Who will run in 2020?

I need to call out Yang too. He wants to go the public option route. One of the main reasons Bernie is creeping back up to my #1 spot.

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The most tilting part of action oriented movies for me is where the hero/villain wins a fight and lets the other person walk away mostly unscathed setting up an even bigger fight scene later in the movie. Put me in any of those situations and I gleefully murder my opponent while they are still on the ground. Because I donā€™t want to have another fight later in the movie lol. I just won this fight. If they wanted a ā€˜everybody goes homeā€™ negotiated solution that was available before the big fight scene.

Nobody is ever going to tell me ā€˜you should have killed me when you had the chanceā€™. If I beat you in a brutal fight with lethal weapons and somehow subdued you thatā€™s nice and allā€¦ but youā€™re not going to live to fight another day. Because Iā€™m not an idiot.

Iā€™m fully aware that we probably wonā€™t get public healthcare on the next big heathcare fightā€¦ but thatā€™s fine. I want to force all the people who have been bought by the health insurance lobby into the light so that we can name them, shame them, and primary them. I donā€™t even care if we winā€¦ Iā€™m still in favor of ruining these people just to send a message.

We can have a big healthcare fight and lose in 2020ā€¦ and then have another one in 2024 and winā€¦ But the Democratic Party has to make public healthcare something itā€™s willing to go to the mat for, and make standing against it obvious treachery that we punish with political death.

We need to be about this the way the GOP is about any gun control at all. Something that people are barely even allowed to flirt with.

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https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1184783633158234113?s=19

And the difference between getting something done that actually helps people vs just scoring political points is not starting the negotiation from a compromised position. If you donā€™t start with an ambitious plan the middle ground ends up being garbage.

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Yeah Barack Obamaā€™s biggest flaw as a president was that he was a terrible negotiator. The person who makes the first reasonable offer losesā€¦ which means that if circumstances force you to make a reasonable offer it needs to be a demand and not a negotiation.

Seriously if you give someone a reasonable offer you canā€™t let them counter offer. You have to stand your ground and say ā€˜yeah that offer was pretty fair so take it or leave itā€™. And if they leave it the deal is off. Little tweaks here and there are fine, but itā€™s important that you get something in return for them. You canā€™t compromise on the substance of the offer if you started anywhere near your exit point.

Source: Am literally a professional negotiator.

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Amy Klobuchar throws shit at employees and eats salads with a used comb. She has the charisma of a sloth and excites nobody. I truly donā€™t understand how a supremely unlikeable, banal person becomes a senator and remains on the POTUS debate stage.

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I can see how Klob became a senator but I have no idea wtf sheā€™s even doing in the presidential race. There must be some inside baseball reason sheā€™s still in it, like she wants to build her brand for a 2024 run or something.

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This fucking guy. He is the enemy, full stop.

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Yup. At the same time though heā€™s right about somethingā€¦ Medical spending is something like 600% of defense spending. We spend 3.1% of GDP on defense, but we spend 18% on medical. Now 12% of the medical spend at best is justifiedā€¦ but that still means we are wasting two entire military budgets worth of money on health care.

Itā€™s the single biggest reason why our schools suck, our infrastructure sucks, and we have so much inequalityā€¦ because news flash a huge chunk of the egregiously wealthy plutocrats benefit directly from our healthcare system. Itā€™s by far the biggest source of rent in the country.

If you whacked healthcare back to 12% and had all the savings in a giant pool of cash the size of two militaries you could forgive all the student loan debt and two years later youā€™d be ready to redo infrastructure both without borrowing any money with a few hundred billion left over for cost overruns.

Again Iā€™m sorry but in a lot of ways saying ā€˜Iā€™m liberal but I like my healthcare the way it isā€™ is just a joke. You could flip that on its axis and say ā€˜Iā€™m a complete GOP conservative and all that means but Iā€™ll insta vote for public healthcareā€™ and immediately be a radically better public servant than the so called liberal. This issue is just too big for any combination of other issues to make up for.

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Biden might end up suppressing Dem voter turnout more than the entire GOP and its dirty bag of tricks.

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Yup. Guy is a real piece of shit and probably views himself as some kind of Amercan hero.

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He really should have left his legacy with those Obama Biden memes and rode off into the sunset. Instead he decided to ruin it all with the charge of the light brigadeā€¦ and Iā€™m not even a little bit sorry heā€™s getting dragged as a result. He always sucked he was just fortunate enough to be the right old white dude for Obama to use to balance the ticket. Him ruining his own legacy so completely is almost proof that there is some justice (and it being self inflicted makes it better IMO) in the world.

Honestly Iā€™d almost rather another term with Trump than a Biden term. At least Trump can be blamed on the GOP and is systematically tearing shit up. Biden would smooth everything over removing all the beautiful opportunities for systemic reform weā€™re looking at now. The planet is cooking and weā€™re spending 18% of GDP on healthcare lol. I donā€™t want things to go back to ā€˜normalā€™. ā€˜Normalā€™ is going to create a terrible world for me when Iā€™m Bidenā€™s age and my future kids will spend most of their lives in a post apocalyptic nightmare world.

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All that military money just magically appears though.

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Also private insurance is gratis

Like Medicare will charge me $400 a month, but my private insurance premium will drop from $400 a month to $0 a month but this is HORRIBLE because I got a $400/month ā€œtax increaseā€

Also you wonā€™t get the pleasure of dealing with your insurance company refusing to pay for stuff when you get a terminal illness

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Iā€™m starting to aggressively hate Biden and when he entered the race I was leaning strongly toward voting for him

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I had a conversation with my actuary brother recently where we both talked about how we would handle finding out we had a serious medical problem with our respective insurance companies. The plan we gamed out together was to just immediately hit them with a nasty letter from an attorney to try to short circuit whatever their usual automatic denial process was.

We are literally planning to hit them with our personal attorneys before they even have the chance to deny the claim lol. Thatā€™s because we both know people who have had insurance companies force them to crawl through broken glass to get a 10-20k claim paidā€¦ and we want to stop them from even firing that bullet at us so we donā€™t have to deal with it.

The more you look at Biden the uglier he gets. It turns out Elizabeth Warren actively dislikes him as a person for excellent reasons. Heā€™s a horrible human being.

You are completely inventing new definitions of ā€œqualifiedā€ and ā€œcorruptionā€ never used in the context of board seats because republicans manipulated you into being a useful idiot for them. Al Gore isnā€™t really ā€œqualifiedā€ to be on Appleā€™s board either but itā€™s obviously not inherently corrupt by any reasonable definition. Al Gore is a celebrity with an image that Apple thinks will benefit the company.

We should have a ā€œPost of the Monthā€ contest each month for stuff like this, or at the very least a ā€œbest ofā€ thread.

It canā€™t just be based on hearts though; a lot of the ones that get a lot of hearts are jokes. (Not that thereā€™s anything wrong with that, but Iā€™m thinking of a thread highlighting the best substantive posts that not all of us might see because weā€™re not in every thread)

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