Politics

[Wheels]

This is an MSNBC anchor with a New York Times editor! This is not higher math. This is simple math that you would expect every kid leaving grade school to be able to solve. This is the kind of math that allows a Bernie to lead the Democrats. This is how dumb the mainstream media is today.

https://videos.files.wordpress.com/RmTlzkRd/msnbc-brian-williams_dvd.mp4

 

[Opposite Pole]

This is an MSNBC anchor with a New York Times editor! This is not higher math. This is simple math that you would expect every kid leaving grade school to be able to solve. This is the kind of math that allows a Bernie to lead the Democrats. This is how dumb the mainstream media is today.

https://videos.files.wordpress.com/RmTlzkRd/msnbc-brian-williams_dvd.mp4

Bloody hell.

 

[1dirthawker]

This is an MSNBC anchor with a New York Times editor! This is not higher math. This is simple math that you would expect every kid leaving grade school to be able to solve. This is the kind of math that allows a Bernie to lead the Democrats. This is how dumb the mainstream media is today.

https://videos.files.wordpress.com/RmTlzkRd/msnbc-brian-williams_dvd.mp4

AND THEY BREED!!!!

 

[nztimb]

Thought this was an interesting read this morning and wondered what your take on it might be.
Unfortunately, the answer is Hillary
By Joel Gilbert
Who does not want Bernie Sanders to get the Democrat nomination? Who recently said of him, "He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. It's all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it"?

Answer: Hillary.

Who has a conveniently timed four-part documentary series on Hulu right now, called Hillary? Whose documentary is billed as "a remarkably intimate portrait of a public woman"? Whose documentary is getting plenty of favorable coverage from the mainstream media?

Answer: Hillary.

Who helped DNC chairman Tom Perez get his job and earned his loyalty?

Answer: Hillary.

Who has repeated ad nauseam that her life mantra is the lesson that her mother taught her: "What defines you in life is not getting knocked down. It's about how you get back up"?
Answer: Hillary.

Who never quits?

Answer: Hillary.

Who has the connections within the Democrat Party establishment to orchestrate in only 24 hours before Super Tuesday the surprise exit of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobachar? Who has the power to persuade these candidates to endorse Joe Biden?

Answer: Hillary.

Whom will Joe Biden endorse, by design, on the eve of the Democrat Party Convention when he announces that, on advice his wife and doctors, he will not pursue the Democrat Party nomination?

Answer: Hillary.

After having watched Joe Biden's further descent into senility and confusion between March and July, who will relieved Democrats, women especially, embrace as their tried and true candidate?

Answer: Hillary.

And who, by design, will name as her vice president a fellow with the last name of Bloomberg who just happens to be waiting in the wings with his nationwide campaign offices open and with full staff on salary and billions in cash?

Answer: Hillary.

Who has at her fingertips Deep State opposition research gleaned from the Mueller investigation, Michael Cohen's files, and spying data on everything Trump, ready to drop sometime in September?

Answer: Hillary.

Who will benefit from massive early voting, voting by mail, and voter fraud?

Answer: Hillary.

Who will Big Tech get behind and push in all online forums?

Answer: Hillary.

Who will get about 5 billion additional dollars in positive free earned media?

Answer: Hillary.

Who has an excellent chance of being the next president of the United States of America?

Answer: Hillary.

Remember, you read it here first.

Hollywood film director Joel Gilbert is president of Highway 61 Entertainment. Among his many films are political documentaries including The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America, Trump: The Art of the Insult, There's No Place Like Utopia, Dreams from My Real Father, Atomic Jihad, and Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam.

 

[PHOENIX PHIL]

Thought this was an interesting read this morning and wondered what your take on it might be.
Unfortunately, the answer is Hillary
By Joel Gilbert
Who does not want Bernie Sanders to get the Democrat nomination? Who recently said of him, "He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. It's all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it"?

Answer: Hillary.

Who has a conveniently timed four-part documentary series on Hulu right now, called Hillary? Whose documentary is billed as "a remarkably intimate portrait of a public woman"? Whose documentary is getting plenty of favorable coverage from the mainstream media?

Answer: Hillary.

Who helped DNC chairman Tom Perez get his job and earned his loyalty?

Answer: Hillary.

Who has repeated ad nauseam that her life mantra is the lesson that her mother taught her: "What defines you in life is not getting knocked down. It's about how you get back up"?
Answer: Hillary.

Who never quits?

Answer: Hillary.

Who has the connections within the Democrat Party establishment to orchestrate in only 24 hours before Super Tuesday the surprise exit of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobachar? Who has the power to persuade these candidates to endorse Joe Biden?

Answer: Hillary.

Whom will Joe Biden endorse, by design, on the eve of the Democrat Party Convention when he announces that, on advice his wife and doctors, he will not pursue the Democrat Party nomination?

Answer: Hillary.

After having watched Joe Biden's further descent into senility and confusion between March and July, who will relieved Democrats, women especially, embrace as their tried and true candidate?

Answer: Hillary.

And who, by design, will name as her vice president a fellow with the last name of Bloomberg who just happens to be waiting in the wings with his nationwide campaign offices open and with full staff on salary and billions in cash?

Answer: Hillary.

Who has at her fingertips Deep State opposition research gleaned from the Mueller investigation, Michael Cohen's files, and spying data on everything Trump, ready to drop sometime in September?

Answer: Hillary.

Who will benefit from massive early voting, voting by mail, and voter fraud?

Answer: Hillary.

Who will Big Tech get behind and push in all online forums?

Answer: Hillary.

Who will get about 5 billion additional dollars in positive free earned media?

Answer: Hillary.

Who has an excellent chance of being the next president of the United States of America?

Answer: Hillary.

Remember, you read it here first.

Hollywood film director Joel Gilbert is president of Highway 61 Entertainment. Among his many films are political documentaries including The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America, Trump: The Art of the Insult, There's No Place Like Utopia, Dreams from My Real Father, Atomic Jihad, and Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam.

As much as I despise both of those pieces of fecal matter named Clinton, this is just a bit too much to buy into.

 

[tigris115]

Whenever I hang out with my mom, she says that the worst thing the Clintons ever did was opening up with trade China. I'm pretty inclined to agree with her statement, and not just because she's my mom.

Also, seeing the Democrats fail this miserably is embarrassing. You have all the resources in the world yet you always decide to put your eggs in the C4 basket.

Like I have no love for Trump but that man came in, kicked ass, and, despite many of his party trying to hold him back, kept going like a cocaine powered bullet train.

 

[PHOENIX PHIL]

Whenever I hang out with my mom, she says that the worst thing the Clintons ever did was opening up with trade China. I'm pretty inclined to agree with her statement, and not just because she's my mom.

Bad thing yes, worst thing? I don’t know, if possible I’d like to get the opinion of all those dead people in the Clinton path.

 

[tigris115]

Bad thing yes, worst thing? I don’t know, if possible I’d like to get the opinion of all those dead people in the Clinton path.

Put a one of in there and you're good.

Also, to go off-topic, Eisenhower has earned himself a spot on my presidential shitlist for the Iran coup which is, IMO, a textbook example of something coming back to sink its teeth into our collective ass meat. This is just one example of why we honestly need to pull out of the Middle East as much as we can. It's nothing but trouble

 

[Ray B]

The real probability isn't that HRC will be the DemonRats candidate for president, but whether the person chosen as running mate for vice-president will be HRC or Miss-shale O'Bama. My guess is following a turbulent convention the ticket will end up being Sanders-O'bama. The two most completely Unqualified people on the planet to run the country.

 

[Brent in Az]

The real probability isn't that HRC will be the DemonRats candidate for president, but whether the person chosen as running mate for vice-president will be HRC or Miss-shale O'Bama. My guess is following a turbulent convention the ticket will end up being Sanders-O'bama. The two most completely Unqualified people on the planet to run the country.

Trump will destroy the Democrat challenger. Whatever buffoons the DNC put forward, is comical at best.

 

[Brent in Az]

[emoji3]

 

[tigris115]

Also, I was browsing another forum I hang on occasionally and a few people gave some interesting takes on why socialized healthcare wouldn't work, especially with what Bernie's proposing. I was kind enough to put all 3 of these takes in spoilers so as not to create a nightmare for mobile friends but the tl;dr is that too much bureaucratic crap that almost seems tailor-made to suck us dry.

None of these opinions are mine btw so don't shoot the messenger. I just found these takes interesting.

Spoiler: List of reasons U.S. healthcare is screwed

Healthcare in the United States is in a poor state because:

• Cross-state insurance purchases are prohibited. This narrows down the possible insurance plans available to people, encourages graft and makes insurance pricing less (virtually non-) competitive.
• Doctors, hospitals, clinics and, insurance providers need to be licensed by local, state or federal government (it varies.) This isn't bad in itself obviously, but it becomes a major issue when the monopoly of the American Medical Association gets mixed up in the bureaucracy of scope-of-practice privileges, which in turn are monopolized by local hospitals to reduce competition. This creates a restriction on the supply of local medical facilities and professionals.
• Health exchange boards cooperate with insurance lobbyists to monopolize insurance options. Less-capitalized insurance groups are almost always excluded, effectively killing them, resulting in less options to consumers and allowing a monopoly over the amount of policies available.
• Insurance alternatives, such as fraternal societies, were destroyed by the American Medical Association. People belonging to a mutual aid society (such as a fraternity) could pool their money for the sake of medical care, known as "lodge-practicing", but these groups were blatantly denied licensing in order to generate a monopoly and allowed only large insurance companies to survive.
• Medicaid/Medicare price fixing, which stems from minimum reimbursement rates. Companies use these rates as a baseline (physicians offer lower prices to clients with insurance) and then charge higher prices elsewhere, the cost of which ultimately falls on the uninsured. This also means people cling to their jobs, as they're encouraged to offer health insurance, allowing less overall mobility.
• Stupid subsidies. Medical facilities receive aid for having the latest equipment (regardless of need) and people with truly astronomical medical bills can receive federal assistance (encouraging hospitals to charge absurdly-high fees on everything to try and reach that threshold.)

You will notice I didn't include "medicine isn't socialized" on my list because that's not the problem. The problem is a collection of short-sighted, stupid laws caused by pharmaceutical and insurance company lobbying, all of which would become even worse if our broken healthcare was offered to absolutely everyone without any sense of discretion. The black population alone would bankrupt our entire country within a year.

Your average Bernie voter likely hasn't heard of anything I mentioned above. Bernie himself probably hasn't heard of it, because he is a charlatan, a useful idiot for the Democrat party and shouldn't be taken seriously by anybody smarter than a fern.

Spoiler: Additional hot take

I'll make it even simpler. One word. Billing.

Anyone who has ever worked a National Account or Government billed job, as opposed to one where the consumer directly pays, knows that they stack on the services and inflate the rates as much as they possibly can. It's no-bid and it's too late to change horses, what are they gonna do? Go somewhere else? They are locked in. Run the meter.

Every little tiny bill runs through this process. From the manufacturer to the distributor to the care facility to the insurance then finally the customer. Each one hiring some little bean counter to charge as much as they can on the periphery while the contract says they are charging a below-market rate. You see, selling, managing, and subtly sucking dry your Corporate National Accounts is practically an art form incorporates America.

Reign that shit in. Make them offer the same rates for products/services to all consumers ala carte with no discounts to whoever they cut a backroom deal with and the entire process gets much simpler. There no longer are avenues to **** over the guy/company who didn't get the special rate on everything (think As Seen on TV shit where they charge $40 shipping and handling for a $20 mop). No more big amalgam of a bill where that shit gets defrayed either. People/companies will know who is ****ing them, on what, and how hard.

I'm not advocating price fixing here. That's dumb. I'm saying if they sell a thing to Person A they should sell it to Person B at that same price. Whatever that price is is up to them.

**** corporate salesmen. **** accounts managers. Useless bloodsucking leeches the lot of them.

Spoiler: ACA story

This is giving me flashbacks to the mythical "doughnut hole" in the Affordable Healthcare Act (ACA).

I remember my nephew having a hell of a time trying to get on the ACA. His father (my brother) is much older and so he was able to collect on his Social Security (SS) just as his boy was entering college. Here's the problem: SS disqualified my nephew from being able to use the benefits of his father's insurance due to the nature of SS. Even though laws had been changed to allow the boy to remain on his parents' insurance until he was 26.

Now I completely understand why the boy wasn't able to be on his father's benefits package once he switched over to SS. It wouldn't be fair for the kid to draw from benefits that his father had spent a lifetime paying into, but that he (the child) had not.

But it all seemed like a giant "**** you" to the kid, who was killing himself financially to have a private plan. So when he went to try for the ACA, he was given the ****ing runaround by every agency in the book. And so he found himself in the doughnut hole of the ACA. My nephew was too wealthy to be on ACA, but absolutely could not justify paying out for a private policy. In the end he ate the penalty on tax day and luckily didn't get sick for a few years. It ended up working out well because the ACA plans he was looking at, upon reassessment months later, were already creeping up to the same rates as his old private plan.

This current tax season will finally see his return given to him in full and not garnished by the government for not being insured. It's pretty ****ed up. You're talking a young man in the prime of his earning life having a sizable amount of his income taken from him.

I can tell you another thing as well... that kid is scary-Republican now. Even I think he needs to pump the brakes now and again. I don't think that was the plan with the ACA...

 

[tarbe]

I have a deep distrust of any private corporations being totally unbridled, for they will often go straight for profit while neglecting things like human welfare as seen with Amazon.

In a free(ish) market, the folks paying the bills can vote with their feet if a provider is not up to snuff. Some good capitalist will always be there to fill the gap.

In a government controlled market, there is no recourse. You are stuck.

I say "free(ish) because there really is no completely free market...there is always some regulation.

I am not following your Amazon comment. We are free to use Amazon, or not. Plenty of other ways for me to get my widgets.

 

[tigris115]

In a free(ish) market, the folks paying the bills can vote with their feet if a provider is not up to snuff. Some good capitalist will always be there to fill the gap.

In a government controlled market, there is no recourse. You are stuck.

I say "free(ish) because there really is no completely free market...there is always some regulation.

I am not following your Amazon comment. We are free to use Amazon, or not. Plenty of other ways for me to get my widgets.

Monopolies happen so some trust busting is always welcome.

 

[Royal27]

Monopolies happen so some trust busting is always welcome.

Monopolies are illegal in the US and don't happen. The only monopoly allowed here is the government. And guess what happens when they get involved in an industry and try to control it?

Education and healthcare come to mind. Government has totally screwed up those two industries. Want to fix them both? Get the government out of them and they will self correct. Problem is, there will be extra pain in the short-term that no one wants, and the government counts on that to help keep their claws in you.

 

[tarbe]

Monopolies are illegal in the US and don't happen. The only monopoly allowed here is the government. And guess what happens when they get involved in an industry and try to control it?

Education and healthcare come to mind. Government has totally screwed up those two industries. Want to fix them both? Get the government out of them and they will self correct. Problem is, their will be extra pain in the short-term that no one wants, and the government counts on that to help keep their claws.in you.

Took the words right out of my mouth!

The one monopoly we can't seem to bust is the entrenched bureaucracy that government weaves so finely into the public life and soul that to abolish it would be death itself.

 

[Red Leg]

Put a one of in there and you're good.

Also, to go off-topic, Eisenhower has earned himself a spot on my presidential shitlist for the Iran coup which is, IMO, a textbook example of something coming back to sink its teeth into our collective ass meat. This is just one example of why we honestly need to pull out of the Middle East as much as we can. It's nothing but trouble

It is why being petroleum independent is so critical to our national security. It is also why the anti-fracking idiocy is so dangerous. As a net exporter of petroleum, the Middle East becomes far less strategically important to us.

 

[tigris115]

It is why being petroleum independent is so critical to our national security. It is also why the anti-fracking idiocy is so dangerous. As a net exporter of petroleum, the Middle East becomes far less strategically important to us.

A good piece of my energy independence comes out of spite for places like Saudi Arabia.

 

[Hogpatrol]

I'm somewhat energy independent in the winter. Starting to wind down this month, though.

 

[tigris115]

I think energy should definitely be way more independent. No idea why greenies arent arguing for this.

Also, I would KILL to see tax money going to a spit and shine of.our aging infrastructure. I'm sure you can get private resources to help with this.

However, with all this talk about smaller government, what I think we all really mean is that the federal government has become far too bloated and bureaucratic to the point where the will of the people cannot be carried out in any real manner. I think it's less draining the swamp and more trimming the fat.