That fact that he might be just a cynical egomaniac instead of someone with a sincere hatred of various minorities doesn’t make it better, because his followers still hear it and start defending the notion that only white judges can give fair rulings in cases even vaguely adjacent to issues of race.
I mostly agree with you, but I'm not sure how useful it is to take literally clear trash talk.
Let's look at speech from a much smoother politician.
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”
If it were a White judge (one assumes ruling the same way which is likely), Trump would find a different way to be an ass. Witness going after John McCain's war record.
Where, other than Mass, was this attempted, much less implemented?
Exchanges, mandates, the lack of pre-existing conditions, and tax subsidies were the right’s *only ideas*.
Lack of Transparency prevents consumers from knowing how much something costs. Force the publication of all costs.
Lack of Transparency also prevents consumers from knowing how safe a doctor or hospital is, and it's a real challenge to figure out who is good at what. How many surgeries of type X does Doctor Y do a year? What is his success rate?
3rd party pays prevents consumers from having any skin in the game, figure out a way that they do, the HSA isn't a terrible way to do it but there are others.
In the news recently are drugs off patent (epi-pens for example) which increase in price to crazy levels. Why do we have one pen while Europe has 9 or so? Regulatory capture? Standards set too high?
And yes, I shouldn't lose my insurance just because I have to move across state lines, so letting insurance be sold across state lines would be good.
And yes, defensive medicine is a bad thing, so tort reform would be good.
Medical mistakes are a problem. There are better ways to address this than lawyers, where the doctors are incentivized to hide their mistakes so other doctors can make the same mistakes. Something like what we do for vaccinations would probably work, and/or what the Air Force(? I think) does for mistakes. Reviewed them, examine them, don't blame the guy who did it, blame the system and fix it.
Of course, I am *not* making entirely random movements.
You say that like doing this is the equiv of walking across the room. It's more like winning a gold medal at the Olympics, actually a lot harder because *someone* is going to win even if everyone screws up. If you claim to have put on ice-skates for the first time and you got a gold metal at the Olympics (one of the other comparisons used by experts to describe how unlikely all this was), then we should be concerned.
The next question we should ask is if there's a simpler explanation.
Neither was Clinton. She was being advised by someone who knew the market well.
Even ignoring that the guy who "knew the market well" wasn't profitable himself, how many people who "know the market well" get these sorts of results? When her defenders talk about other people making this level of money in the market, they're talking about raw money (from people trading far bigger accounts), not percentage gains.
Moreover, while you’re citing *this paper* as evidence of all the claims, I will point out there’s no raw data of claims like ‘She often sold at the highest price a day and sold at the lowest one’, which would be pretty damning…but isn’t *here*.
I'm not willing to pay the $40 to down load it, those damning claims come from reporters' summaries and others evaluations. Worse, many of the records either don't exist or never did. This link here details what we know about her highs and lows. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436066/hillary-clinton-cattle-futures-windfall
So, throwing *that* away, what exactly was this office bribing her for?
So if I can't detail exactly who was paying the wife of the governor and exactly who benefited and how, the math should just get a handwave? My lack of ability to detail exactly what transaction took place doesn't change the underlying math, nor the shear insanity of someone like HRC risking her family's net worth in a field where the expected result is large losses.
It's possible we're looking at another "Marc Rich" situation where the transaction is deliberately kept vague enough so one can't get arrested, and if we could put a back-in-time movie camera on this we'd see handshakes rather than written agreements, and winks rather than handshakes.
I'm focused on the math of all this. And the math would be damning even without the whole "and the office was convicted of routinely did this for VIPs at that time" aspect of it.
The latest start date I’m finding for the Tea Party movement was in January 2009… within days of Obama taking office. Add the Tea Party to Isis on the list of things he miraculously founded.
Hmm... looks like I got the President right but the incident wrong.
The movement began following Barack Obama's first presidential inauguration (in January 2009) when his administration announced plans to give financial aid to bankrupt homeowners. Following a February 19, 2009 rant by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for a "tea party,"[11][12] over fifty conservative activists agreed by conference call to coalesce against Obama's agenda and scheduled series of protests, including the 2009 Taxpayer March on Washington.[13][14] Supporters of the movement subsequently have had a major impact on the internal politics of the Republican Party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement
Although granted, they were pretty irritated over lots of things Bush did.
The key word there is "Massachusetts", not "Romney". The rest of the Country is no where near as liberal as the state which kept Ted Kennedy in power for 47 years.
That some Dems wanted something more to the left is irrelevant, they put together a plan as far to the left as it was possible to pass. The reported price for GOP input to the plan was supporting "the public option". And shock, what was middle of the road in Massachusetts was far left in much of the rest of the country.
Most politicians follow, as opposed to create, public opinion. The President is one of the few with a good sized budget and the ability to connect to the media, and that wasn't close to being enough.
Absolutely the GOP did what they could to fan the flames, but the core of the ACA is to expand coverage to a minority of people at the expense of the majority who were happy with what they had. If I ask "what is in it for me?" and your only answer is "higher prices so we can cover someone else", that's not going to be popular.
Second, you seem to think they made paid speeches while in power.
HRC was in office the moment Bill stepped down (being the NY Senator certainly counts, especially if she or Bill was giving speeches to NY banks). Then she became Secretary of State. And for the bulk of that time it was assumed she'd be President.
Trump has explicitly said he traded in government favors. He just did it from the other side.
A real estate guy in New York? And internationally? From the 1970's on? No way he could function without paying off the unions/politicians/organized crime. That doesn't change that he doesn't (yet) have a multi-year network to accept bribes. Granted very much that he's starting with a lot of the underlying pieces in place.
Congress has the right to impeach for whatever reason they want, regardless of whether or not something is a crime.
Impeaching Trump on the basis of why the voters elected him sounds more like an excuse than a reason. I think we wait for it to be a problem (and to be clear, it probably will be), and then act on it.
What is “medical reform”? I’ve never heard that term before. All I’ve heard from conservatives at this point (apart from dismantling Medicare) is a) HSAs and b) open up competition across state lines and c) “torts!”.
Conservatives? The liberals wrote the ACA, aren't there any liberal ideas for reducing cost short of single payer and price controls? Having said that, let's make a partial list on why the market doesn't work and go through it.
Lack of Transparency prevents consumers from knowing how much something costs. Force the publication of all costs.
Lack of Transparency also prevents consumers from knowing how safe a doctor or hospital is, and it's a real challenge to figure out who is good at what. How many surgeries of type X does Doctor Y do a year? What is his success rate?
3rd party pays prevents consumers from having any skin in the game, figure out a way that they do, the HSA isn't a terrible way to do it but there are others.
In the news recently are drugs off patent (epi-pens for example) which increase in price to crazy levels. Why do we have one pen while Europe has 9 or so? Regulatory capture? Standards set too high?
And yes, I shouldn't lose my insurance just because I have to move across state lines.
And yes, defensive medicine is a bad thing (how bad is unclear).
And so are medical mistakes. There are better ways to address this than what we've been doing.
I'm sure I'm missing things but this is the conversation which we should have had, and it would have been impossible for the GOP to not get involved because reducing medical costs is something everyone wants.
Do you want to know how to explain the ’30 trillion to one chance’? It’s easy: The person who said that said it about the *Clintons*, in the *90s* There. That’s almost it entirely. It’s crying wolf.
That number comes from a peer reviewed study published in the Journal of Economics and Finance. A google search on each of the authors doesn't go to anywhere either left wing or right wing. The authors and study are here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02920493
They stripped out HRC's name for the study to at least try and keep it from being a partisan mess. They appear to be exactly what they claim. BTW that 30 Trillion is after making lots of happy assumptions in favor of the trader, a more conservative estimate is 10^16. Her activities involved exposure to losses that potentially could have been greater than her family's net worth.
And there was a lot of innumerate nonsense in the allegations...
The New York Times is hardly anti-Clinton. Neither of those journals are right wing rags.
Let's review what you're claiming actually happened. HRC went into an office known for doing exactly what I'm claiming at exactly the time HRC was there. The office suffered from systemic corruption and shortly afterwards set records for the level of fines imposed. The office gave her extreme VIP treatment and ignored all sorts of rules about her account. However, although she was the (pregnant?) wife of the governor, they didn't dare cross *that* line for her, although they did for others. She then took insane risks which could have broken her family, and beat really long odds to make eye-popping returns based on the advise of a man who was loosing money.
Even ignoring the math, why is this a more likely interpretation? HRC is hardly known for taking wild risks.
We have had literally had *hundreds* of crimes asserted to have been committed by them, most of them investigated to the point we know they were nothing.
Many/most of those crimes were indeed made up, and others were simply not provable criminal, but that's a far cry from "nothing". The pardoning of Marc Rich ignored normal processing, vetting, standards, and advise, but since we can't prove it was linked to the large money Denise Rich gave to Bill's library, or HRC's campaign, it's not provably criminal.
However these ethical adventures have always followed the Clintons around, and "not provably criminal" is a very different standard than "ethical", much less "appearance of impropriety". To their (dis?)credit, the Clintons are good at staying on this side of "not provably criminal", so imho there's a good chance that the Cattle Futures thing would have worked out the same way.
But that doesn't change that the math and situation strongly say she was given those trades, she wasn't at risk for destroying her family, and so forth. "Not provably criminal" is so far from "appearance of impropriety" that I can't tell the difference between that and "openly corrupt"... probably because there is none.
Republicans certainly gained seats in the the midterm, but lost the presidency and seats in both the Senate and house in 2012.
The cost of the ACA goes way beyond a few seats.
The Dems went from a super majority because the GOP was (rightfully) despised to losing control of the House (at the next election) and then the Senate as soon as enough Senators who'd voted for the ACA faced election.
If the ACA had been popular, or if the dems had just backed off and done nothing, they would have kept their super majority MUCH longer because there's no way Ted's seat would have gone to the GOP.
If the Dems had enacted popular legislation they would have kept the House, they might or might not have lost their Super Majority but they'd still be in the majority in the Senate and thus would now have tilted the Supreme Court Left. The Elderly Leftist Supremes might have been convinced to retire and be replaced by Obama.
The GOP taking power in 2010 across multiple states was huge because of the Census and gerrymandering, the Dems would have been the group doing that if they could have stayed the party of fiscal responsibility for two years.
Imagine the Tea Party never existing because Obama governed like a fiscal conservative (or at least moderate) and the GOP was still burdened with the reputation of being the party of incompetent war, big, irresponsible spending and irresponsible tax cuts.
I don’t think the political expense actually has been that extreme.
We've been through about three election cycles where it's been a serious issue, and has caused Dems to either retire or lose elections. Incumbents losing elections is seriously rare.
...people who don’t need insurance must pay into the system for the entire model to work...
This is the wrong discussion, and was the wrong discussion back when the Dems did the ACA.
What the country needed was medical reform (i.e. cost), not medical insurance reform (coverage).
The Dems turned the system upside down, promised all sorts of things, including that costs would go down, and delivered increasing costs, a government mandate on my person, and a broken website.
Further, IMHO the dems' leadership was counting on entitlements being almost impossible to remove after enacted to safeguard the ACA. Of course I also think they believed the ACA would work better than it has at reducing expenses and so forth, and that the political expense wouldn't be this extreme.
Maybe... but we're running the risk of thinking that anyone other than HRC could have beaten Trump.
Time after time after time I proclaimed Trump couldn't go any further, and I was always wrong. At every step I underestimated him, at some point I have to wonder if it's something other than luck, especially with people like Scott Adams dissecting his moves.
I’ve explained the holes I see in the theory, you keep trying to imply she’s guilty by math, I’ve pointed out the holes in that...
Your "holes" include accepting that a 30 Trillion to one chance happened in her favor, with the destruction of her husband's career waiting in the background if it didn't work.
And even after that, you have no explanation for her consistently getting the high/low of the day other than corruption.
my belief that *that* is not only explainable via bribery does not mean I cannot point out *other* examples of bribery.
So bribery is only a problem when the GOP does it?
whether or not she managed to get a $100,000 bribe almost *thirty years ago* is not particularly relevant to the modern day.
She has a history of cleverly disguising how she gets bribes. She and her family are worth hundreds of millions of dollars after a lifetime on gov salaries. She's openly accepting money with one hand and giving out government favors with the other, with only the thinnest of fig leaves separating the two.
And one of Trump's big arguments is government only serves the interests of the elites.
If you want what the gov does to be popular, and the expansion of gov to be popular, then you can't have openly corrupt people running it and you can't be making excuses for them when they are.
And they made some paid speeches. Speeches, I must point out, that are standard practice for almost *everyone* in politics when not in power.
The key words there are "when not in power". Now that it's true I expect Bill's speaking fee to go down a lot and fewer people will be willing to pay it.
Trump is either nowhere near as rich as he claims, *or* he’s someone absurdly greedy and very insecure in his money and willing to do anything for amounts of money that *should* be trivial. Or some combination of that.
Trump claims $10 Billion, Forbes claims $4 Billion (so yes, he's nowhere near as rich) AND he's absurdly greedy (cashing $0.13 checks) AND insecure in his money (ex-wives' prenup).
It's possible that he *had* to run for President, just keep his empire from collapsing like a house of cards.... it's also possible being president was just the next rung up for someone *that* narcissistic.
Why do you think having a president that *can* be bribed without anyone noticing is going to *cut down* on corruption? Should this not be your *entire focus* if you care about corruption?
It's awful to have the possibility of invisible corruption, but he couldn't have been trading in gov favors until today. Tolerating open corruption tells everyone in the government what is and is not acceptable.
We have to have, or to codify, as some sort of principle, that the president cannot just own opaque entities via which he can be given money without us being able to see where it’s coming from!
Even if we were going to do this, and imho we probably should, Trump would still be grandfathered out for the whole "unfix-able" reasons you went over... and it might take a Constitutional Amendment.
One of the nasty things here is the voters knew darn well what they were getting when they put him in office. Another nasty part is Trump's empire is legal, and even legit. I don't see how Congress can insist the people are wrong and impeach Trump for having his empire when that's what he ran on and why he won.
Fundamentally Trump's election was a result of the political class to failing to police themselves and failing to listen to the people.
And that crew passed a good-but-not-perfect law. What you call “sovereignty” is really a demand that your preferences get veto power over elections. Which is nonsense.
That law has cost the Dems a lot of elections. The American people spoke up at the time, Obama rammed it through anyway, and the Dems have been losing elections ever since.
That pieces of the ACA poll well doesn't change the fact that a lot of politicians have lost their jobs over it.
How did Obama get elected by the margins he did if he didn’t have policies (including expanding health care) that people wanted?
Obamacare was carefully timed to roll out after the election, and there were other issues. Election-wise the ACA has been an amazing gift for the GOP.
Ted Kennedy's seat was given to a guy for the explicit purpose of preventing it; Wave after wave of GOP politicians has been elected because they denounced ACA; Wave after wave of Dems have been thrown out of office for voting for it.
Obama himself is popular, everyone else supported the ACA at their own risk.
You realize a sizable (but hard to nail down) percentage was against it because they supported a public option or medicare for all.
And these are the people who are throwing Dems out of office and putting in GOP politicians who promise to get rid of the ACA?
What limits his ability to make structural changes is the fact he has very little idea how anything at all works. He is, basically, the opposite of a wonk. He is an anti-wonk in every field...
Where we might see something useful is him stealing other people's ideas (not a horrible skill for a politician). Ryan makes a proposal, Trump puts a "made by Trump" sticker on it to make it "the best ever" and we're off.
IMHO we'll be very lucky if we get one useful overhaul of anything before the spending begins.
Trump didn't run on a pro-growth platform, that sharply limits his ability to make structural changes, assuming he even knows what would be useful which is also doubtful.
So McConnell hadn’t committed, in advance, to organizing lockstep opposition to everything the Dems and Obama proposed no matter what it was? Odd that he then went and said the opposite.
Just like every other opposition party has done with every other first term President.
The Dems on this forum have been making suggestions for how to make Trump a one term President (or even less than that), I'm reasonably sure the professional Dems are plotting against Trump as well.
Bush x2 opened with nasty feelings which didn't go away until 911. He was often referred to as "Commander and Thief".
Here's something they were saying about Reagan: The meeting occurred as delegates praised Cuomo's stern warnings that continued divisions within the party could enable President Reagan to win a second term and subject the nation to the threat of "economic crisis . . . fiscal disaster or . . . nuclear holocaust."
Good Presidents work around that sort of thing, normally by mobilising public support for whatever they want to do.
Obama didn't have that skill set going into the office. The talk of him uniting everyone was in defiance of his history and resume which showed no such skills.
But most importantly, the thing I really only internalized a few days ago: The left can’t be the targets of the rage anymore. We’re out. We’re done. Your turn.
The last time the GOP was in charge we got an expensive new entitlement, war poorly fought, and an unpaid for tax cut. I used to joke that they were spending money like drunk dems.
We'll see if they've learned their lesson and will do something for the economy rather than spending other people's money.
I said he shouldn’t be allowed to *serve as president* without disclosing his finances.
I'm not opposed, but I'm not sure we can get enough detail to do any good for the reasons you've laid out.
So, duh, maybe he *was* good at giving advice after all...
I'm waiting to hear how HRC can consistently get the top or bottom trade of the day.
It's 11am, her chosen option opened at $5 and is now at $8. What magic "system" tells her if this is the high of the day? That skill is worth Billions if not Trillions of dollars.
The only way to consistently get the high/low price of the day is if you're making so many trades you get (most) all the prices of the day (which the office as a whole was), but then that takes us back to her trades simply being given to her retroactively (which is what the office was also doing).
Trump, meanwhile, has a system were *literally everyone in the world can give him money without anyone noticing*... They just make a check out to one of his businesses, tada. The end. It’s not even a conspiracy. It’s just a check.
I am all in favour of good, non-corrupt, governance. This is why I've been so appalled at the Clintons openly accepting money from people they're doing government business with and doing government favours for.
That behaviour, i.e. that being an elite means you get to work the levers of the government for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, imho is a big reason why Trump got elected (and why Bernie was so hard to beat in the primary). HRC is a walking example of the system not policing itself, so the people turned to an outsider.
Trump, for all his (many) warts, can't possibly have a history of accepting bribes to do the government's business because he wasn't part of the government.
Ideally we wouldn't have put ourselves into this situation, as for what to do now... I guess we have to live with a President who can, in theory, be bribed. The good news is he's already so rich it might not matter, the bad news (link below) is he's so hyper focused on money that it might.
You mean that the media has made the mistake of believing that he means what he’s said?
Trump has said everything about every issue. Then people pick and choose what they want to hear, with the media picking one version and his supporters picking another. It's all very Biblical.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “On Reversing the Tide”
I mostly agree with you, but I'm not sure how useful it is to take literally clear trash talk.
Let's look at speech from a much smoother politician.
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”
-Obama, talking about the Republicans
"
If it were a White judge (one assumes ruling the same way which is likely), Trump would find a different way to be an ass. Witness going after John McCain's war record.
On “A One Party Nation”
Where, other than Mass, was this attempted, much less implemented?
Lack of Transparency prevents consumers from knowing how much something costs. Force the publication of all costs.
Lack of Transparency also prevents consumers from knowing how safe a doctor or hospital is, and it's a real challenge to figure out who is good at what. How many surgeries of type X does Doctor Y do a year? What is his success rate?
3rd party pays prevents consumers from having any skin in the game, figure out a way that they do, the HSA isn't a terrible way to do it but there are others.
In the news recently are drugs off patent (epi-pens for example) which increase in price to crazy levels. Why do we have one pen while Europe has 9 or so? Regulatory capture? Standards set too high?
And yes, I shouldn't lose my insurance just because I have to move across state lines, so letting insurance be sold across state lines would be good.
And yes, defensive medicine is a bad thing, so tort reform would be good.
Medical mistakes are a problem. There are better ways to address this than lawyers, where the doctors are incentivized to hide their mistakes so other doctors can make the same mistakes. Something like what we do for vaccinations would probably work, and/or what the Air Force(? I think) does for mistakes. Reviewed them, examine them, don't blame the guy who did it, blame the system and fix it.
On “The Scorecard”
You say that like doing this is the equiv of walking across the room. It's more like winning a gold medal at the Olympics, actually a lot harder because *someone* is going to win even if everyone screws up. If you claim to have put on ice-skates for the first time and you got a gold metal at the Olympics (one of the other comparisons used by experts to describe how unlikely all this was), then we should be concerned.
The next question we should ask is if there's a simpler explanation.
Even ignoring that the guy who "knew the market well" wasn't profitable himself, how many people who "know the market well" get these sorts of results? When her defenders talk about other people making this level of money in the market, they're talking about raw money (from people trading far bigger accounts), not percentage gains.
I'm not willing to pay the $40 to down load it, those damning claims come from reporters' summaries and others evaluations. Worse, many of the records either don't exist or never did. This link here details what we know about her highs and lows. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436066/hillary-clinton-cattle-futures-windfall
So if I can't detail exactly who was paying the wife of the governor and exactly who benefited and how, the math should just get a handwave? My lack of ability to detail exactly what transaction took place doesn't change the underlying math, nor the shear insanity of someone like HRC risking her family's net worth in a field where the expected result is large losses.
It's possible we're looking at another "Marc Rich" situation where the transaction is deliberately kept vague enough so one can't get arrested, and if we could put a back-in-time movie camera on this we'd see handshakes rather than written agreements, and winks rather than handshakes.
I'm focused on the math of all this. And the math would be damning even without the whole "and the office was convicted of routinely did this for VIPs at that time" aspect of it.
On “A One Party Nation”
If anyone cares: This link deconstructs Trump's history with racism...
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
"
Hmm... looks like I got the President right but the incident wrong.
The movement began following Barack Obama's first presidential inauguration (in January 2009) when his administration announced plans to give financial aid to bankrupt homeowners. Following a February 19, 2009 rant by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for a "tea party,"[11][12] over fifty conservative activists agreed by conference call to coalesce against Obama's agenda and scheduled series of protests, including the 2009 Taxpayer March on Washington.[13][14] Supporters of the movement subsequently have had a major impact on the internal politics of the Republican Party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement
Although granted, they were pretty irritated over lots of things Bush did.
"
The key word there is "Massachusetts", not "Romney". The rest of the Country is no where near as liberal as the state which kept Ted Kennedy in power for 47 years.
That some Dems wanted something more to the left is irrelevant, they put together a plan as far to the left as it was possible to pass. The reported price for GOP input to the plan was supporting "the public option". And shock, what was middle of the road in Massachusetts was far left in much of the rest of the country.
Most politicians follow, as opposed to create, public opinion. The President is one of the few with a good sized budget and the ability to connect to the media, and that wasn't close to being enough.
Absolutely the GOP did what they could to fan the flames, but the core of the ACA is to expand coverage to a minority of people at the expense of the majority who were happy with what they had. If I ask "what is in it for me?" and your only answer is "higher prices so we can cover someone else", that's not going to be popular.
On “The Scorecard”
HRC was in office the moment Bill stepped down (being the NY Senator certainly counts, especially if she or Bill was giving speeches to NY banks). Then she became Secretary of State. And for the bulk of that time it was assumed she'd be President.
A real estate guy in New York? And internationally? From the 1970's on? No way he could function without paying off the unions/politicians/organized crime. That doesn't change that he doesn't (yet) have a multi-year network to accept bribes. Granted very much that he's starting with a lot of the underlying pieces in place.
Impeaching Trump on the basis of why the voters elected him sounds more like an excuse than a reason. I think we wait for it to be a problem (and to be clear, it probably will be), and then act on it.
On “A One Party Nation”
Conservatives? The liberals wrote the ACA, aren't there any liberal ideas for reducing cost short of single payer and price controls? Having said that, let's make a partial list on why the market doesn't work and go through it.
Lack of Transparency prevents consumers from knowing how much something costs. Force the publication of all costs.
Lack of Transparency also prevents consumers from knowing how safe a doctor or hospital is, and it's a real challenge to figure out who is good at what. How many surgeries of type X does Doctor Y do a year? What is his success rate?
3rd party pays prevents consumers from having any skin in the game, figure out a way that they do, the HSA isn't a terrible way to do it but there are others.
In the news recently are drugs off patent (epi-pens for example) which increase in price to crazy levels. Why do we have one pen while Europe has 9 or so? Regulatory capture? Standards set too high?
And yes, I shouldn't lose my insurance just because I have to move across state lines.
And yes, defensive medicine is a bad thing (how bad is unclear).
And so are medical mistakes. There are better ways to address this than what we've been doing.
I'm sure I'm missing things but this is the conversation which we should have had, and it would have been impossible for the GOP to not get involved because reducing medical costs is something everyone wants.
On “The Scorecard”
That number comes from a peer reviewed study published in the Journal of Economics and Finance. A google search on each of the authors doesn't go to anywhere either left wing or right wing. The authors and study are here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02920493
They stripped out HRC's name for the study to at least try and keep it from being a partisan mess. They appear to be exactly what they claim. BTW that 30 Trillion is after making lots of happy assumptions in favor of the trader, a more conservative estimate is 10^16. Her activities involved exposure to losses that potentially could have been greater than her family's net worth.
The New York Times is hardly anti-Clinton. Neither of those journals are right wing rags.
Let's review what you're claiming actually happened. HRC went into an office known for doing exactly what I'm claiming at exactly the time HRC was there. The office suffered from systemic corruption and shortly afterwards set records for the level of fines imposed. The office gave her extreme VIP treatment and ignored all sorts of rules about her account. However, although she was the (pregnant?) wife of the governor, they didn't dare cross *that* line for her, although they did for others. She then took insane risks which could have broken her family, and beat really long odds to make eye-popping returns based on the advise of a man who was loosing money.
Even ignoring the math, why is this a more likely interpretation? HRC is hardly known for taking wild risks.
Many/most of those crimes were indeed made up, and others were simply not provable criminal, but that's a far cry from "nothing". The pardoning of Marc Rich ignored normal processing, vetting, standards, and advise, but since we can't prove it was linked to the large money Denise Rich gave to Bill's library, or HRC's campaign, it's not provably criminal.
However these ethical adventures have always followed the Clintons around, and "not provably criminal" is a very different standard than "ethical", much less "appearance of impropriety". To their (dis?)credit, the Clintons are good at staying on this side of "not provably criminal", so imho there's a good chance that the Cattle Futures thing would have worked out the same way.
But that doesn't change that the math and situation strongly say she was given those trades, she wasn't at risk for destroying her family, and so forth. "Not provably criminal" is so far from "appearance of impropriety" that I can't tell the difference between that and "openly corrupt"... probably because there is none.
On “A One Party Nation”
Excellent post. Very insightful.
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The cost of the ACA goes way beyond a few seats.
The Dems went from a super majority because the GOP was (rightfully) despised to losing control of the House (at the next election) and then the Senate as soon as enough Senators who'd voted for the ACA faced election.
If the ACA had been popular, or if the dems had just backed off and done nothing, they would have kept their super majority MUCH longer because there's no way Ted's seat would have gone to the GOP.
If the Dems had enacted popular legislation they would have kept the House, they might or might not have lost their Super Majority but they'd still be in the majority in the Senate and thus would now have tilted the Supreme Court Left. The Elderly Leftist Supremes might have been convinced to retire and be replaced by Obama.
The GOP taking power in 2010 across multiple states was huge because of the Census and gerrymandering, the Dems would have been the group doing that if they could have stayed the party of fiscal responsibility for two years.
Imagine the Tea Party never existing because Obama governed like a fiscal conservative (or at least moderate) and the GOP was still burdened with the reputation of being the party of incompetent war, big, irresponsible spending and irresponsible tax cuts.
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We've been through about three election cycles where it's been a serious issue, and has caused Dems to either retire or lose elections. Incumbents losing elections is seriously rare.
This is the wrong discussion, and was the wrong discussion back when the Dems did the ACA.
What the country needed was medical reform (i.e. cost), not medical insurance reform (coverage).
The Dems turned the system upside down, promised all sorts of things, including that costs would go down, and delivered increasing costs, a government mandate on my person, and a broken website.
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@davidtc
I'll second what Koz said.
Further, IMHO the dems' leadership was counting on entitlements being almost impossible to remove after enacted to safeguard the ACA. Of course I also think they believed the ACA would work better than it has at reducing expenses and so forth, and that the political expense wouldn't be this extreme.
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Maybe... but we're running the risk of thinking that anyone other than HRC could have beaten Trump.
Time after time after time I proclaimed Trump couldn't go any further, and I was always wrong. At every step I underestimated him, at some point I have to wonder if it's something other than luck, especially with people like Scott Adams dissecting his moves.
On “The Scorecard”
Your "holes" include accepting that a 30 Trillion to one chance happened in her favor, with the destruction of her husband's career waiting in the background if it didn't work.
And even after that, you have no explanation for her consistently getting the high/low of the day other than corruption.
So bribery is only a problem when the GOP does it?
She has a history of cleverly disguising how she gets bribes. She and her family are worth hundreds of millions of dollars after a lifetime on gov salaries. She's openly accepting money with one hand and giving out government favors with the other, with only the thinnest of fig leaves separating the two.
And one of Trump's big arguments is government only serves the interests of the elites.
If you want what the gov does to be popular, and the expansion of gov to be popular, then you can't have openly corrupt people running it and you can't be making excuses for them when they are.
The key words there are "when not in power". Now that it's true I expect Bill's speaking fee to go down a lot and fewer people will be willing to pay it.
Trump claims $10 Billion, Forbes claims $4 Billion (so yes, he's nowhere near as rich) AND he's absurdly greedy (cashing $0.13 checks) AND insecure in his money (ex-wives' prenup).
It's possible that he *had* to run for President, just keep his empire from collapsing like a house of cards.... it's also possible being president was just the next rung up for someone *that* narcissistic.
It's awful to have the possibility of invisible corruption, but he couldn't have been trading in gov favors until today. Tolerating open corruption tells everyone in the government what is and is not acceptable.
Even if we were going to do this, and imho we probably should, Trump would still be grandfathered out for the whole "unfix-able" reasons you went over... and it might take a Constitutional Amendment.
One of the nasty things here is the voters knew darn well what they were getting when they put him in office. Another nasty part is Trump's empire is legal, and even legit. I don't see how Congress can insist the people are wrong and impeach Trump for having his empire when that's what he ran on and why he won.
Fundamentally Trump's election was a result of the political class to failing to police themselves and failing to listen to the people.
On “A One Party Nation”
That law has cost the Dems a lot of elections. The American people spoke up at the time, Obama rammed it through anyway, and the Dems have been losing elections ever since.
That pieces of the ACA poll well doesn't change the fact that a lot of politicians have lost their jobs over it.
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Obamacare was carefully timed to roll out after the election, and there were other issues. Election-wise the ACA has been an amazing gift for the GOP.
Ted Kennedy's seat was given to a guy for the explicit purpose of preventing it; Wave after wave of GOP politicians has been elected because they denounced ACA; Wave after wave of Dems have been thrown out of office for voting for it.
Obama himself is popular, everyone else supported the ACA at their own risk.
And these are the people who are throwing Dems out of office and putting in GOP politicians who promise to get rid of the ACA?
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You say the word "racist" and I translate that into "not a Democrat".
I didn't vote for Trump for other reasons, but the "racist" charge has been used so often and for so little reason that it's been devalued.
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Where we might see something useful is him stealing other people's ideas (not a horrible skill for a politician). Ryan makes a proposal, Trump puts a "made by Trump" sticker on it to make it "the best ever" and we're off.
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IMHO we'll be very lucky if we get one useful overhaul of anything before the spending begins.
Trump didn't run on a pro-growth platform, that sharply limits his ability to make structural changes, assuming he even knows what would be useful which is also doubtful.
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Just like every other opposition party has done with every other first term President.
The Dems on this forum have been making suggestions for how to make Trump a one term President (or even less than that), I'm reasonably sure the professional Dems are plotting against Trump as well.
Bush x2 opened with nasty feelings which didn't go away until 911. He was often referred to as "Commander and Thief".
Here's something they were saying about Reagan: The meeting occurred as delegates praised Cuomo's stern warnings that continued divisions within the party could enable President Reagan to win a second term and subject the nation to the threat of "economic crisis . . . fiscal disaster or . . . nuclear holocaust."
Good Presidents work around that sort of thing, normally by mobilising public support for whatever they want to do.
Obama didn't have that skill set going into the office. The talk of him uniting everyone was in defiance of his history and resume which showed no such skills.
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The last time the GOP was in charge we got an expensive new entitlement, war poorly fought, and an unpaid for tax cut. I used to joke that they were spending money like drunk dems.
We'll see if they've learned their lesson and will do something for the economy rather than spending other people's money.
On “The Scorecard”
I'm not opposed, but I'm not sure we can get enough detail to do any good for the reasons you've laid out.
I'm waiting to hear how HRC can consistently get the top or bottom trade of the day.
It's 11am, her chosen option opened at $5 and is now at $8. What magic "system" tells her if this is the high of the day? That skill is worth Billions if not Trillions of dollars.
The only way to consistently get the high/low price of the day is if you're making so many trades you get (most) all the prices of the day (which the office as a whole was), but then that takes us back to her trades simply being given to her retroactively (which is what the office was also doing).
I am all in favour of good, non-corrupt, governance. This is why I've been so appalled at the Clintons openly accepting money from people they're doing government business with and doing government favours for.
That behaviour, i.e. that being an elite means you get to work the levers of the government for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, imho is a big reason why Trump got elected (and why Bernie was so hard to beat in the primary). HRC is a walking example of the system not policing itself, so the people turned to an outsider.
Trump, for all his (many) warts, can't possibly have a history of accepting bribes to do the government's business because he wasn't part of the government.
Ideally we wouldn't have put ourselves into this situation, as for what to do now... I guess we have to live with a President who can, in theory, be bribed. The good news is he's already so rich it might not matter, the bad news (link below) is he's so hyper focused on money that it might.
http://fusion.net/story/170645/donald-trump-check-prank-spy/
On “A One Party Nation”
Trump has said everything about every issue. Then people pick and choose what they want to hear, with the media picking one version and his supporters picking another. It's all very Biblical.
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