US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6286

On November 23 2016 01:39 oneofthem wrote:
the ACA(and medicaid expansion that came along) was mostly about expanding coverage, particularly for poor americans. in evaluating the ACA your view of how important providing healthcare to that segment is pretty important.



source

should expanding healthcare to poor people be a high priority? recent discussion on the plight of working class white americans seems to suggest so. the ACA also had a bunch of tax increases, including on capital gains, higher level pay payroll taxes and steeper penalty for large employers that do not offer insurance coverage. these explain the political resistance to the ACA because the republican agenda is largely written by a few large donors supporting these tea party organizations.

On November 22 2016 10:10 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
Lower wages is heartbreaking. So many Trump supporters apparently don't mind losing extra pay, losing health insurance, or enabling bigotry and restrictions on rights... I wonder what their most important reason was for voting him into office. Guns? White supremacism? "Because he's not Hillary"?

On November 23 2016 01:45 LegalLord wrote:
What Obamacare set out to do was certainly commendable. How it went about doing it turned into a slop of compromise that doesn't particularly work and that cost the Democrats all their political capital for multiple successive election cycles.

Single payer universal healthcare should be what is actually passed next time we get around to substantial healthcare reform.

On November 23 2016 01:24 Sadist wrote:



I honestly think Obama thought the ACA was a stop gap and a temporary solution towards at least the discussion of single payer.

There was no political will at the time for single payer at the time (cuz lol socialist) even though it is the solution for this mess.

On November 23 2016 01:51 LegalLord wrote:
Trump talked about a lot of issues that people care about and want addressed. He has some very striking flaws that made it perfectly clear why he lost the popular vote, but he was the only one who really talked about some of these issues other than a crotchety old man who hates the banks and who had to be sidelined to make way for the most electable Democrat in the history of elections. That got him a truly impressive base of support where he needed it and converted a supposedly safe blue state like Cheeseconsin into a Trump electoral victory.

On November 23 2016 01:51 LegalLord wrote:
Trump talked about a lot of issues that people care about and want addressed. He has some very striking flaws that made it perfectly clear why he lost the popular vote, but he was the only one who really talked about some of these issues other than a crotchety old man who hates the banks and who had to be sidelined to make way for the most electable Democrat in the history of elections. That got him a truly impressive base of support where he needed it and converted a supposedly safe blue state like Cheeseconsin into a Trump electoral victory.

On November 23 2016 01:51 LegalLord wrote:
Trump talked about a lot of issues that people care about and want addressed. He has some very striking flaws that made it perfectly clear why he lost the popular vote, but he was the only one who really talked about some of these issues other than a crotchety old man who hates the banks and who had to be sidelined to make way for the most electable Democrat in the history of elections.

On November 23 2016 01:52 LegalLord wrote:

That it was. But the times are a-changing and socialism isn't the boogeyman it was eight years ago. It could happen within a decade.

Donald Trump plans to meet with The New York Times after all, despite announcing by Tweet early Tuesday morning that he was canceling sessions with the paper's executives and journalists.

It continued a whirlwind 24 hours of Trump's mixed messages to the media.

The president-elect kicked it off Monday with a session in which he had invited television news anchors and executives to establish a new working relationship, only to berate them for what he termed unfair campaign coverage. He then told them he wanted a reset with the press.

Early Tuesday, Trump tweeted that the Times had sought to change the ground rules of their planned meetings, which he termed "not nice."

The top spokeswoman for the newspaper, Eileen Murphy, contradicted Trump's account in an email to NPR. Murphy said that the Times "was unaware that the meeting was cancelled until we saw the President-Elect's tweet this morning."

She said there had been two planned sessions: The first, a smaller one, was to be off-the-record. At the second, Trump's camp had agreed he would respond to questions, on the record, from a group of the paper's reporters, columnists and editors.

Trump had sought to eliminate the longer on-the-record meeting; according to Murphy, the Times refused, and then Trump's camp seemingly agreed to revert to the original understanding.

Later, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told a Times reporter serving as a pool reporter for the political press corps that the meeting was back on.

On November 23 2016 01:44 TanGeng wrote:


Look at those numbers on the middle class though. Medicare expansion under ACA hit the lower middle class to the upper middle class the hardest with -1%. The ridiculously wealthy barely got touched.

On November 23 2016 00:18 xDaunt wrote:


How is lambasting the mainstream press while tolerating (or even praising) the appointment of Bannon hypocritical? Both actions are completely consistent.



You don't get it. The right's hate of the media is not something that emerged in this election. The media has been torpedoing our guys for decades. The deck has been stacked against republicans and conservative figures for generations.The media has made itself our enemy, so we treat it as such. This isn't something that I expect any liberal or democrat to ever understand. But a solid 40% of the country does understand and finds Trump to be cathartic. Trump is loved because he fights and doesn't take the media's bullshit lying down like too many of our previous politicians.

President-elect Donald Trump is reneging on his promise to jail Hillary Clinton, a sharp departure from the “lock her up!” chants that Trump encouraged at his campaign rallies, immediately drawing the ire of some conservatives.

Breitbart News, the alt-right news organization formerly run by Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist, headlined the lead story on its home page “BROKEN PROMISE.”

And Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog agency that sued to get more of Clinton’s State Department emails released, urged Trump on Tuesday to “commit his administration” to investigating Clinton, while promising to continue its own litigation and investigations to help uncover possible scandals.

For Trump to refuse to do so “would be a betrayal of his promise to the American people to ‘drain the swamp’ of out-of-control corruption in Washington, DC,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton warned in a statement. “President-elect Trump should focus on healing the broken justice system, affirm the rule of law and appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Clinton scandals.”

Kellyanne Conway, the senior adviser who successfully managed the final iteration of Trump’s campaign, said Tuesday the president-elect will not push for further criminal investigations into potential wrongdoing by Clinton, suggesting he has chosen to “help her heal” from the bruising defeat her campaign never saw coming.

It traditionally would not be seen as the proper role of the president to direct any Justice Department investigations because a firewall has historically been respected between the DOJ and the White House. However, Trump said during the campaign that if elected, he would ask his attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Clinton for her use of a private server as secretary of state.

“I think when the president-elect, who’s also the head of your party now, tells you before he’s even inaugurated he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content, to the members,” Conway said. “And I think Hillary Clinton still has to face the fact that a majority of Americans don’t find her to be honest or trustworthy, but if Donald Trump can help her heal, then perhaps that's a good thing.”

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” reported Tuesday morning, citing an anonymous source “with direct knowledge of Donald Trump’s thinking,” that Trump will not pursue criminal investigations against Clinton over her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state or of her family’s charitable foundation.

On November 23 2016 01:22 Nebuchad wrote:


This is a really important set of points. A lot of people seem to equate unbiased and neutral.

Sometimes the media isn't biased, sometimes the facts are biased: sometimes people are just wrong and/or dishonest, a lot, very often. This is a situation that can easily be thought of, especially in the context of american republicans and especially in the context of the Tea Party.

A part of a biased liberal media that people seem to forget is that it's also a media biased against progressive ideas. If progressives had a bigger influence on the narrative, I really don't think you would be all that offended by liberal coverage...