Flowers For Algeria posted:

^^^^^^^^edit: shut up you, don't remind me that lieberman is still alive


Or... you could compare it to foreign systems, or to systems that were in competition against it and that were actually debated in committee, or to pretty much every other imaginable health care system

And according to all these metrics, ppaca was bad. It had some good in it, but so did Mass Effect Andromeda, and everyone agrees that Mass Effect Andromeda was a Bad Game.

Fulchrum posted:

Ah yes, Spider-Man's most famous power, belly button projection.

Pants Donkey posted:

We interrupt this feud with a shocking report: Payne suddenly says firing Comey was a bad idea.

Stay tuned for further developments.

Fulchrum posted:

Right, because last time literally nothing happened due to Democrat efforts to reform healthcare being undermined and producing nothing.

Last time around, attempts to reform healthcare were destroyed by hardliners who refused to work on anything that wasn't single payer

Fulchrum posted:

Alright, let's compare it to all those foreign systems that tried to completely overhaul their entire healthcare system from scratch overnight with a population the size of America's who are that pathologically opposed to taxes and big dramatic change.

Fulchrum posted:

And no, that analogy doesn't work, cause Mass Effect Andromeda is a worse game than the Mass Effect trilogy, which is what came before it, you idiot. A good analogy would be last year's Doom. So, even though it's better than what came before it in every way and is making real positive change that people want, it's poo poo, because it's not Half Life 3. Nobody promised you Half Life 3. Half Life 3 is never gonna happen. But you want Half Life 3, so anything that isn't Half Life 3 is garbage and awful.

Shangri-Law School posted:

1

sleeptalker posted:

And why pray tell, you loving moron, were the Democrats who supported single-payer the outliers and not the majority? Why was the party that ran on providing universal health care and won the presidency from an incumbent in 1992, while maintaining control of the Senate and the House, so hard-pressed to come up with the single-payer policy that everyone expected rather than a bizarrely complex and business-friendly market-based solution? Could it be that they never actually supported single-payer healthcare in the first place, and used misguiding terminology in their campaign to attract the voters who did? Or is that just how politics works?

Shangri-Law School posted:

4

Pants Donkey posted:

Jesus, it feels like years since the David S. Pumpkins sketch.

Cat Mattress posted:

From what I understand they all touched together a novelty lamp shaped like a representation of the Earth to turn it on; and it was in the middle of something that supposedly is an anti-terrorist propaganda center or something. The desired symbol was one of a world united in a fight against terrorism, I presume. Instead it ended up looking like a weird occult ritual by a bunch of power-hungry despots in a Bond villain base.

Pants Donkey posted:

Flowers For Algeria posted:

I mean there literally was a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate AND a majority in the House, but nooooooo, incrementalism and market-based solutionsssss are the only way forward

People like you are the reason why Democrats suck so hard

MelvinBison posted:

My eyes glazed over around the Public Good part, but I managed to come back in time to see him claim to own Spider-Man.

Jurgan posted:

I hate this "filibuster-proof majority" line. There were 60 people in the Democrats' Senate caucus for about five months total (Franken's election was delayed and Ted Kennedy died), and that includes Joe Lieberman. If all of the 60 were rock-solid leftists, then there would have been a better plan. Thanks to McConnell's non-stop filibustering every single Democrat or Democrat-affiliated independent had to vote yea for anything to pass, so Lieberman had the leverage to personally kill the public option.


There's no doubt that he has a strong claim to Spider-Man, and probably had more influence on him than Lee did for a while there. It's also true that Marvel was pretty terrible about respecting the contributions of their artists, which is why MacFarlane and a bunch of others left to form Image (though they ultimately weren't much better).

Fulchrum posted:

I like how you projecting ideas onto their 1992 campaign and sticking to your own dogmatic idea that the only acceptable form of healthcare is single payer, is somehow their fault. That they somehow tricked America, who all universally wanted Single payer, by pretending that they'd do that, only to then try to put in their own plan.

Also, how in the 900 flavors of gently caress was Hillarycare "Business friendly"? It was putting 100% of the cost of health care directly ON businesses, with subsidies paid by the government for those self employed or who did not or could not work. It was a universal health care program that would have worked. The problem was that people decided that endless goddamn infighting and insisting that they had a better system was a good idea, and in the end, we got abso-loving-lutely nothing.

Jurgan posted:

I hate this "filibuster-proof majority" line. There were 60 people in the Democrats' Senate caucus for about five months total (Franken's election was delayed and Ted Kennedy died), and that includes Joe Lieberman. If all of the 60 were rock-solid leftists, then there would have been a better plan. Thanks to McConnell's non-stop filibustering every single Democrat or Democrat-affiliated independent had to vote yea for anything to pass, so Lieberman had the leverage to personally kill the public option.

Horrible Lurkbeast posted:

First thought that came at this cartoon:
Do you think Trump has a plan to be interred after his death in a pure gold sarcophagus with an army of mummified servants at his side?

"New Yorker magazine: Where Trump Wants to Be Buried" posted:

American Presidents traditionally choose to be buried in their home towns, often in sight of a library built in their honor. If Donald J. Trump were to win the election, that might change. Although five of his relatives are interred in the Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery, in Middle Village, Queens, Trump has been making plans to spend eternity behind the first tee of one of the courses at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. “Wouldn’t you want to be buried here?” he told the Wall Street Journal, in 2015.

It is likely that Trump has no idea that the landscape architect of the club, whose members reportedly pay an initiation fee of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, was a real-life version of Chance, the gardener—a twenty-four-year-old local named Andy Sick, who had no prior horticultural experience.

Last week, Sick, now thirty-six and a civil-litigation lawyer and app developer who lives in Brooklyn, was sitting at a table at the Tewksbury Inn, a golfer-friendly joint down the street from the club. “It was supposed to be just this summer job before I headed off to law school. It paid seven-fifty an hour,” Sick, who has a red beard, said. “I was just a tree-cutter-downer.”

Things went smoothly for three weeks, until Trump suddenly fired the golf course’s superintendent, Sick’s boss. Trump had bought the property in 2002, from investors who’d bought it from the automaker John DeLorean in a bankruptcy sale. But two years and millions of dollars later, there was still no golf course.

A few days after the boss was fired, one of Trump’s golf-course architects, Tom Fazio, Jr., spotted Sick planting petunias. “He asked me if I was the landscape architect,” Sick said. “I told him yeah. My only gardening experience was mowing my parents’ lawn.”

Fazio told Sick to get to work, so he went home that night and Googled “French formal gardens.” “I knew Trump liked ostentatious stuff, so the gardens of Versailles were a perfect fit. I wasn’t even looking at other golf courses. I was just looking at grandiosity.” Sick ordered boxwoods and topiaries from a local nursery to frame Bedminster’s main clubhouse, DeLorean’s old Georgian-style home. He pulled up a recent photograph of the house on his cell phone. “Except for the annuals, this is all my stuff,” he said.

Early on in Sick’s planting, Trump paid a surprise visit. He loved what he saw. “Once that happened, I was given an unlimited budget,” Sick said. His ambitions quickly outgrew the local nurseries’ capacities, so he ordered tractor-trailers filled with trees from the West Coast. “Trump once spoke to one of my co-workers. He said, ‘Really good job, really good job.’ ”

After spending between two and three hundred thousand dollars of Trump’s money, Sick got nervous. “I was worried the plants were going to die,” he said, so he e-mailed a high-school friend who had studied landscape architecture for guidance.

A few months went by, and Sick, who was still earning seven-fifty an hour, decided to ask for a raise. “The new boss asked me how much I was making. I told him it didn’t matter—I wanted seventy-five to a hundred dollars an hour. He agreed to a hundred.” At the end of the summer, Sick had to quit to start his first year of law school, at Syracuse.

Trump ended up liking the golf club so much that, in 2007, he filed plans with Somerset County to build a family mausoleum there, decorated with nineteen-foot-tall stone obelisks. Local authorities were skeptical, and Bedminster’s mayor, Robert Holtaway, argued before the city council that a Trump grave could attract the wrong sort of people, comparing it to a place “in Austria where a Nazi war criminal was buried” that “became a tourist attraction.”

In 2009, as the mausoleum debate raged, Ivanka Trump married Jared Kushner at the Bedminster club, surrounded by Sick’s Versailles-inspired boxwoods. More recently, the club has served as Trump’s debate-prep war room, where Kushner, Rudy Giuliani, Roger Ailes, and Kellyanne Conway coached him to take on Clinton. Last summer, with the permits finally secured, Trump broke ground on the tomb. When the work began, Fox News reported on the development with a headline that would be hard for any editor to resist: “Trump Is Digging His Own Grave.”

sleeptalker posted:

Did you not know that the they copied specifically the universal healthcare rhetoric of Jesse Jackson's '88 primary campaign? Because that was for single-payer, and Clinton's 1992 campaign used the same messaging to promote a completely different plan, one that would have been just as "universal" as the ACA which is to say not really because it still ends up with people going bankrupt from medical crises. And it's bullshit blaming the infighting on those who wanted the obvious proven system that their voters expected instead of on the Democratic leadership's unwillingness to consider anything but their pet think tank solution created to appease a for-profit industry.

sleeptalker posted:

Did you not know that the they copied specifically the universal healthcare rhetoric of Jesse Jackson's '88 primary campaign? Because that was for single-payer, and Clinton's 1992 campaign used the same messaging to promote a completely different plan, one that would have been just as "universal" as the ACA which is to say not really because it still ends up with people going bankrupt from medical crises. And it's bullshit blaming the infighting on those who wanted the obvious proven system that their voters expected instead of on the Democratic leadership's unwillingness to consider anything but their pet think tank solution created to appease a for-profit industry.

QuoProQuid posted:

It is extremely funny that you ask that.

MikeyTsi posted:

It was considered, and then discarded because the "filibuster proof majority" wasn't going to loving happen with it in there. The GOP was going to party-line vote against anything period, and you can't pass it in the Senate with 59 votes.

There was nothing nefarious. They had the choice of incremental improvement or nothing, and they chose to do what improvement they could.

Apple Pie Hubbub posted:

After The War posted:

Glad to see someone still doing Mort Drucker-style caricatures.

Fulchrum posted:

And leftist hardliners ensured that "Nothing" won the day.

Well, nothing and a decades long smear campaign against Hillary Clinton. But when would that ever cause a problem?

Also, they didn't have 59 votes, they had 57, in an election that did nothing to shift the balance in the senate and gave seats to Republicans in the House.

MikeyTsi posted:

And so, lacking any actual response, you now try to shift the topic.

Just concede or shut up already.

Fulchrum posted:

What the gently caress? The only argument you can come up with is that the Clintons ran on universal healthcare in the general after Jesse Jackson ran on it in the Democratic Primary 4 years earlier before he was crushed by Dukakis, therefore that was willful deception because people couldn't have been expected to notice that their plan for universal healthcare was different to a single payer system, and was therefore evil and wrong and would only make things worse?

Do you have any clue how few people in 1992 even knew that Jackson was advocating single payer?

Also, are you gonna back up how health crises could bankrupt people under the Clinton Health system? Or is it just more "its not exactly what I want, therefore it is pure evil because I know it is"?

MikeyTsi posted:

We're talking about the ACA. Stop trying to change the subject.

MikeyTsi posted:

We're talking about the ACA. Stop trying to change the subject.

Apple Pie Hubbub posted:

Dork457 posted:

Didn't the ransomware only target Windows XP machines?

sleeptalker posted:

Holy poo poo did Ramirez actually turn?

Fulchrum posted:

It's weird. This posts bears no relationship to reality, and yet it's such a widely held belief by stupid people, that I can't tell if it's sarcastic or not.