Caltrops - Balance of Power





	[quote name="blackwater"][quote name="Mischief Maker"]Not only are they repealing the ACA with no plan to replace it (hello again, pre-existing conditions), they also passed legislation to not publicly reveal how much the ACA repeal will explode the national debt. And they created sanctions for people streaming the discussions on the House floor to the public on smartphones when Paul Ryan wants the CSPAN cameras off.[/quote] The Republicans have basically never shut up about how much they hate Obamacare. In the Obama years, they failed to prevent it from taking effect or to put it into the much-discussed "death spiral." Now they have a dilemma. They have an incoming Republican president and a Republican-controlled legislature, so they have no excuse for delaying any longer. But the health care system is a huge mess. Anyone who touches it ends up stained by the huge failure that is US healthcare. Health care costs continue to explode, so even if you put in place the same system that was around in 2000 (say), it would still look like a huge failure. My sense of things is that Trump is a pragmatist, and doesn't want to die on this particular hill. If it were up to him, there would be some kind of face-saving fudge where they change some minor thing and declare it "fixed." People like Paul Ryan are more ideological about this and might actually want to get rid of things like the univeral mandate. The Republicans are probably pretty divided right now, which is why they want to keep this stuff off television. I don't think anyone knows what will happen next. [quote name="Mischief Maker"] Then they're also doing a massive sell-off of public land, restriction of state's rights (fuck your pot decriminalization), [/quote] It's funny how people on both the left and the right discover that they're big fans of states' rights when it advances some particular agenda they have in mind. Honestly, all these cannabis entrepreneurs turn my stomach. Do we really need to turn pot into big business? We've been gradually winning against one particular group of lung cancer merchants, but now it looks like another one is starting to rise up. Pot dispensories and vape shops are a blight on the land, if you ask me. And someone ought to go after all these pharma companies that have created the opiate epidemic. In the rest of the world, you only get morphene if you're about to die and they don't want your last moments to be too bad. [quote name="Mischief Maker"] and defunding planned parenthood, despite the fact that abortion services get zero federal funding already. [/quote] How can you defund something that isn't funded? [quote name="Mischief Maker"] Why are Republicans so evil? Probably because their philosophical guiding light comes from Ayn Rand, whose ideal man was <A HREF="http://michaelprescott.freeservers.com/romancing-the-stone-cold.html">a corpse-mutilating sociopath</A>. [/quote] I think you have the Republican Party confused with the Libertarian Party. It's OK, it's a common mistake. Here's a handy guideline: anything Trump says is probably the opposite of what a Libertarian would say (for better or worse). Except when he's talking about foreign policy, where they both would agree that we should mind our own business and not play world policeman. [quote name="Mischief Maker"] We are so fucked. [/quote] We are only fucked if China decides it wants to stop buying T-Bills and funding our huge debt, or Russia decides to push the button and make the world uninhabitable. Otherwise it's all pretty normal stuff that's been happening for decades. In a decade or two, you'll barely remember the Trump years, just like you don't remember the Clintons' "tough on crime" and "three strikes" initiatives. Just let it go, man. Bernie is a tired old man, and his ideas are old and tired too. They're only new to you because you are an American. His whole agenda was put in place in France in the postwar years, and that place didn't become a utopia. People put too much faith in politicians... just like they did with Obama and Bush. The reality is that politicians and the government have a lot more ability to create problems than solve them.[/quote]