phone, and she admitted that her office would have been the one to notify Coweta County whether I had a felony conviction. However, she could find no reference of anyone with my combination of name and birthday in the Athens/Clarke County system. I expected that. (As I said: no felony conviction.) What I did not expect was that she would suggest that I should run a background check on myself just to be sure. Wait, what?

I have to assume that she misunderstood why I called. If Clarke, which was the county that reported to Coweta that I had a felony conviction, didn't have a record of such a conviction, why did I need to run a background check on myself to prove anything to anyone?

Anyway. Problem solved, I think. It looks like I'll finally be registered to vote. Not that I planned to. But it's the principle of the thing that matters.

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I called my father to ask who he planned to vote for in the Presidential primaries. He was thinking about Donald Trump. Dad wants to Make America Great Againâ„¢.

I couldn't let that happen, if only partially because I don't think that America was so great once upon a time that I would ever want to go back there. Whenever that was.

When pressed for his reasoning, he said, "I think Trump's got the business background to fix America's budget problem." Maybe so. But is that the only prerequisite worth considering?

I asked whether it wasn't a problem for him that Trump had repeatedly belittled women and called Mexicans rapists. I asked him if it was okay that the head of our Executive branch of government bullied those of us who didn't have as much money as he did. I asked if it was acceptable to elect a commander-in-chief who called POWs "losers" because they got captured by the enemy.

Those are all things my father had taught his son not to do. Was behavior inappropriate for his son somehow acceptable in his President?

Dad thought about that for a while before telling me he's changed his mind. He now says he'll be voting for "Jeb!".

I guess I can live with that.

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In a country that puts more faith in a ground-dwelling rodent than a meteorologist, it should surprise no one that the leading Republican political candidates are a self-aggrandizing game-show host and a bible-thumping, anti-science lawyer.

Happy Groundhog Day.

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For most of this week, Atlanta was snowed under. We had ample warning that the storm was coming, but a delayed response by the state government and the Department of Transportation caused thousands of commuters to be trapped in their cars for 19 hours or more. Some children had to spend the night trapped in their school buses!

Georgia Governor Nathan Deal blamed the National Weather Service despite their predictions being remarkably accurate as far as 12 hours before the storm arrived. Adding insult to injury, the Georgia Emergency Management Agency Director said that GEMA didn't respond to the crushing gridlock for more than 3 hours because "it wasn't as gridlocked as it is now."

That's Georgia's government for you: we can't read a weather report and we don't open our umbrellas until we are already soaking wet.

But not everyone has been unhappy about the weather's effects. July and Victoria have spent as much time as I will let them outside playing in the snow.

I think it's funny that they hate rain but love snow. I've tried to explain to them that snow and rain are pretty much the same thing, but they don't listen. They never listen.

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The local newspaper reports that the Georgia House of Representatives is considering a bill to legalize unpasteurized "raw milk." According to State Representative David Stover:

"In a lot of ways, it is a liberty and freedom bill. It is your freedom to consume what you want to consume.

I'm with Stover. How dare the FDA tell me what's harmful to put in my body? I'm finally going to start drinking gasoline, just like I always wanted. What the hell does some college-educated doctor know, anyway? Keep your laws off my body, mandatory fluoridation: I'm drinking what I want!

Hey, if the state wants to let me decide whether it is safe to ride in a car without a seat belt, fire my gun at birds in my suburban neighborhood, or smoke crystal meth for breakfast, who am I to refuse? Just because the consumption of unpasteurized milk has sickened thousands in the past decade in America alone is no reason for the government to ban the practice. If those people want to get sick, I say let 'em!

But that's not all Stover has to say to the Newnan Times-Herald:

He said he is not a milk drinker, but he is "a person who believes in organic foods and natural foods. That is just where I stand. I feel it is healthier for you."

What a nice guy. Russian roulette isn't his thing, but it's your right to play, he says. I'm sure that message will look great on his re-election banners. Raw milk: not good enough for David Stover, but just fine for you.

That's the America I live in. Land of the free and home of the criminally stupid.

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Remember New York City's proposed law forbidding the sale of giant sugary beverages? Turns out that law isn't just silly, as many people have claimed. It's also racist.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Hispanic Federation have joined forces to oppose the new law. They argue that the ban will "arbitrarily discriminate against citizens and small business owners in African-American and Hispanic communities." Their position, in a nutshell, is that a disproportionate amount of the revenue generated by minority businesses comes from sales of Big Gulps.

How, exactly, does the NAACP or the Hispanic Institute think that they are helping by wading into the dispute over this law? If it is true that the 64-oz beverage is the true economic engine of the minority business in New York City, shouldn't they be working to solve that problem instead of perpetuating it?

I don't recall the NAACP standing up for the cigarette companies as governments worked to eliminate them as a health menace. I doubt that the Hispanic Federation stood up for the use of lead paint. So why now, why giant cups of soda? If the only thing that the law's Big Beverage opponents can do is call it a racially-motivated attack by The Man, there must not be a lot that they can do to stop it.

Once super-sized sodas are outlawed, maybe then there will be an underground criminal empire built around delivering jugs of black-market soda. Since crime disproportionately affects minorities in this country, at least that would give the NAACP and Hispanic Federation something to protest.

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