In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
On October 27 2016 15:26 xM(Z wrote: i think your assumption is flat out wrong; the idea that Trump is a brilliant strategist is said as a joke or at most, is some low level sarcasm(yes, by his supporters).
I've been reading a lot of comments (mostly on reddit) from their end - it doesn't seem like sarcasm. Nor did it when Adams wrote about it in his blog.
On October 27 2016 15:26 xM(Z wrote: i think your assumption is flat out wrong; the idea that Trump is a brilliant strategist is said as a joke or at most, is some low level sarcasm(yes, by his supporters).
No, this is just false. Even in this thread, several posters have argued that he was strategically/tactically brilliant, in particular with regards to his (supposed) ability to play the media.
In other news, ERB has just released their Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump battle
Not one of the best, but pretty funny regardless. For those who missed it, here was the Obama vs Romney episode:
On October 27 2016 15:26 xM(Z wrote: i think your assumption is flat out wrong; the idea that Trump is a brilliant strategist is said as a joke or at most, is some low level sarcasm(yes, by his supporters).
I've been reading a lot of comments (mostly on reddit) from their end - it doesn't seem like sarcasm. Nor did it when Adams wrote about it in his blog.
maybe i should've generalize less because he has his base and if Trump tells them that grabbing women by their pussies would make America great again they'll probably do it but those would inflate any(if) trait of his perceived as positive - e.g., brilliant player of medias in this case. i was referring there to the other ones that vote for Trump, aren't his base and are trying to rationalize the screw up somehow.
Edit: so where i think you people fuck up - you're hell bent on showing Tump's voters that they're making a/the wrong choice. that, from start, falls on deaf ears because(except his base) people already know they'll fuck up(in the dark corners of their minds) but they'll do it anyway. you should instead focus on why they do not care about making that wrong choice.
Ted Cruz, currently attempting to be the most useless man in congress.
Sorry, this was to good not to post.
Something tells me that if the GOP actually tried to do this the 8 Supreme Justices will march into congress and tell them to get their act together personally in a brilliant show of national public humiliation.
No, this is just false. Even in this thread, several posters have argued that he was strategically/tactically brilliant, in particular with regards to his ability to play the media.
You have to admit the media conference at his new DC hotel about a month ago was pretty amazing. Got the media to attend a conference by claiming he would address the birther conspiracy theories. Free advertising for his new hotel, 30 minutes of veterans endorsing Trump before Trump finally comes onto the stage, dismisses the birther conspiracy and doesn't take questions. It was genius.Trolling genius.CNN regretted doing the live feed.
Obama Was Right About Republican Extremism All Along
It has been a long time since a popular, term-limited president has campaigned vigorously on behalf of his presumptive heir. Bill Clinton famously refrained from campaigning for Al Gore, at Gore’s request, and Ronald Reagan was a surprisingly quiet surrogate for George H. W. Bush. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has hit the trail for Hillary Clinton with an elan that recalls his days as a swaggering presidential candidate in 2008. He has become the Democratic nominee’s most unvarnished and indispensable champion.
Obama’s primary goal, of course, is to help Clinton defeat Donald Trump, so as to cement his own legacy. But the president clearly takes extra pleasure campaigning in battleground states against Republicans who didn’t consider Trump an affront to the conscience until the GOP nominee’s poll numbers tanked.
“I understand Joe Heck now wishes he never said [nice] things about Donald Trump,” Obama said at a weekend campaign event in Las Vegas, Nevada, referring to the Republican congressman who’s running for Senate. “But they’re on tape. They’re on the record. And now that Trump’s poll numbers are cratering, suddenly he says, well, no, I’m not supporting him. Too late. You don’t get credit for that.”
Obama is repurposing a critique he’s been making for years, in public and in private, directed at Republican officeholders themselves. His retooled stump speech is crafted not just to fire up Democratic voters against Trump, but to overwhelm other Republican politicians with a sense of dread by making them recognize the huge mistake they made not listening to him.
On October 27 2016 19:23 WhiteDog wrote: Assange must be a facist if he criticize Hillary anyway.
Yeah, or maybe he's just anti-American, and that means he was anti Bush when Bush was in office and now he's anti-Clinton. Feels to Americans that he's switching political sides, but no, its just that his motives were never pure. That, unlike Snowden, no reasonable case can actually be made for the guy. He was reckless then, and now he's even moreso, publishing without any redaction. And really, this reflexive anti-Americanism just means that he falls in the laps of people who are guilty of the same sins as America but to greater extents. He is now, and really has always been, a pawn in a larger game.
On October 27 2016 19:23 WhiteDog wrote: Assange must be a facist if he criticize Hillary anyway.
What? You don't believe Buzzfeed?
Haha buzzfeed.Oh my aching sides. Is Assange really paranoid when Clinton has literally stated she wants to drone him? Surely you can at least understand he may dislike the woman for saying she wants him dead kwizach?
On October 27 2016 19:52 Kipsate wrote: Random question is it actually possible for the GOP to indefinitely block the Supreme court effectively?
I know that the public wouldn't really like that but is it"legally" possible?
Yes. But the senate could change the rules to make it Supreme Court appointments can be moved forward with a simple majority, rather than 60. But that is the "nuclear" option. Changing the rules of the senate opens up the door for further rule changes when the democrats are not in control. It is the very essence of short term plans and not something the democrats want.
But it is unlikely. Everyone in the Senate hates Ted Cruz. If the Republicans lose the senate, they will tell yes to go sit in the corner.
No, this is just false. Even in this thread, several posters have argued that he was strategically/tactically brilliant, in particular with regards to his ability to play the media.
You have to admit the media conference at his new DC hotel about a month ago was pretty amazing. Got the media to attend a conference by claiming he would address the birther conspiracy theories. Free advertising for his new hotel, 30 minutes of veterans endorsing Trump before Trump finally comes onto the stage, dismisses the birther conspiracy and doesn't take questions. It was genius.Trolling genius.CNN regretted doing the live feed.
That "conference" resulted in the entire media getting tired of his shit and changing their entire tone to be more combative.
WASHINGTON — The architects of the Affordable Care Act thought they had a blunt instrument to force people — even young and healthy ones — to buy insurance through the law’s online marketplaces: a tax penalty for those who remain uninsured.
It has not worked all that well, and that is at least partly to blame for soaring premiums next year on some of the health law’s insurance exchanges.
The full weight of the penalty will not be felt until April, when those who have avoided buying insurance will face penalties of around $700 a person or more. But even then that might not be enough: For the young and healthy who are badly needed to make the exchanges work, it is sometimes cheaper to pay the Internal Revenue Service than an insurance company charging large premiums, with huge deductibles.
“In my experience, the penalty has not been large enough to motivate people to sign up for insurance,” said Christine Speidel, a tax lawyer at Vermont Legal Aid.
Some people do sign up, especially those with low incomes who receive the most generous subsidies, Ms. Speidel said. But others, she said, find that they cannot afford insurance, even with subsidies, so “they grudgingly take the penalty.”
The I.R.S. says that 8.1 million returns included penalty payments for people who went without insurance in 2014, the first year in which most people were required to have coverage. A preliminary report on the latest tax-filing season, tabulating data through April, said that 5.6 million returns included penalties averaging $442 a return for people uninsured in 2015.
With the health law’s fourth open-enrollment season beginning Tuesday, consumers are anxiously weighing their options.
William H. Weber, 51, a business consultant in Atlanta, said he paid $1,400 a month this year for a Humana health plan that covered him and his wife and two children. Premiums will increase 60 percent next year, Mr. Weber said, and he does not see alternative policies that would be less expensive. So he said he was seriously considering dropping insurance and paying the penalty.
“We may roll the dice next year, go without insurance and hope we have no major medical emergencies,” Mr. Weber said. “The penalty would be less than two months of premiums.” (He said that he did not qualify for a subsidy because his income was too high, but that his son, a 20-year-old barista in New York City, had a great plan with a subsidy.)
Iris I. Burnell, the manager of a Jackson Hewitt Tax Service office on Capitol Hill, said she met this week with a client in his late 50s who has several part-time jobs and wants to buy insurance on the exchanges. But, she said, “he’s finding that the costs are prohibitive on a monthly basis, so he has resigned himself to the fact that he will have to suffer the penalty.”
60% obamacare premium hikes for some next year? God damn.... I heard the average was 25% but this is beyond the pale.
On October 27 2016 19:52 Kipsate wrote: Random question is it actually possible for the GOP to indefinitely block the Supreme court effectively?
I know that the public wouldn't really like that but is it"legally" possible?
Yes. But the senate could change the rules to make it Supreme Court appointments can be moved forward with a simple majority, rather than 60. But that is the "nuclear" option. Changing the rules of the senate opens up the door for further rule changes when the democrats are not in control. It is the very essence of short term plans and not something the democrats want.
But it is unlikely. Everyone in the Senate hates Ted Cruz. If the Republicans lose the senate, they will tell yes to go sit in the corner.
They will only lose the Senate for 2 years because of the 2018 map and honestly if I am the democrats I take the risk of the nuclear option anyway because the difficulty of republicans winning a presidential election is not going away. I say that because currently it looks like the Democrats will safely have 270 going forward with the map continuing to expand in there favor.
To explain that point I will simply say that of the states that are currently going to be 5+ points in the democrats favor now (and are trending even moreso) I cant see any reason they would suddenly reverse trend. Colorado , Michigan ,New Hampshire , Pennsylvania , Virginia , and Wisconsin add up to 72 electoral college votes and they HAVE to flip one before they can even talk about running the table in the battleground states.
Good riddance, hopefully they lose the string of court cases and it drags them further down.
Exxon Mobil Corp. may be facing “irreversible decline” as the oil giant fails to cope with low oil prices and mounting debt, a report released Wednesday found.
The Texas-based company, scheduled to report its third-quarter earnings on Friday, has suffered a 45 percent drop in revenue over the past five years as it bet big on drilling in oil sands, the Arctic and deep-sea sites ― decisions that proved expensive, environmentally risky and politically controversial.
Combined with a two-year plunge in oil prices, ballooning long-term debt to cover dividend payments to shareholders and an evaporating pool of cash, Exxon Mobil’s finances show “signs of significant deterioration,” according to new research from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonprofit based in Cleveland.
“Investors right now are getting less cash from Exxon than they have historically, and are likely to get less cash in the future,” Tom Sanzillo, director of finance at the IEEFA, told The Huffington Post on Wednesday. “This is going to be a much smaller company in the future, and the oil industry is going to be much smaller in the future.”
In April, Exxon Mobil was stripped of Standard & Poor’s top credit rating for the first time since the 1930s. The rating agency said it worried Exxon took on billions in debt to fund new drilling projects at a time when oil prices were high. Now, with the price of crude below $50 per barrel, that debt looks risky. Despite S&P specifically citing such payments in its downgrade, Exxon Mobil actually increased its dividend by 2 cents the next day.
Usually, dividends go up as a company’s stock price thrives. But shares of Exxon have trailed the S&P 500 for 10 quarters in a row, the report noted, and that’s before factoring in the risks of climate change.
Exxon Mobil is embroiled in a bevy of legal fights, notably with a handful of state attorneys general who are investigating the company for spending decades covering up the role of burning fossil fuels in global warming. The firm has repeatedly insisted such probes are politically motivated, and claimed that subpoenas seeking internal documents on climate change violate its constitutional rights.
Unlike some of its rivals, Exxon has been slow to invest in renewable energy. CEO Rex Tillerson last year mocked the idea of investing in clean energy, likening it to losing “money on purpose.” Tillerson said last week that oil prices are unlikely to rebound anytime soon, thanks to large stockpiles of oil and resurgent shale output in the U.S.
“If you’re an institutional investor and you’ve received very good returns from a company for many years and all of sudden you don’t get those returns, and all of a sudden the company is in controversy, you have to start asking questions of management,” said Sanzillo, who spent years working to manage New York City’s pension fund.
Exxon flatly denied claims made in the report, suggesting that the nonpartisan IEEFA ― funded mostly by large philanthropic foundations ― is serving as a shill for “anti-oil activists.”
“The report and its conclusions are inaccurate and were bought and paid for by the same anti-oil activists who have been running a campaign of disinformation against our company,” Alan Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon, told HuffPost in an email. “ExxonMobil believes that its operations will exhibit strong performance over the long term as a result of disciplined investment, cost management, asset enhancement programs and application of advanced technology.”
Exxon’s head-in-the-sand approach could spell doom for the company, much as it did for the financially ravaged coal industry. The value of the coal sector has decreased by two-thirds since 2010. In recent months, industry giants Peabody Energy, Arch Coal, Alpha Natural Resources and Patriot Coal have all filed for bankruptcy.
On October 27 2016 15:26 xM(Z wrote: i think your assumption is flat out wrong; the idea that Trump is a brilliant strategist is said as a joke or at most, is some low level sarcasm(yes, by his supporters).
I've been reading a lot of comments (mostly on reddit) from their end - it doesn't seem like sarcasm. Nor did it when Adams wrote about it in his blog.
I wouldn't call him brilliant but he functions completely differently from your average calculating intelligent person. As in, he sounds like a coked up Baffoon but still rose to his level of wealth, won the primary when he was given a 1 percent chance with practically free advertising, I think you'd have to be pretty naive to underestimate him at this point. Intelligence comes in many forms, and from the perspective of the hyper analytical systemizing minds that frequent this thread, we emphasize our own form of intelligence and neglect his.
WASHINGTON — The architects of the Affordable Care Act thought they had a blunt instrument to force people — even young and healthy ones — to buy insurance through the law’s online marketplaces: a tax penalty for those who remain uninsured.
It has not worked all that well, and that is at least partly to blame for soaring premiums next year on some of the health law’s insurance exchanges.
The full weight of the penalty will not be felt until April, when those who have avoided buying insurance will face penalties of around $700 a person or more. But even then that might not be enough: For the young and healthy who are badly needed to make the exchanges work, it is sometimes cheaper to pay the Internal Revenue Service than an insurance company charging large premiums, with huge deductibles.
“In my experience, the penalty has not been large enough to motivate people to sign up for insurance,” said Christine Speidel, a tax lawyer at Vermont Legal Aid.
Some people do sign up, especially those with low incomes who receive the most generous subsidies, Ms. Speidel said. But others, she said, find that they cannot afford insurance, even with subsidies, so “they grudgingly take the penalty.”
The I.R.S. says that 8.1 million returns included penalty payments for people who went without insurance in 2014, the first year in which most people were required to have coverage. A preliminary report on the latest tax-filing season, tabulating data through April, said that 5.6 million returns included penalties averaging $442 a return for people uninsured in 2015.
With the health law’s fourth open-enrollment season beginning Tuesday, consumers are anxiously weighing their options.
William H. Weber, 51, a business consultant in Atlanta, said he paid $1,400 a month this year for a Humana health plan that covered him and his wife and two children. Premiums will increase 60 percent next year, Mr. Weber said, and he does not see alternative policies that would be less expensive. So he said he was seriously considering dropping insurance and paying the penalty.
“We may roll the dice next year, go without insurance and hope we have no major medical emergencies,” Mr. Weber said. “The penalty would be less than two months of premiums.” (He said that he did not qualify for a subsidy because his income was too high, but that his son, a 20-year-old barista in New York City, had a great plan with a subsidy.)
Iris I. Burnell, the manager of a Jackson Hewitt Tax Service office on Capitol Hill, said she met this week with a client in his late 50s who has several part-time jobs and wants to buy insurance on the exchanges. But, she said, “he’s finding that the costs are prohibitive on a monthly basis, so he has resigned himself to the fact that he will have to suffer the penalty.”
60% obamacare premium hikes for some next year? God damn.... I heard the average was 25% but this is beyond the pale.
The ACA has some good things in it but didnt go far enough. This was going to be a side affect since health care costs were never on the table to be cut.
The people not buying insurance arent very smart though. One trip to the hospital or an expensive prescription and you are basically fucked.
EPT
