He keeps trying to pass himself off as a smart man, and there’s just no way to keep up that act if you’ve got an actually smart man talking to you.

Yep, agreed. If that specific company is so critical that we as a society can’t operate without its survival, it should be a government function anyway.

Loomer figured it out? Loomer?! This is a real low point. Yeah, this one hurts.

My desire for the people on Epstein’s list to go to jail has nothing to do with who they are.

Interesting. They didn’t have enough fun making Colbert and Kimmel into martyrs, now they have to go after another member of the Strike Force Five?

Cool. Honestly and unironically, I hope so, whatever her reasons. Now go prove it.

Sometimes “what would you have done differently?” is a valid question.

Working class people tend to be less-educated, live in more rural areas, be a part of less-diverse communities, and be prone to accept authority figures. And the GOP has spent a half-century trying to convince that exact group that every problem they’re experiencing is actually the opposite. So they vote against their best interests in election after election, and then the people they voted for successfully convince them that the Democrats actually torpedoed it all and they could’ve actually made everything better if they just had one more term…rinse and repeat across 25+ election cycles.

I believe that’s always been the case, officially. It certainly was about fifteen years ago, when I worked in pharmacy. I know there are some ways that hospitals had of getting around it (like charging the full amount and putting it on a payment plan, but then immediately forgiving the remaining balance after one payment), but I don’t think those loopholes have been closed even still.

Unironically yes, and it’s sad that that’s the case. However, he did issue a similar EO in 2019 which didn’t do much; the administration claims that it lowered costs on the most expensive procedures by 6%, but whether that’s true or not the cheapest procedures became about 3% more expensive. Something like 20% of hospitals and insurers were ever in compliance, which Trump of course blames the Biden administration for; and attempts to make the EO a law went nowhere on the Hill.

But yes, healthcare price transparency is a good thing. Still, I’m a bit suspicious; because the insurance companies actually welcomed the EO when it was first signed. I can’t figure that one out.

1. Capitalism is also a failure. Choose one.

2. Mamdani is not a communist, but a socialist. There’s a difference, and even though you can apparently be the President without knowing that, it’s worth being clear about it.

And he was right. Still, I wonder how things would’ve been different had Clinton accepted the counteroffer and tried to iterate on it afterwards. The 2004-and-beyond GOP playbook has been to keep the Republican base spiked with anxiety and fear, blame Democrats for it, and use that cortisol to bring out the vote; but if the fear and anxiety about health care had been toned down and reduced their overall fear, maybe maga would’ve had more trouble gaining traction.

Or maybe it would’ve been successfully repealed in 2016. Who knows.

Look, honestly, I kind of am too. Though for much different reasons.

They’ve been trying to tell us they have this secret plan since the ACA passed in 2010. Fifteen years of swearing up and down that it’s some great plan that will help everyone, maybe including poor people if they think it’ll help convince anyone but definitely including insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants.

The problem is, the ACA was already their idea. The 2006 Massachusetts law that he proposed and signed into law as governor was an early version of Obamacare, including the Individual Mandate and a penalty for businesses that didn’t provide insurance to their employees. It was a stopgap measure to overhaul the system so that patients wouldn’t use the ER for health care and run up huge unpaid bills when they could just pay for the care from the correct provider; but unintentionally, it also got 98% of Massachusetts residents insured.

But by the time Romney started campaigning for president in 2012, the GOP had already started moving dramatically to the right, to the point where this lukewarm, milquetoast excuse for a solution was seen as radical. And since the GOP can’t risk doing something that will reduce their voters’ hardship (because paradoxically then they might stop voting for them), they are terrified of coming up with anything that might actually help.

“Kids do stupid things,” he continued. “Especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do.”

I was a young, stupid, conservative boy. Most of my jokes were Strong Bad related. I didn’t at any time glorify Hitler.

These kids need an intervention, not apologia.

Yes. If it is built using public money, it belongs to the public.

Just stop with this. It’s a form of obeying in advance: buying into the despair of nothing being possible, and everything being broken.

Their plan is to make it seem like there’s no point in fighting so nobody does, but if we give up the fight three years out we’re just conceding that ground to them.

Yes, they’re going to cheat. So we have to make it impossible for them to manipulate. Yes, they might try to make it look like a landslide anyway. So we have to be ready to take every single possible thing all the way through the courts.

Yes, the Supreme Court is a captured entity as well. So we have to overwhelm and clog up the apparatus they’re using to make it do horrible things and force everyone from the poll worker all the way up to the SCOTUS justice to publicly go on record and say “voter fraud is ok.” Then, when fascism falls (and it always does, don’t kid yourself) we know who to throw in jail first.

Don’t give up in advance. They want you to love Big Orange Brother or fear Big Orange Brother with every fiber of your being; either way, you’ll never stand up to him.

We assume there’s an election until there isn’t. We assume it’s fair (or fair-ish) until we have proof it isn’t. Anything less is saying “eh, you can have this one.”

Ok, last 20 years. So that’s Obama v. McCain, Obama v. Romney, Clinton v. Trump, Biden v. Trump, and Harris v. Trump. Five elections: two featured probably the most attractive (or at least youngest) president in recent history winning, and the other three featured maybe the ugliest S. O. B. on God’s green earth, who won twice. I feel like it’s generally a tossup.

I don’t mean voter fraud is the theory. Yes, obviously it definitely happened and will happen again. I mean the commonly-repeated theory that there “won’t be an election” next year. That is a great way to just capitulate the election in advance.

Honestly I might have replied to the wrong comment. I’m sorry.

Except when you realize that the last five Republican presidents have looked like: Annoying Orange with a cobweb toupee and a perfectly cylindrical body; the guy who bullied literally everyone in high school; an unholy combination of Jeff Daniels, age 70 on the right side and Jeff Daniels, age 40 on the left side; a washed up movie star with too many hours under the warming lamp; and the villain in a teen movie about having a bake sale to save the local dance hall.