US elections: Kang vs. Kodos

[IheartIheartTesla]

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos

[BloodRider]

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We must move Forward, Not backwards, Upwards, not forward and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!

 

[DanteGabriel]

Quoting Mandy from the last topic:

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This blase, dismissive attitude of not getting worked up over things when it comes to Hillary is what bothers me about most HRC supporters.  It's like they expect her to lie sometimes or do illegal things, but as long as they aren't huge lies or huge illegal acts, it's cool. 

Like I said, I supported Bernie, as did my wife and most of our friends. I think Mrs. Gabriel even donated to Bernie's campaign. And I don't think it's a big deal that Bill Clinton gladhanded some people at a polling place.

This Republican-like witch-hunt mode that seems to be ramping up as the math gets worse for Sanders is what bothers me most about my fellow Bernie supporters.

[TrackerNeil]

Mandy said:

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This blase, dismissive attitude of not getting worked up over things when it comes to Hillary is what bothers me about most HRC supporters.  It's like they expect her to lie sometimes or do illegal things, but as long as they aren't huge lies or huge illegal acts, it's cool. 

I don't know if what Bill did was illegal, and from what I am reading, I am not sure election officials are clear on it, either. But even if it is, what do you propose we do about it? We could assume that every single voter who turned up at that polling place that day was unduly influenced by Big Bill, and give those votes to Sanders, but that won't change the results of the election. We could also invalidate the entire election over this and require Massachusetts to hold another primary. What's the desired outcome here?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Kal, Mormont

I'm just saying that someone who believes in an issue is more likely to take action, and more likely to be determined to achieve their end goal than someone who doesn't really believe in the issue but knows they need to sound like they do to win an election. I don't think that's very controversial.

[Kalbear]

Just now, Tywin et al. said:

Kal, Mormont

I'm just saying that someone who believes in an issue is more likely to take action, and more likely to be determined to achieve their end goal than someone who doesn't really believe in the issue but knows they need to sound like they do to win an election. I don't think that's very controversial.

It's not controversial but it's also not that factual. And it's mostly weird that you'd be upset about someone who is pragmatic and shows success getting things done regardless of their personal passion towards something. 

[Ormond]

7 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos

In regard to our previous discussion:

I would think that a system where you get one ballot that has the primary candidates for all parties on it would result in a lot of spoiled ballots where people mistakenly vote in more than one party's primary and their results have to be thrown out. It seems to me having separate ballots for each party is a lot less prone to voting errors. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 minute ago, Kalbear said:

It's not controversial but it's also not that factual. And it's mostly weird that you'd be upset about someone who is pragmatic and shows success getting things done regardless of their personal passion towards something.

Clinton claims she's gotten a lot more done than she actually has.

The whole point is I fear she is saying a lot of things to cut off Sanders in the primary that she will walk away from to some extent in the general, and if she were to win the presidency, might not pursue at all.

And that's coming from someone who voted for Clinton, not Sanders.

[Kalbear]

Well, election officials say that he didn't violate any laws given that he didn't talk to any voters within that distance. He isn't going to be charged with a crime. 

[TrackerNeil]

3 minutes ago, Mandy said:

The question of whether he broke laws or not really hasn't been answered, in my opinion.  " Within 150 feet of a polling place…no person shall solicit votes for or against, or otherwise promote or oppose, any person or political party or position on a ballot question, to be voted on at the current election "

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2016/03/01/bill-clinton-new-bedford-video/

 

I don't think it's a witch hunt, it's a simple question of whether laws were broken or not, and people acting like it's not a big deal.

I don't mean to dog-pile, but I don't think it is that simple, Mandy. What do you want done about this? Should Bill be fined? Should the election be invalidated?

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, Tywin et al. said:

Clinton claims she's gotten a lot more done than she actually has.

The whole point is I fear she is saying a lot of things to cut off Sanders in the primary that she will walk away from to some extent in the general, and if she were to win the presidency, might not pursue at all.

And that's coming from someone who voted for Clinton, not Sanders.

Well, okay. But say that, then. You aren't afraid of people who switch positions per se; you're worried about Clinton not holding up her side on things she's proposed. And I think that's fair - just like it is a fair criticism of Obama, who still hasn't killed Gitmo, still hasn't improved volunteer options, still hasn't fixed gun control and didn't get out of Iraq in a particularly timely fashion. 

[OnionAhaiReborn]

Bernie Sanders' Most Radical Idea Is One He Almost Never Mentions

In 2004, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America -- better known as PhRMA  -- was on a roll. It had just secured a new Medicare prescription drug benefit that would let medicine makers charge the government whatever prices they wanted. Sanders had voted against the deal and was looking for ways to protect Medicare from ballooning costs.

So he started talking to someone who had actually beaten PhRMA: James Love, who heads the nongovernmental organization Knowledge Ecology International. At the time, Love was on a hot streak of his own. His first big win as a public interest advocate was a reversal of Reagan administration policies that had privatized government data. In the early 1990s, it could cost $25 to access a single annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That's chump change for major corporations, but a massive expense for environmental activists and public interest groups attempting to do serious research. Thanks to Love, every bill in Congress and every corporate filing is now available online for free.

...

Love negotiated a deal with the CEO of Indian generic drugmaker Cipla to provide AIDS treatments in Africa at a "humanitarian price" of $1 a day. With the price barrier broken, legal walls tumbled (with some help from AIDS activists, including a young Rachel Maddow). The result was a revolution in access to AIDS and HIV treatment that saved millions of lives.

But Love recognized that the pricing insanity for AIDS drugs in Africa -- and the pharmaceutical industry's capture of ostensibly liberal American politicians -- was just one example of a nakedly predatory business model. He didn't want to tweak prices. He wanted to reshape the entire industry.

"We knew it would be perceived as a nuclear option, because it would really blow up the existing pharma business model," Love said. "So we talked to Bernie because we thought he'd have the guts to put it out, but also because we really liked working with his staff. They were willing to go with it."

...

In 2004, Love and Sanders began drafting the Medical Innovation Prize Act, which the Vermont senator formally introduced in January of the following year. At the time, the problems in the American pharmaceutical markets were clear. Today, they are even worse. The "findings" section of Sanders' 2005 bill states that Americans were paying over $179 billion a year for prescription drugs. In 2014, they spent $374 billion -- an increase of nearly 110 percent in a decade, and over $140 billion in excess of ordinary inflation. It's enough to make the pharmaceutical industry the most profitable industry in the world -- more than Big Oil, Big Media, and only slightly ahead of banking, Sanders' other top-targeted industry on the campaign trail.

There are glaring problems with the existing system. Minor afflictions that plague large numbers of wealthy Americans -- say, hair loss -- have no shortage of research. But research into antibiotic-resistant pathogens, for instance, is plummeting, even as the problem escalates. And it's not that hard to understand why. If you figure out a great way to kill a super-bacteria, patients only need the pill for a few weeks. It's much more profitable to treat long-term conditions like HIV or cancer, offering to extend life without a quick cure. New cancer drugs frequently cost well over $100,000 a year. A new cystic fibrosis drug carries an annual price tag of over $300,000 per patient.

Drug companies have defended these prices -- and profits -- arguing they are necessary to finance research and development into new medicines. Love and Sander's solution is to replace drug patents -- which grant pharma companies years of monopoly profits -- with simple financial prizes. Got a cool innovation?You get a prize. How much depends on how many other innovations are out there and how much therapeutic value your new drug has. Since the market value for curing rare diseases is low, you also qualify for a prize boost if you can kill off an obscure affliction.

Under the Sanders plan, once an inventor creates a new drug, any company could manufacture and market it at whatever price the market demands. Competition would dramatically lower the costs to consumers -- and the government, putting Medicare and Medicaid on stronger financial footing.  The program would be funded by a new fee on health insurance companies. Insurers, of course, would also be primary beneficiaries of the program, since ending the current drug patent system would dramatically reduce the prices of prescription drugs, saving insurers (and patients) lots of money.

After deliberating with Love, Sanders set the total prize fund amount at 0.5 percent of total U.S. economic output -- about $60 billion in 2005 (he has since raised it to 0.55 percent of economic output -- about $86 billion). The prize fund is a lot of money, roughly equal to what the government spent on food stamps in the deepest depths of the Great Recession. But it's a huge pay cut for pharmaceutical shareholders and executives. The companies argue that absent the big payouts on patent monopolies and other intellectual property incentives, they just wouldn't have the drive to develop new drugs.

[DanteGabriel]

10 minutes ago, Mandy said:

The question of whether he broke laws or not really hasn't been answered, in my opinion.  " Within 150 feet of a polling place…no person shall solicit votes for or against, or otherwise promote or oppose, any person or political party or position on a ballot question, to be voted on at the current election "

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2016/03/01/bill-clinton-new-bedford-video/

Hrm, that's a little different than the stories I'd heard. I was under the impression that he just stopped in at a few polling places to shake hands with poll workers and take photos and stuff. That impromptu rally does look like more problematic activity.

But if that video's from New Bedford, the complaint that he was blocking the polling place actually gets blunted a little bit. New Bedford is heavily minority and went big for Hillary clinton, 54% to 44%. If Bill Clinton was preventing people from voting, he was likely impeding his wife's own supporters.

[Bonesy]

Right. It didn't really matter. That was just the majority of the live complaints I saw on the day, which by Wednesday had been completely subsumed by the selfies and megaphone stuff.

[Maithanet]

43 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos

Abortions for some, miniature American Flags for others!

YAY!!!!

[alguien]

The fix is in! Not only is Hillary using Bill to underhandedly win, she's also employed the Pinkertons.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

23 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Well, okay. But say that, then. You aren't afraid of people who switch positions per se; you're worried about Clinton not holding up her side on things she's proposed. And I think that's fair - just like it is a fair criticism of Obama, who still hasn't killed Gitmo, still hasn't improved volunteer options, still hasn't fixed gun control and didn't get out of Iraq in a particularly timely fashion.

I have said that several times. Changing your mind on an issue can be a good thing. My mistrust with Clinton is that she's changed on so many key issues that it makes one wonder if it was done because she had a sincere change of heart or was it politically motivated. So I'm left here hoping her new positions on Wall St. reform and tuition reform are real changes of the heart rather than calculated political moves.

[Myshkin]

This faux outrage over Bill Clinton being at a polling place is just another in a long line of excuses for why Bernie didn't win. Of course it could never be Bernie's own fault that he lost, it had to be something nefarious, something outside of his control. First it was coin tosses, then it was John Lewis being a corrupt sellout, then it was low information voters, then it was black people voting against their interests, and now it's Bill Clinton shaking some hands at a polling place. News flash, Bernie lost because, as someone pointed out in the last thread, he ignored several key demographics within the Democratic base. He waited too long before he started addressing the issues important to minority voters. In fact he waited until after the first two nominating contests before he really started to reach out to minority voters. I don't think it was lost on anyone that those first two nominating contests happened to be 95% white. And when he did finally turn his attention to minority voters he tried to tie the issues they care about into his larger campaign theme, as if the problems of institutionalized racism are merely a symptom of the larger problem of income inequality. That's just insulting. There's a reason that Bernie's getting destroyed among nonwhite voters. We white people have the luxury of considering income inequality a, if not the, top priority. That's because we don't have to deal with racism, on scales both petty and grand, on a daily basis. Nonwhite voters don't have that luxury. Now to avoid any confusion, I'm not saying that Bernie Sanders is in any way racist, nor am I saying that income inequality isn't a major issue that desperately needs addressing; what I'm saying is that his message does not resonate as strongly with nonwhite voters as it does with white voters, and that his attempt to marry his message to the issues nonwhite voters care most about was poorly handled. No one wants to be told that the issues that affect them every day are secondary, and that the way to deal with them is to fix this other problem first.

[IheartIheartTesla]

51 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

I don't mean to dog-pile, but I don't think it is that simple, Mandy. What do you want done about this? Should Bill be fined? Should the election be invalidated?

Someone should become Bill Clinton's handler if he is ever to be First Gentleman and make sure he doesn't distract from the overall progressive agenda. Why wait till Jan 2017, someone should be his handler right now.

[Bonesy]

So Bernie appeals mostly to white voters. White male voters in particular if you believe the Berniebros mythology. The very people least affected by a Republican presidency. But at the end of the day Sanders supporters will all fall in line to vote for Clinton.

I constantly hear all of the above, on this very site in fact.

Yet they cannot all be true.