Originally Posted by playwrite

The Dems response will be Hillary trumping The Donald in the general.

I don't think Trump is going to win. I think it will be Cruz on the second ballot.

Originally Posted by The Wonkette

Just curious about your prediction for a Clinton/Cruz matchup.

Clinton Crushes Cruz (TM)

Originally Posted by Odin

So I take it you think we should raise the voting age and minimum enlistment age to 21, since you think 20yo people are "kids"?

Enlistment,yes; voting, no
But that has nothing to do with the issue; just mindless snark bait for the mindless.

Originally Posted by Odin

Once you destroy the 2nd Amendment what other parts of the Bill of Rights to you want to go and abolish?

Typical hyperbole. If you can just jettison a few faux Lefty viewpoints, you would make a fine t-bagger

Originally Posted by marypoza

Bernie is rocking this debate

Says who?
Latest poll this morning has Clinton up by 17 in NY.
Bernie is off to the Vatican looking for Devine intervention. 😉

Originally Posted by playwrite

I realize that goes far in magic pony land, but for the rest of us, not so much.

Today I learned that magic pony land has been hiding in plain site this entire time.

They've got free healthcare, free child day care, and they've even had free college for hundreds of years. Some people claim these colleges in magic pony land helped to lay the intellectual and academic groundwork for the enlightenment, liberalism, capitalism, and even the industrial revolution.

Most telling: Their national animal is a unicorn.

This magical place? It's actually called Scotland.

Originally Posted by playwrite

Says who?
Latest poll this morning has Clinton up by 17 in NY.
Bernie is off to the Vatican looking for Devine intervention. 😉

Divine.

Bernie Sanders and Pope Francis are very close on economics.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

I'm feeling the Bern too. But I disagree with you about the ACA. Are you saying it was better before? My grandson earns about 15K Obviously he could not afford insurance. Because of the ACA he now has health insurance. To pay for it I pay more in taxes. That's fine, I approve of taxes that actually buy tangible goods for Americans.

A friend has a daughter who had an organ transplant as a child. To stay alive she needs expensive meds, plus she had other health issues that had it difficult for her to keep a job with an employer that provided insurance. With this pre-existing condition she was uninsurable as an individual. When the ACA passed she was able to go back on her father's insurance, until age 26, by which the ACA had rolled out and she could get a plan. The ACA saved her life. I am happy for her, even though covering people like her is what makes the ACA insurance more expensive that the plans they replaced.

If you are low income, there are subsidies and so the insurance should be affordable. If you make more than ~90K (where the subsidies phase out) then you should be abl-e to afford the premiums and co-pays. Insurance costs money, Sander's plan will cost me $14K more than what I have now, should I oppose it for that reason?

--actually Bernie's plan will save $, to the tune of $5 billion

http://usuncut.com/politics/top-econ...us-5-trillion/

Medicare for all was off the table in 2009. Republicans were 100% against it and the ONLY way it would vote was with 100% Democratic support in the Senate. Some Democrats were dead set against Medicare for all, period. They would never have changed their mind. They have since been replaced by Republicans. Do you think you will have a better chance with them?

-- so put it back on the table
Consider: if Bernie is the nominee there will be high voter turnout & the Senate will probably flip. So all Bernie has to do is work on the House.

I support Bernie for two reasons. One is the issues he brings to the table (higher taxes and opposition to free trade). The other is the political revolution, which means that the political reality I described above changes.

The political revolution refers to a very specific thing. The Sanders campaign sought to create a groundswell of interest in changing what Sanders calls "the rigged economy". It would manifest as large numbers of new voters, mostly working class and young people, who previously did not vote, coming to the polls to support Bernie. This would show up as record turnout in the Democratic primaries. It did not happen. Turnout was considerable smaller than in 2008. Had it been larger, Bernie would be ahead in delegates, total votes and the super delegates would be flocking to his standard.

The plain fact is Sanders did not spark a political revolution. The political revolution DID happen. The new voters Sanders sought did come to the polls. Turnout did set record levels. It just happened on the Republican side. Donald Trump, sounding some of the same memes as Sanders, has brought new participants to the Republican primaries and in doing so has upended the Republican party. If they nominate Cruz, as now seems likely, and the GOP loses both the presidency and the Senate, movement conservatism will have been severely damaged, possibly irreparably. Trumpism (without Trump) provides a possible path for the party that will have more to offer the GOP base than tax cuts for the rich.

Given a re-tooled GOP, the Democratic party will need to figure out a response or become irrelevant. They will need to figure out how to offer something besides business-like policies. For example, Sanders could have proposed the free tuition, infrastructure and Medicare as an ACA option and pay for it by eliminating the GOP tax cut--saving X trillions of dollars!

-- good observations I agree with most of them. But on obummercrap we're gonna have to agree to disagree. It's a f-ing ponzi scheme & it's wrong. You can rationalize it to me all you want but it's still wrong. I'm telling you this from my gut.

Originally Posted by playwrite

Clinton Crushes Cruz (TM)

Not quite a TM; I probably said it first! (with cosmic indicators too)

Originally Posted by Mikebert

I don't think Trump is going to win. I think it will be Cruz on the second ballot.

We'll see. I'm still thinking Donald can pull in about 40-50 unpledged delegates after CA and before Cleveland to put him over the top. He will likely get 8 or 9 from Ben Carson, and maybe at least 20 more individually-elected delegates from PA if he wins comfortably there; plus from assorted islands and other places.

If he can do better than I projected in the 6 mid-Atlantic elections this month, that could bring him closer too. He leads handily in CT, RI and winner-take-all Maryland/Delaware, and of course NY. But he also has to win easily in Indiana on May 3, where older polls have him ahead but not by a lot. He'll get a boost from NJ in June, 51 delegates winner-take all. And he leads in CA.

In those states that Trump wins easily, he'll have more delegates than the proportion of the vote that he wins, because most states vote according to the Republican gerrymandered districts, with winner-take-all in each district, plus a few at-large to the state-wide winner or unpledged.

Since he's giving more attention to the delegate selection process now, maybe Trump can get more of his supporters on the convention floor than he has now. I project Cruz wins no more than 775 going into the convention, if he cuts a bit into Trump's primary election advantage in the mid-Atlantic and Indiana. If he gets all of Rubio's delegates, all the 120 or so unpledged delegates, and most of the few delegates pledged to other candidates besides Kasich and Carson, Cruz is still short (1066). He would have to win about 200 Trump delegates on the second ballot, plus get Rubio's support, and most of the unpledged, to win. It's possible, but no more possible than Trump getting the 40 or 50 extra delegates he needs for the first ballot.

Democrats, knowing these congressional districts are phony, don't use that system. It's almost all proportional statewide, which makes it harder for Bernie to catch up, especially without a big upset in NY's closed primary next Tuesday.

Originally Posted by playwrite

Typical hyperbole. If you can just jettison a few faux Lefty viewpoints, you would make a fine t-bagger

Nah, the only thing I have in common with Right-Libertarian Tea Party idiots is not liking paternalistic authoritarians like you.

Originally Posted by Teacher in Exile

More ammunition for Bernie's argument (which Hillary opposes) that America's megabanks must be broken up:

Big Banks still too big to fail

Bank of America, JP Morgan, other banks fail key regulators test.

Regulators on Wednesday flunked most big banks on a key test of whether they're still too big to fail as they rejected their plans for winding themselves down in a crisis.

The vote of no confidence raises questions about whether the system put in place by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law is going to prevent another bank bailout.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/0...#ixzz45ik0ydhd

In the Democratic debates, Bernie has consistently argued that the megabanks are too big to fail--and their executives too big to jail. He has also advocated that Glass-Steagall be reinstated as one (proven) measure to combat systemic risk in the financial system. Hillary, on the other hand, has argued that Dodd-Frank is sufficient to head off another banking meltdown. It isn't and it won't. I sincerely hope that Bernie draws on this new information to win the argument on this key issue in Thursday night's CNN debate.

Do you know how Bernie plans to break up the big banks? What is the legal means he would use, beyond Dodd-Frank?

Originally Posted by marypoza

Bernie is rocking this debate

Excellent summary of it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/15/op...f=opinion&_r=0

Originally Posted by Odin

Once you destroy the 2nd Amendment what other parts of the Bill of Rights to you want to go and abolish?

Actually, destroying the 2nd Amendment would be the best thing we can do the PRESERVE the other parts of the bill of rights. At least you can take heart that Ted Cruz is on your side.

But I know you redneck yahoos out in the heartland want to conceal and carry your guns so you can shoot up your neighborhood and sadistically kill lots of innocent animals. /snark/sarc

Naturally, gun advocates like Odin think ANY gun control or a lawsuit against distributors/manufacturers of military weapons who make those weapons available outside the military to unqualified folks is a violation of the 2nd amendment. They ought to be concerned instead that more shootouts, massacres, murders, suicides, accidents and endangered-species is the real threat to their 2A and their right to keep and bear arms.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

Do you know how Bernie plans to break up the big banks? What is the legal means he would use, beyond Dodd-Frank?

"Robert Reich: Sanders Knows How to Break Up the Big Banks—That's Why He Scares the Establishment"

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/robert-reich-sanders-knows-how-break-big-banks-thats-why-he-scares-establishment#.Vwv_ivnmlwM.email

The recent kerfluffle about Bernie Sanders purportedly not knowing how to bust up the big banks says far more about the threat Sanders poses to the Democratic establishment and its Wall Street wing than it does about the candidate himself.

Of course Sanders knows how to bust up the big banks. He’s already introduced legislation to do just that. And even without new legislation a president has the power under the Dodd-Frank reform act to initiate such a breakup...

...But Sanders threatens the Democratic establishment and Wall Street, not least because he’s intent on doing exactly what he says he’ll do: breaking up the biggest banks.

The biggest are far larger today than they were in 2008 when they were deemed “too big to fail.” Then, the five largest held around 30 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Today they have 44 percent...

And Bernie has some pretty hefty--and credible--company calling for megabanks to be broken up--and sooner rather than later:

...Bernie Sanders isn’t the only one urging the big banks be broken up. Neel Kashkari, the new president of the Federal Reserve bank of Minneapolis – a Republican who used to be at Goldman Sachs – is also pushing to break them up, as has the former head of the Dallas Federal Reserve, among others...

And this recent article from the Financial Times: "Explaining Bernie Sanders’ ‘too big to fail’ plan"

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8a176bc0-fda2-11e5-a31a-7930bacb3f5f.html#axzz45v0Ud9GS

...While the Dodd-Frank Act already gives the Treasury the authority to determine which financial institutions pose systemic risks to the economy, the Treasury has not actually broken up any financial institutions...

Five megabanks recently flunked their "living will" tests, so what's the big holdup in breaking them up? Could it be the record amount of campaign cash that Obama--and Hillary too, perhaps--has raked in from Wall Street? Just saying...

...Mr. Sanders said he could take two routes to break up the banks. One would be to use Section 121 of the Dodd-Frank Act while a second would be to get his 2015 “Too Big To Fail, Too Big to Exist” act to be passed by Congress. That act would bar any financial institution deemed too big to fail from receiving financial assistance from the Federal Reserve and force the Treasury to break up the banks — rather than just deeming them systemically risky, as the current legislation does.

Another part of Mr. Sanders’ plan for cutting banks down to size is to implement a 21st century version of the Glass-Steagall Act — a 1933 law that separated stolid deposit-taking banks from riskier investment activities. It was repealed by former president Bill Clinton in 1999, a business-friendly piece of deregulation that left a stain on his legacy in the eyes of many progressives.

That last sentence goes a long way, in my opinion, to explaining why Hillary may be "soft-pedaling" this vitally important issue.

So I ask you, how much more specific does Bernie have to get on this issue without coming across as a policy wonk? Especially in a debate format. Recall that FDR was deliberately vague about his specific plans to combat the Great Depression prior to his election and inauguration.

Originally Posted by Teacher in Exile

...Mr. Sanders said he could take two routes to break up the banks. One would be to use Section 121 of the Dodd-Frank Act while a second would be to get his 2015 “Too Big To Fail, Too Big to Exist” act to be passed by Congress. That act would bar any financial institution deemed too big to fail from receiving financial assistance from the Federal Reserve and force the Treasury to break up the banks — rather than just deeming them systemically risky, as the current legislation does.

Another part of Mr. Sanders’ plan for cutting banks down to size is to implement a 21st century version of the Glass-Steagall Act — a 1933 law that separated stolid deposit-taking banks from riskier investment activities. It was repealed by former president Bill Clinton in 1999, a business-friendly piece of deregulation that left a stain on his legacy in the eyes of many progressives.

That last sentence goes a long way, in my opinion, to explaining why Hillary may be "soft-pedaling" this vitally important issue.

So I ask you, how much more specific does Bernie have to get on this issue without coming across as a policy wonk? Especially in a debate format. Recall that FDR was deliberately vague about his specific plans to combat the Great Depression prior to his election and inauguration.

So it appears that either it's not true that Dodd-Frank doesn't go far enough or is inadequate, as you on the contrary said it was, OR that Sanders will get his legislation passed.

The latter may be hard unless he pulls off his "revolution" in congress. If congress should flip, due to Trump/Cruz on the ballot as well as to Bernie's and The Left's activism this election cycle, then Sanders could get it passed. That's a very big IF, but he would not even have to be elected president to get his legislation passed, in that case. But he'd still need President Hillary to implement it. Or she would have to use Dodd-Frank to break them up, if they are deemed a risk to the economy, and Dodd-Frank gives her the authority. Which she seems ready to do only if the economy is endangered by bank failures. I would agree with Sanders that, if the authority is there, they should be broken up now to prevent another economic tailspin.

She has been reluctant to agree to reinstate Glass-Steagall, maybe because of her ties to her husband. She counters that she has another plan that is more thorough and will be more tough on more financial institutions.

I think Bernie has to be just enough of a policy wonk to show that he knows what's he's talking about, and is not just shouting slogans. That concern has been raised about him, and so he needs to deal with it. He's running in the Democratic Party, against a policy wonk; not running in the Republican Party, against a demagogue. In the Fall, it may be different-- if he is nominated, and he can be "FDR." But that appears unlikely unless he gets a big upset win this Tuesday in NY.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

So it appears that either it's not true that Dodd-Frank doesn't go far enough or is inadequate, as you on the contrary said it was, OR that Sanders will get his legislation passed.

The latter may be hard unless he pulls off his "revolution" in congress. If congress should flip, due to Trump/Cruz on the ballot as well as to Bernie's and The Left's activism this election cycle, then Sanders could get it passed. That's a very big IF, but he would not even have to be elected president to get his legislation passed, in that case. But he'd still need President Hillary to implement it. Or she would have to use Dodd-Frank to break them up, if they are deemed a risk to the economy, and Dodd-Frank gives her the authority. Which she seems ready to do only if the economy is endangered by bank failures. I would agree with Sanders that, if the authority is there, they should be broken up now to prevent another economic tailspin.

She has been reluctant to agree to reinstate Glass-Steagall, maybe because of her ties to her husband. She counters that she has another plan that is more thorough and will be more tough on more financial institutions.

I think Bernie has to be just enough of a policy wonk to show that he knows what's he's talking about, and is not just shouting slogans. That concern has been raised about him, and so he needs to deal with it. He's running in the Democratic Party, against a policy wonk; not running in the Republican Party, against a demagogue. In the Fall, it may be different-- if he is nominated, and he can be "FDR." But that appears unlikely unless he gets a big upset win this Tuesday in NY.

"Democratic Debate: Clinton Dangerously Trumpets Obama’s Record"

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/04/democratic-debate-clinton-dangerously-trumpets-obamas-record/

During the series of Democratic debates, including the one last night hosted by CNN, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly trumpeted the record of President Obama in signing tough legislation to rein in Wall Street abuses when questioned on her money spigot flowing from Wall Street. According to her logic, since Obama’s campaign and his Super Pacs took plenty of money from Wall Street and went ahead and enacted tough Dodd-Frank reform legislation, why should her integrity be questioned...

Early in last night’s debate, when Sanders raised the fact that she and a Super Pac supporting her have taken $15 million from Wall Street, Clinton had this to say:

“Well, make — make no mistake about it, this is not just an attack on me, it’s an attack on President Obama. President Obama…You know, let me tell you why. You may not like the answer, but I’ll tell you why. President Obama had a super PAC when he ran. President Obama took tens of millions of dollars from contributors. And President Obama was not at all influenced when he made the decision to pass and sign Dodd-Frank, the toughest regulations on Wall Street in many a year. So this is — this is a phony — this is a phony attack that is designed to raise questions when there is no evidence or support, to undergird the continuation that he is putting forward in these attacks.”

What has remained unsaid in this debate cycle is that Dodd-Frank is the antithesis of financial reform with teeth and provided no real cops on the beat. Dodd-Frank is, in fact, the very evidence that Hillary says doesn’t exist to show that Wall Street bought itself a boatload of cozy deals from Obama in exchange for its cash windfall to his campaign.

When Obama took office in January 2009, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. At that point, Obama had two years to use his bully pulpit to enact meaningful legislation and put real cops on the beat. What did Dodd-Frank do instead? It gave increased authority to the Federal Reserve, the very regulator whose crony ties to Wall Street had prevented it from reining in the abuses that led to the 2008 crash. Just how ludicrous that structure was came into focus in 2012 when Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was sitting on the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as his bank was being investigated by the Fed for gambling in derivatives with depositor funds and losing $6.2 billion.

Not only did Dodd-Frank fail to end future taxpayer bailouts of the mega banks, as stated just this week by the Vice Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Thomas Hoenig on the occasion of three of the five largest banks in the country flunking their regulatory plans to unwind in a crisis without taxpayer assistance, but the largest banks have moved beyond the frauds perpetrated during the crisis to serial new frauds — like rigging the interest rate benchmark known as Libor, and manipulating physical commodities markets and electric markets. In May of last year, for the first time in U.S. history, two of the nation’s largest banks, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, admitted to felony counts related to rigging the foreign currency markets.

And exactly what was it that President Obama ended with the Dodd-Frank law that Hillary finds so inspiring? The Wall Street mega banks have gotten materially bigger since the crash. Wall Street’s former lawyers sit in the top seats at the SEC and only recently exited the Justice Department’s top posts, ensuring that no bank executives went to jail over their role in the crash.

The rating agencies are still taking Wall Street’s dough and handing out ratings. Wall Street CEO pay and bonuses are still obscene: For the year 2015, in which JPMorgan received its third criminal felony count in two years time and settled more multi-billion-dollar charges with regulators, costing shareholders $35 billion over the prior four years, the bank’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, who had been at the helm during this crime spree received a pay boost of 35 percent or $27 million in total compensation...

If Hillary becomes president, she had best pray that the recent predictions by both Trump and Cruz of a looming crash don't come to pass. She will have nowhere to hide, rhetorically. Bernie, at least, can say, "I told you so."

Originally Posted by Odin

Once you destroy the 2nd Amendment what other parts of the Bill of Rights to you want to go and abolish?

I'd be satisfied to restrict gun ownership to people who have legitimate cause to own guns -- like sport hunters. I can think of reasons that would cause me to possess a gun:

Bears nearby.

Cougars nearby.

(reference to the animals, of course).

Known sexual predator nearby.

Gang activity in the area.

None of those now apply to me.

Hillary makes that argument over and over again; she's kind of stuck on it, that Obama's PAC money didn't stop him from passing Dodd-Frank. I wish she would admit that Bernie has waged a better campaign, especially in the way he funds it.

I don't think Dodd-Frank cures all the misbehavior of the banks, nor does it prevent them from getting bigger and their CEOs richer. It does provide mechanisms to break them up and avoid taxpayer bailouts, since apparently that's what Sanders plans to use to do it, and Hillary plans to use to help cure a bank-caused recession.

I don't think increased authority in the federal reserve is a bad thing in itself; just like with the SEC and other regulators, it depends who staffs it and whether they do their job. So, in that last respect, Hillary tying herself to Obama means tying herself to too-Wall St/corporate/bank-friendly appointments to regulatory positions that Obama made. Bernie supporters need to tell Hillary that she needs to appoint regulators who are not tied to the interests that they regulate, but hold the interests of the people first. I admit that could be tough if she thinks that getting money from Wall Street and corporate PACs does not deter people (like herself and Obama) from doing strong and perceptive regulation on behalf of the people.

But Hillary can not only pray that the predictions of the Republican demagogues and fanatics Trump and Cruz don't come to pass, but she can look me up and feel relieved about my astrological prediction that they won't come to pass!

Bernie fiddles, Rome gets Berned

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/v...isionary-video

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

Hillary makes that argument over and over again; she's kind of stuck on it, that Obama's PAC money didn't stop him from passing Dodd-Frank. I wish she would admit that Bernie has waged a better campaign, especially in the way he funds it.

I don't think Dodd-Frank cures all the misbehavior of the banks, nor does it prevent them from getting bigger and their CEOs richer. It does provide mechanisms to break them up and avoid taxpayer bailouts, since apparently that's what Sanders plans to use to do it, and Hillary plans to use to help cure a bank-caused recession.

I don't think increased authority in the federal reserve is a bad thing in itself; just like with the SEC and other regulators, it depends who staffs it and whether they do their job. So, in that last respect, Hillary tying herself to Obama means tying herself to too-Wall St/corporate/bank-friendly appointments to regulatory positions that Obama made. Bernie supporters need to tell Hillary that she needs to appoint regulators who are not tied to the interests that they regulate, but hold the interests of the people first. I admit that could be tough if she thinks that getting money from Wall Street and corporate PACs does not deter people (like herself and Obama) from doing strong and perceptive regulation on behalf of the people.

But Hillary can not only pray that the predictions of the Republican demagogues and fanatics Trump and Cruz don't come to pass, but she can look me up and feel relieved about my astrological prediction that they won't come to pass!

"The Fed Sends a Frightening Letter to JPMorgan and Corporate Media Yawns"

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/04/the-fed-sends-a-frightening-letter-to-jpmorgan-and-corporate-media-yawns/

Yesterday the Federal Reserve released a 19-page letter that it and the FDIC had issued to Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, on April 12 as a result of its failure to present a credible plan ["living will'] for winding itself down if the bank failed. The letter carried frightening passages and large blocks of redacted material in critical areas, instilling in any careful reader a sense of panic about the U.S. financial system.

A rational observer of Wall Street’s serial hubris might have expected some key segments of this letter to make it into the business press. A mere eight years ago the United States experienced a complete meltdown of its financial system, leading to the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. President Obama and regulators have been assuring us over these intervening eight years that things are under control as a result of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. But according to the letter the Fed and FDIC issued on April 12 to JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank with over $2 trillion in assets and $51 trillion in notional amounts of derivatives, things are decidedly not under control.

At the top of page 11, the Federal regulators reveal that they have “identified a deficiency” in JPMorgan’s wind-down plan which if not properly addressed could “pose serious adverse effects to the financial stability of the United States.” Why didn’t JPMorgan’s Board of Directors or its legions of lawyers catch this?

It’s important to parse the phrasing of that sentence. The Federal regulators didn’t say JPMorgan could pose a threat to its shareholders or Wall Street or the markets. It said the potential threat was to “the financial stability of the United States.”

That statement should strike fear into even the likes of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who has been tilting at the shadows in shadow banks while buying into the Paul Krugman nonsense that “Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Is Working” when it comes to the behemoth banks on Wall Street.

Elizabeth Warren recently called out Paul Krugman--who's in the tank for Hillary--on this issue. Warren has far more credibility on this issue, as witnessed by the serious bank reform legislation that she has introduced. (If only she were running for President and not Hillary!)

How could one bank, even one as big and global as JPMorgan Chase, bring down the whole financial stability of the United States? Because, as the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR) has explained in detail and plotted in pictures (see below), five big banks in the U.S. have high contagion risk to each other. Which bank poses the highest contagion risk? JPMorgan Chase...

The Federal Reserve and FDIC are clearly fingering their worry beads over the issue of “liquidity” in the next Wall Street crisis. That obviously has something to do with the fact that the Fed has received scathing rebuke from the public for secretly funneling over $13 trillion in cumulative, below-market-rate loans, often at one-half percent or less, to the big U.S. and foreign banks during the 2007-2010 crisis...

...Three of the five largest U.S. banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo) have now had their wind-down plans rejected by the Federal agency insuring bank deposits (FDIC) and the Federal agency (Federal Reserve) that secretly sluiced $13 trillion in rollover loans to the insolvent or teetering banks in the last epic crisis that continues to cripple the country’s economic growth prospects. Maybe it’s time for the major newspapers of this country to start accurately reporting on the scale of today’s banking problem.

Originally Posted by marypoza

--actually Bernie's plan will save $, to the tune of $5 billion

Those savings are for the economy as a while. I am talking about the impact on me personally. Bernie will raise my taxes by 17K, but I will get Medicare out of it, which will replace my current health insurance that costs about 3K (I have employer-provided insurance). Result it costs me 14K more.

Consider: if Bernie is the nominee there will be high voter turnout & the Senate will probably flip.

If this is so why didn't voters show up in the primaries? Turning was considerably less than in 2008.

-- good observations I agree with most of them. But on obummercrap we're gonna have to agree to disagree. It's a f-ing ponzi scheme & it's wrong. You can rationalize it to me all you want but it's still wrong. I'm telling you this from my gut.

Many people have the same "gut" feel about Sander's that you do about Obamacare. The difference is the number of voters adversely affected (e.g. anyone would works for a big company with decent benefits) is much larger, and the negative impact is greater.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

Those savings are for the economy as a while. I am talking about the impact on me personally. Bernie will raise my taxes by 17K, but I will get Medicare out of it, which will replace my current health insurance that costs about 3K (I have employer-provided insurance). Result it costs me 14K more.


If this is so why didn't voters show up in the primaries? Turning was considerably less than in 2008.

Many people have the same "gut" feel about Sander's that you do about Obamacare. The difference is the number of voters adversely affected (e.g. anyone would works for a big company with decent benefits) is much larger, and the negative impact is greater.

For highly-paid professionals with employer-provided health coverage, that is a serious drawback.

Originally Posted by Odin

Nah, the only thing I have in common with Right-Libertarian Tea Party idiots is not liking paternalistic authoritarians like you.

You're so close but so far away.


Out of thousands of manufacturers and businesses, you want one and only one type to be protected from lawsuits. You want that special exemption because you are an ammosexual and don't give a shXt about legal consistency or fairness - its your way because you say so.

That, my friend, is the root of an authoritarian.

What you have in common with t-baggers is not an aversion to authoritarianism, you are an authoritarian. It's just that you all also lack self awareness and project your serious personality flaws onto others. You should look into it.

Originally Posted by playwrite

You're so close but so far away.


Out of thousands of manufacturers and businesses, you want one and only one type to be protected from lawsuits. You want that special exemption because you are an ammosexual and don't give a shXt about legal consistency or fairness - its your way because you say so.

That, my friend, is the root of an authoritarian.

What you have in common with t-baggers is not an aversion to authoritarianism, you are an authoritarian. It's just that you all also lack self awareness and project your serious personality flaws onto others. You should look into it.

Do any of the other manufacturers and businesses have their own constitutional amendment?

In the aftermath of World War I, the British government had a surplus of rifles they were selling off as scrap. As they didn't want these weapons falling into the hands of Irish rebels, they drilled a hole in the barrel to make the rifle unusable as a weapon. Not all these weapons were scrapped. Some found their ways into collector's hands. One such rifle found its way into the hands of a friend of mine, but neither the seller nor the gunsmith who refurbished the weapon noticed the hole. Thus, my friend lost a part of a thumb, and filed a successful lawsuit that collected a good deal from the seller and gunsmith.

There is a difference between a lawsuit where there is true negligence or misrepresentation of what is being sold, and a lawsuit for selling a good product which the purchaser has a constitutional right to purchase, a product which performs as advertised and designed. The US legal system does recognize the difference, and legislatures have written additional law to make the distinction very clear. I approve. Does this make me authoritarian?

Only in your very confused mind.

Whenever I see you use the word 'ammosexual', the word 'ammophobic' pops to mind. You seem to have an acute fear of firearms, one that severely impacts your ability to comprehend law or basic facts relating to gun policy. I'd really rather not get going again with attempting to educate you, but it is hard ignoring the disinformation and crazy notions you keep posting.