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US Politics: A Farewell to Arms


DMC

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11 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

Is this a Farewell to bear arms or a Farewell to bare arms or a Farewell to Bear Arms?

Whichever one the reader likes the best - that's what it is.

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@Kalbear I like that 6% bump you're predicting.  I wouldn't predict a thing about this because either than Comey, there's really no data to go off of.  But hey, to each her own.  So is that 6% bump a raw number or net?  Honestly just curious.

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Just going to bed now, but the next story on CNN tonight that I'm seeing is that Lindsey Graham has admitted today that he's the one who told John McCain to take his copy of the infamous Dossier on Trump to the FBI.

Trump has been shitting all over McCain for months and months and months, and one of the big reasons is because McCain was given a copy of the Dossier which was handed to the FBI "instead of calling me and giving it to me".

And Graham has been silent about this all along the way.

You can't make up this shit. It's a wonder The Onion and SNL can stay i business.

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29 minutes ago, DMC said:

@Kalbear I like that 6% bump you're predicting.  I wouldn't predict a thing about this because either than Comey, there's really no data to go off of.  But hey, to each her own.  So is that 6% bump a raw number or net?  Honestly just curious.

What 6% bump? I said that he'll get a 3% bump - he's currently at 41.9% (actually, he was - he's already up to 42.3%). Rasmussen has him right this instant at 45%, but that's down 3% from their last one, and there's another poll at 48% a few days prior. 

There may be no data, but the news cycle is going to be utterly dominated for the next few weeks with Trump shitting on Dems, doing victory laps, talking about total exoneration, and making everyone wonder if the Dems know what they're doing. It'll bring a bunch of people back, I predict. Not a crazy amount - but some. And it doesn't take much. 

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15 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

What 6% bump? I said that he'll get a 3% bump - he's currently at 41.9% (actually, he was - he's already up to 42.3%). Rasmussen has him right this instant at 45%, but that's down 3% from their last one, and there's another poll at 48% a few days prior. 

Yeah, sorry about the 6% bump.  Looks like that was in my head.  Swear there were more posts there though, thing some of it went to the cleaners.  Anyway, I could give two shits what Scott Rasmussen says.  Talking aggregate.

18 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

There may be no data, but the news cycle is going to be utterly dominated for the next few weeks with Trump shitting on Dems, doing victory laps, talking about total exoneration, and making everyone wonder if the Dems know what they're doing. It'll bring a bunch of people back, I predict. Not a crazy amount - but some. And it doesn't take much. 

Well, yeah, 45% is a much more moderate showing than I thought.  We'll see.

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1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

You know the saying, strike while the iron is hot?

I just heard on CNN that the US government has tonight asked 'the courts' (at whatever level) to strike down all of the ACA,

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Jared Kushner's brother Josh has a healthcare business called Oscar. I can't help but wonder if repeal and replace won't involve Jared's brother somehow.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/world/middleeast/kushner-saudi-arabia.html

And no surprise, the timing coincides to when Trump was hot and heavy on getting rid of the ACA. 

http://www.healthreformtracker.org/ahca-timeline/

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21 minutes ago, Triskele said:

I'm a little bit off of the ledge from the last two days, and it's the whole "the population at large doesn't care that much about the Russia investigation / the 2018 midterms weren't fought on the Russia investigation" thing.  

What? It’s true. Democratic candidates who focused their positions especially on economic policy and health care, etc. Like really only barely 40% of the electorate actually thought Trump even did something illegal in regards to Russia pre-report. The Muller report likely won’t shift public sentiment that much. However it does prove democrats did in fact make a mistake in making this an issue to use rally people. I legitimately if certain left-leaning media outlets  allowed the investigation to progress without constantly talking about it nearly all the time every day this rather anti-climatic conclusion wouldn’t prove so disastrous to them.

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Oh hey, the Trump admin is now not only pushing that part of the ACA should fall (the preexisting conditions part, which is the one that is HUGELY popular) - now they're pushing that the whole thing should just die.

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In a stunning, two-sentence letter submitted to the Fifth Circuit today, the Justice Department announced that it now thinks the entire Affordable Care Act should be enjoined. That’s an even more extreme position than the one it advanced at the district court in Texas v. Azar, when it argued that the court should “only” zero out the protections for people with preexisting conditions.

Seriously, fuck them so very, very much. 

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Sometimes it really astonishes me that the Democrats just won the House a few months ago - in spite of odds that all the cynics here thought were insurmountable until they realized their claims were stupid.

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I really think this is why Trump will win in 2020 in microcosm.  He doesn't give a shit that he has an unpopular message or an unpopular image.  He goes out every single day and repeats the same thing consistently so people actually start to believe it.  Its something I have always admired about Republicans truly awful ideas but damn they are great salesmen to bad what they are selling is so often moonshine and snake oil.    

What do I say to all of my Republican family members who go on and on about a "false report cooked up by the Dumbocrates" that always somehow fail to mention the weaponized wikileaks? 

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7 minutes ago, Crazydog7 said:

What do I say to all of my Republican family members who go on and on about a "false report cooked up by the Dumbocrates" that always somehow fail to mention the weaponized wikileaks? 

You tell them to wait for the actual report.  Or you tell them to fuck off.  I dunno, I usually do the latter with close family members that are that stupid.

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3 hours ago, Crazydog7 said:

What do I say to all of my Republican family members who go on and on about a "false report cooked up by the Dumbocrates" that always somehow fail to mention the weaponized wikileaks? 

You could just try discussing non-Russia related problems you find with Trump. The investigation so far has proven to be dud when it comes to the conspiracy theory. Maybe there’s more incriminating things laden in it that don’t look good for Trump(I imagine that’s why the senate republicans voted no to making it public), but it’s ridiculous to act as though there’s much ground to stand on now in terms of Russia+Trump

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I just can't make my mind up. Some days I think Larry Kudlow has to be the biggest dumb ass ever. Or maybe Kevin Warsh is the biggest dumb ass. But, then I think, wait no, Stephen Moore is the biggest dumb ass ever.
The joke of appointing Moore to the FED.
 

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It’s no secret that Donald Trump has appointed a lot of partisan, unqualified hacks to key policy positions.

 

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About Moore: It goes almost without saying that he has been wrong about everything. I don’t mean the occasional bad call, which all of us make. I mean a track record that includes predicting that George W. Bush’s policies would produce a magnificent boom, Barack Obama’s policies would lead to runaway inflation, tax cuts in Kansas would produce a “near immediate” boost to the state’s economy, and much more. And, of course, never an acknowledgment of error or reflection on why he got it wrong.

..................................................................................................................................

Minimum Wage, Salty Libertarians, and the misuse of partial equilibrium models.

Now conservative sorts of people, just in case your employer ask you whether if its okay if they raise their prices(or maybe lower them) for whatever they are selling it is okay to use a partial equilibrium model. A partial equilibrium model is good enough in that case. But, its not a complete description of reality. A more realistic model would include the prices on every other current commodity market. And even more realistic model than that would include not only the current prices but also the expected future prices on every market. If the market under study is small enough, then you can get by with a partial equilibrium model. But if the market is very large, then you need to start thinking in general equilibrium. Now go forth and make no more conservative mistakes.

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In the wake of the tragic death of Alan Krueger, attention has been drawn to an implicitly defamatory statement by James Buchanan about those who like Krueger, dared question the orthodox position taken by most economists that minimum-wage laws increase unemployment among low-wage workers,.....................Wholly apart from its odious metaphorical characterization of those he was criticizing, Buchanan’s assertion was substantively problematic in two respects. Such circumstances obtain whenever employers exercise monopsony power in the market for unskilled labor. If employers realize that hiring additional low-skilled workers drives up the wage paid to all the low-skilled workers that they employ, not just the additional ones hired, the wage paid by employers will be less than the value of the marginal product of labor.

 

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The second problem with Buchanan’s position is less straightforward and less well-known, but more important, than the first. The inverse relationship by which Buchanan set such great store is valid only if qualified by a ceteris paribus condition. Demand is a function of many variables of which price is only one. So the inverse relationship between price and quantity demanded is premised on the assumption that all the other variables affecting demand are held (at least approximately) constant.

 

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Trump and activist conservative judges.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/25/18281788/doj-obamacare-unconstitutional-trump

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The Trump administration wants the federal courts to overturn the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, an escalation of its legal assault against the health care law.

The Justice Department said in a brief filed on Monday that the administration supports a recent district court decision that invalidated all of Obamacare. So it is now the official position of President Trump’s administration that all of the ACA — the private insurance markets that cover 15 million Americans, the Medicaid expansion that covers another 15 million, and the protections for people with preexisting conditions and other regulations — should be nullified.

 

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Legal experts dismiss the states’ argument as “absurd,” yet they have worried that it could find a receptive audience among conservative jurists, given the prior success of anti-Obamacare lawsuits thought to be spurious that still found their way to the Supreme Court

And now we're back to:

Litigation Myth #8: In order to be successful, a lawsuit must have merit.

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1 hour ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

You could just try discussing non-Russia related problems you find with Trump. The investigation so far has proven to be dud when it comes to the conspiracy theory. Maybe there’s more incriminating things laden in it that don’t look good for Trump(I imagine that’s why the senate republicans voted no to making it public), but it’s ridiculous to act as though there’s much ground to stand on now in terms of Russia+Trump

I don’t know if that’s necessarily true.   Even just given what we know out in the open (things like Kushner wanting a private direct line to Russia, the Trump Tower deal, Fredo Jr.’s clear acceptance of a meeting for dirt on Hillary, how Trump keeps meeting with Putin without anyone but translators present, telling a foreign power to hack an opponent’s private account during a debate, etc), it’s pretty clear there’s a lot there that we should find unacceptable and probably subject to some kind of legal consequence.   The problem isn’t that these assholes are “innocent” or that there’s nothing to see here.   I think it’s that our laws are woefully insufficient to deal with the kind of abject venality of this family of syphillitic ulcers- this presidency seems to be exposing all the weaknesses in our laws.  And not just with this Russia business, but also with all these ridiculous things that aren’t technically illegal but remarkably corrupt like self-dealing, nepotism, not presenting tax returns, cheating on taxes, and so forth.   Maybe Dems should pursue that report relentlessly and start turning some of this “norm” business into law.

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