JaneAusten

I have zero interest in all the showboating about who Lebron will sign with but you have to admit the guy has done tons for the community. Coming from someone who loved Michael Jordan as a player but has watched him do zip to give back.

I have to say one more thing about healthcare. The idiots who defend the status quo and I am talking pre ACA, forget one big thing. Healthcare costs were going up astronomically. And do people think those who don't have healthcare don't goto a doctor when they get sick. They goto the emergency room, are not able to pay, so who do these folks think pay for this. Those of us who pay for insurance do when they raise our premiums to cover this. My 23 year old nephew at the time had an serious accident on an ATV. He broke his jaw, had to have several surgeries, and his teeth rebuilt. This was when we had the ACA but he decided to pay the IRS penalty because he didn't want to pay 80/month for a plan he qualified for. A plan that would ultimately have covered the majority of this costs. So what happened? He racked up over 100k in medical expenses and did what? Filed bankruptcy. Who paid for that? Those of us who actually pay our premiums do. And fortunately he now realizes what a dumbass he was and how irresponsible he was and has a good healthcare plan with his employer, which by the way unlike years back where employer provided healthcare was a given, has to pay for.

Where on earth is Bernie proposing we keep what we have now. If you mean medicare yes. And he's advocated for NOW under the GOP administration which is dismantling whats in place now(the ACA) is shoring it up and improving it. Medicare was not perfect when it was rolled out and it's not perfect now. But maybe again do some research on what Bernie Sanders(which was actually John Conyers bill he had been bringing to the table for the last 20 years) is a medicare like solution. Lord one thing proposed when the ACA was being compiled was lowering the Medicare age to 50. Why? Because it would lower the cost of private insurance and employer provided insurance. And when you talk about costs just yesterday a study was released showing the cost of Medicare for all would be 32 billion dollars. What it also said is that overall it would cut health costs, the actual national healthcare expediture by 2 trillion dollars. You know the actual cost of healthcare in the U.S. for ALL OF US. Last time I looked 2 trillion is more than 32 billion. https://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sanders-medicare-for-all-plan-cost-save-money-2018-7

I could care less anymore and totally discount the "how to pay for it argument" which is always based on smaller gvmt and deficit spending when we are close to a 1 trillion dollar deficit and refuse to cut defense spending and continue to overpay private defense contractors and private prison contractors. These people don't care about any of this unless it conflicts with something they don't want. Free free free except when women are blocked from controlling their own reproductive rights, when legalizing marijuana is popular, when keeping poor people in jail awaiting trial because they cannot afford bail(gee who makes money off of keeping these folks in jail).

Showing you are uninformed again. Canada for example(because I have family and friends who live there and use their healthcare system) does not RATION healthcare. What they do is prioritize care based on the most urgent need. That doesn't mean I can't see a doctor if I have the flu or that you cannot get preventative care, it means that someone who needs to have rhinoplasty surgery for example due to non life threatening sinus issues might not get the surgery immediately over someone who needs to have bypass surgery and without it may die. And you try and get into seeing a specialist in the United States anywhere under our great private healthcare system. My neighbor had to wait 6 weeks to get her daughter in to seeing a neurologist, who was diagnosed with epilepsy. In the meantime she ended up in the emergency room 3 times in that timeframe due to seizures. The neurologist by the way had access to additional testing metrics and other drug plans that a doctor of internal medicine does not have. Once she got in, she was put on a newly approved drug only available to specialists which turned out was able to control her seizures. She may have died from one of the 3 seizures she had while waiting for the appointment our great private healthcare system was able to provide to her. The Bernie Sanders plan as you call it is Medicare. Medicare where physicians and hospitals negotiate directly with the gvmt on the cost for procedures, doctor visits, surgeries and the providers who serve medicare patients(most providers by the way) agree to accept those payments. They don't have a middle man demanding to make a profit off of this as you do when you are dealing with an insurance company or doctors and hospitals upping costs because they know the insurance company is more than willing to pay it and skim off profit for themselves. Medicare allows seniors here to: - get healthcare expeditiously - get quality healthcare - get affordable healthcare This would save taxpayers and the gvmt by the way trillions of dollars. God forbid any of you want to save money when you are plenty happy paying private prisons $800/day to jail toddlers in detention camps to private prison contractors. Federally run prisons which are not for profit manage to jail prisoners for less than $200/day

I'm honestly ashamed of the response by Osborne. She would have been better to keep her mouth shut rather than respond in this fashion. Timing? Did she actually read the article?

I've had my issues with Farrow in the past, but I have to say he's had my utmost admiration and support from the time MSNBC canned him and axed his show. It's clear the show wasn't cutting it, but the way he was treated following that was frankly incredibly disrespectful. Their attempts to shut down the story that won him his Pulitzer for The New Yorker is perhaps the nudge his career actually needed to make him a real force to be reckoned with. I think it's extremely naïve of someone like Anderson Cooper and Leslie Stahl especially to believe that nothing went on because of how they have been treated.

Walker is pretty hated in Wisconsin but he has the Koch machine so I would not trust a thing. But frankly after 2016 who is trusting polls anymore.

You folks are assuming this hasn’t happened. It’s already happened out and open during the 2000, 2004, and yes even the 2008 elections Makes me physically ill. We are now growing future terrorists blatantly on our own soil. The best I can say is we are not gassing these refugees - yet.

Thats interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Part of the problem is that people don't get that the days of the family farm is gone. Most are owned by big agribusiness companies, so does anyone really believe this bailout will goto farmers directly. I've actually become a vegan this past year and a lot of it has to do with farm animal treatment along with the big agribusiness destroying our rural communities and people. I've tried to stay away from buying produce items from supermarkets and have gravitated to my local CSA and now that summer is here farmers markets also. But I am only one person and it's not what the majority even knows about or has the ability to do. And places like White Foods and Sprouts don't practice what they preach either.

Oh look how great the tariffs are working. Where are all the haters of big gvmt now that the tariffs are hurting farmers and the Trump administration is rolling out an FDR new deal program to bail out farmers. Our economy is so strong we need to roll out a New Deal depression era program when we had 40% unemployment to bail out farmers. I thought our economy was booming and he have record unemployment for all of us including those lily white working class and farmers. We can add farmers to big corporations as the recipients of government handouts and welfare now can't we? Or are they only handouts when it's healthcare and things that can help urban poor people. Free Market my *ss. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/white-house-readies-plan-for-12-billion-in-emergency-aid-to-farmers-caught-in-trumps-escalating-trade-war/2018/07/24/7bec9af4-8f4d-11e8-b769-e3fff17f0689_story.html?utm_term=.6e1b782caa30

I'm tired of the gaslighting and tired of people spewing the GOP/alleged "Libertarian" BS when they really don't understand a darn thing. I wonder if this person will come forward and ask why Walmart and Amazon encourage their employees to apply for public assistance while their shareholders and CEO's get richer and richer while the taxpayer has to foot the bill for public assistance for these people because our gvmt can't increase the minimum wage or because the benevolent CEO's and Corporations that benefit from government corporate welfare can't seem to afford to pay their workers a fair wage. People don't want regulation but then don't seem to care that the middle class is dying, unions killed, and the things that helped build a viable middle class has been ripped since the GOP/Reagan demonization of anything that forced our "benevolent" corporations to treat workers fairly. We see now after the great taxcut, wages have again dropped., yet keep hearing how great the taxcut is. None of these folks have seen a darn thing and are just spewing what their paymasters tell them to. Oh so the great taxcuts have had zero impact on WORKING Americans, in fact wages have dropped. Unless people are going to claim Bloomberg is some leftist publication now. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-18/trump-s-tax-cut-hasn-t-done-anything-for-workers?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-view&cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business

What on earth do you think Medicare covers? The reason Medicare exists was due to higher insurance costs for seniors making it unaffordable. The answer is take health insurance out of the hands of the private insurance industry as we have done with Medicare. Like every other country on earth has done including places like China and Russia. And no Canada, the UK, France, Denmark, Germany do not have crap healthcare or doctors who are gvmt employees. Frankly you folks are so limited in how you see things, you don't even realize how employers use private health insurance to keep you locked into working for them giving you less freedom to decide who you want to work for. If we had a National Healthcare Program like Richard Nixon actually proposed when he was president, it would work similarly to Medicare and guess what. Employers could get out of the business of providing healthcare for their employees, giving them more latitude to compete with companies globally who do not have to worry about it or the costs associated with it. Most importantly it would give citizens healthcare so you could work for whoever you want to without worrying about whether your healthcare plan would provide the type of coverage you need and want. And no Medicare is not going broke. We actually have a separate TAX CALLED PAYROLL TAX that was implemented to cover social security, medicare, and Medicaid., before you start telling me we cannot afford it and blah blah about more taxes. Maybe ask your senators and congress people why they keep lying to Americans about how these programs are going broke when they have a huge surplus. You know who's going broke? The gvmt where our federal INCOME TAX NOT PAYROLL TAX pay for things like defense spending and congressional healthcare and salaries. So if you want to save tax dollars start there with the secret sexual harassment settlement fund for congress, the lifetime healthcare they get for themselves and their families, and their salaries for doing nothing. Then start going after our bloated 1 trillion dollar military budget and private prison program where the costs we spend today are inflated by 500% over what we paid when we didn't pay private defense contractors and private prisons for gvmt responsibilities. That's how GREAT privatization is. Take a look and see how much we are paying to jail each toddler we put in an internment camp and how much money the prison industry is making off this then come back and cry about social security and medicare taxation.

I believe this 1000%. I think the only folks today who ID themselves as one party or another are true partisans. And with Independents Trump is in the water by over 25%. My brother, my nephew, and one of my best friends who is from Indiana, all diehard republicans no longer ID themselves that way. They all claim to be independents. And all hate Trump by the way. And out of the 3, my nephew is the only Trump voter. He never really liked him but now hates him with a passion. I won't get into the logic as to why he voted for him. It's not worth discussing but says it was the worst mistake he made.

So the "great" taxcuts have now driven wages down. But hey corporate America and the 1% are getting even richer. But rah rah the worthless taxcut. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-18/trump-s-tax-cut-hasn-t-done-anything-for-workers?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-view&cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business And this is the reality for so many people in this country and not just poor people but middle class folks. But it's so easy for folks to not give a darn.

I’ll give the great tax cut I got back in a heartbeat, a tax cut I haven’t seen, if it means I can have affordable healthcare. It’s nice for folks not to give a darn about the rest of America or folks like me who once again may have limited or no options for healthcare due to the preexisting condition mandate being stripped. But maybe you think I’m the one responsible for getting breast cancer several years ago like those who claim we with PEC are lazy and contribute to our own bad health. It’s so nice to see people beating the drums that have caused every world empire to crumble. Cut more domestic spending and programs to help real people while continuing to spend spend spend on the military. You really must love the military industrial complex and our now trillion dollar military budget. meanwhile in the real world most Americans have seen a negative impact on taxcuts, the trickle down approach has resulted in guess what, more golden CEO parachutes and stock buybacks, while we normal people see 1.50 a week while our health insurance skyrockets, interest rates rise, food prices up, gas prices up, farmers crying over tariffs they apparently thought the stable genius would exempt them from., and people at a Missouri nail manufacturer likely to close due to tariffs want a special exemption from the pain the stable genius caused. Maybe you work for a defense contractor or private prison if you live high on the hog these days. you can’t make this stuff up.

I actually agree with you on this. None of them thought leave would win the referendum therefore had no real plan on how to move forward. I can't stand the Tories or May, but they are all cowards, including that buffoon Boris Johnson. I am no Corbyn fan and lets face it, Labour does not really have a Brexit plan either, and I know another election is no option right now, but right now I'd give anything to see the Tories out period. I have also read a theory about Kennedy being pseudo forced out due to his sons relationship with Trump via Deutch Bank. Who knows. The suspicious part of all this is that Kennedy did hire law clerks for the next SCOTUS term so something is definitely up.

This is someone I follow on twitter and always appreciate her candor. Read this thread for the latest on Brexit and what's happened.

The times has also become The Onion when it comes to this ridiculous defense of their vote of the orange clown. They never seem to ask why poorer black evangelisticals turned away from him. They don’t want to write that article. Seriously this is just asinine.

The Kennedy aspect is disturbing but not surprising after watching Thomas rule on cases related to Monsanto when he had direct ties with them. I think whatever legacy Kennedy allegedly was going to have is tarnished but was already tarnished. He did believe in personal liberty which is what he used to hold up Roe, but he also riled on some of the most disastrous decisions in conservatives favor. We can thank him for Citizens United which is one of the main factors that is eating away at our politics today. As for ICE, I don't think the idea is that unpopular. Frankly I've been won over by the idea of taking bold but maybe not popular stands. I don't mean extreme left radical, but reasonable practical solutions. I think a re-examination of what ICE's original intent was and whether it's still needed. I just wish we could do the same for the dept of defense which sucks up now a trillion dollar budget.

I saw other polling in the Tennessee race which seems to be assured for Bredesen with the third party candidate running(the Trump nut), Democrats are ahead in polling in Ohio, Nevada, and in Montana. As of now Tammy Baldwin in Wi is ahead but its tight as is McCaskill. In terms of voter suppression, yes it's wrong. Why it hasn't been turned into a centerpiece I can't say. But here is my frustration. If Millennials would just show up to vote at even 40%, the democrats would never lose another election. And we could fix all the problems with voter suppression, gerrymandering, voter roll scrubbing, and such. These people complain about the GE candidates but cannot get out and vote in primaries when they could actually vote for a candidate they might be more passionate about. And people can f-off about protesting(not you Carl) - I'm talking about all the white men wagging their fingers at the rest of us telling us to be civil. Enough. I am not interested in one more stupid story about Trump voters despite the Times still stupidly pushing them on people. Jeremy Peters has to be the most insufferable smug piece of work at the times and that says a lot with people like Thrush, Haberman, and Peter Baker on staff

ICE arose from 9/11 so unless someone can explain what purpose it serves currently other than rounding up people to send to the gulags. I'm not suggesting we don't need some sort of law enforcement arm but ICE is and was never effective and is frankly out of control. I don't care if the bill goes nowhere now. AS LEAST someone is speaking out. And surely this is politics, a way to galvanize the democratic base. No one in Washington especially Donald Trump has any interest in solving problems. And it would not shock me at all that he manufactured this crisis on purpose because they know the tax cut has been such a monumental flop even with their base of voters.

Oh yes the GOP cares for the military so much they are covering up a report showing they are being poisoned. https://newrepublic.com/article/149280/military-drinking-water-crisis-white-house-tried-hide

Vee they are still doing it. They spent weeks on a narrative about how democrats were losing control of key races in the California primary citing alleged polling and such. And when the results started coming it and initially showed some positives for the GOP(which flipped as the night went on), they were crowing over it. MSNBC especially., Frankly they had eggs on their faces the next day when the GOP got locked out of 10 races in the state legislature and the democrats not one. I'm, sure a case could be made for a couple of races being close, but it's about winning elections as my Senator Durbin says. And I have not seen one publication or network apologize for their coverage. It still galls me that Scarborough can sit around and blame Trump being a democrat on the horribleness of the GOP. The only time I have ever seen a visible reaction to Scarborough's idiotic comments was when Whoopi Goldberg rolled her eyes at him and didn't say one word when he and his "fiancé" appeared on The View several months ago.