Trump's America, March 2017: Using His Inside VOICE

the thing people keep focusing on is whether the meeting is inherently appropriate or inappropriate and it's like - "congratulations, that's not what we're discussing". It's that these meetings happened around the same time where Russian meddling in the election was said to have happened and your Attorney General didn't see fit to disclose that. Who knows, maybe they talked about beer and pussy?

It's the constant "OMG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE, WHY ARE YOU LOOKING" that doesn't help matters, whereas Obama/Schumer et al are all like "lol go ahead investigate the FISA claim, knock yourself out"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMlP_Moo0bE&app=desktop

"White House press release contains full paragraph copied verbatim from Exxon press release."

https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/838874217852567552

i was going to say something about how lazy this was but clearly people don't care about the formality of government officials attempting to mask corruption by corporations anymore so, i guess, nothing really to see here

The House plan to destroy Obamacare has been released.

Back ACHA

Thought I suppose it should be AHCA. Ah well.

Anyway, apparently there's two parts?

https://t.co/HfGQzgFrLG

anti-Muslim Ban demo happening outside the WH now

Health care for everyone! With a side of green beans!

guys there's no question something happened

http://www.sfgate.com/local/politics/article/Two-third-back-special-prosecutor-to-probe-10981219.php

2/3 of Americans need to get worked up about the emoluments clause, instead!

2/3rds of Americans need to...y'know what, not goin there

close to 2/3 of states are controlled by the GOP/Kochs/ALEC. you say you want a constitutional convention, well, you know, we all want to outlaw abortion

this new healthcare repeal is hilarious. this isn't at all what Republican voters wanted

Tony Blair has long since settled into his 'British actor can't get work at home, has to butter up colonials with bad renditions of his past work' phase.

Blair has managed the impossible of being arguably more hated in the UK than Thatcher - in that everyone hates him, right, centre and left. Not to me though, obviously I hate Thatcher more than Hitler, Mao and Stalin combined.

how long do we think before we have another Pizzagate scenario where a civilian hears fake news and nearly or actually kills someone because of it? I'm not even talking the hate crimes that have escalated under this Presidency, I'm talking phony bullshit news either perpetuated by Trump or his cronies at Breitbart that have caused unstable idiots to do things?

I mean as laughably stupid as this wiretap story is, to people who called Obama's America "police state" and lap up all of this shit, it's like throwing kerosene on a campfire.

I guess this is how late stage capitalism burns itself out. People aren't really down with being treated like slaves or objects to be used and discarded, and trying to be sneaky about it only causes shit like this. Not that the established powers that be really give a fuck about what we're dealing with here, and about to deal with.

We're in for a fun ride here. Trump's the symptom, baby.

we have the "conservatives" in congress planning to cut seven million people out of healthcare. that's not the same as a shootup i know but our government is ruled by phony bullshit and thousands of people will die as a result. it's completely fucking insane, even without factoring in how "christian" all these assholes swear they are

can't wait for the CBO score on this bill

"meet our new health care act, which is designed to.....ensure less people are enrolled".

can't wait for the CBO score on this bill

― waht, I am true black metal worrior (Neanderthal),

can't wait for the White House to claim CBO run by bad, sick people

of course. endless feedback loop until the end of ti-

so many bad, sick people out there. someone should try getting them some health care.

Ah but

https://twitter.com/StevenTDennis/status/838909597322739712

House is going to start having committee votes on Obamacare bill on Wednesday that they released to the public at 6 p.m. today. No CBO score

And DJT to provide his full support oh wait

https://twitter.com/JDiamond1/status/838914517430075392

if you give them a week's notice they'll all get sick at once. Bad!

Can someone provide me with a link or something that explains why so many Americans (and so many poor ones) think that affordable care is a bad thing? Because it's completely baffling to outsiders. Is it just big business lobbying/ brainwashing thing similar to the gun rights issue?

burn Washington burn

so I kinda exaggerated the mandate above, obv what it is = taking the 63 day period that they used for pre-existing condition exclusions back in the day and now assessing you a 30% surcharge.

which is kinda hilarious cos in many cases, that's a much larger annual financial hit than the ACA mandate penalty, and even that had exemptions that one could easily qualify for to avoid the penalty (I still find most people who whine about the mandate don't realize the existence of these).

Repubs will argue it's not the same because "hey you don't HAVE to enroll in the coverage and take the surcharge" or "insurance companies don't HAVE to charge you the extra 30%" (like they won't), but it is.

I guess the "low deductibles/premiums, you're gonna love em" speech was, as per usual, smoke and mirrors.

why so many Americans (and so many poor ones) think that affordable care is a bad thing

really need that rolling explaining conservatism thread don't we

jed_ I don't think it's any one thing. The arguments against it vary but typically it was:

*In the earlygoing, lots of misstatements about some of the tenets of the plan, such as that it would "ration" healthcare or there would be "death panels". or be a slippery slope to single payer which would lead to long waits to get health care. that died down after a while.

*it's tyrannical to force your populace to buy health insurance, it's unconstitutional (yawn), etc, etc. I have a right to be uninsured all I want! coupled with...

*People who were proudly ignorant of the many exceptions to the penalty, such as the one that made you exempt if the premiums would cost more than 8% of your income (or something along those lines). I know several friends and family members who were uninsured and who qualified for the exemptions and just didn't apply for them because it was "too hard" or they literally didn't know they existed. and now lately it's

*OMG prices are skyrocketing and deductibles are too high. which of course was the case prior to ACA which everybody has forgotten. That being said, ACA does have a lot of blind spots, particularly in states that didn't expand Medicaid. My mother's insurance was ridiculously expensive. Single payer is the only actual means of providing affordable quality health care, really.

to paraphrase a friend, people used to picket against actual injustice, now they fight for the right to do dumb harmful shit to themselves because "nobody can tell me what to do!".

my dad drove without a seatbelt for a while to protest the police being able to ticket him - all the while admitting he was basically going to be torn like tissue paper if he got in an accident.

xp
Always figured it was "Blah, blah, blah my tax dollars paying for someone else's bad choices" by people young/lucky enough not to have needed any serious medical care yet.

why so many Americans (and so many poor ones) think that affordable care is a bad thing

People are isolated these days, get pretty much all of their information from sources that tell them this, and it's tied up with the dopamine-rush of hatred.

There was that too. Some of it was well-intentioned, but misguided - a liberal friend of mine was loudly against it because his mother was dying of cancer at the time and he was feeling immense personal pain over it and he didn't feel it was fair that, in his eyes, she should be forced to subsidize someone else's health care. His argument didn't make sense but he was going through Hell at the time so I understood why he wasn't approaching it with a clear head.

Often times the people who talk about their tax dollars paying for shit are the people who get massive refunds each year so they can stfu

ACA is actually the most popular it's ever been in the US, too (which isn't saying a lot, still almost half of the country hates it, but it started out much worse).

humorously of course, the whole campaign started with Town Halls which tea party people infiltrated and disrupted by yelling and being disruptive, which apparently isn't cool now that Democrats and independents are flooding town halls.

Yeah, that is funny, single-payer healthcare is actually pretty popular. We just don't have a government that listens to any of us ... a few years ago there was a Princeton study that showed citizens have a 0% influence on legislation and policy in Congress.

But don't doubt the propaganda shit for the people who fall for it, it's crafted intentionally to screw with people's heads in very well-engineered ways. And it works, too. People have figured that stuff out down to a science, and there are no laws to stop it right now.

white ppl who get anything from the guvmint are traitors to the race. so think the 'billies

yup. in my 20s, the people I met that would say shit like "why should we tax our best people" were never people that resembled that remark. they were kids up to their ears in debt who probably borrowed money from their parents to pay for things.

sometimes I want to grab some of these idiots by the scruff of their neck and say "fucko, I pay more in taxes than you do, stfu"

Single-payer healthcare, jobs programs, and taxpayer-funded largesse are always popular, right up until the part where it's clarified that brown people, too, are eligible. Even those white people who pay nothing in federal taxes hate nothing more than the idea that people darker than them could get benefits that are funded by federal taxes.

I don't even think it's the "brown people", these same people voted for Obama for president, and got pissed off when they still got shat on when they tossed out their prejudices for hope.

People have 0% influence on US government. Nobody likes feeling powerless, and having their livelihoods, communities, identities taken from them, and then to be dehumanized and treated like objects. What's happening now is people are kicking downward.

And there are people more than happy to take advantage of that. Sick shit.

sometimes I think BF Skinner was right all along

For spectulation's sake, Nazi Germany came to being from many Germans feeling powerless, humiliated, and dehumanized after WWI. Many Americans are feeling that way from Americans themselves, from our system itself. We're in some strange waters here.

And now we've got hate entrepreneurs ready to take full advantage of it.

Thanks for the replies. I have some reading to do, clearly.

If you believe opinion polls -- and who knows whether you should, but it's what we've got -- universal coverage up to and including some version of single-payer has typically polled above 60 percent pretty consistently, at least in concept. Obama may have been relying on that when he pushed ahead, figuring that regardless of the political fight it would end up being popular. But, as he usually did, he overestimated the power of rational argument and underestimated tribal affiliation. If Republicans had decided to work with him and make the ACA something they could sell, the story would have been different. But once it became a with-him-or-against-him issue, a lot of people who probably would have been ok with it in principle instead decided it was the worst thing ever. None of the "repeal Obamacare" posturing since has really had anything to do with the substance of the law or people's actual ideas about how to provide a functional health care system (which, of course, most people don't really understand well enough to have an opinion about anyway). Which leads to the current predicament, where Republicans feel duty-bound to repeal a thing they've spent the last seven years demonizing, even though probably a good number of them understand it's not actually a demon and they don't actually have any ideas that are going to provide more or better health care.