U.S. Politics 2016: The Mayans Were Only Off By 1418 Days

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

7 hours ago, Jo498 said:

A few years ago the conservative columnist Rod Dreher recalled an episode with his dad ranting about some people depending on welfare handouts without realizing that his own healthcare (or other important service) was mostly based on his status as a veteran of the US armed forces. Rule: It is only socialist handouts if others get it!

I can kind of understand making a distinction there, as I do believe that there should certainly be benefits for military service, but yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. Whether it's the Public Library System, Federal, state, county, city roads, The Postal Service, etc etc, we all benefit from socialist programs in some way shape or form. 

[OldGimletEye]

31 minutes ago, SerHaHa said:

Ser Scott -
 

Right, sort of like a couple dozen idiots doing the Nazi/Roman salute, which = the entire Alt Right movement is filled with Nazis.  How is it a "few extremist" when the specific examples I gave were leaders of the BLM movement, particularly their treatment of Sanders at HIS rally, which they tried to use threats of violence, and actual violent lunging/screaming/etc, to get what the wanted.  Hundreds and thousands chanting "we want dead cops".  That's not a "few extremist", but nice attempt at moving those goalposts, the hallmark of the left.

I don't support Trump, I support Ron Paul and any other libertarian which believes in actual liberty and freedom, not some social justice censorship BS propaganda house of lies.

You know though, when you look at some these so called "neo reactionary" clowns that inhabit the alt-right, it seems some of them began their intellectual journey as hardcore libertarians and students of Austrian economics.

It really isn't surprising that these guys would migrate to backing monarchy or aristocracy as when you take libertarianism to its extreme it seems it would back feudalism as a form of government.

That's how I take the views of somebody like say Murray Rothbard.

Although I libertarians like to portray themselves as "real Americans" I have to wonder how many of them are really pissed off about, let's say, the American Revolutions as that seemingly violated the King's property rights.

The problem with people like the Paul's is that they only see power in terms of the government. They don't ever see private forms of power as being an issue. That's why they really don't like things like 1964 Civil Rights Act.

As far as quackery goes, people like the Pauls push Nuttery like the Gold Standard. While Ron Paul pals around with Thomas Dilorenzo who has spent most of his academic career talking about what a Marxist bum Lincoln was.

But, by all means, continue to tell us all how awesome liberatarians like the Pauls are, while liberals suck.

[TrackerNeil]

1 hour ago, Castel said:

Democrats seem to have started losing patience with the media around the time of Matt Lauer and his forum. They may be gaining their own taste for blood.

I can tell you that this Democrat is ready to open the bag of dirty tricks. By electing Trump, Republicans have turned the presidency into a joke*, so let's just make sure we're laughing at them. 

*This IMO really is the worst part of all this. The White House has held fools and morons and bigots and assholes, but I never thought we'd willingly and knowingly elect a buffoon. Now that we have, I guess Democrats are OK running Oprah Winfrey in 2020. 

[The guy from the Vale]

20 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

I can tell you that this Democrat is ready to open the bag of dirty tricks. By electing Trump, Republicans have turned the presidency into a joke*, so let's just make sure we're laughing at them. 

*This IMO really is the worst part of all this. The White House has held fools and morons and bigots and assholes, but I never thought we'd willingly and knowingly elect a buffoon. Now that we have, I guess Democrats are OK running Oprah Winfrey in 2020. 

The US reelected Bush the Lesser in 2004, at a time when his idiocy should have been well on display He even won by bigger margins than in 2000 (and indeed, it was the only Republican popular vote victory in the last 27 years!). So that ship has already sailed.

[TrackerNeil]

10 minutes ago, theguyfromtheVale said:

The US reelected Bush the Lesser in 2004, at a time when his idiocy should have been well on display He even won by bigger margins than in 2000 (and indeed, it was the only Republican popular vote victory in the last 27 years!). So that ship has already sailed.

I disagree. Although Bush was a disastrous president, he was conventionally qualified and conventionally behaved. He never taunted his rivals. He never admitted to groping women, nor brushed it off as "locker room talk." He never bragged about the size of his penis in a debate, nor mocked a disabled person on television. He was a plausible, if terrible, president, and I never held it against those who voted for him either time. I thought the choice was foolish, but not necessarily indicative of bad character

Donald Trump is something else, and for the first time in my life I can say that I think that those who voted for him are either bad people or they're willingly assisting bad people. (If there's a distinction to be drawn.) 

[The guy from the Vale]

Point taken, although reelecting a president who let the CIA torture people using methods that, at Nuremberg, carried the death penalty, is still utterly wrong - and we knew about torture, at least at Abu Ghraib, back in 2004. The images of the tortured inmates of that prison should have sunk all reelection chances of Bush. Instead he won a bigger proportion of the popular vote than any Republican since 1988.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

On 12/1/2016 at 11:07 AM, OldGimletEye said:

It's hard to say. Some of it is probably ideology and part of it is probably "I got mine" fuck everyone else. With regard to the second, some of the worst hypocrites are the people that get employer sponsored health coverage and then bitch about the ACA. What these people refuse to acknowledge is that employer sponsored health coverage didn't come about because of the goodness of their employer's little old hearts, but because of the tax exclusion for employer sponsored healthcare. The government subsidizes employer sponsored healthcare.

These are the same people that will make some kind of dumb argument about the ACA being "a takeover of 1/6 of the economy" without realizing that the government has been involved in healthcare in a major way for a long time. Medicare being one example. Employer sponsored healthcare being another.

I'm personally not a huge fan of employer sponsored healthcare. One reason being, it gives employers too much power, I think,

I can come up with something morally reprehensible for each of our presidents, even the sainted ones.  I believe Trump is different.

[OldGimletEye]

10 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

I can come up with something morally reprehensible for each of our presidents, even the sainted ones.  I believe Trump is different.

I don't doubt you here. 

But, I'm not sure what that has do with the blithering nonsense that has been told about the ACA.

Or the hypocrisy by some people.

[Crazydog7]

On 12/1/2016 at 1:41 PM, MerenthaClone said:

And (at least in PA) by promising people that coal would come back, which, uh, isn't something he can do.  

 

My mother's side of the family is from a town in Western PA called Washington (everyone from that area called it Little Washington) I remember my grandmother's stories about how the street lights got turned on at 3 in the afternoon and how children couldn't see the sun because of all the shit in the air.  How every other house had an Uncle so-and-so living with them who could no longer work because he was dying of black lung or was just bedridden because his legs had been crushed in an accident in the Steel Mill. 

Long story short I will never understand why some people continue to think that this period of time in our history was somehow a golden age and why so many people seem so eager to hop in their Delorean's and get back to it. 

[Mlle. Zabzie]

7 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

I don't doubt you here. 

But, I'm not sure what that has do with the blithering nonsense that has been told about the ACA.

Or the hypocrisy by some people.

Stupid quote function - should never try it other than on my computer.  Meant to quote @theguyfromthevale

[OldGimletEye]

Just now, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Stupid quote function - should never try it other than on my computer.  Meant to quote @theguyfromthevale

I hate the quote the quote function too. I think I'll start a thread about it. LOL.

No worries.

[LongRider]

Here's a link to an article about the nine documentaries that Steve Bannon has made.  It's makes for interesting reading.  http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/steve-bannon-films-movies-documentaries-trump-hollywood-214495

Quote

Since Trump named Bannon his “chief strategist,” a job that gives him the president’s ear in what’s likely to be a smash mouth, mercurial White House, reporters have been riffling through his past to pin down his politics. Sure, in interviews, he’s laid out a worldview that touches on everything from “enlightened capitalism” to the decline of Christianity. And his welcoming of the white-nationalist “alt-right” on Breitbart has made him the target of protests, unusual for an adviser in an administration that hasn’t even taken office yet. But the documentaries offer a different, and rarely opened, window into how he sees the struggle America is facing. From start to finish, Bannon productions are intense, often short (they average 82 minutes), and vehicles for an extremely Darwinian, highly alarmed view of just what threatens the nation—and who might save us.

 

[Martell Spy]

Quote

“The Chinese leadership will see this as a highly provocative action, of historic proportions,” Evan Medeiros, former Asia director at the White House National Security Council, told the FT. “Regardless if it was deliberate or accidental, this phone call will fundamentally change China’s perceptions of Trump’s strategic intentions for the negative. With this kind of move, Trump is setting a foundation of enduring mistrust and strategic competition for U.S.-China relations.”

So, Why Can't You Call Taiwan?
President-elect Donald Trump has committed a sharp breach of protocol—one that underscores just how weird some important protocols are.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/12/trump-taiwan/509474/

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

36 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

I don't doubt you here. 

But, I'm not sure what that has do with the blithering nonsense that has been told about the ACA.

Or the hypocrisy by some people.

I've always opposed mandates because if the government can require you buy private insurance because you live in the US why can't it mandate private gym memberships and exercise times upon the same rational?   The Government compelling us to privately purchase X is too much.

[OldGimletEye]

21 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I've always opposed mandates because if the government can require you buy private insurance because you live in the US why can't it mandate private gym memberships and exercise times upon the same rational?   The Government demanding we privately purchase X is too much.

Do you have problem with people being forced into social security? How about medicare?

Supposing the federal government just imposes a major tax penalty for not buying insurance. Does that bother you?

How about the tax exclusion that encourages employers to buy insurance? Does that bother you?

If you are going to stop people from being denied insurance for pre-existing conditions, you do need some mechanism to get people to buy insurance. And that mechanism, may have to be a bit coercive.

Something like the mandate might be a bit coercive. But, getting a healthcare system that is cheaper and where people don't have to rely on their employers to get it, can be freedom enhancing for a lot of folks.

If you have a credible method of solving adverse selection problems, I'm all ears.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

19 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Do you have problem with people being forced into social security? How about medicare?

Supposing the federal government just imposes a major tax penalty for not buying insurance. Does that bother you?

How about the tax exclusion that encourages employers to buy insurance? Does that bother you?

If you are going to stop people from being denied insurance for pre-existing conditions, you do need some mechanism to get people to buy insurance. And that mechanism, may have to be a bit coercive.

Something like the mandate might be a bit coercive. But, getting a healthcare system that is cheaper and where people don't have to rely on their employers to get it, can be freedom enhancing for a lot of folks.

If you have a credible method of solving adverse selection problems, I'm all ears.

Did I say the mandate didn't serve a rational purpose that it is not crafted for that purpose?  I understand why it exists.  I object to Government compelling me to purchase private item  X or face State scanction.  That's not taxation.  That is the State giving my money to a corporation at the barrel of a gun.

[OldGimletEye]

5 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Did I say the mandate didn't serve a rational purpose that it is not crafted for that purpose?  I understand why it exists.  I object to Government compelling me to purchase private item  X or face State scanction.  That's not taxation.  That is the State giving my money to a corporation at the barrel of a gun.

So you oppose Medicare and Social security?

And what happens if you don't pay taxes?

And assuming you want health insurance, guess what? You are going to be paying money to corporation. The question is if we are going to pay corporations, can't we do it a bit better?

How do you like being locked into an employer, knowing if you leave you might lose your insurance? Are you smelling the freedom there?

Also, you know, just speaking comparatively, the government can do much more horrible things to do you, than making you buy broccoli or gym memberships. Like for instance drafting you and sending you into some bullshit war.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Just now, OldGimletEye said:

So you oppose Medicare and Social security?

And what happens if you don't pay taxes?

And assuming you want health insurance, guess what? You are going to be paying money to corporation. The question is if we are going to pay corporations, can't we do it a bit better?

Also, you know, just speaking comparatively, the government can do much more horrible things to do you, than making you buy broccoli or gym memberships. Like for instance drafting you and sending you into some bullshit war.

Medicare and Medicaid are government sevices paid for via the taxing power.  They are not the State compelling me to buy X from a corporation.

If I choose to buy health insurance that's my call without the threat of force behind the purchase.

You think I don't oppose the draft?

[OldGimletEye]

5 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Medicare and Medicaid are government sevices paid for via the taxing power.  They are not the State compelling me to buy X from a corporation.

It's still coercion. And you have to participate.

And I take this as you don't have a problem with the government using it's taxing powers to encourage people to buy insurance. Is that correct?

 

5 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

If I choose to buy health insurance that's my call without the threat of force behind the purchase.

1. Do you think it's a good idea for people not to have health insurance?

2. Supposing you get sick? Are you really going to tell the doctor."Oh well, just let me die, I didn't buy insurance. LOL." I doubt it.

3. Are against getting car insurance too?

5 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

You think I don't oppose the draft?

Well, I'm not a fan of it either. But, the government does have the power to do it.

[Martell Spy]

https://newrepublic.com/minutes/139124/turns-raising-minimum-wage-not-cause-armageddon

Turns out raising the minimum wage does not cause Armageddon