Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Neither one of us is young anymore, so our path off the planet is relatively short (20 years +/-) and reasonably well defined (unless you have plans to the contrary, we're not starting the next Instagram or Snapchat). Millies, on the other hand, have decades to go before they rest, and it's just now dawning on them that they own this, like it of not. I don't know how they will react, but they have the most to gain and lose by making good or bad choices.

Reactionaries win when no one opposes them. They make opposition very hard and failure highly costly. Then again, they are inherently weak. Other than money, they lack resources and numbers.

Millies are gearing up to clean house. When they do, watch out!

Originally Posted by playwrite

There is a 93% overlap in Clinton and Sanders voting record; could be higher if Sanders wasn't an ammosexual.

I know its hard for one with Clinton Hater Derangement Syndrome to read that and comprehend; and your's is a particularly virulent.

But read that simple line a couple times and try to let it sink in. It could open a whole new world to you.

Thanks for proving my point, not all legislation is equal in significance and importance. Such figures are also simply the result of how clastrophobically narrow American policy differences, are.

Originally Posted by playwrite

Ah, sorry, but over 12 million people with ACA insurance would disagree with you-

Meanwhile in the real world people are getting angry because they are being mandated to buy insurance that borders on useless because the co-pays and deductibles are so high.

Originally Posted by playwrite

With you (and for Rags as well), I'm not suggesting that its about Clinton hate. On the other hand, there are obviously those here whose cerebral lobes have been turned off by exactly that hate.

I also agree it is about strategy, I would lower it to actually being about tactics.

Your underlying assumption with "something needs to change" is it will be for the better. I see Sanders in the WH as being much more of risk of things becoming worse exactly because of his assumed tactics.

You know that there isn't a chance in hell of any of his magic ponies becoming reality through an immovable GOP House. I'm pretty sure you're not banking on Millies to do anything more when called upon other than adding some 'likes/dislikes' to Facebook pages in protest; maybe the more committed ones will go join a drum circle somewhere but I doubt it will last as long as Occupy Wall Street - too many distractions and where are they going to plug in their PlayStations? Compare their 'fever' to that of what it took years to barely accomplish in the 60s.

So exactly what do you think is going to happen when all of Bernie's jumping up and down gets him even less than what Obama got? You really think the Debs, Odins and others wanting their faux revolutionary are going to stick around? If not, what happens to Bernie? SNL skits alone are going to kill him off as a political force and set the GOP up for big wins in 2018 and 2020 - that's game over for you and me.

Insulting Sanders supporters by calling them mentally deficient is not going to make them vote for Hillary.

Originally Posted by B Butler

In Massachusetts it's as much Romney Care as Obama Care, but I'm one who is covered and am very pleased to be covered. Still, I can see why it is called a scam. The insurance companies are skimming a lot off the top. For a while I was doing pay as you go. As soon as Romneycare started coming in, the prices of prescription drugs started to skyrocket. One of the wrinkles is that those who refuse to play along with the scam get scammed big time. Prices are being inflated through the roof and I've no doubt that the insurance companies are taking their cut.

The only problem with this meme is the required Medical Loss Ratio that mandates the insurer can keep 15-20% of the total cost of the insurance, and that has to pay for everything - salaries, rents, keeping the lights on, retained earnings, and dividends to stock holders. Anything more gets rebated to the insured, and that has happened every year so far.

There is nothing like that for the non-ACA part of the insurance world. It is also going to be what causes consolidation in the health insurance business to the point that single payer will be the only viable option.

Originally Posted by B Butler

I'd prefer single payer. I think ACA is a scam. It's just the best scam we've got.

There's not a Progressive out there that doesn't want that. The only question is whether or not you believe you get that by riding around on one of Bernie's magic ponies.

Originally Posted by playwrite

There is the judiciary including the SCOTUS, and that is a change your children will be living with.

And that is an excellent example of how the two tactics will play out.

With President Sanders we'll get an in-your-face, in a highly public way, SCOTUS nominee and give the GOP Congressional Critters not only an excuse to hold up the confirmation indefinitely but to rally their amygdala-dominated for the 2018 mid-terms. By then, the crabby-old-man-isolated-in-the-WH meme will be in full bloom and the disappointed former BernieBros coupled with foaming-at-the-mouth amygdala-dominated will result in a landslide for the GOP - just in time to set the stage for the 2020 census and locking in gerrymandered GOP dominance for another decade.

This scenario is what makes the usual run-of-the mill cynicism of maybe-a-GOPer-in-the-WH-won't-be-so-bad stupid and suicidal.

On the other hand, with President Clinton, most of the work for the SCOTUS nominee will be behind the scenes. Likely, the BernieBros, still-seething over their savior's nomination lost, will see the eventual nominee as a sellout which will actually help the nominee get through the confirmation process and not hand the GOP the touchstone to motivate their amygdala-dominated into a mouth-foaming 2018 voters. Then, some SCOTUS decisions taking the juice out of campaign funding, protecting pro-choice, limiting guns, etc. will make it clear to everyone what HC accomplished

The stakes are very high; its not the time to just let the chips fall where they may on the empty set of promises just to show how frustrated you are - the other side doesn't give a shXt how you feel.

Sanders has one option as far as SCOTUS is concerned, and that is to stick to his guns when a conservative vacancy develops when either Scalia or Kennedy (the oldest sitting justices) pass away. The Court can get by with the 7 justices it started out with when the Court was founded, and if four of those justices are liberal, then it becomes 4 to 4 with the Senate renouncing the filibuster for Appelate judges or even 4 to 3 liberal if both Scalia and Kennedy die. If Sanders's revolution sweeps Congress, three of the four conservative justices can be impeached, too, since they have failed to recuse themselves in cases in which they had an interest.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

I have yet to meet one person excited (or even happy) about having the ACA insurance, unless they received close to the maximum subsidy.

If your going to run on anecdotes, then at least take the bother to google aca personal stories. The good far outweighs the supposed bad; it's just that the Right wingnut propaganda machine is very very good and the Left is so busy gazing at their single payer navels that they buy into the horsey poo without a moment's hesitation.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

It's like whack-a-mole. Get everyone insured, and the insurers get in bed with the providers. Now, we need to address that. Following that fix (assuming it happens a some point), then we'll have to address Big Pharma.

The healthcare system is getting even more broken than it was, and guaranteeing a steady flow of money may be part of the cause. We need to impose some order, but the "Freedom Caucus" just yells OPPRESSION!, and we back off. If we ever get to the point that we understand that the needs of all outweighs the desires of the few, we may make progress. Not yet, though.

And in the meantime, what for millions without insurance provided by the ACA. People who want to wait until the time is right tend to be people with some sort of insurance subsidized but not questioned, like employer-based insurance. Lucky them, I guess.

Originally Posted by MordecaiK

Sanders has one option as far as SCOTUS is concerned, and that is to stick to his guns when a conservative vacancy develops when either Scalia or Kennedy (the oldest sitting justices) pass away. The Court can get by with the 7 justices it started out with when the Court was founded, and if four of those justices are liberal, then it becomes 4 to 4 with the Senate renouncing the filibuster for Appelate judges or even 4 to 3 liberal if both Scalia and Kennedy die. If Sanders's revolution sweeps Congress, three of the four conservative justices can be impeached, too, since they have failed to recuse themselves in cases in which they had an interest.

What about if its Ginsberg who is the first to die?

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

You are looking at the wrong picture here. Sanders is reconnecting with average Americans, because he refuses to use the language of identity politics. That's why Trump is doing well too. Decoupling the white working class from the GOP is worth the short term risks. This is the long game now, because the short game has been an abject failure.

Indeed. And Sander's approach already appears to be paying dividends for him. See http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/05/up...vide.html?_r=0 Income, apparently was the key divide between Sanders and Hillary. Older voters and higher income voters (who tend to be the same thing) went for Hillary and lower income voters of all ages went for Bernie. And since independents could choose to attend either caucus and since Trump did not do as well as was expected, although this article does not say so, some of Trump's pool of lower income white voters may have gone to Bernie, the only other "change" candidate and the one who has concrete proposals instead of a pledge to "Make America Great " (or is it Gross?) Again".

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Neither one of us is young anymore, so our path off the planet is relatively short (20 years +/-) and reasonably well defined (unless you have plans to the contrary, we're not starting the next Instagram or Snapchat). Millies, on the other hand, have decades to go before they rest, and it's just now dawning on them that they own this, like it of not. I don't know how they will react, but they have the most to gain and lose by making good or bad choices.

Reactionaries win when no one opposes them. They make opposition very hard and failure highly costly. Then again, they are inherently weak. Other than money, they lack resources and numbers.

All true, but it also requires some brains.

Have you read any rationale for Sanders support that comes from the head rather than heart. It's like being at a Eugene McCarthy convention - almost by rote, it makes me want to throw-up.

Originally Posted by The Wonkette

What about if its Ginsberg who is the first to die?

That's where the model breaks down. Ginsburg's cancer could always recur.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Reagan ran it the other way by being his congenial self, and not much more. It's hard to know what tips the balance, but it happens. Why not this time? The justification is certainly there.

If you think Reagan's Democratic House is just the polar opposite of Paul Ryan's House, you are suffering from one of the worse cases of false equivalency meme that I have ever encountered.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

I don't disagree. I do disagree about who is on which side. If you read the article by Benjamin Studebaker that was posted earlier (or this one on Sanders in particular), then you saw the argument that the DLC and the GOP are much the same. They are authoritarian and, more or less, conservative on economic issues, all eyewash propaganda to the contrary.

Sanders is neither, and it's time to make the point that a left-libertarian is a better choice. If the point is never made, then how does anyone get the option to select it?

What you do counts a lot more than what you say, and Sanders is consistently NOT part of the authoritarian right.

Just as long as you don't care about, you know, actual results that actually move us down the Progressive agenda.

Maybe we could get Disney to add a ProgressiveLand to their theme park, to the left of course. And have Libertarian land on the right hand side. Or, just mix them both in Fantasyland, but I guess that would lead to too many arguments at the shooting gallery.

Originally Posted by XYMOX_4AD_84

Millies are gearing up to clean house. When they do, watch out!

Yea, they're gearing up all right, just not the way you think -



But don't worry, I'm working on script for both GTA and ES that will have a SandersWorld to get down and all Progressive and stuff!

Originally Posted by Odin

Thanks for proving my point, not all legislation is equal in significance and importance. Such figures are also simply the result of how clastrophobically narrow American policy differences, are.

So Sanders is "narrow."

I'm going to tell, and you'll have to turn in your Bernie button!

Originally Posted by Odin

Insulting Sanders supporters by calling them mentally deficient is not going to make them vote for Hillary.

News flash!

Hate makes one stupid, Odin.

Feeling the Yern: Why One Millennial Woman Would Rather Go to Hell Than Vote for Hillary

Stumping for Hillary Clinton this weekend in New Hampshire, hedge fund manager Madeleine Albright squawked, "There's a special place in Hell for women who don't help each other."

When the Democratic National Committee chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was asked earlier this year why she thought Millennials resist Hillary Clinton, she casually threw them under the bus. "Here's what I see," she groused. "A complacency among the generation of young women whose entire lives have been lived after Roe v. Wade was decided."

Asked a similar question by Bill Maher this past Friday, women's-rights icon Gloria Steinem cawed, "When you're young, you're thinking, 'Where are the boys?' The boys are with Bernie."

There seems to be no shortage of bizarrely sexist assumptions as to why I, a Millennial feminist, am not voting for Hillary Clinton. But speaking as a Millennial feminist, let me assure you: None of them is accurate. Granted, the span of my political biography is only as long as it took Howard Dean to go from human rights crusader to insurance lobbyist. But the reason for my political disaffection is plain: I've spent my entire Millennial life watching the Democratic Party claw its way up the ass of corporate America. There's no persuading me that the Democratic establishment — from where it sits now — has the capacity to represent me, or my values.

And I'm not alone. According to a 2013 poll by Harvard's Kennedy School, three out of five of my peers now believe politicians prioritize private gain over the public good. When young people open opensecrets.org to gauge just how cheaply our futures trade these days, are we being cynical, or just realistic?

If Millennials are coming out in droves to support Bernie Sanders, it's not because we are tripping balls on Geritol. No, Sanders's clever strategy of shouting the exact same thing for 40 years simply strikes a chord among the growing number of us who now agree: Washington is bought. And every time Goldman Sachs buys another million-dollar slice of the next American presidency, we can't help but drop the needle onto Bernie's broken record:

The economy is rigged.

Democracy is corrupted.

The billionaires are on the warpath.

Sanders has split the party with hits like these, a catchy stream of pessimistic populism. Behind this arthritic Pied Piper, the youth rally, brandishing red-lettered signs reading "MONEYLENDERS OUT." If you ask them, they'll tell you there's a special place in Hell for war criminals who launch hedge funds.

Last week in Iowa, Sanders proved his bleak candor is every bit as appealing to American voters as Hillary's enthusiasm for tweakmanship. Especially among the youth. According to entrance polls, Millennials backed Comrade Sanders over Neoliberal Clinton by a tidy 70-point margin. And in New Hampshire, the most recent UMass poll has Sanders taking 89 percent of the state's Democrats under 30.

But these numbers should not surprise you. According to a YouGov poll conducted last week, people under 30 are more likely to say they support socialism than capitalism.

Capitalism, as Vonnegut explained, is "what the people with all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decided to do today." We've just spent a lifetime watching capitalism buy itself a government. And I'll be frank: It's not working well for most of us. Drones make orphans in our name. Our friends will die indebted. We are poisoning our own well.

The spectacle of our government's being bought is so obvious, even the youngest among us can see it. "With Hillary," eighteen-year-old Olivia Sauder told Times reporters at the Iowa Caucus, "sometimes you get this feeling that all of her sentences are owned by someone."

Ding, ding, ding.

Having once been marked by the Onion's A.V. Club as a "hyper-articulate radical feminist communist," I feel uniquely qualified to pour you a rich cup of cold-brewed truth here: The kids are lit. And yet despite our frank rejection of establishment politics, establishment media waste no time swooping in to lecture us about our cognitive defects like so many pedantic barn owls.

"Stay sane, America!" hoots David Brooks for the Times, going on to equate voting one's conscience with voting for overt fascist Donald Trump. It's plainly bananas, says Brooks, to waste a primary vote on a man threatening disestablishment. There's no way he can win.

Yet according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on February 5, Bernie has 42 percent of the national Dem vote to Hillary's 44 percent. "Democrats nationwide are feeling the Bern as Senator Bernie Sanders closes a 31-point gap to tie Secretary Hillary Clinton," says Quinnipiac's assistant director Tim Molloy in Friday's press release. And according to Gallup's January numbers, Sanders's net favorability among Democrats is actually four points higher than Hillary's. By most poll estimates, Dems say they are just as, if not more, likely to vote for Bernie as Hillary against any Republican front-runner.

But David Brooks is just one gassy bird in the barn. I've got a stack of editorials here telling me how insane and delusional I am, each more insulting to my intelligence than the next.

My favorite owl pellet comes from Alexandra Schwartz, writing for the New Yorker, who claimed Bernie's incessant talk of Wall Street fuckery is somehow outdated: "When [Sanders's] campaign tweets that it's 'high time we stopped bailing out Wall Street and started repairing Main Street,' you have to wonder," writes Schwartz, obtusely, "why his youngest supporters, so attuned to staleness in all things cultural, are letting him get away with political rhetoric that would have seemed old even in 2012."

What a charmed life Alexandra Schwartz must lead to think that the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression should resolve itself according to the needs of the news cycle. But believe it or not, the poors have not yet moved on from being gobsmacked by a globally devastating market collapse. Freedom from the burdens of financial ruin is a privilege I imagine millions of Americans wish they could share with New Yorker staff writer Alexandra Schwartz.

And what did the great tawny-bellied Paul Krugman have to say to the nation's waywardly progressive? "Sorry," he pecked in his Times column. "There's nothing noble about seeing your values defeated because you preferred happy dreams to hard thinking about means and ends." Pausing to cough up a mouse carcass, he chittered on: "Don't let idealism veer into destructive self-indulgence."

I'm trying to imagine an eighteenth-century Krugman admonishing a young Thomas Jefferson against letting his happy dreams of liberty veer into self-indulgence. For good reason, American historians seem unimpressed by owls counseling restraint in the face of corruption and oppression.

If anything concerns me at this pivotal moment, it's not the revolutionary tremors of the youth. Given the Great American Trash Fire we have inherited, this rebellion strikes me as exceedingly reasonable. Pick a crisis, America: Child poverty? Inexcusable. Medical debt? Immoral. For-profit prison? Medieval. Climate change? Apocalyptic. The Middle East is our Vietnam. Flint, the canary in our coal mine. Tamir Rice, our martyred saint. This place is a mess. We're due for a hard rain.

If I am alarmed, it is by the profound languor of the comfortable. What fresh hell must we find ourselves in before those who've appointed themselves to lead our thoughts admit that we are in flames? As I see it, to counsel realism when the reality is fucked is to counsel an adherence to fuckery. Under conditions as distressing as these, acquiescence is absurd. When your nation gets classified as a Class D structure fire, I believe the only wise course is to lose your shit.

The reason Wall Street is dropping zillions of quarters into Hillary's Super PAC-Man machine isn't because it wants change — it's because Wall Street sees revenue in her promises of keeping things much the same. Under Hillary, our prisons will continue to punish for profit. Our schools will continue to be sold off to private contractors. And despite 87 percent of Democrats standing behind universal health care, Hillary insists it will "never, ever come to pass." Not from her, I guess, since she's taken over $13 million from the health care industry.

We really can't, America, says Hillary. Nope. Not ever. We are a powerful nation, kids, but one run by the Great Market God. Leave your moral gag reflex at the door. Close that pesky Overton window, won't you? And be a doll and bolt those tables to the floor. You'll love the moneylenders, dear. I do. Hell, my daughter married one!

"Want a selfie?"

No, young heroes, mind not the barnshitting owls. And I insist we take a pass on contracting foxes to assess the holes in our fence. Abandon no hopes, America. We have important work to do. This democracy will not save itself.

"The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution," sermonized Father Guthrie, musing on what got him through the Great Depression. "All a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine."

Amen.

But according to the Almighty barnshitting owl Playdude she is a moron wanting puppies and unicorns.

Originally Posted by MordecaiK

Sanders has one option as far as SCOTUS is concerned, and that is to stick to his guns when a conservative vacancy develops when either Scalia or Kennedy (the oldest sitting justices) pass away. The Court can get by with the 7 justices it started out with when the Court was founded, and if four of those justices are liberal, then it becomes 4 to 4 with the Senate renouncing the filibuster for Appelate judges or even 4 to 3 liberal if both Scalia and Kennedy die. If Sanders's revolution sweeps Congress, three of the four conservative justices can be impeached, too, since they have failed to recuse themselves in cases in which they had an interest.

Gee, you give a Progressive an inch and they believe they're entitled to a mile.

Originally Posted by Odin

Feeling the Yern: Why One Millennial Woman Would Rather Go to Hell Than Vote for Hillary



But according to the Almighty barnshitting owl Playdude she is a moron wanting puppies and unicorns.

Originally Posted by article

establishment media waste no time swooping in to lecture us about our cognitive defects like so many pedantic barn owls.

OK

* pendantic barn owls that shit on purported cognitive defects award for the MSM

I admit the revulsion to Hillary evident here on this forum was felt among younger people in New Hampshire too. We'll see how this plays out in more conservative states though.

Remember, the cosmic horoscope scores are advantage Sanders.

Originally Posted by Classic-X'er

Gee, you give a Progressive an inch and they believe they're entitled to a mile.

Yes, I think we're entitled to a society that is up to date with the rest of the world, not beholden to a medieval ideology.

Originally Posted by Odin

Insulting Sanders supporters by calling them mentally deficient is not going to make them vote for Hillary.

Well, maybe Hillary can try insulting women who support Sanders. Maybe that will work

Originally Posted by playwrite

Just as long as you don't care about, you know, actual results that actually move us down the Progressive agenda.

Maybe we could get Disney to add a ProgressiveLand to their theme park, to the left of course. And have Libertarian land on the right hand side. Or, just mix them both in Fantasyland, but I guess that would lead to too many arguments at the shooting gallery.

A theme park of political delusions. I like it

I don't think Disney would do it though. They are too authoritarian to be fair.

Originally Posted by playwrite

- the '08 financial mess will not happen again, that's an 80-year thing.

No they aren't. Panics occurred in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1884, 1893, 1907 and 1932-33, about 16 years apart on average. Then Congress shut them down in the 1930's. Congress re-authorized them in 1997 and we got the first 9 years later. So what is the recurrence rate? If we get one this recession then I would guess once per Juglar cycle. If not then I would suspect it will be every other cycle like before.

Another way to look at it is the four peaks in stock market valuation: 2000, 1929, 2015, 1906. Two gave panics two (so far) have not. If we go with the big crashes there were big crashes in 1987, 1929, 1946, 2008, again a 50:50 shot. So flip a coin.

Originally Posted by playwrite

You will in the general if Sanders is the nominee.

He's going to be sliced and diced by the GOP. Clinton has treated him with the daintiest kid gloves in comparison.

His chances of winning in the general are slim, but they are absolutely zero without people like me.

I'm smart enough to support whoever the Dem is to keep a GOPer out of the WH, but there's plenty of people like me who are toying with the idea of staying home to not only get Kinser's hoped-for suicide pact of a GOPer driving the national car back into the ditch again, but to allow today's Far Lefty need for their own George McGovern in order to grow a brain.

Myself, I'll support Sanders and hope he gets elected, even though it will inevitable bring about the task of defending him for four years with his former BernieBot supporters - just like I did with the '08 Obamatrons when they abandoned their prior savior.

I disagree. If Sanders does win the nomination, and event I think has 0% probability, then I will stand corrected, and become very enthusiastic about my nominee. They only way he can win is if he brings a shitload of new voters to the polls. If young people vote at a HIGHER percentage than any other age group (something that has never happened) then it might happen. If the this sort of thing happened it would be a political-revolutionary scenario. In 1919-1922 the country had a revolutionary scenario, which led to the 1924 immigration suppression. The Trump phenomenon is this cycle's version of this, but with a somewhat different configuration. Over the same period Sanders' hero Eugene Debs ran for president (from jail). Sander's campaign is this cycle's version of this. In 1919 came Red Summer, the largest concentration of racial violence since the Klan War in the aftermath of the Civil War. BLM is this cycle's version of that.

The revolutionary situation fizzled then. If S&H are right, it fizzled because it was a 3T. So maybe the cards are lining up for another go around, but this time, if S&H are right, it is a 4T. Perhaps the outcome will be different.

I can think of a scenario where Sanders could deliver most of his campaign promises and fix the economy to boot IF he could get white youth and minorities to the polls in numbers like Obama got blacks to vote in 2012, and IF we have another financial panic next year. That's a lot of IFs, so right now Sanders is mostly fantasy.