The Glade 4.0

Had you just killed Reed Richards...



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Raell Kromwell

What do identity politics have to do with Obamacare? They were used to some extent to sell the law to the public but Obamacare itself doesn't discriminate based on race or sex.

Reforming Medicare is 1000x more important than doing anything about Obamacare. The entire concept of trying to provide 20+ years of medical care to the elderly off a 1.45% payroll tax is utterly laughable. Germans pay four times this amount to support their equivalent, and since their system is twice as efficient that implies we'd have to pay eight times just to make Medicare sustainable in the long term.

Comparing the United State with a country that has half the area of Texas and roughly the same population as New York, California and Texas combined is ridiculous.

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"If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me." - Alice R. Longworth

"Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun." - Ash Williams

To be fair to Mus, I didn't take his criticism of our government in that regard as targeted at the R-team. I saw it as him saying "let's just stop defense spending and give everybody free stuff."

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The Dude abides.

This much is actually not a factor in Canadian health coverage costs.

It's not that you aren't correct that pharmaceuticals are far more expensive in the USA...that's true, but... our universal health care does not cover pharmaceuticals. We either pay out of pocket, or have private/employer health insurance for our prescription medications.

However...

Canadians pay an average of $1100 per citizen per year on private health care costs. This includes the cost of private insurance, as well as out of pocket expenses for things not covered by our universal insurance. (If you include this $1100 in the cost of Canadian healthcare, you also have to find out what americans spend out of pocket for private insurance or procedures not covered by their insurance and add it to the $5000. As the ACA doesn't pay for health insurance for middleclass or rich Americans, this number is going to be a LOT more than $1100.)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Social policies are always sold as directly necessary to benefit either a minority group or women, or are sold on economic grounds to help poor people - followed by decrying opposition as "racist" or "anti-women" because of different demographics regarding income. Almost any federal law has provisions in it somewhere - or is tied to pre-existing ones - intended to benefit females or minorities.

We cannot have a German-like arrangement of "pay taxes and get benefits" because our entire political debate proceeds with an underlying assumption that equal treatment is unfair.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I was wrong. This won't be fun.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I dunno, the wailing, moaning, clothes rending and "the sky is falling" hyperbole is sort of entertaining...

I strongly disagree.

I'm greatly enjoying watching all the special snowflakes melt, and the absurdity of watching people protesting against free and open elections.

It's absolutely **** delicious.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Ladies and gentlemen, I, personally, stopped Hillary Clinton from becoming president of the United States of America. I commit the unpardonable sin of defying the leftist elite and voting for Gary Johnson, and will forever live in infamy as the man who made Donald Trump president.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I canceled out one person's vote in CA. **** you, shitlord.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I was watching the news about the protests last night. You know, I was angry and wanted to burn the country down too because of the direction I saw things were heading. Instead, I quietly voted.

Much more satisfying.

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In time, this too shall pass.

I find it amusing that Hillary Clinton stood there and conceded and took her medicine like a grown-up, and, at the bitter end, put the republic ahead of herself and said "Donald Trump deserves a chance to govern." Obama's statement was that of a gentleman, too. I don't know if Sanders said anything, but he's been a gentleman from the start and I doubt that's changed.

A lot more of the Left could stand to behave more like these people are in the face of this.

Those who can't; who want to wail and carry on and pretend this is some sort of disaster - I am going to enjoy watching you get absolutely **** on for the next 2 years. You didn't just manage to elect Trump; you've allowed the Republicans to hold the Senate and the House, and snatch up well over half the governorships and state legislatures.

It is high **** time the Left faced the facts. You can't have a platform that's about "tolerance" while calling people "deplorables" and "clingers", nor claim you're "progressive" while refusing to even admit meaningful progress on problems that have been obsolete for 3 decades.

You've got 2 years to get your **** together and make a meaningful play for the House, and if your playbook then still focuses on identity politics, you're **** then too. The candidate you just pulled out all the stops - and I do mean ALL the stops; the entire mainstream media and a significant portion of the conservative just blew the last of their credibility in naked attempts to tell the public what to think - to beat outperformed his 2 much-more-genial predecessors among blacks and Hispanics.

It was your guy that originally said "it's the economy, stupid." You'd do well to remember that instead of trying to coronate Cersei Lannister and then parading a bunch of wealthy, privileged celebrities who know almost nothing about the issues they're talking about on stage to convince the people you told you want to "put out of business" that you really do care about them, really, you do.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I like how the electoral college was great as long as there was a blue wall and now it sucks.

Also, I liked the girl last night who was upset that Hillary lost because she'd "benefited from Hillary's health care plan."

You know, the one that never even got a vote in Congress.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'll be amused if Trump ends up managing to go through with his own healthcare plan, which (from the ridiculously sparse detail Trump gave because he really has no plan) sounds closer to what Obama wanted to pass and he couldn't get any cooperation on.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

That's all right, Congress will be happy to supply him with one for his signature. I expect most of 'his' plans to be of this nature.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I didn't catch HRC or Sanders concessions. But I have to say that Obama's speech yesterday about it was excellent. It was the first time in a long time I felt like he was trying to unify like he did in his first campaign. He acknowledged the example set before him by prior Presidents and affirmed a commitment to the same. It was humble, professional, and classy.

All he need to do was drop the mic and say "I'm out." and it would have been a perfect 5 out of 7.

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The Dude abides.

I saw some of the press conferences with the WH rep today. The press is more or less asking "so is Obama making any plans to stop the gestapo murder squads from deploying before Trump declares himself God-Emperor of the USA?

Ok, I may have exaggerated a bit. But they are definitely eager to get a whiff some some Trump-is-an-evil-despot drama.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Can you blame them? He did his best adolf impersonation through the entire campaign. Only without hitler's sense of decency and fair play. Replace mexicans with jews and it's 1933 again.

He's probably not that type of person, but he does a damn good immitation.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Having read about Hitler and his party, I'd say Trump's a pale comparison. YMMV. If anything he'd be closer to Mussolini. Hitler has become too much of a Devil-made-real to use in conversation. He ruined the little mustache AND being able to seriously talk about fascism.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

uh.... wow....

His campaign had same style of populist fearmongering Hitler used to get the German people onboard. He created a cult of personality rather than a platform. "America will die. Only I can fix it!" And then placing America's woes at the feet of them.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

She's not far from the mark. Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump sounded like an authoritarian despot. How much of that was the left-wing media's portrayal of him, I really can't say. In the wake of Hillary's collapse, it turns out that the crackpot right-wing conspiracy theorists vastly underestimated the extent to which the media really was biased left. It must be said, however, that Donald Trump really did say all of those things used to portray him as a racist fearmongerer. It also needs to be said that the white racists did come out in droves to support him. That wasn't what won him the election, but he did speak directly to them, and they did show their support. The butthurt left-wing conservative crybabies didn't invent all of their grievances out of thin air, only some of them.

The real shock of this election is not that Donald Trump won, it's that the candidate who sounded the most like a third world dictator managed to come across as the leader of the free world once the final votes were tallied.

It will take a lot more than one good victory speech to win people over, though. To the rest of the world, it looks very much like the United States just elected Pol Pot as president. (I mean, really, Hitler got elected in 2000). We're going to have to square ourselves with that. For all her corruption, for all the mess she helped create in the Middle East, the rest of the world sincerely believes Hillary Clinton was the guardian angel that was going to save the world from the United States electing a genocidal dictator. We're the Fourth Reich, now, and we have to convince the rest of the world otherwise.

That was the price of stopping Hillary Clinton. We're already two days late on payment.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Most people (including myself) basically excused this by saying that Trump wasn't that guy. That guy was a marketing construct used to get support. Trump seems to have no convictions of any kind; he seems primarily to be a narcissist only concerned with himself. So as I said above, he's probably not an orange führer, he just did a great impersonation.

That raises other concerns though. When "he's lying, he didn't really mean that," is an actual defense that makes a guy seem better, you have a problem. And the bigger concern wasn't Trump, but that his tactics worked. It appears, to an outsider looking in, that 60 million Americans really wanted an orange führer in the white House.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Trump didn't say anything that should have reminded any reasonably intelligent person of Hitler; he says the kinds of things retired truck drivers say at the VFW when they're trash-talking and pretending to be tough. This is just histrionic bullshit. Even his more ill-advised remarks about blowing up families are not anything that you don't hear all the time from people just venting at yet another terrorist attack. It didn't take him long to figure out that isn't acceptable even as campaign tough-guy talk and abandon it.

We are not the Fourth Reich and we don't look like Pol Pot to anyone around the world with half a **** brain in their head. This sort of language is just as absurd as the proposals of Trump's that you're complaining about. It's campaign language; it's been said about every Republican since Bob Dole and quite a few before that. The only difference is that the Republican base forced a candidate willing to engage in the same sort of over-the-top language the left treats as a matter of course on the Republican establishment, and what do you know? It worked!

In case you hadn't noticed, all the people actually involved - both Clintons, Trump, Obama, Sanders, Biden, Warren, Ryan, McConnell, etc. have ALL suddenly become very gracious and concilatory.

This is because none of them are buffoons or idiots, the consistent overestimation of Hillary's competence notwithstanding. Donald Trump is about to sit in the chair. He is probably, right about now, having quite a few internal revelations about just what he's actually gotten himself into. The campaign is over; he can't just blame everyone else any more - he doesn't even have the excuse of a Democrat congress. He is not in 1930s Germany with a decade or so of democratic tradition; he's in a Republic with 2 and a half centuries of history, and well-established institutions jealous of their own perogatives.

Even the targets of his so-called "racism" consist of people that come in illegally, wave their own flag around, and then pretend they have a "human right" to be here, and members of a religion where it makes you a bleeding-heart liberal just to not advocate living under Sharia.

This nonsense about dictators, pol pot, and Hitler wouldn't pass muster in a 10th grade civics class.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."