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Voyager I posted:It's getting hard for me to follow politics because current events make me so angry, especially around the healthcare bill. There is sincere murder in my heart for Paul Ryan, and while I don't think it's wrong (if he has his way, he will knowingly be responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people), it's not really a place I want to be. Other than just tuning out for a bit, what are some strategies people have for coping with this level of anger? Exercise if you're fortunate enough to be healthy. Also, look for people places and ways you can put your feet on the ground in protest or in service. Look for meals on wheels and volunteer programs that dovetail with your skills and inclinations. Part of this right wing enfilade is built on atomizing society and breaking people with convergent interests apart. Resist that by standing with your fellows. Failing that, the best last resort for terror and anomie is and remains a unitarian church social night. Meet and be with people, and keep your body healthy for the long night to come, and for the day of reckoning that will follow.
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Jun 26, 2017 20:35
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That CBO score does not reflect merely death and suffering, it also reflects the practical collapse of medical care as an industry. If this passes, there will be layoffs overnight across multpile industries. Doctors, nurses, hospital admin, social workers, counselors and therapists, janitors, orderlies, insurance adjusters, my god. This bill is recession that will hit immediately, and will devastate a load bearing pillar industry in a massive, cross-cutting way.
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Jun 26, 2017 21:33
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This bill would effectively end rural hospitals, urgent care centers, all but the most gold plated hospice and nursing homes, pre and neonatal care for the plurality of infants, and would wreak complete havoc on drug rehab and treatment, out patient, non emergency mental health services, and..god, on and on. They are talking about stripping ten digits of public facing money from healthcare generally. Also very important to look past raw coverage figures and think long and hard about what the collapse of aca insurance definitions means for those who still have insurance. Lifetime caps. Post illness recission. Jesus.
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Jun 26, 2017 21:49
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Passing this bill would be so immediately horribly destructive to such a wide variety of peoplease and industries I almost hope they do it, because the counterpunch will be swift by necessity. This will not be like gutting welfare in the 90s where the consequences are abstruse and longitudinal. The consequences will be loving right now immediate. They tried to protract things out and obscure the destruction, but you can't with this.
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Jun 26, 2017 22:21
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They may back off from this, like children caught with their hands in the cookie chair, whistling nonchalantly. If they do, don't ever let anyone forget that but for their inability to successfully lie and get away with it, these ghouls would happily cash checks on dead children and ruined industries.
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Jun 26, 2017 23:00
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Everything is amazing, but maybe the most amazing is to see all this jailhouse lawyering horseshit from well heeled masters of the universe types. This is almost sovereign citizen level willful self delusion. White shoe lawyers with clients who behave like nightmare clients at the public defenders office. Surreal.
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Jul 11, 2017 17:41
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Hmm this disgraced Romanian neo nazi makes a good point...
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Jul 11, 2017 17:44
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EwokEntourage posted:there's a perverse joy in watching another lawyer get hosed over by a lovely client Watching rich white shoes mangle client control with manifestly guilty super dumb rear end hole clients with social media accounts is so so cathartic. These trumpies are like sovereign citizen levels of dumbfuck. It's amazing, and there won't likely be another moment you can see honest to god client control and jailhouse lawyer poo poo coming out the white house.
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Jul 11, 2017 20:37
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Like at some point I can see in my head Jeff Sessions turning to some senior partner at Aiken Gump at a bond hearing going off about how that motherfucker ain't represent him, and he'll plead not guilty right here and it's amazing
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Jul 11, 2017 20:40
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I like Wray saying his response to illegal pressure from trump would be to resign. Comey failed to do his job and head in for one last meeting with a wire and a keyword script, and now the takeaway is that administrative cops resign instead of investigating active government criminal conspiracy. Apparently you wave a 20 at a traffic cop, and he takes the long walk like Sydow in the Stallone Dredd movie.
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Jul 12, 2017 23:15
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Phoix posted:How is this the real world that we live in. Oh, demon alcohol Sad memories I can't recall Who thought I would fall Enslaved to demon alcohol
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Jul 13, 2017 21:58
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Kasowitz could easily get a public reprimand or somesuch from his state bar on this, but the thing he really needs to think about is his drinking, and the real worry he has with the bar is his drinking.
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Jul 13, 2017 22:22
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mdemone posted:Hell I forgot about that. I wonder how many clients/opposing counsel he's drunkenly emailed threats to. The state bar of ny already 100% for sure received this email and a temperament complaint. If this isn't his first, and I don't think it is, when he has to respond to the bar, and he will, it would be awkward to say the least.
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Jul 13, 2017 22:31
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Prester Jane posted:At this point I am developing a pet hypothesis that Russia saw Citizens United as a massive opportunity to funnel money into vulnerable US politicians- and wound up funding a fair portion of the GOP establishment as a result. Further, I suspect the Russians may learned from what the Koch bro's did in creating the Tea Party and are using that as a model to steer/manipulate the alt-right. I am also very suspicious that Russia might have been quietly funding certain American fringe media figures like Alex Jones and the like- certainly Russia has no problem in openly using state assets like RT to support people like Alex Jones.
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Jul 14, 2017 16:44
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Don't mock that dude, he can't help it. Over time, every trial lawyer starts to look more and more ridiculous. By the time a trial lawyer hits 80, most have actually become daguerrotype photographs in saloons. It's a real problem in the community, and there is no cure.
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Jul 14, 2017 17:00
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Chilichimp posted:Price is a callous rear end in a top hat. Nobody does dumb like nominally white collar types in career tracks that camouflage rote memorization as intelligence. Dumb doctors and dumb lawyers have sovereign citizen levels of global dumbness. I used to know solo practitioner lawyers and small practice doctors who had the exact tin foil health insurance for themselves that the aca outlawed. They were pissy as can be that Obama wouldn't let them get cheated anymore and even though you'd think they'd be professionally situated to grasp that they'd purchased trash and nothing, they would and could not grasp it. Never underestimate the stupidity and cupidity of an educated rube. They're the building blocks of all grifts.
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Jul 17, 2017 12:30
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The really shocking thing about the ACA is not how good or bad it was, or how good or bad it has made the system. The real story is how utterly horrible the old system was. It was not so long ago you had parents with health insurance leave neonatal with babies who had already hit lifetime coverage gaps. It was not so long ago that having fibromyalgia was effectively a uniquely painful way to be paralyzed without recourse. It was not so long ago insurers could and would break your policy and pay you some premiums back if you contraced HIV, or cancer, or hepatitis a. As with most social programs, the most shocking thing is how we lived before it, and that we allowed ourselves to live that way for so long for so little reason.
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Jul 17, 2017 14:16
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Pre ACA, the American health care system was an unjustifiable expensive grift, a sort of arcane medical Calvinism. It was a story written to humiliate the conscience. Now it's just bad and overpriced. Before, though, everyone went everyone by the grace of providence and too much money.
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Jul 17, 2017 14:21
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It would be really nice to see the democratic party take the initiative on something... I hear encouraging stuff out of state and local politics, more effort to bring in young people, more interest in locall organizational positions. I'm not seeing a lot out of the DNC, I'm hoping they're still heavily restaffing under Perez and Ellison. I haven't heard much of or from the dccc.
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Jul 18, 2017 12:34
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Inferior Third Season posted:Here, have an update: But who the gently caress releases a bumper sticker as a show of work product? Like your lawyer sends you a picture of a judge wearing a silly hat? Also, that whirlwind sticker - if you're using whirlwind absent immediate context, the most common reaction will be blank, and the second most will be connecting the phrase to the biblical allusion. So what the hell is in that well that they want to go there? I might actually like a bumper sticker in that vein, like one that just reads, "Reap the whirlwind." Or one that just reads, "You have made covenant with Hell." That's not really a positive message, but at least it has a sliver of thought to it.
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Jul 18, 2017 13:01
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TheScott2K posted:Honestly all I want the Democrats to do this year is let the Republicans hang themselves while quietly staffing up for the midterms, which is what they seem to be doing. Push policies closer to when people actually vote. Still though I'd love to have some democratic party consensus platform to work with and look at and engage with. Need a new shiny. There's this agonizing void right now where the democratic party long term grownup health care plan should stand as counterpoint and it's driving me antsy. The past six months have been a horror show of sleepy old profligate trying to talk themselves into murder in the dark reaches of a long night. It has been so loving surreal and meaningless in that threatening way caprice gets when it's well funded. Just be nice to have a countervailing message out there.
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Jul 18, 2017 13:46
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evilweasel posted:you are buying her propaganda instead of looking at her nearly universal support for trump when the chips come down Arlen Specter, for all he was, torpedoed the appointment of one Jeff Sessions to the federal bench, because Jeff Sessions is Jeff Sessions, and he had such integrity. Susan Collins, by contrast, helped put Sessions in charge of the DOJ, because Jeff Sessions is Jeff Sessions. She is pretending to occupy that political space, but she does not occupy that political space. She is a cardboard cutout.
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Jul 18, 2017 16:11
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Watching American right wingers try to sell Roma hate to their us public makes me wonder just how much cross pollination there is at this point between European and American white supremacists in their respective propaganda outlets.
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Jul 18, 2017 17:09
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Steve Bannon has the look of a science fiction author who died drunk on a houseboat.
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Jul 18, 2017 23:45
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So Sen Feinstein has a briefing with Mueller, and she asks him a question like, "Does your investigation preclude them testifying in a public hearing?" And he says "No, of course not," because he has no gag order authorities and what prosecutor would say no to having two suspects saying poo poo under oath in public? Two things happen. First, the senator has a counter if the trumps try to pull some variant on their IRS audit horseshit. Second, the senator has the means to create that headline whenever she wants that reads a lot like a subpoena though it isn't. Well played.
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Jul 19, 2017 01:58
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They pay people to help them pretend they're big game hunters, they steal on invoice and bribe local officials so they can pretend they're developers, they grift charity to pretend they're decent, and now they got a country that's so deep in pretense itself that it'd let them pretend they're governing. There is nothing in these people but pretense.
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Jul 19, 2017 13:35
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The millenial generational cohort and the one coming after are not merely more left wing or more blue, they're both far more importantly far more brown. At the moment, the Republicans have doubled down several times over on voter suppression and closely related immigration crackdowns designed to disrupt the path to citizenship. They at the same time are lobbying for more non citizenship path temp guest worker passes for low wage work. The goal here is obvious, to paralyze the ability of as many brown people as possible to vote every which way they can. The hope for the future of this country lies not in some improvement to the politics of the next iteration of white peole, it lies in the brown people this administration is trying to ghettoize through imigration law. The most underreported story in American politics right now is ICE moving against law abiding undocumented folks after exhausting the entire list of ones who actually did crime here. They've flooded the immigration courts with the equivalent of bogus probation violation show causes to overburden the court and place a soft freeze on people fixing their immigration status. Randbrick fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Jul 19, 2017 |
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Jul 19, 2017 16:20
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The biggest thing I worry about in people my age a little older and on down to 18 19 or so, especially white people, and especially men, is social anomie and online crap replacing real social interaction. I don't say this because it's a real insight or because I am so wise, more because my god I just became old. Dog picture? I don't know how to do it. Oh dear.
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Jul 19, 2017 16:51
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DreamShipWrecked posted:
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Jul 19, 2017 17:44
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The whole drug money angle is definitely there in forfeiture, but it's not just drugs. In some states, forfeiture will be had on any instrumentalities of a felony, like say a 3rd or subsequent dwi, the states could try to take the car. And it isn't just money. You'll see forfeiture for jewelry, nice shoes, good coats. Saw it once against a wedding ring. It's become a formalized system for the sort of police action where you're out at night driving through the boonies and deputy dawg from the nowherevile sheriff dept really likes your shoes, son, how'd a feller like yew come to have such nice shoes, body's gotta wonder.
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Jul 19, 2017 19:27
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PneumonicBook posted:I'm a leftist who agrees with gun control but this rhetoric is loving insufferable fyi, and will never lead to any worthwhile discussion in this country. One day, years ago, one of his guns went missing, and was thankfully found. The next day he sold all the guns he had, some 30 or so, some quite nice. He bought a boat with the money. We lived in a desert at the time, and he said he'd rather have a boat that he'd never use than a lethal weapon he no longer felt properly secure. This is because he is a responsible person. That language is precisely how he talks about guns now. It lead to worthwhile discussion, with me, with some of his relatives, with some of his old army buddies and work friends. I don't find that rhetoric insufferable. I find it honest and essential.
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Jul 19, 2017 22:03
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PneumonicBook posted:So responsible he couldn't keep tabs on his guns evidently. Kudos to him for realizing that and getting rid of them I suppose. Both. He addresses and understands guns as deadly weapons with a tendency to shoot children, often by children. He also thought back to people he knew where he grew up, rural, as they say, and the mishaps, disasters, and escalation that guns present. They're fun, they're profoundly satisfying in a really immediate pavlovian way, and they're also weapons designed to kill rapidly, repeatedly, and at range. That is a really loving weird mix.
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Jul 19, 2017 22:32
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Repealing Obamacare would immediately withdraw an enormous amount of money from the health care system, as it would eliminate the expanded eligibility criteria and coverages that comprised the medicaid expansion. It would also eliminate the subsidies and therefore policies for the working poor and middle class, as they'd either lack coverage at worst or at best have less coverage under less generous plans. This assumes, though, that people aren't underinsuring or witholding potentially discretionary income or savings they could otherwise spend on health coverage. The scope of these two changes would effectively drain the risk pool locality by locality and cascade to a national crescendo. Thinking through just how bad the straight repeal would land in policy terms is truly sobering and horrifying.
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Jul 19, 2017 22:44
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Bear in mind that millions of health insurance policies means economic activity. This is not like right wing economics where you lie about numbers and fraud, but real old proper labor economics. 32 million insurance policies is 32 million people going to doctors, getting surgery, having medical supplies, filling prescriptions. 32 million insurance polices is doctors nurses orderlies therapists counselors psychologists receptionists billing people sales people marketing people on and on. 32 million insurance policies are jobs that stay filled cause people aren't dead, or because grandma has a nice home and goddammit dignity, it's business, and it's life. To effectively cut that much life and activity from the economy is of itself a massive depression. And that's just by foreword.
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Jul 19, 2017 22:52
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Forfeiture is an extreme presentation of something really dark and secret in the heart of the American legal tradition. We have a presumption that it is suspect for certain people to have money. I am not being metaphorical. When prosecutors have solid cases, they convict, by plea or trial. Forfeiture is for when they don't. In those cases, literally, to reach the 50%+1 of proof by a preponderance of the evidence standard, the evidence reads like, "Black man driving car with a bunch of money." The only way such a case could prevail is if there were a presumption, informal or otherwise, that the fact of possession by person looking like x is suspect. I did not use an adjective to describe the black man's car. That is because the same trooper talking about a nice car or a lovely car, or a suspiciously average car is talking to the same circuit court judge. They can agree that any black man's car is suspect for any reason, no matter how it looks.
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Jul 19, 2017 23:23
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They murdered a Russian forensic accoutnant named Magnitsky. He was hired by an investor some Russian oligarchs ripped off. Magnitsky uncovered massive graft fraud and theft, and then Russian government imprisoned him and beat him to death. The act is a series of targeted sanctions against individual Russian oligarchs. Putin retaliated by freezing American parents who sought to adopt Russian orphans, because he and his are genuinely awful trash people. Hence, adoptions. Randbrick fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Jul 20, 2017 |
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Jul 20, 2017 01:02
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Well that was a whole lot of poo poo that just happened all at once.
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Jul 20, 2017 04:27
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Antti posted:One of the big underreported stories is that Medicaid expansion was one of the key cornerstones of PPACA and the people drafting it didn't fully consider the notion that a state would cynically turn down free money from the federal government for purely partisan reasons. One of the legal attacks on the aca which made its way to the Supreme Court resulted in a 5 4 split where the Roberts ignored prior precedent and made it possible for states to reject the money, keep in their state the old narrower eligibility criteria, and say no to the money on behalf of their constituents. People at that time were suguesting that no state would cynically turn down that money after their politburo judges cynically allowed them to do so.
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Jul 20, 2017 12:56
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That newest otherworldly interview with the NYT is more than baffling than the last few. I wondered why he decided to do this, but I genuinely think he felt frustrated and lonely that the health care thing didn't result in the level of approval and validation he needs. He needed Maggie to show up and nod deferential at him and say yes to him and soothe him with her non confrontational manner. O kept calling him wrong too often, because I kept hunting through his shithouse behavior for plans and strategy. But this isn't planned, he's acting on need and desire and pathology.
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Jul 20, 2017 13:17
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Smol posted:I just want to know that what kind of work does a guy like Manafort actually do to earn a $12M (or whatever the exact sum was) paycheck. You got a bunch of cash, but it's stolen. You need to domesticate and clean that cash so you can continue being baller. You'd hire a Manafort to take that cash and buy real estate on the us through an anonymous llc. Like that time Paul Manafort got caught at lax with 10 million in money stolen out the Filipino treasury in a briefcase, working for Marcos, because that's his loving game. Maybe if prosecutors hadn't spent the past few decades being lazy cowards who take a cut of money laundered proceeds for their win and instead put these fuckers in jail we wouldn't have so many renowned money launderers running around.
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Jul 20, 2017 16:11
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