Deplorable

Two specific changes that will really help me personally: 1. A separate pool for high risk patients that don't get coverage through their job or a government program. Under our pre-Obamacare system these people were screwed. I am in favor of getting them coverage, but Obamacare basically did it on my back. I think it was something like 5% of Americans pre-Obamacare that purchased insurance individually. We were all shoved onto the Obamacare exchanges, along with the people who were uninsurable. The goal was to get more healthy, uninsured Americans to sign up through the threat of a fine. This was supposed to balance out the market. It didn't work. A fairer way would be the separate pool for the uninsurable, and have the government subsidize this pool through general tax receipts. That spreads the burden to fix a problem over all of society, rather than on a small segment that includes me. 2. A national private insurance market rather than state by state. I live in an unhealthy state with a low population. If I were in a larger and more healthy market my prices wold hopefully go down.

Two notes regarding Obamacare and any potential replacement: 1. The people complaining about how insurance companies are going to make more are financially illiterate. Obamacare is in the process of destroying any possible way for companies to provide insurance for those of us who don't get it through work and don't qualify for government programs. 1/3rd of the counties in America are down to one provider, and they claim to be losing money on a bunch of those counties. I personally need companies to be able to turn a profit. 2. People are talking about loads of folks losing insurance. I'm taking a wait and see approach to that as what the government and media said about Obamacare was so far off from reality. One point I will make is that even for the people who qualify for subsidies on the Obamacare exchanges, they still face massive deductibles. How much good is "free" insurance to someone making $20,000/yr if they still face a $5,000 medical bill? Deductibles have skyrocketed under Obamacare. That person making $20k might be able toswing paying a $2k deductible. Even if some people do lose insurance, assuming the costs can be put down others are going to be getting insurance that won't put them into debt. There are two sides.

My whole life in America I've heard similar tributes to black Americans. How they never lost faith. How they dreamed of freedom and participating as equal citizens. How they knew the values of America would one day apply to them. It's all probably just a bunch of crap that people say because it sounds good and makes us feel good. But it's normal rhetoric. It was odd that Ben Carson used the word "immigrant." My general stance is that you take a statement as it was intended. Carson wasn't pulling a right wing troll routine. He's a nice dude who was trying to say nice things about black people, his ancestors and mostly the people he's supposed to help in his new job. The way people ripped him apart, especially all the black people calling him an Uncle Tom and a coon, was disgusting. There isn't much worse a black American can be called. The fact that Obama used the exact same word while making the exact same point is entirely relevant to the debate on the sensitivity or usualness of Carson's statement, and how people should react. Further, the fact that the media blew this up to the point that it was on the front page of major newspapers across the country says something about our media's bias.

What country did we steal the drum thing from? It's terrible. I've very, very occasionally attended Pittsburgh Riverhounds games and the drumming from the "supporters section" is incredibly annoying. What's to decide. It's great. Might have to reassess my view of MLS fans. What I don't understand is their plan to break the cycle of poverty by hiring low income youth. Isn't that what every stadium does for concessions? Are they paying them extra than would be normal for the job?

"Certainly, it wasn't easy for those of African heritage who had not come here voluntarily and yet in their own way were immigrants themselves. There was discrimination and hardship and poverty. But, like you, they no doubt found inspiration in all those who had come before them. And they were able to muster faith that, here in America, they might build a better life and give their children something more." Barack Hussien Obama, Dec 15, 2015 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=111241 I'll take apologies in the form of red dots to any Granny Danger post. Honest question, do lefties like to be offended and then search for things which give offense? Is it like a high?

Mr. Danger equates abiding by the correct made up PC language rather than correct legitimate language with intelligence. Haha. Amazing. Obamacare is economically unsustainable. It doesn't matter who won the election. The Democrats created a system which could not last, but that shouldn't have been a shock to anybody.

More nonsense from Berkeley at the March 4 Trump. Does this city not have police? The nerds are having fun with the Alt Knight though.

Freedom was a common theme of the Negro Spirituals. This was commented on my Mr. King during his famous speech.

You don't think slaves had dreams that their sons and daughters would be able to one day pursue prosperity? Those are the exact words he used regarding the slaves. He used the words "dreams and opportunities" when describing the Ellis Island immigrants.

I think the AG would have to sign off on a wiretap, if one existed. Theoretically it could be done with the President in the dark, but it would be hard to imagine the AG would sign off on wiretapping the opposition party candidate without running it by Obama.

Again, Obamacare passed without a single Republican vote. They didn't make compromises to get Republican votes. It is true that moderate Democrats were a block towards a system that I imagine you would advocate. And for clarification, Obama claimed the Affordable Care Act would not cause anybody to lose their health insurance if they liked it. This wasn't a claim about what he wanted in an ideal bill. This was a claim about what was in the Bill Congress was about to vote on.

God, this Ben Carson controversy is everything that's wrong with our society. Immigrant - Noun: A person who comes to live permanently in another country. Dude spent his life saving babies as the top brain surgeon in the world. And he spent his spare time helping the less fortunate and working with disadvantaged kids. He's literally a great human being. And we have all these leftist keyboard warriors acting like they are better people based on them deciding to redefine words and then hold him to these made up standards.

When I'm sitting at home doing nothing I usually put some sort of game on tv and surf the web.

1. Please show me a poll that shows less than 85% of Republicans supporting Trump. 2. Trump is what he is with the exaggerations. This is going to be whataboutary, as you people put it, but Obama told me that if I like my health insurance I could keep it and that increases in costs would be borne by people making over $250,000/yr. Well I'm two canceled policies in and pay hundreds of dollars more per month for the right for my insurance company to start paying my health care costs once I've accumulated $6,000 in costs in a year. And there's only one company to choose from now. You can look at how he ran opposing gay marriage, specifically citing his Christian faith. I don't personally care about that issue one way or the other, but lots of people do. He was lying. What I care about is Trump telling me the truth about his policies. He said he was going to ban Muslims, build a wall and deport illegal Hispanics, kill new trade deals and renegotiate NAFTA, pull back on spreading democracy overseas by force, replace Obamacare with a program that still gets everyone covered, etc. It seems to me that he's working towards all those promises. He hasn't lied to me.

James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence under Obama, has claimed there were no warrants on Trump. Clapper perjured himself in front of Congress, but was never charged and kept his job. FBI Director Comey is also reportedly pushing back on the idea. Let's remind ourselves of the sourcing on the story. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/10/fbi-chief-given-dossier-by-john-mccain-alleging-secret-trump-russia-contacts Democrat Sen. Chris Coons on March 3: So if there were no wiretaps we either have mainstream media publications making up stories, or sources inside the government lying to the media. And we also have Democrat politicians lying about the existence of evidence. It will be interesting to see what all comes of this. Either there's evidence that Trump did something illegal, there's evidence that people in the government engaged in shady activity towards spying on Trump, or that elements within the government and media have been making up stories about Trump.

Here's the potential case that could be made against Obama, assuming the reports in places like the Guardian and NY Times over the past few months about the warrants against Trump are true, presented from a conservative lawyer if anybody here is interested in seeing what the other side is saying. http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/yes-obama-could-be-prosecuted-if-involved-with-illegal-surveillance/ Interestingly, it claims that only 12 out of 35,000+ FISA warrant requests have been turned down by the FISA court judges. That should take care of Savage Henry's speculation that the FISA courts would have to be on Obama's side. These courts serve as rubber stamps.

It's interesting that they went through the FISA courts. If they had evidence they would have gone through the regular courts. We don't know if they tried and were told no. According to the Guardian FISA courts approved 1,457 / 1,457 warrant requests in 2015. 1,379 / 1,379 in 2014. That they turned down the first warrant request on Trump is amazing there must have been something seriously off. Reports in the media say the second request was granted. If they found something criminal I'd assume charges would have been brought rather than letting him become President. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I am cynical about government spying. A bunch of weird stuff happened at the end of the Obama administration. 1. In the last weeks of his administration Obama relaxed the strict rules by which the NSA could share raw intelligence with other agencies. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/nsa-gets-more-latitude-to-share-intercepted-communications.html?_r=0 2. The Mike Flynn situation. How did the subject matter of a private phone call leak? Either he was under surveillance, the NSA (who would be surveilling the Russian ambassador) themselves leaked the call, or the NSA did not properly redact the comments made by a private US citizen before sharing the data with other government entities. See no. 1. 3. There have been recent reports that the Obama administration worked to distribute information about Russian involvement in the election as widely as possible within the US government and across allied governments. This included lowering classification standards. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/us/politics/obama-trump-russia-election-hacking.html They are of course portraying this as preserving evidence and warning allies. If there was actual wrongdoing, why not bring charges? A cynic might say that they were trying to disseminate as widely as possible information which could be used at a later date against the Trump administration. Back to Flynn. He did nothing illegal. But someone with access to the transcript of Flynn's phone call heard Pence on tv say that Flynn had not talked to Russia about sanctions. Boom, a man with a bunch of enemies in the intelligence agencies is damaged goods. Now we have these "backdoor" warrants issued for Trump, but nothing worth criminal charges was found. There's smoke floating around.

Didn't know this was an American thing. I don't think it would be so much that it would damage Biden. It would be that he wouldn't want the Clinton press investigating his family situation which would embarrass and potentially damage his kids. The Clinton's are notorious dirty players when it comes to politics. That isn't my partisan opinion, that's the general consensus that's existed my whole life.

They went through the FISA courts, which are separate. FISA courts grant warrants 99.9999999% of the time and are in general never used to gather evidence which will be used in criminal cases. They turned down the initial request. Another warrant was granted a few months later. Speculation on whether the Obama administration was spying on Trump has been around since just after the election. I can't say what's true, but it's been suggested that the military people involved in the intelligence community gave Trump the heads up about what was going on. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-and-intelligence-community-chiefs-have-urged-obama-to-remove-the-head-of-the-nsa/2016/11/19/44de6ea6-adff-11e6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html?utm_term=.8fb2bc693bbd Here's an article from former federal terrorism prosecutor Andrew McCarthy in January. It was written in the Never Trump National Review. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443768/obama-fisa-trump-wiretap FISA and the Trump Team The idea that FISA could be used against political enemies always seemed far-fetched. Now it might not be.

MLS made a mistake in allowing hipsters to set down the stadium culture. It puts a cap on how many general American sports fans the MLS can attract, even as soccer in general becomes more and more popular. You hear two main reasons as to why sports fans who like soccer ignore the MLS. One is that it's not the top players in the sport. Nothing the MLS can do about that. But issue I hear about the most is that MLS culture is embarrassing or cringe worthy. The European cosplay stuff is bad enough (and MLS had a hand in encouraging all that), but it's even worse that they picked only the lamest and most sanitized version.

Sessions is safe. This is starting to boomerang around. The bigger right wing outlets like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin (hardcore NeverTrumper), Breitbart, and Fox News are now covering Obama's attempts to spy on Trump during the campaign. Multiple attempts at FISA wiretap warrants. Changes in rules for the NSA sharing raw data on intercepted phone conversations involving American citizens. Sen Orin Hatch and Paul Ryan both brought it up today. Everyone is calling for investigations of Obama's conduct. Fox News is finally reporting on Obama's Justice Department slush fund where they would shake down companies based on the "disparate impact" theory, but allow them to donate to left wing social justice groups like La Raza and the Urban League instead of facing charges. The Jesse Jackson / Al Sharpton move with the force of the government behind the shake down. In the evidence that the mainstream media is Trump's main opposition party:

The funny thing about this picture is that yesterday she denied ever meeting the Russian ambassador. "Have you ever met with the Russian ambassador?" "Not with this ambassador. Never." she didn't mean a group meeting, but a one on one meeting. It's almost like you sometimes interpret a question one way in your own head whole it could possibly be interpreted by others in a different way. That or she became the 2nd democrat to lie about meeting the Russian ambassador in order kill Sessions' career. My Democrat Senator, who also serves on the Armed Forces Committee, went on tv right after this story broke and said he meets with ambassadors all the time when asked.

I live in a state that went almost 70% for Trump. I follow the conservative press. I can tell you that I haven't run into anybody in real life who takes this seriously. And it seems like the conservative press is mostly mocking the Democrats for attempt to create a controversy out of nothing. The talk you hear most is about investigating whether Obama is behind any of this, not whether Sessions should step down. That's my bubble, though it should be obvious from the fact that I'm reading what people here write that I make an attempt to see what the other side is saying. What I'm saying is that outside of the Scottish left bubble there's a bunch of people who think this is all a witch hunt. I'm not off on an island here, which it seems like most people on this thread thinks right now.

Y'all are the crazy ones not me. The fact that he used his own money rather than government money to pay for travel to an event has nothing to do with whether he talked about Ukraine or Russian plots to affect the US election. Amazing! And Baxter is calling me dim witted when he clearly thought he was exposing an expenses scandal when he originally posted the article. Pence was using an AOL account. Haha. Nobody has one of those anymore. Clinton set up a secret and private server outside the government system for her email and continued to use it after numerous warnings against. The most logical explanation is that Pence occasionally and carelessly used his email account from when the internet first became popular in the 1990s while Clinton was trying to avoid oversight.