Senate The US Politics discussion

Rep Elijah Cummings recovering from heart surgery.

 

I'm a licensed insurance agent (though I work support for the agent whose name is on the agency), so J-Rod.

I'll try to keep this brief. Mandatory insurance to protect others (auto, biz liability, etc,) is so the innocent victim does not have to bear the costs caused by the negligent party. I'd be pretty pissed at you if you put me in the hospital, totalled my car (this HAS happened to me) and *I* am the one who is out money (I was, no injuries, but no way could I afford a comparable car with the settlement I did receive so I had to take an older, far more used car or take out an auto loan I did not want).

As far as health insurance, ok, I get it. You don't want to pay for maternity care, perhaps it may be inferred you don't want to pay for any issues "unique" to women. I understand that stance, but really - should all women, post-menopausal or infertile help others subsidize that, or should just the women who get pregnant be the ones to pay for it? What about the men who get the women pregnant - do they get off scot free price-wise (relating to health care, of course)?

Should women pay for plans that cover Viagra? Testicular cancer?

Also, most young folks won't use health insurance, true. But what if they are in an auto accident? Have a bike accident? Break an arm or leg?

As for me, I'm in the group that could be dramatically affected if the House GOP plan went through - I'm female, just turned 60, no health insurance through work. I'm also healthy - no health issues.

One final thought on this subject - it's better for everyone and the economy to keep the population healthy - YOU and I and everyone pay for everyone anyway - but do we pay more than we should by having the uninsured utilize emergency rooms OR do we make it possible for most people to stay healthy with preventive care?

 

18% reporting, the Democratic candidate in Montana is up by just 1000 votes

 

Another One Bites the Dust: Lieberman withdraws name for FBI Director

He cites Trump's attorney who works at the same firm as Lieberman as a conflict of interest. Sure, or it could be that the President is under investigation that gets worse by the day. Even a rat like Lieberman knows when to abandon ship.

 

Montana has like a couple hundred thousand residents tops. How many people are actually participating in this election?

 

Around half a million I would guess. Democrat way behind the Governor's numbers, no chance.

 

Yeah, Quist is toast.

 

In the presidential election, Montana had 694,370 eligible voters and 516,901 voted:
http://sos.mt.gov/elections/voter_turnout/index

And here's their official site for the votes coming in:
http://mtelectionresults.gov/

It's mostly just the early voting that has come in so far. If Quist makes up some of the gap, even without winning, it means the Body-Slamming hurt Gianforte. If Gianforte actually expands his lead, then the Body-Slamming probably helped him win votes.
50-45-5 right now

(Btw, some of the Montana county names are ridiculous! "Petroleum" "Carbon" "Mineral" "Custer" "Liberty" "Hill" "Lake" "Granite" "Prairie" "Valley" "Wheatland" "Stillwater" "Sweetgrass")

 

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2017/05/truth-hurts

The truth hurts
Donald Trump’s budget ignores what is ailing American workers

Cuts to social programmes are unlikely to improve the health or employment prospects for struggling Americans


PRESIDENTIAL budget requests are worth exactly nothing. They carry no force of legislation. They land, heavy, bound and shrink-wrapped, so they can be immediately binned as Congress continues its now yearly stumble toward a “continuing resolution”—a supposedly temporary legislative act that in recent decades has almost entirely replaced the statutory budget process. The request from the President is the least consequential part of something that is completely broken. It functions like a bumper sticker on an old car. It only tells you about the person who’s driving.
Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina who won his seat in the Tea-Party wave of 2010, runs Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. Mr Mulvaney has created the budget his wing of the Republican party always wanted: government as a service, paid for by its clients, the taxpayers. If you receive more than you pay, the system has failed, and must be fixed. The marketing copy that accompanied the budget calls this “respect for people who pay the bills”.
This respect consists, mostly, of cuts to social services. Mr Mulvaney finds most of his savings by reducing what the federal government spends on health insurance programmes for the poor by $616bn over the next ten years. He wants to cut subsidies for student loans, for a savings of $143bn. He wants to make cuts to a programme that supports poor families with children ($272bn), and another that provides an income for those sick or injured who can’t work ($72bn). His aim is to encourage people to get back to work.
This last programme, the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) disability insurance, is certainly in need of reform. More than 5% of working-age Americans receive disability benefits, a number that’s doubled since 1990. Last year its chief actuary told me this growth could mostly be explained by the ageing of the workforce. But the programme also grows when unemployment is high, a correlation that shouldn’t exist, since unemployment has nothing to do with back pain. And benefits are disproportionately high in rural counties that have lost jobs. In parts of America, disability insurance functions as a kind of unemployment insurance.

That does not necessarily mean that the programme has grown through malingering or fraud (though some anecdotes to this effect can be found). Aggressive fraud investigation over the last five years by the SSA failed to dig up a lot of savings. The truth is more depressing, and complex. People with poor health will work when there are jobs, and apply for disability when there aren’t. Last year, in Van Buren County, Arkansas, I met a woman with a list of health complications that come from being overweight; she had spent her career in the cab of a long-haul truck. She receives a disability cheque, and works when she can as a “secret shopper”, checking in on petrol stations for the companies that own them. She is careful not to take a job too far away, so as not to have to spend her wages on a motel stay. Hers is not the tale of someone unwilling to try hard enough.
To fix disability insurance, then, Mr Trump must pull off an impossible trick: he has to fix rural America. He has to provide better, cheaper health care, and public health programmes to prevent obesity and smoking. He has to provide jobs—to replace the poultry slaughterhouse and copper wire and fishing boat manufacturing plants that have left Van Buren County, for example. He could make it easier to move, or train for a job at a desk.
There is already a Republican plan to reform Social Security Disability Insurance. It comes from French Hill, a Republican congressman who represents Van Buren County. In cooperation with David Autor, an economist at MIT, Mr French hopes to raise the limit on what people receiving benefits can earn through work, to ease the transition into a new job. But there is no sign of this plan in the White House’s budget request. Again, the request is just a bumper sticker. What it says of the man driving is that he’s not paying attention to the landmarks around him, and he’s not interested in asking for directions.

 

J-Rod what will it take for you to comprehend that you are unequivocally supporting a puppet of Vladimir Putin, a man with nothing but disdain for the democracy and freedom you claim to hold so dear?

 

http://www.politico.eu/article/trump-calls-germans-very-bad-vows-to-curb-car-sales-report/

“If you want to build cars in the world, then I wish you all the best. You can build cars for the United States, but for every car that comes to the U.S., you will pay 35 percent tax,” Trump had told Germany’s Bild newspaper at the time. “I would tell BMW that if you are building a factory in Mexico and plan to sell cars to the U.S., without a 35 percent tax, then you can forget that.”

So, he wants American cars to have a competitive advantage? Ok, I guess I can see where he's coming from. Only, why does he want terrible, awful cars to be the cheapest ones available to Americans?
Also doesn't he like Mercedes (German), Maybach (German) and Rolls Royce (owned by BMW)?

lol @

 

The mainstream press is doing its job. Conservatives are like a sports team that cheats over and over and over, and then they scream "BIAS" when the referee rules against them. This is f---ing disgusting.

 

Body - slammer won.

 

It's...not that simple. Look, the mainstream press spiked the football hard for Hillary Clinton and ate crow like nobody has eaten crow before election night. There *was* a bias. For Clinton. CNN is a laughingstock. "And Jake Tapper left journalism to join CNN" - Alt Right Bigot Barack Obama. MSNBC is right now acting like the left wing InfoWars. How embarrassing was Rachel Maddow's "We have Trump's tax returns oh it's actually nothing" build up and blue ball? Where was the mainstream press doing its job back in 2003 when we were about to invade Iraq? Where was CNBC doing its job during the housing market crisis? When Kramer was telling people to get junk bonds? Why was the Charleston Massacre perp treated like a regular criminal in the media instead of a terrorist? Yet every brown person committing a crime is treated as a terrorist. Where was the mainstream media when it came to Obama's drone strikes? Why is it that every time anyone wants to bring up Obama's drone strikes, it's brought up as a "yeah i don't like that but please stop talking about it?" And can you tell me the media would *ever* hold a Clinton presidency to account between ***ping sessions of "FIRST WOMAN PRESIDENT"

The media has its fair share of ****. Obviously this doesn't justify assaulting a guardian reporter, but sitting here and pretending that everyone who doesn't like the press is some alt right whiner isn't going to solve any problem. The media has an image problem it needs to fix.

 

So what does it say about conservatives if they think the mainstream media hasn't bent over backwards enough to validate their warped views? Whatever problems we may think the mainstream media might have, conservatives are worse by many orders of magnitude. We have a president who encouraged his supporters to beat up reporters, and now we have a Congressman who's actually gone and done it. All the spurious garbage we've heard from conservatives about how Obama was trying to silence them, and now they've put into office a president whose actions actually do threaten the First Amendment. It's completely backwards, upside-down, black-is-white, Grade A horse----.

 

Right wing media callers were quite happy about the body-slammer. "Someone is finally sticking up for our side."

Yet in Saudi Arabia he bowed and curtsied.

 

This hasn't addressed a single thing in my post.

You can't pretend the media doesn't need to fix its image problem. You just can't.

 

Ender, he is so absolutely and utterly clueless on trade that it's mind-boggling. You almost have to try to be that stupid.

Edit: he also seems to be going back to his old belief that NATO spending commitments are a check countries have to pay the US. Is he being willfully stupid for political reasons, or is he suffering from severe dementia?

 

Trump's views on state capitalism, and how it works, are rather amusing. Not event the Chinese are that protectionist.

This is more in line with Mosley's isolationist economic plan.

 

Really starting to believe the latter. It's really becoming a race to whether he makes enough mistakes to be impeached or if he freaks out Pence and the Cabinet enough to force them to trigger the 25th. And I seriously never thought that would be even considered. But his behavior has only grown MORE erratic over time. And more and more people are noticing and growing concerned that he really does have some form of dementia. So if we see it, I can't imagine what it's like up close for the people actually working next to him.

Regardless, nothing is likely to change until after the Midterms.

 

Trump is not a politician. So the man has zero idea on how to carry himself in Office; thinks it is no different from running a corporate empire.

 

I've been a bit busy. I'll be here to address questions. I'm just wondering if anyone had bothered to listen to Prager on Adam Carolla's podcast from yesterday? Hey, I'ts better than a reading assignment.

http://adamcarolla.com/dennis-prager-and-david-wild/

 

Alright, so the media has been partially and belately doing its job. And then look at the massive howls of protest from right-wing circles just for doing their job halfway. Sure, we can bang on the media for its insufficiencies, but isn't that like trying to put out a small trash can fire when the house next door is engulfed in flames? We really can't be picky about our allies at this point...this is a "first they came for the socialists" moment.

 

Well I'll give Gianforte this much credit: At least he took responsiblity and gave a public apology for body - slamming the reporter and admitted it wasn't something he should have done (granted it was at his victory party), and even apologized during his speech to Ben Jacobs, the reporter. So I'll at least give him credit to do something Trump claims he would never do, and that's apologize.