…the hospital has removed a kidney for transplanting purposes as payment.
The fantasy is that Trump gets elected. Not to be catastophistic but we don’t live in that nice world where no one can get hurt by any action I intend, ever and forever, amen. Unless you give up on Democracy how are you ever going to “teach” those Trump voters the error of their ways? Your solutions mean ignoring Trumpism as some abbrent minority party delusion and ignoring the reality they now control all three houses of the government.
Through gerrymandinring so effective that despite losing the popular vote for each of those three houses, they have unified control.
Which is the disgusting part.
Gerrymandering remains one of those things in life that I will just never understand. How it continues to blatantly cheat the people out of proper representation is just disgusting.
I didn’t say your actions can never hurt anyone, I said the solution of “let those people suffer so they learn to make better choices” is not something that can happen in reality. People suffering doesn’t lead to better choices, it leads to worse ones. Other people suffering doesn’t cause someone who isn’t suffering to make the right choice. The fact that the government is controlled by a bunch of people who all share the same delusion doesn’t make that delusion into reality. They can and quite possibly will enact laws on the theory that a risk of really big future suffering will be enough to convince people to suffer a little more right now, but it’s already been shown that this is not the case, and that this system will only benefit those who are already well-off.
Did you watch the video of the NC legislature discussing the redistricting? How one of them got up, flat out, and said that ‘we designed this map to create Republican advantage, and we believe this is legal and will pursue it’. A map designed to give them an unbreakable supermajority, despite voting being almost exactly 50/50.
It made me want to physically remove each one of those from office.
Shit like that is too depressing to actually see.
There is a SC case coming out that might rule that sort of gerrymandering unconstitutional or at least a violation of federal law.
Do you think there is a chance with Trump vomit appointing Scalia’s vacancy that we don’t see that challenge denied?
Well, you need 5 to win either way, so Trump can’t change a loss to a win, will stay a loss. It could change a draw to a loss, but I think it will be a 5-3 or 6-2 ruling, seriously. I think the justices may be a bit nervous right now as well- that might factor into things.
What’s depressing is that we knew this was an issue TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO.
Yup the employer mandate only kicked in Jan 2015. It only applied to companies with more than 50 employees and most importantly it didn’t apply to 1200+ companies that requested and received waivers.
This is amazing.
So I haven’t followed the ACA stuff terribly much since the repeal crap went through. Am I able to give a big ‘fuck you’ to any known Trump supporter at this point for taking away my kids’ insurance just before they would have benefited from the extended age deal and that heaven forbid should I lose my employment my wife will eventually be left for dead because we’d never be able to bridge the costs of losing the pre-existing coverage rule? Awesome.
I listened to a fair amount of Gen. Mattis hearing today. It is not often when somebody gets praise from the NY Times and the WSJ editorial pages on the same day. As I said when he was nominated I genuinely feel safer know that any orders will pass from Trump through Mattis.
I’m sure he’ll have to throw himself on a grenade more than once in his tenure as Sec Def and threaten to resign rather than do something stupid. I’m not sure Trump has ever had anybody in his organization that has stood up to him before and we will see how long it lasts. Let’s hope it is a long tenure.
Before people get too terribly worked up about this, note that Clinton also got an FEC letter (though only around 60 pages) and Obama was levied the largest fine ever by the FEC for refusing to clean up his contributions, so IMHO the fact that Trump got this letter is not news. It’s more the size of the letter (and from what I understand, there are a lot of LLCs in violation, which I believe is unusual when compared to Clinton or Obama).
Ok, so now assume the proper amount of outrage!
Based on his hearing, Mattis actually sounds like a pretty reasonable guy. And what’s more important, it seems he’s not at all afraid to completely contradict Trump. Optimism!
Not quite yet.
Basically what was passed the other day was meaningful, but only in a logistical way; they didn’t actually kill the ACA or repeal any of its benefits or change prices or anything… they just gave themselves the legal framework do do so in the future without any of those pesky “filibuster” things that the Dems might conceivably institute. To use a terrible analogy: they didn’t shoot anybody, they just procured and loaded the gun that they promise they will soon use for that purpose.
It’s actually possible that this is a good thing for the ACA. The GOP (and maybe Trump) seems to have tentatively settled on the idea that they cannot repeal without a replacement in the wings. Such a plan will take some time to craft… maybe a couple years. So they pass legislation that actually does nothing to the ACA, yet claim that progress is getting made towards doing so. Then, two years hence, they lose the majority in one of both of the chambers just when they were ready to bring their plan to the floor, and they can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to blaming the Democrats for not allowing them to repeal and replace O-Care.