oh lord

Mike Pence’s top seven most homophobic moments (out of many)
http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2016/07/m...-moments-many/

There is a reason that republicans are on like year six of repeal and replace and never got further than repeal.

There was a good article I read, maybe going back to Romney's days of saying they will repeal and replace if elected.

Its been tried over and over and they keep getting one of three outcomes:

1, they manage to just create obamacare by accident and need to start over
2, they need to keep one of the unkeepable ideas (for them) like the mandate to make it work and need to start over
3, they realise they created a significantly worse that people wouldn't accept and need to start over

Trumps team will need to actually accept one of those three outcomes. Maybe they just keep the bulk of the aca, give it a new name and call it progress. Maybe they replace most but keep something they hate to make it work like the mandate and shrug at their tea party supporters hoping they are distracted enough to ignore it. Maybe they create something much worse and hope they can sell worse as being better because of vague notions like freedom.

I think the third will happen. They tear it up, deregulate, allow selling across state lines and create a race to the bottom and claim because it is free capitalism worse is actually better.

No way America keeps the good stuff from the aca if they will actually replace. It just can't happen. Certainly pre existing conditions is off the table.

We were joking about this Thursday at work.

As much as the protesters will hate president trump his supporters may end up hating him more.

As bad as he will be he won't nearly be half as bad as his supporters expect.

I don't know, the one thing history has taught us is that when things get bad, they get bad fast. I still don't think we likely see anything like that in the next 4-8 years, but there's still a non-zero chance. the problem is there's nobody to de-escalate anymore. Right now if there's a police shooting of an unarmed black man, the situation basically always plays out this way, shooting, protests and/or riots, everyone calls for calm, DOJ investigates, maybe some arrests, conciliatory statements from leading politicians expressing condolences/regret/need to fix the system, protests/riots eventually peter out. Now imagine a slightly different scenario. There is some flashpoint like the shooting of an unarmed black man. Instead of calling for calm, a president DJT takes to the airwaves bashing the lawless protestors and calling for mass arrests. Protestors respond by directly protesting DJT in D.C. Those protests get violent. DJT responds with increased force. Protests respond with increased force. Protestors get killed (now including white people). Escalation continues on both sides and is now no longer about BLM at all but is about the government violently suppressing its citizenry. You can see how that spirals out of control really quickly. It's not even a reach to think that in the face of a DJT administration doing things that are really obscene in response to riots you could have government leaders in liberal cities/blue states reacting in an unprecedented way.

Because Russia is a cancelled election away from being a literal dictatorship as its leader had full control over the media, political institutions, courts and many industries.

As well as enriching himself through his corruption intimidation and assassination of business leaders he openly murders critics including journalists, passes draconian laws attacking minorities and is openly engaging in a campaign to destabilise democracies including America itself.

And these are bad things.

I think the real attraction of Putin for Trump is how being a country's leader can make you $200B. Hell, if Russia can do that the US can make Trump a trillionaire easy.

If you have a ban on pre-existing coverages and no mandate, I don't see how you can have insurance outside of employer programs (or other big collectives). If you're an individual, you'd be 100x better off to just pay out of pocket for your check-ups, etc. and then if you ever come down with something serious, just buy a plan to get coverage for that (only real risk would be ER visit). Which would of course to lead to no insurance company offering this.

Because traditionally the US isn't super keen on supporting brutal, bloodthirsty repressive dictators.

But they also haven't ever elected one in the US either, so apparently the times are a-changin'.

Go on...

Uh...

Seconding the "Uh..."

Noodle, were you serious?

I read it through twice to check for sarcasm, pretty sure it's straight up. TBF it seems like a from-the-hip post he didn't think too much about.

Would it have been better if he specified western brutal, bloodthirsty repressive dictators? Usually the ones we prop up are in the middle east or South America, right?

Might not be the most opportune time to point and laugh at ridiculous AWice predictions.

My slight hope for a Trump presidency is that when he said only he can fix America's problems, that'll be "only Nixon could go to China" with a Republican POTUS spending a lot to benefit the American people.
Democrats will sign on to such legislation regardless of POTUS. Republicans will only do it with one of them in charge.

Talking about deficits, Trump has said: "you never have to default because you print the money"

He ran on out-spending Hillary on infrastructure
"Reagan proved deficits don't matter" -Dick Cheney ... if Trump spends big, and the economy booms as a result, his supporters probably don't abandon him because of bigger deficits. Actually he would probably have more support than now.

This theory may rely too much on Trump having a far-reaching vision and sense of what's best for him i.e. even if he does a lot of spending maybe it'll be tax cuts to the rich that don't help the economy much, because it's what the GOP wants.

Other than GWB deposing Saddam (a brutal, bloodthirsty repressive dictator that was tolerated, if not supported, by the previous several presidents), I can't think of a repressive dictator the US actively opposed since Hitler--who we aligned with repressive dictator Stalin to defeat.

Noriega, though that's more in the Hussein model. And Castro. But yeah, the US doesn't have a super good track record on that score.

Maybe we can settle on not supporting dictators of countries of similar size?

Edit: Stalin was a forced move.

prediction: trump leaves the UN

they were holding back our greatness!!

Eh, the world is full of repressive governments, some of which we supported and some of which we opposed depending on where our interest lay at the moment.

The media is so lame though that we can support terrible dictators like Islam Karimov and hardly anyone even knew his name. If we oppose a probably less bloodthirsty guy like Kaddafi we really get to hear about how bad they are.

Ford and General Motors (Opel) built trucks and half-tracks for Hitler's army, and the Waffen-SS, thoughout the Second World War, for profit, the profits being repatriated to the United States through shell companies in Switzerland.

thanks for the laugh bro

Noriega definitely had US support before he didn't and possibly he was put into power by the CIA assassinating the populist Torrijos shortly after Reagan became POTUS.

But I don't want to go to war with them over their elections and border conflicts .... really struggling with supporting the Hilary wing of the D's ever again because I'm a hyper-isolationist and it honestly feels like we have a better chance of de-escalating some of these overseas conflicts with a trump admin.

Part of the problem is what are the wings of the democrat party? Bernie/Warren financial regulation/fairness wing, Hilary too much war wing, ...what else? Also, what national candidates will the D's have in 2.5 years when the election starts up again?