(03-20-2019 10:52 PM)olliebaba Wrote:  I would rather have someone that I don't like but loves to work in my team anytime. Why would I want someone who is loved by everyone but is lazier than Rip Van Winkle? I didn't like Trump at first because of his brashness but it all changed when I discovered that he truly wants to better our country than have some smooth talking liar whose only aim was Change but not the kind I desired. He wanted Change alright but that change was what those Dum S'es who call themselves Demoncraps today want. Oblunder was the preliminary fighter to todays Socialists. He openly started the whole crazy mindset of what they call the beautiful communist agenda. Oblunder was a smarter, more wicked sort of OAF, er, OAC.

He told us right up front that he wanted to fundamentally transform America. At first I thought he didn't have a chance but his time in office was merely the foretelling of things to come. And here those things are, right in our face, bold as all git-out when 12 years ago these people would have been laughed off the stage.

(03-20-2019 11:09 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Given a choice between someone I dislike and a socialist/communist/collectivist, I don't dislike him that badly.

Exactly.

(03-20-2019 11:37 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(03-20-2019 11:09 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Given a choice between someone I dislike and a socialist/communist/collectivist, I don't dislike him that badly.

We'd all be better off if Trump would switch to Vito Corleone mode. You know, "Never tell them what you are thinking!" I am well versed in what kind of mole McCain was. He spent 5 years with my uncle in Hanoi. He ratted out the grass roots movement of the Republican party by not voting to rescind Obamacare and it was all because of his life of privilege and his corporate connections. But he's dead. Just shut up about him. If the public finds out he's behind the dossier so be it. His image will tarnish in their minds. But Americans think it is out of bounds to criticize the dead. Let history deal with McCain once we have historians that actually dig for the truth instead of trying to twist history into a justification for the future.

Trump is right 90% of the time. He's accomplished some great things for us. Just shut up already and somebody get rid of his damned cell phone and close his twitter account.

In American politics we vote for ideas, wrong or right it's the image of our future that turns the voters on. Having a great vision gets you elected. Trump has the vision part down in spades. He's going to/has hurt his message by not knowing when to keep his mouth shut, and when to brush off his opposition. Retaliating in a verbal war isn't helping to accomplish his agenda.

I'm all for him going after his enemies, but do it stealthily and let those below you leak the dirty details to those who will trumpet them. Use the power of the office to stay above the fray so the message stays on point.

Johnny Isakson is a Dixiecrat hiding in the Republican party. He had an excuse to come out today. He's a jerk. There's plenty on somebody like that. Leverage him. But don't give the putz a public platform. As for the Dirty Dozen find their dirt and leak them out of office. They are all firmly in the corporate globalization camp anyway. You don't trash them, you let others do it for you.

Trumps Achilles heel is that he enjoys going after his foes. He's got to learn that the best political hit in the world is the one that can't be traced back to him.

I agree with most of this but I think if he gives up his cellphone and twitter he loses half his outreach capability. The MSM won't give him balanced coverage. I wish he would come across a little smoother and a little more polished and eloquent but that's just not who he is. And that's one reason I voted for him, because of who he wasn't, a seasoned politician.

As to his victory laps, let him have them. I'd do a table dance every time I shot one of those maroons down. I don't think it hurts him one iota among his base. I understand that it does nothing to promote unity but that ship sailed with the Obama's.

(03-20-2019 05:18 PM)Niner National Wrote:  

(03-20-2019 02:20 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  The flag bearers for the Democrats are now openly pondering dismantling whatever apparatus is necessary to change how the counting is done for who wins and who loses. "Lower the voting age to 16. Stack the SCOTUS ... double it in size if necessary. Abolish the electoral college and have direct democracy." These aren't "sitting on the counter top" solutions. You have to have rummaged through a lot of cabinets before looking back behind the stove to find that sort of stuff. It smells of desperation. It smells of the knowledge of an inability to pull together a coalition on anything of substance other than "not orange man." The Democratic Party of Bill Clinton is in shambles. White working class and union types are now completely out of the coalition. The union types especially like Trump directly on his policy "merits" as far as they're concerned. Tariffs on foreign competition in both the supply chain and end products on all things automotive? You just gave everybody from the UAW to United Steel Workers a semi. In terms of Latino voters, their immigration policy, if you have to paint them with a broad and imperfect brush, is "after our family is over, shut 'er down." And while first generation Latino immigrants are liberals ... they spawn second generation conservatives. This also isn't a stable base of the currently constituted Democrat Party. Most of the rest of the core consists of factions too small to stand on their own (LGBT, single mothers, Hollywood, tenured academia, socialist).


The Republican Party is ousting most of its vanilla core and parts of the fiscal core to be replaced by Trumpian populists who don't just not care about free trade, but actively fight against.


So it feels like it's Progressives vs Populists ... and populists will win that fight handily if that's how things lock into place right now. But there's an awful lot of groups on the sideline with no home right now in either place:

Fiscal conservatives, Libertarians, Corporate/Fortune 100/Globalists, Pro-Life, Evangelical, Neoconservatives, Moderates, "Blue Dogs" ... I'm sure there are more.

A lot of these groups feel like they end up landing in the Trump camp right now because it's less icky than the far left progressives. But there's no real home for them right now at least.

if my options are trump and a far left progressive, I'll sit this one out. I refuse to vote for someone I dislike just because I dislike the other person more.

For me it's not just a matter of "like".

I have to ask myself "does my dislike of a person outweigh the damage the progressive candidate will do to the country?"

I frankly rolled that dice in '16. Hillary was bad, but not Bernie, Beto, Fauxcahontas level of insanity.

Like I said before, the damage that electing Bernie and his socialist acolytes will do the country will force me to vote GOP for anyone just shy of Lucifer.

(03-21-2019 12:01 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  

(03-20-2019 04:32 PM)Claw Wrote:  My thoughts on this are much less mainstream.
The left doesn't care how they destroy the Republic. They just want it removed and replaced with some brand or another of totalitarianism. They want to see world government. The current U.S. system will never fit in there. It has to be removed.

I'm pretty confused by a lot in this post. So the Republicans are the defenders of Constitutional norms and structure against the Democrats? Are you seeing Trump as one of those defenders?

I'm not calling you stupid, but that seems to me to be a pretty straightforward statement in complete sentences of English words. How do you not understand it?

Quote:

(03-20-2019 04:32 PM)Claw Wrote:  The Obama era push failed early on to actually change the country legislatively. The push back against Obamacare made it quite clear Americans were not going to vote themselves into socialism.

Obamacare isn't socialist, it was originally created by Romney and Republican think tanks as a free-market solution to health care. That's a big part of the reason why he used that model. When Obama pushed it, Republicans turned against the idea and have been promising a great healthcare strategy ever since.
While Obamacare was initially unpopular, it has become much more popular. So much so that Republicans couldn't vote it out even when they held both sides of Congress. It was also a large part of the messaging for the 2016 midterm, with a lot of Republicans adopting Obamacare language as their own to keep up.

Stop, just stop. This whole, "Obamacare was created by Romney and Republican think tanks" lie needs to stop. Romneycare was roughy a 100 page bill. Obamacare is a 2100 page bill. That means that roughly 95% of it had to come from somewhere else. That 95% is largely all the micromanagement bureaucracy that is driving doctors from the practice of medicine now.

And Romneycare wasn't Romney's idea, it was what he could get as a compromise with a Massachusetts legislature dominated by democrats.

Yes, there is some legacy from the Heritage proposal, which was based loosely on Bismarck free-market concepts. But that legacy has been pretty badly perverted. Couple of examples:
1) Exchanges. Obamacare proponents say that came from Heritage. But here is the thing. Heritage included interstate purchases of insurance, like Germany. But they needed a way to let you buy out-of-state policies, since there aren't likely to be a lot of people seeing Georgia health insurance policies in California. So they adapted the German concept of the exchanges as a marketplace for buying out-of-state insurance. But Obamacare does not allow out-of-state insurance. So the Obamacare exchanges are not the same as the Heritage/German exchanges. And obviously, this could not have been addressed in a state law, so they didn't get this from Romneycare.
2) Mandate. Heritage included a very different approach to driving full participation. If you obtained health insurance, you got a refundable tax credit equal to the cost of a basic health insurance policy. So you essentially got basic health insurance free and had to pay for anything above that. Democrats blasted that approach in the 1990s in two basic ways. One, they said there are people who can't wait until April 15 or next year to get reimbursed, which is hogwash because you can adjust your withholding to get the money now. Two, they said it was nothing but a huge tax cut for the wealthy, which is kind of curious because everybody gets it, and it is a much less significant item for people with large incomes. I think what really irked them was the idea that you could upgrade in a free market, so the government couldn't control what health care you got. Anyway, this is obviously a carrot where the mandate was a stick, and not a big enough one to matter.

So, no, I'm not going to let you argue that Obamacare is Romneycare, much less so Heritage, and even much less so Bismarck. It could transition to Bismarck if you adjusted the economics and got rid of the bureaucracy, but the objective of Obamacare was always more government control of our lives, not less. Health care was merely the vehicle to accommodate the insatiable quest for power.

Any thing short of a Constitutional Amendment guaranteeing my right to purchase private medical insurance and care without restrictions by the federal government is socialized medicine. Who wrote it doesn't mean a damn thing.

(03-21-2019 08:11 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-21-2019 12:01 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  I'm pretty confused by a lot in this post. So the Republicans are the defenders of Constitutional norms and structure against the Democrats? Are you seeing Trump as one of those defenders?

I'm not calling you stupid, but that seems to me to be a pretty straightforward statement in complete sentences of English words. How do you not understand it?

Ha! I might be stupid. It's well within the realm of possibility. I meant more that I was confused about the motivation and lines of attack in the post, not which words he was using and the syntax.

There is a lot of legitimate things to blast the Democrats for. Trying to incite mass shootings to prove their point? I don't really understand what motivates someone to cling to something like that.

(03-21-2019 08:11 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-21-2019 12:01 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  Obamacare isn't socialist, it was originally created by Romney and Republican think tanks as a free-market solution to health care. That's a big part of the reason why he used that model. When Obama pushed it, Republicans turned against the idea and have been promising a great healthcare strategy ever since.
While Obamacare was initially unpopular, it has become much more popular. So much so that Republicans couldn't vote it out even when they held both sides of Congress. It was also a large part of the messaging for the 2016 midterm, with a lot of Republicans adopting Obamacare language as their own to keep up.

Stop, just stop. This whole, "Obamacare was created by Romney and Republican think tanks" lie needs to stop. Romneycare was roughy a 100 page bill. Obamacare is a 2100 page bill. That means that roughly 95% of it had to come from somewhere else. That 95% is largely all the micromanagement bureaucracy that is driving doctors from the practice of medicine now.

And Romneycare wasn't Romney's idea, it was what he could get as a compromise with a Massachusetts legislature dominated by democrats.

Yes, there is some legacy from the Heritage proposal, which was based loosely on Bismarck free-market concepts. But that legacy has been pretty badly perverted. Couple of examples:
1) Exchanges. Obamacare proponents say that came from Heritage. But here is the thing. Heritage included interstate purchases of insurance, like Germany. But they needed a way to let you buy out-of-state policies, since there aren't likely to be a lot of people seeing Georgia health insurance policies in California. So they adapted the German concept of the exchanges as a marketplace for buying out-of-state insurance. But Obamacare does not allow out-of-state insurance. So the Obamacare exchanges are not the same as the Heritage/German exchanges. And obviously, this could not have been addressed in a state law, so they didn't get this from Romneycare.
2) Mandate. Heritage included a very different approach to driving full participation. If you obtained health insurance, you got a refundable tax credit equal to the cost of a basic health insurance policy. So you essentially got basic health insurance free and had to pay for anything above that. Democrats blasted that approach in the 1990s in two basic ways. One, they said there are people who can't wait until April 15 or next year to get reimbursed, which is hogwash because you can adjust your withholding to get the money now. Two, they said it was nothing but a huge tax cut for the wealthy, which is kind of curious because everybody gets it, and it is a much less significant item for people with large incomes. I think what really irked them was the idea that you could upgrade in a free market, so the government couldn't control what health care you got. Anyway, this is obviously a carrot where the mandate was a stick, and not a big enough one to matter.

I'm not sure where we're disagreeing here. I said that Obamacare was modeled after those ideas, not that Romney sat down and wrote a 2100 page bill and Obama copy pasted it.

It's not the same legislation or an exact copy, but Obama used that as a model instead of something like the public option that the Democrats wanted, in order to appeal to Republicans. I don't think they rewarded him for compromising on that, IIRC...

(03-21-2019 08:11 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  So, no, I'm not going to let you argue that Obamacare is Romneycare, much less so Heritage, and even much less so Bismarck. It could transition to Bismarck if you adjusted the economics and got rid of the bureaucracy, but the objective of Obamacare was always more government control of our lives, not less. Health care was merely the vehicle to accommodate the insatiable quest for power.

Why does every government program need to be motivated by more government control over our lives on an insatiable quest for power? Isn't it possible that our healthcare sucks and is too expensive and people wanted to fix that? That people don't want to keep expanding the government, but the free market isn't fixing the problem and the Republicans haven't even been able to propose any small government solutions for ~ a decade?

Politics are becoming more and more dysfunctional not because we trust our political opponents too much, but because everyone keeps attributing these malicious motivations to everything the other side is doing and the crazies take that and run with it.

Whenever I look at the current state of our political system, I just feel like having a drink. My vote doesn't matter much in Illinois except for the Democratic primary (I might vote D for the least offensive candidate), too bad I don't still live in Florida like 2016.

(03-21-2019 11:38 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  Ha! I might be stupid. It's well within the realm of possibility. I meant more that I was confused about the motivation and lines of attack in the post, not which words he was using and the syntax.

Why don't you just read the words and reply to them rather than having to conjure up some motivation?

Quote:I'm not sure where we're disagreeing here. I said that Obamacare was modeled after those ideas, not that Romney sat down and wrote a 2100 page bill and Obama copy pasted it.

I'm saying that Obamacare was not modeled after those ideas. They took some words that Heritage and Romneycare may have used, but the meanings of those words were perverted beyond reason, as I explained, apparently just so they could lie and say, hey, we borrowed those ideas from republicans.

Quote:It's not the same legislation or an exact copy, but Obama used that as a model instead of something like the public option that the Democrats wanted, in order to appeal to Republicans. I don't think they rewarded him for compromising on that, IIRC...

That's my point. No, he didn't. Obamacare took some of the words and perverted their meanings, but he didn't take the ideas. The Heritage proposal, and the Bismarck system upon which it was loosely based, were more free-market than what we had before Obamacare. Obamacare used words from those approaches, so its backers could somehow dishonestly claim that it was based on something that it wasn't. It's just like the "it's not a tax, wait it is a tax, no it is not a tax" flim-flam that was played with the mandate.

And Obama didn't compromise with republicans. The democrat leaders had to make those compromises to get their OWN party onboard in sufficient numbers to pass the bill. If they had wanted republicans, they would have gone for things like interstate purchases of insurance (what the exchanges were supposed to be), malpractice reform, greater use of health spending accounts, and a meaningful tax credit for buying insurance instead of a penalty for not buying it.

Quote:Why does every government program need to be motivated by more government control over our lives on an insatiable quest for power?

I don't know. You tell me. Better yet, give me an example of a government program that isn't.

Quote:Isn't it possible that our healthcare sucks and is too expensive and people wanted to fix that?

No, because if that had been the motivation, they would have done something else. Obamacare managed to combine the worst element of our previous system (tying health insurance to employment) with the worst element of single-payer/single-provider systems (bureaucratic edicts replacing the doctor-patient relationship). If they really wanted to improve health care, there are any number of models they could have investigated and used. They didn't. So I don't think the motivation was to improve health care.

Quote:That people don't want to keep expanding the government, but the free market isn't fixing the problem and the Republicans haven't even been able to propose any small government solutions for ~ a decade?

I am totally exasperated with republican failures to lead on this and other issues. I said in 2010 that if I had been the republicans, the first day on the job after retaking the house, I would have passed French Bismarck health care to replace Obamacare and either Bowles-Simpson or Domenici-Rivlin or some combination of the best of both (which would not have been hard since they say pretty much the same things--lower and flatter income taxes across a broader definition of income, cuts to redundant or counterproductive programs, Domenici-Rivlin did include a consumption tax which Bowles-Simpson did not, therefore reducing the deficit more. That would have showed a willingness to lead on two big issues--health care and the. deficit--and would have announced to the democrats that they are going to have competition for ideas.

Quote:Politics are becoming more and more dysfunctional not because we trust our political opponents too much, but because everyone keeps attributing these malicious motivations to everything the other side is doing and the crazies take that and run with it.

I too am troubled by the nastiness that has invaded politics. But I'm sorry, when I see something that strikes me as evil, I am going to call it out as such. And right now, I see more evil coming from democrats, and being met by abject stupidity from the republicans.

(03-20-2019 03:13 PM)swagsurfer11 Wrote:  Let’s just start over and make rules that everybody can get down with. Weed, gay marriage, prostitution legal. Speed limits, automatic weapons and racism illlegal.

I take exception with four of those.

One is unconstitutional, two have unintended consequences, and the fourth is a public safety concern.

(03-20-2019 11:37 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(03-20-2019 11:09 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Given a choice between someone I dislike and a socialist/communist/collectivist, I don't dislike him that badly.

We'd all be better off if Trump would switch to Vito Corleone mode. You know, "Never tell them what you are thinking!" I am well versed in what kind of mole McCain was. He spent 5 years with my uncle in Hanoi. He ratted out the grass roots movement of the Republican party by not voting to rescind Obamacare and it was all because of his life of privilege and his corporate connections. But he's dead. Just shut up about him. If the public finds out he's behind the dossier so be it. His image will tarnish in their minds. But Americans think it is out of bounds to criticize the dead. Let history deal with McCain once we have historians that actually dig for the truth instead of trying to twist history into a justification for the future.

Trump is right 90% of the time. He's accomplished some great things for us. Just shut up already and somebody get rid of his damned cell phone and close his twitter account.

In American politics we vote for ideas, wrong or right it's the image of our future that turns the voters on. Having a great vision gets you elected. Trump has the vision part down in spades. He's going to/has hurt his message by not knowing when to keep his mouth shut, and when to brush off his opposition. Retaliating in a verbal war isn't helping to accomplish his agenda.

I'm all for him going after his enemies, but do it stealthily and let those below you leak the dirty details to those who will trumpet them. Use the power of the office to stay above the fray so the message stays on point.

Johnny Isakson is a Dixiecrat hiding in the Republican party. He had an excuse to come out today. He's a jerk. There's plenty on somebody like that. Leverage him. But don't give the putz a public platform. As for the Dirty Dozen find their dirt and leak them out of office. They are all firmly in the corporate globalization camp anyway. You don't trash them, you let others do it for you.

Trumps Achilles heel is that he enjoys going after his foes. He's got to learn that the best political hit in the world is the one that can't be traced back to him.

hell.....he pretty much has out of the gate...

he's simply fk'n with 'em now....the reigns are 'supreme'....

he's in biatch slappin' mode now.....

(03-21-2019 08:11 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-21-2019 12:01 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  

(03-20-2019 04:32 PM)Claw Wrote:  My thoughts on this are much less mainstream.
The left doesn't care how they destroy the Republic. They just want it removed and replaced with some brand or another of totalitarianism. They want to see world government. The current U.S. system will never fit in there. It has to be removed.

I'm pretty confused by a lot in this post. So the Republicans are the defenders of Constitutional norms and structure against the Democrats? Are you seeing Trump as one of those defenders?

I'm not calling you stupid, but that seems to me to be a pretty straightforward statement in complete sentences of English words. How do you not understand it?

Quote:

(03-20-2019 04:32 PM)Claw Wrote:  The Obama era push failed early on to actually change the country legislatively. The push back against Obamacare made it quite clear Americans were not going to vote themselves into socialism.

Obamacare isn't socialist, it was originally created by Romney and Republican think tanks as a free-market solution to health care. That's a big part of the reason why he used that model. When Obama pushed it, Republicans turned against the idea and have been promising a great healthcare strategy ever since.
While Obamacare was initially unpopular, it has become much more popular. So much so that Republicans couldn't vote it out even when they held both sides of Congress. It was also a large part of the messaging for the 2016 midterm, with a lot of Republicans adopting Obamacare language as their own to keep up.

Stop, just stop. This whole, "Obamacare was created by Romney and Republican think tanks" lie needs to stop. Romneycare was roughy a 100 page bill. Obamacare is a 2100 page bill. That means that roughly 95% of it had to come from somewhere else. That 95% is largely all the micromanagement bureaucracy that is driving doctors from the practice of medicine now.

And Romneycare wasn't Romney's idea, it was what he could get as a compromise with a Massachusetts legislature dominated by democrats.

Yes, there is some legacy from the Heritage proposal, which was based loosely on Bismarck free-market concepts. But that legacy has been pretty badly perverted. Couple of examples:
1) Exchanges. Obamacare proponents say that came from Heritage. But here is the thing. Heritage included interstate purchases of insurance, like Germany. But they needed a way to let you buy out-of-state policies, since there aren't likely to be a lot of people seeing Georgia health insurance policies in California. So they adapted the German concept of the exchanges as a marketplace for buying out-of-state insurance. But Obamacare does not allow out-of-state insurance. So the Obamacare exchanges are not the same as the Heritage/German exchanges. And obviously, this could not have been addressed in a state law, so they didn't get this from Romneycare.
2) Mandate. Heritage included a very different approach to driving full participation. If you obtained health insurance, you got a refundable tax credit equal to the cost of a basic health insurance policy. So you essentially got basic health insurance free and had to pay for anything above that. Democrats blasted that approach in the 1990s in two basic ways. One, they said there are people who can't wait until April 15 or next year to get reimbursed, which is hogwash because you can adjust your withholding to get the money now. Two, they said it was nothing but a huge tax cut for the wealthy, which is kind of curious because everybody gets it, and it is a much less significant item for people with large incomes. I think what really irked them was the idea that you could upgrade in a free market, so the government couldn't control what health care you got. Anyway, this is obviously a carrot where the mandate was a stick, and not a big enough one to matter.

So, no, I'm not going to let you argue that Obamacare is Romneycare, much less so Heritage, and even much less so Bismarck. It could transition to Bismarck if you adjusted the economics and got rid of the bureaucracy, but the objective of Obamacare was always more government control of our lives, not less. Health care was merely the vehicle to accommodate the insatiable quest for power.

(03-21-2019 11:38 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  

(03-21-2019 08:11 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-21-2019 12:01 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  I'm pretty confused by a lot in this post. So the Republicans are the defenders of Constitutional norms and structure against the Democrats? Are you seeing Trump as one of those defenders?

I'm not calling you stupid, but that seems to me to be a pretty straightforward statement in complete sentences of English words. How do you not understand it?

Ha! I might be stupid. It's well within the realm of possibility. I meant more that I was confused about the motivation and lines of attack in the post, not which words he was using and the syntax.

There is are a lot of legitimate things to blast the Democrats for. Trying to incite mass shootings to prove their point? I don't really understand what motivates someone to cling to something like that.

(03-21-2019 08:11 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-21-2019 12:01 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  Obamacare isn't socialist, it was originally created by Romney and Republican think tanks as a free-market solution to health care. That's a big part of the reason why he used that model. When Obama pushed it, Republicans turned against the idea and have been promising a great healthcare strategy ever since.
While Obamacare was initially unpopular, it has become much more popular. So much so that Republicans couldn't vote it out even when they held both sides of Congress. It was also a large part of the messaging for the 2016 midterm, with a lot of Republicans adopting Obamacare language as their own to keep up.

Stop, just stop. This whole, "Obamacare was created by Romney and Republican think tanks" lie needs to stop. Romneycare was roughy a 100 page bill. Obamacare is a 2100 page bill. That means that roughly 95% of it had to come from somewhere else. That 95% is largely all the micromanagement bureaucracy that is driving doctors from the practice of medicine now.

And Romneycare wasn't Romney's idea, it was what he could get as a compromise with a Massachusetts legislature dominated by democrats.

Yes, there is some legacy from the Heritage proposal, which was based loosely on Bismarck free-market concepts. But that legacy has been pretty badly perverted. Couple of examples:
1) Exchanges. Obamacare proponents say that came from Heritage. But here is the thing. Heritage included interstate purchases of insurance, like Germany. But they needed a way to let you buy out-of-state policies, since there aren't likely to be a lot of people seeing Georgia health insurance policies in California. So they adapted the German concept of the exchanges as a marketplace for buying out-of-state insurance. But Obamacare does not allow out-of-state insurance. So the Obamacare exchanges are not the same as the Heritage/German exchanges. And obviously, this could not have been addressed in a state law, so they didn't get this from Romneycare.
2) Mandate. Heritage included a very different approach to driving full participation. If you obtained health insurance, you got a refundable tax credit equal to the cost of a basic health insurance policy. So you essentially got basic health insurance free and had to pay for anything above that. Democrats blasted that approach in the 1990s in two basic ways. One, they said there are people who can't wait until April 15 or next year to get reimbursed, which is hogwash because you can adjust your withholding to get the money now. Two, they said it was nothing but a huge tax cut for the wealthy, which is kind of curious because everybody gets it, and it is a much less significant item for people with large incomes. I think what really irked them was the idea that you could upgrade in a free market, so the government couldn't control what health care you got. Anyway, this is obviously a carrot where the mandate was a stick, and not a big enough one to matter.

I'm not sure where we're disagreeing here. I said that Obamacare was modeled after those ideas, not that Romney sat down and wrote a 2100 page bill and Obama copy pasted it.

It's not the same legislation or an exact copy, but Obama used that as a model instead of something like the public option that the Democrats wanted, in order to appeal to Republicans. I don't think they rewarded him for compromising on that, IIRC...

(03-21-2019 08:11 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  So, no, I'm not going to let you argue that Obamacare is Romneycare, much less so Heritage, and even much less so Bismarck. It could transition to Bismarck if you adjusted the economics and got rid of the bureaucracy, but the objective of Obamacare was always more government control of our lives, not less. Health care was merely the vehicle to accommodate the insatiable quest for power.

Why does every government program need to be motivated by more government control over our lives on an insatiable quest for power? Isn't it possible that our healthcare sucks and is too expensive and people wanted to fix that? That people don't want to keep expanding the government, but the free market isn't fixing the problem and the Republicans haven't even been able to propose any small government solutions for ~ a decade?

Politics are becoming more and more dysfunctional not because we trust our political opponents too much, but because everyone keeps attributing these malicious motivations to everything the other side is doing and the crazies take that and run with it.

(03-21-2019 11:38 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  Politics are becoming more and more dysfunctional not because we trust our political opponents too much, but because everyone keeps attributing these malicious motivations to everything the other side is doing and the crazies take that and run with it.

When it comes to things like Obamacare and the Green New Deal and attacks on the 2nd Amendment, I'm sorry but I believe the motivations are in fact malicious. My reason for so believing is that each of those takes a problem and attempts to supply a solution or solutions which 1) won't solve the problem, or even make meaningful contributions to solving it, but 2) will significantly increase government intrusion into and control over our lives.

When I can look at each of those issues and see workable solutions that will have a bigger impact with less government intrusion and control, then I have difficulty believing that the motivation is, "we're from the government and we're here to help."

If people genuinely wanted to improve health care or climate change or gun violence, I believe they would study the issue sufficiently to identify solutions that have the best chance to work, not those that have the best chance to intrude and disrupt private lives.

Again, I believe the motivations are malicious, because if not, then they would have done something else.

(03-21-2019 11:38 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  

(03-21-2019 08:11 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-21-2019 12:01 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  I'm pretty confused by a lot in this post. So the Republicans are the defenders of Constitutional norms and structure against the Democrats? Are you seeing Trump as one of those defenders?

I'm not calling you stupid, but that seems to me to be a pretty straightforward statement in complete sentences of English words. How do you not understand it?

Ha! I might be stupid. It's well within the realm of possibility. I meant more that I was confused about the motivation and lines of attack in the post, not which words he was using and the syntax.

There is a lot of legitimate things to blast the Democrats for. Trying to incite mass shootings to prove their point? I don't really understand what motivates someone to cling to something like that.

(03-21-2019 08:11 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-21-2019 12:01 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  Obamacare isn't socialist, it was originally created by Romney and Republican think tanks as a free-market solution to health care. That's a big part of the reason why he used that model. When Obama pushed it, Republicans turned against the idea and have been promising a great healthcare strategy ever since.
While Obamacare was initially unpopular, it has become much more popular. So much so that Republicans couldn't vote it out even when they held both sides of Congress. It was also a large part of the messaging for the 2016 midterm, with a lot of Republicans adopting Obamacare language as their own to keep up.

Stop, just stop. This whole, "Obamacare was created by Romney and Republican think tanks" lie needs to stop. Romneycare was roughy a 100 page bill. Obamacare is a 2100 page bill. That means that roughly 95% of it had to come from somewhere else. That 95% is largely all the micromanagement bureaucracy that is driving doctors from the practice of medicine now.

And Romneycare wasn't Romney's idea, it was what he could get as a compromise with a Massachusetts legislature dominated by democrats.

Yes, there is some legacy from the Heritage proposal, which was based loosely on Bismarck free-market concepts. But that legacy has been pretty badly perverted. Couple of examples:
1) Exchanges. Obamacare proponents say that came from Heritage. But here is the thing. Heritage included interstate purchases of insurance, like Germany. But they needed a way to let you buy out-of-state policies, since there aren't likely to be a lot of people seeing Georgia health insurance policies in California. So they adapted the German concept of the exchanges as a marketplace for buying out-of-state insurance. But Obamacare does not allow out-of-state insurance. So the Obamacare exchanges are not the same as the Heritage/German exchanges. And obviously, this could not have been addressed in a state law, so they didn't get this from Romneycare.
2) Mandate. Heritage included a very different approach to driving full participation. If you obtained health insurance, you got a refundable tax credit equal to the cost of a basic health insurance policy. So you essentially got basic health insurance free and had to pay for anything above that. Democrats blasted that approach in the 1990s in two basic ways. One, they said there are people who can't wait until April 15 or next year to get reimbursed, which is hogwash because you can adjust your withholding to get the money now. Two, they said it was nothing but a huge tax cut for the wealthy, which is kind of curious because everybody gets it, and it is a much less significant item for people with large incomes. I think what really irked them was the idea that you could upgrade in a free market, so the government couldn't control what health care you got. Anyway, this is obviously a carrot where the mandate was a stick, and not a big enough one to matter.

I'm not sure where we're disagreeing here. I said that Obamacare was modeled after those ideas, not that Romney sat down and wrote a 2100 page bill and Obama copy pasted it.

It's not the same legislation or an exact copy, but Obama used that as a model instead of something like the public option that the Democrats wanted, in order to appeal to Republicans. I don't think they rewarded him for compromising on that, IIRC...

(03-21-2019 08:11 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  So, no, I'm not going to let you argue that Obamacare is Romneycare, much less so Heritage, and even much less so Bismarck. It could transition to Bismarck if you adjusted the economics and got rid of the bureaucracy, but the objective of Obamacare was always more government control of our lives, not less. Health care was merely the vehicle to accommodate the insatiable quest for power.

Why does every government program need to be motivated by more government control over our lives on an insatiable quest for power? Isn't it possible that our healthcare sucks and is too expensive and people wanted to fix that? That people don't want to keep expanding the government, but the free market isn't fixing the problem and the Republicans haven't even been able to propose any small government solutions for ~ a decade?

Politics are becoming more and more dysfunctional not because we trust our political opponents too much, but because everyone keeps attributing these malicious motivations to everything the other side is doing and the crazies take that and run with it.

It’s never that simple. The modern politician has very little to nothing in common educationaly or philosophicaly with the founding fathers. The founding fathers studied political systems and theory through history to understand what worked best. They didn’t just cobble together some feel good thoughts and call it government. Distrust of those who want to scrap the system that has made this country the greatest of human history is not division. It is survival.

(03-21-2019 06:46 AM)TigerBlue4Ever Wrote:  

(03-20-2019 11:37 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(03-20-2019 11:09 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Given a choice between someone I dislike and a socialist/communist/collectivist, I don't dislike him that badly.

We'd all be better off if Trump would switch to Vito Corleone mode. You know, "Never tell them what you are thinking!" I am well versed in what kind of mole McCain was. He spent 5 years with my uncle in Hanoi. He ratted out the grass roots movement of the Republican party by not voting to rescind Obamacare and it was all because of his life of privilege and his corporate connections. But he's dead. Just shut up about him. If the public finds out he's behind the dossier so be it. His image will tarnish in their minds. But Americans think it is out of bounds to criticize the dead. Let history deal with McCain once we have historians that actually dig for the truth instead of trying to twist history into a justification for the future.

Trump is right 90% of the time. He's accomplished some great things for us. Just shut up already and somebody get rid of his damned cell phone and close his twitter account.

In American politics we vote for ideas, wrong or right it's the image of our future that turns the voters on. Having a great vision gets you elected. Trump has the vision part down in spades. He's going to/has hurt his message by not knowing when to keep his mouth shut, and when to brush off his opposition. Retaliating in a verbal war isn't helping to accomplish his agenda.

I'm all for him going after his enemies, but do it stealthily and let those below you leak the dirty details to those who will trumpet them. Use the power of the office to stay above the fray so the message stays on point.

Johnny Isakson is a Dixiecrat hiding in the Republican party. He had an excuse to come out today. He's a jerk. There's plenty on somebody like that. Leverage him. But don't give the putz a public platform. As for the Dirty Dozen find their dirt and leak them out of office. They are all firmly in the corporate globalization camp anyway. You don't trash them, you let others do it for you.

Trumps Achilles heel is that he enjoys going after his foes. He's got to learn that the best political hit in the world is the one that can't be traced back to him.

I agree with most of this but I think if he gives up his cellphone and twitter he loses half his outreach capability. The MSM won't give him balanced coverage. I wish he would come across a little smoother and a little more polished and eloquent but that's just not who he is. And that's one reason I voted for him, because of who he wasn't, a seasoned politician.

As to his victory laps, let him have them. I'd do a table dance every time I shot one of those maroons down. I don't think it hurts him one iota among his base. I understand that it does nothing to promote unity but that ship sailed with the Obama's.

To quote "How I met your mother," nothing good comes after 2 am. Although for Trump I would move it up to midnight. No tweeting between midnight and 6am. That's when his worst stuff seems to come out.

(03-22-2019 06:53 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-21-2019 11:38 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  Politics are becoming more and more dysfunctional not because we trust our political opponents too much, but because everyone keeps attributing these malicious motivations to everything the other side is doing and the crazies take that and run with it.

When it comes to things like Obamacare and the Green New Deal and attacks on the 2nd Amendment, I'm sorry but I believe the motivations are in fact malicious. My reason for so believing is that each of those takes a problem and attempts to supply a solution or solutions which 1) won't solve the problem, or even make meaningful contributions to solving it, but 2) will significantly increase government intrusion into and control over our lives.

When I can look at each of those issues and see workable solutions that will have a bigger impact with less government intrusion and control, then I have difficulty believing that the motivation is, "we're from the government and we're here to help."

If people genuinely wanted to improve health care or climate change or gun violence, I believe they would study the issue sufficiently to identify solutions that have the best chance to work, not those that have the best chance to intrude and disrupt private lives.

Again, I believe the motivations are malicious, because if not, then they would have done something else.

I'm inclined to attribute the motivations of most Democrats to stupidity. Some to graft (pharmacy and insurance companies helped write the Obamacare rules) which force is very strong among the Democrats. Only some are malicious. They viewed Obamacare as the first step in taking over healthcare and making it not just single payer, but single operator as a major part of a nanny state.

Fact is that Obamacare attacked a symptom (lack of health insurance) and did nothing about the core problem-the expense of health care.

(03-22-2019 07:40 AM)SoMs Eagle Wrote:  

(03-21-2019 11:38 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  

(03-21-2019 08:11 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-21-2019 12:01 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  I'm pretty confused by a lot in this post. So the Republicans are the defenders of Constitutional norms and structure against the Democrats? Are you seeing Trump as one of those defenders?

I'm not calling you stupid, but that seems to me to be a pretty straightforward statement in complete sentences of English words. How do you not understand it?

Ha! I might be stupid. It's well within the realm of possibility. I meant more that I was confused about the motivation and lines of attack in the post, not which words he was using and the syntax.

There is a lot of legitimate things to blast the Democrats for. Trying to incite mass shootings to prove their point? I don't really understand what motivates someone to cling to something like that.

(03-21-2019 08:11 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-21-2019 12:01 AM)atsKnight Wrote:  Obamacare isn't socialist, it was originally created by Romney and Republican think tanks as a free-market solution to health care. That's a big part of the reason why he used that model. When Obama pushed it, Republicans turned against the idea and have been promising a great healthcare strategy ever since.
While Obamacare was initially unpopular, it has become much more popular. So much so that Republicans couldn't vote it out even when they held both sides of Congress. It was also a large part of the messaging for the 2016 midterm, with a lot of Republicans adopting Obamacare language as their own to keep up.

Stop, just stop. This whole, "Obamacare was created by Romney and Republican think tanks" lie needs to stop. Romneycare was roughy a 100 page bill. Obamacare is a 2100 page bill. That means that roughly 95% of it had to come from somewhere else. That 95% is largely all the micromanagement bureaucracy that is driving doctors from the practice of medicine now.

And Romneycare wasn't Romney's idea, it was what he could get as a compromise with a Massachusetts legislature dominated by democrats.

Yes, there is some legacy from the Heritage proposal, which was based loosely on Bismarck free-market concepts. But that legacy has been pretty badly perverted. Couple of examples:
1) Exchanges. Obamacare proponents say that came from Heritage. But here is the thing. Heritage included interstate purchases of insurance, like Germany. But they needed a way to let you buy out-of-state policies, since there aren't likely to be a lot of people seeing Georgia health insurance policies in California. So they adapted the German concept of the exchanges as a marketplace for buying out-of-state insurance. But Obamacare does not allow out-of-state insurance. So the Obamacare exchanges are not the same as the Heritage/German exchanges. And obviously, this could not have been addressed in a state law, so they didn't get this from Romneycare.
2) Mandate. Heritage included a very different approach to driving full participation. If you obtained health insurance, you got a refundable tax credit equal to the cost of a basic health insurance policy. So you essentially got basic health insurance free and had to pay for anything above that. Democrats blasted that approach in the 1990s in two basic ways. One, they said there are people who can't wait until April 15 or next year to get reimbursed, which is hogwash because you can adjust your withholding to get the money now. Two, they said it was nothing but a huge tax cut for the wealthy, which is kind of curious because everybody gets it, and it is a much less significant item for people with large incomes. I think what really irked them was the idea that you could upgrade in a free market, so the government couldn't control what health care you got. Anyway, this is obviously a carrot where the mandate was a stick, and not a big enough one to matter.

I'm not sure where we're disagreeing here. I said that Obamacare was modeled after those ideas, not that Romney sat down and wrote a 2100 page bill and Obama copy pasted it.

It's not the same legislation or an exact copy, but Obama used that as a model instead of something like the public option that the Democrats wanted, in order to appeal to Republicans. I don't think they rewarded him for compromising on that, IIRC...

(03-21-2019 08:11 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  So, no, I'm not going to let you argue that Obamacare is Romneycare, much less so Heritage, and even much less so Bismarck. It could transition to Bismarck if you adjusted the economics and got rid of the bureaucracy, but the objective of Obamacare was always more government control of our lives, not less. Health care was merely the vehicle to accommodate the insatiable quest for power.

Why does every government program need to be motivated by more government control over our lives on an insatiable quest for power? Isn't it possible that our healthcare sucks and is too expensive and people wanted to fix that? That people don't want to keep expanding the government, but the free market isn't fixing the problem and the Republicans haven't even been able to propose any small government solutions for ~ a decade?

Politics are becoming more and more dysfunctional not because we trust our political opponents too much, but because everyone keeps attributing these malicious motivations to everything the other side is doing and the crazies take that and run with it.

It’s never that simple. The modern politician has very little to nothing in common educationaly or philosophicaly with the founding fathers. The founding fathers studied political systems and theory through history to understand what worked best. They didn’t just cobble together some feel good thoughts and call it government. Distrust of those who want to scrap the system that has made this country the greatest of human history is not division. It is survival.

you defined today's 'battle'....well done, sir!

(03-22-2019 08:07 AM)bullet Wrote:  I'm inclined to attribute the motivations of most Democrats to stupidity.

I'm not. At least not the leadership. I do think a lot of the rank and file are little more than useful idiots. Although when some of them reveal their true intentions, like AOC, they may be more idiots than useful.

I think republicans are stupid. I think democrats, at least their leadership, are genuinely evil.

(03-22-2019 08:51 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-22-2019 08:07 AM)bullet Wrote:  I'm inclined to attribute the motivations of most Democrats to stupidity.

I'm not. At least not the leadership. I do think a lot of the rank and file are little more than useful idiots. Although when some of them reveal their true intentions, like AOC, they may be more idiots than useful.

I think that's absolutely right.

The leadership's motivation is power & control. That's what true Marxists want (for themselves anyway). The more of the lemmings and useful idiots they can control, the more power they gain. What better way to get the stupid, lazy, and confused to your side that by offering a utopia where everything is free, nothing is required..... except allegiance to the state.

What bothers "leadership" about AOC and her ilk is that they're not afraid to let that dirty little secret out. Can't perpetrate evil when you're exposed to the light.