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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM

TrashJack Confirmed Doomer from beyond the Despair Event Horizon (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Confirmed Doomer
#118401: Apr 6th 2016 at 6:54:15 PM

[up] Couldn't resist those Steam sales, could you, Duncan? [lol]

"Cynic, n. — A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." - The Devil's Dictionary
TobiasDrake (•̀⤙•́) (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
(•̀⤙•́)
#118402: Apr 6th 2016 at 7:11:01 PM

Well, this is a milestone.

Video games are now as mainstream as humanly possible. We are now a form of government corruption.

My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
theLibrarian Since: Jul, 2009
#118403: Apr 6th 2016 at 7:22:59 PM

How much are Congressmen paid again? Why didn't he use his own money?

Demonic_Braeburn Yankee Doodle Dandy from Defective California Since: Jan, 2016
Yankee Doodle Dandy
#118404: Apr 6th 2016 at 7:35:03 PM

[up][up][up]Worth the weight.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday denied a request from a lawyer who once represented a woman known as the "DC Madam" to release records from her famous escort service.

Earlier this year Madam's attorney said the records contained a bombshell. [1]

A lot of Trump supporters think she had dirt on Cruz.

edited 6th Apr '16 7:43:17 PM by Demonic_Braeburn

Any group who acts like morons ironically will eventually find itself swamped by morons who think themselves to be in good company.
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#118405: Apr 6th 2016 at 7:42:18 PM

He said he'd release them anyway, so I'm very curious about what "bombshell" they contain.

edited 6th Apr '16 7:42:24 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
NativeJovian Jupiterian Local from Orlando, FL Since: Mar, 2014 Relationship Status: Maxing my social links
Jupiterian Local
#118406: Apr 6th 2016 at 7:50:23 PM

Reading the article, it honestly looks like his kid just used the wrong credit card. The bit about "several unauthorized charges resulted after the father tried to close access to the website" honestly makes me think he told the kid to stop it and he didn't, phrased in a way to make it seem like he was hacked. :p That said, it was marked "personal expense, I'll pay this back" on the report, so it's not like he was trying to hide anything.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
darksidevoid Anti-Gnosis Weapon from The Frontiers (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: Robosexual
Anti-Gnosis Weapon
#118407: Apr 6th 2016 at 7:57:21 PM

One of my favorite things about modern Presidential campaigns is the plethora of URLs dedicated solely to mockery and satire.

edited 6th Apr '16 7:58:54 PM by darksidevoid

GM: AGOG S4 & F/WC RP; Co-GM: TABA, SOTR, UUA RP; Sub-GM: TTS RP. I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security to my new Empire.
Demonic_Braeburn Yankee Doodle Dandy from Defective California Since: Jan, 2016
Yankee Doodle Dandy
#118408: Apr 6th 2016 at 7:59:55 PM

[up] Write Loser.com in your URL bar.

Any group who acts like morons ironically will eventually find itself swamped by morons who think themselves to be in good company.
AngelusNox Warder of the damned from The guard of the gates of oblivion Since: Dec, 2014 Relationship Status: Married to the job
Warder of the damned
#118409: Apr 6th 2016 at 8:07:54 PM

[up]Top kek.

edited 6th Apr '16 8:08:51 PM by AngelusNox

Inter arma enim silent leges
TheWanderer Student of Story from Somewhere in New England (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: Wishfully thinking
Student of Story
#118410: Apr 6th 2016 at 8:37:39 PM

How the Koch brothers and their allies are undermining and dismantling the VA for the sake of profit and ideology

In past presidential primaries, when candidates wanted to win the votes of veterans they would trek to American Legion halls and Veterans of Foreign Wars conventions in far corners of Iowa and New Hampshire. While there’s been a little of that in the current primary contest, a new pattern has emerged, at least on the Republican side.

Over the last year, every major GOP candidate with the exception of Donald Trump has made a pilgrimage to gatherings put on by Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), a group that had barely formed during the 2012 primary cycle. Whereas candidates back in the day were under pressure from the old-line veterans’ groups to promise undying support for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and its nationwide network of hospitals and clinics, the opposite has been true this season. Candidates at CVA rallies have been competing with each other to badmouth the VA and its allegedly shabby treatment of veterans. And all have pledged fealty to the CVA’s goal of moving as many vets as possible out of the VA into private care. Even Trump is calling for more “choice.”

This may not at first hearing seem too surprising. Nearly the whole of the Republican Party has become more radically antigovernment in recent years. And since the spring of 2014, when headlines started appearing about long wait times and cover-ups at some VA hospitals, a strong narrative has built up, including in the mainstream media, that the system is fundamentally broken. A recent front-page headline in the New York Times proclaimed, as if it were a matter of fact, that Bernie Sanders’s support for the VA during the controversy over wait times proved his poor judgment: “Faith in Agency Clouded Bernie Sanders’s V.A. Response.”

Yet beneath the surface of events, a far different, deeper, and more consequential story is unfolding. The CVA, it turns out, is the creation of David and Charles Koch’s network. The Koch family has famously poured hundreds of millions of dollars into think tanks, candidates, and advocacy groups to advance their libertarian views about the virtues of free markets and the evils of governments and unions. Seldom, however, has one of their investments paid off so spectacularly well as it has on the issue of veterans’ health care. Working through the CVA, and in partnership with key Republicans and corporate medical interests, the Koch brothers’ web of affiliates has succeeded in manufacturing or vastly exaggerating “scandals” at the VA as part of a larger campaign to delegitimize publicly provided health care.

The Koch-inspired attacks, in turn, have provided the pretext for GOP candidates to rally behind the cause—only recently seen as fringe—of imposing free market “reforms” on the federal government’s second largest agency. The attacks have also damaged the reputation of the VA among the broader news-consuming public, and, not coincidently, undermined morale within the agency itself. And they succeeded in stampeding bipartisan majorities in Congress into passing legislation in 2014 that under the guise of offering veterans “choice” has instead created a deeply flawed and unworkable process of outsourcing VA care while also setting in motion a commission that seems intent on dismantling VA-provided health care altogether.

All this has been happening, ironically, even as most vets who use the system and all the major veterans’ service organizations (VS Os) applaud the quality of VA health care. Adding to the perverse twists of the story is a mountain of independent evidence, including studies mandated by the 2014 law itself, showing that while the VA has an assortment of serious problems, it continues to outperform the rest of the U.S. health sector on nearly every metric of quality—a fact that ought to raise fundamental questions about the wisdom of outsourcing VA care to private providers.

...

Under George W. Bush’s administration, studies continued to show the VA outperforming the rest of the U.S. health care system on most metrics of safety, quality, health IT, and patient satisfaction. Often, the administration seemed not quite sure what to do with this fact. In 2004, when Bush announced an initiative to push for greater adoption of electronic medical records throughout the U.S. health care system, he did so by traveling to the Baltimore VA Medical Center and showcasing the world-class health IT in place there. “I know the veterans who are here are going to be proud to hear that the Veterans Administration is on the leading edge of change,” Bush explained, without showing any evident discomfort with praising the largest actual example of socialized medicine in the United States.

Yet behind the scenes, the administration took many measures to undo the quality transformation that had occurred under Kizer’s leadership, including the freedom given to front-line employees. Partly this was the result of the tendency of top managers in all large organizations to want to exercise control. But it also reflected the Bush administration’s commitment to outsourcing more and more VA functions.

Bush’s political appointees at the VA, for example, quickly squashed software innovation in the field by reconsolidating bureaucratic control over all things digital in Washington and then contracting with venders of private, proprietary software. At one point, the VA even lost control of its own lab software system to Cerner, a private corporation that dramatically ramped up spending on lobbying during the middle of the last decade.

And, increasingly, Bush’s political appointees at the VA began outsourcing more care to private health care providers, often with unhappy results. For example, between 2002 and 2008, the Philadelphia VA outsourced its prostate cancer unit to a team from the University of Pennsylvania. Investigators later found that of the 114 patients who went through the treatment, ninety-two received either too much or not enough radiation to the prostate, and in some cases the physician missed the prostate altogether. Outsourcing also led to financial waste and fraud. For example, the VA inspector general found that in the last year of the Bush administration, 37 percent of the $3.2 billion the VA spent on outsourced care was improperly paid.

At the same time, many key changes that the VA needed to make to ensure access were neglected. One was fixing the worsening misalignment of VA capacity. Nationwide, the number of veterans was shrinking, with the passing of the huge cohorts of World War II- and Korea War-era vets. The decline was, and continues to be, particularly steep in California and throughout much of New England, the mid-Atlantic states, and the industrial Midwest.

Reflecting this decline, as well as a general trend toward more outpatient services, many VA hospitals in these areas, including flagship facilities, want for nothing except sufficient numbers of patients to maintain their long-term viability. At the same time, however, large numbers of aging veterans have been moving from the Rust Belt and California to lower-cost retirement centers in the Sun Belt, which often have more patients than they can easily handle.

Under Bush, the VA appointed a commission to recommend what hospitals and properties it needed to close or dispose of, and where it needed to build new capacity. But the commission’s recommendations were ignored. By 2008, the General Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that the VA was spending approximately $123,000 per day to maintain vacant or underutilized assets. At the same time, no new VA medical centers came on line during the Bush years, including in high-demand areas.

...

In 2011, Republicans took control of the U.S. House. Jeff Miller, a Tea Party conservative from Florida, became chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee. Meanwhile, John Boehner became the new speaker. He had caused a controversy about twenty years earlier when he proposed privatizing the VA. He hadn’t talked much about it since, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking about it.

Later that year—on Veterans Day, appropriately—Mitt Romney was at a barbecue in South Carolina with a group of vets, campaigning for the GOP presidential nomination. During his talk, he floated the idea of a voucher system for VA health care similar to one he was then proposing for Medicare. The Veterans of Foreign Wars was the first of the major veterans’ service organizations to object to the idea: “The VFW doesn’t support privatization of veterans’ health care,” its spokesman told the news website Talking Points Memo. “This is an issue that seems to come around every election cycle.” Indeed, when Senator John Mc Cain was running for president in 2007, he too floated an idea—first developed by the Koch-funded Cato Institute—of giving vets a voucher, in the form of a “plastic card” that they could use to pay for care from private doctors. In the face of protests from VS Os, Mc Cain stopped talking about the idea. Like Mc Cain, Romney also quickly walked his voucher proposal back.

The VS Os were clearly the single biggest obstacle to the conservative dream of voucherizing the VA. Yet in many ways they were weaker than they appeared. Their base of members was shrinking and aging. Moreover, there was a basic ideological tension in their support of traditional VA health care. On the one hand, many VSO members were grateful recipients of VA health care, and even those who weren’t saw such care as a benefit they had earned through their service to the country and might someday use. On the other hand, many of those VS Os’ members leaned Republican, and VA health care is pretty obviously the closest thing America has to socialized medicine: health care delivered by a giant government bureaucracy whose employees are represented by eleven different unions. This internal conflict had long existed, but it had never been fully exploited, until Concerned Veterans for America organized in 2012 and found the funding it needed.

Though the CVA’s incorporation papers don’t reveal its donors, Wayne Gable, former head of federal affairs for Koch Industries, is listed as a trustee. The group also hired Pete Hegseth as its CEO. Hegseth is an Army reserve veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan with two Bronze Stars and degrees from Princeton and Harvard. He is also a seasoned conservative activist, having been groomed at a series of organizations connected to—and often indirectly funded by—the Koch brothers: the Princeton Tory newspaper, where he was publisher; the Manhattan Institute, where he was a policy specialist; and Vets for Freedom (VFF), an advocacy group where he was executive director prior to moving to the CVA.

At VFF, his main job was to counter liberal groups such as Move On.org and Vote Vets.com that were calling for George W. Bush to bring the troops home. Smart, quick, and telegenic, he popped up frequently on conservative radio, Fox News, and mainstream media, and led clusters of like-minded vets to members of Congress to defend Bush and his “surge” in Iraq. During 2008, the VFF undertook a million-dollar campaign against then Senator Barack Obama, who had voted against the war in Iraq in 2006.

At the CVA, Hegseth played a similar role. He went on TV and wrote op-eds defending Mitt Romney and attacking Obama. But this time, his message was no longer just focused on military matters, but on a broad array of economic policy issues, with an unambiguous libertarian bent, including turning traditional military pensions into portable 401(k) plans. In an interview on CNN, he segued from veterans’ support for Romney to fiscal matters in the 2012 election: “We’ve got to be serious about reforming defense so we can also be serious about reforming entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security and getting our debt under control.”

Republicans were in disarray at the start of the second Obama administration in 2013, but the CVA was just hitting its stride. It sent Hegseth and his colleagues on tours around the country, with rallies and town hall meetings aimed at gathering members and garnering support for the organization’s agenda. It began a series of breakfast meetings in Washington with leading conservatives—one, sponsored by the Weekly Standard magazine, featured Hegseth and guest speakers North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, Florida Representative Jeff Miller, and Stewart Hickey of AMVETS, a conservative veterans’ advocacy group that supported most of the CVA’s proposals. It hired key behind-the-scenes players in the Republican veterans’ policy world such as Dan Caldwell, staffer to Representative David Schweikert, a newly elected darling of the Tea Party from Arizona, and Darin Selnick, a former political appointee in George W. Bush’s Department of Veterans Affairs.

Hegseth became a fixture on Fox and was a guest on Bill Maher’s show. He coauthored a Washington Post op-ed with Representative Duncan Hunter, the hawkish California Republican, calling for Shinseki to resign over the backlog of VA benefits—a backlog the VA chief was in the midst of resolving—charging, with no evidence, that veterans were dying while waiting for benefits. Reviving a tactic that conservatives had used in the early 1990s against “Hillarycare,” he also put out a steady stream of op-eds in which he trashed the Affordable Care program by comparing it to alleged VA dysfunction. “If you really want to know what Obamacare is going to be like, just look at the VA system.”

Behind the scenes, some leaders at the traditional VS Os became alarmed about the CVA. According to a longtime executive with one of the groups, “We didn’t know what they did, but they were the new go-to guys when [the media] needed a veteran’s perspective or a quote.” The VS Os were being marginalized, he said, and were too large and too slow to react.

By late 2013, Hegseth and the CVA were making the case that the VA needed “market-based” reform that provided vets with more “choice” to receive care from private doctors and hospitals (though they were careful not to use unpopular words like “vouchers” or “privatize”). They were also signaling their sympathy for another abiding cause of the Koch brothers: crushing the power of unions.

In his media appearances and op-eds, Hegseth blamed the agency’s problems on a lack of “accountability,” and argued that the VA was “unable to fire bad employees and reward good employees based on merit (instead of tenure).” The CVA was among the first groups to applaud legislation, introduced in February 2014 by Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Miller, that would enable the VA secretary to fire underperforming managers by limiting the civil service appeals process. Unions like the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents many VA workers, objected, but got little notice. The CVA also launched a website calling for greater accountability at the VA and warning that veterans were dying because of poor-quality care at the agency.

Then, on April 9, 2014, at a hearing in the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Representative Miller dropped the bomb. He announced that his staff had been quietly investigating the VA hospital in Phoenix and had made a shocking discovery: some local VA officials had altered or destroyed records to hide evidence of lengthy wait times for appointments. And worse, Miller claimed, as many as forty veterans could have died while waiting for care.

This latter charge guaranteed screaming headlines from the likes of CNN, but was later shown to be unsubstantiated. An exhaustive independent review of patient records by the VA inspector general uncovered that six, not forty, veterans had died experiencing “clinically significant delays” while on waiting lists to see a VA doctor, and in each of these six cases, the IG concluded that “we are unable to conclusively assert that the absence of timely quality care caused the deaths of these veterans.”* In other words, the reality behind the headlines had little, if any, more significance than the fact that people die every day while waiting for an appointment to see their tax accountant or lawyer.

Those who showed up on waiting lists usually turned out to have been waiting for a routine visit with a primary care doctor rather than facing an urgent health care problem. Moreover, among those shown as waiting to see a primary care physician, many turned out to be already under the active care of a VA or non-VA specialist. In only twenty-eight out of the more than 3,000 patient cases examined by the inspector general was there any evidence of patient care being adversely affected by wait times. During the worst of the “crisis,” fully 89 percent of patients received appointments within thirty days of their preferred date. There was a long backlog of people waiting to see a urologist, but the nation as the whole faces an acute shortage of specialists in that field.

Moreover, the wait times in Phoenix were not typical of the system as a whole. Capacity constraints, for example, were greater in Phoenix than in most of the rest of the country due to the large number of retirees who had moved to the area in recent years, including “snow birds” who used the Phoenix-area VA system only during the winter months. In most VA facilities, wait times** for established patients to see a primary care doc or a specialist were in the range of two to four days, which compares favorably to the experience of most patients seeking care outside the VA. For the VA system as a whole, 96 percent of patients received appointments within thirty days.

...

Days after these bills passed, Hegseth attended a meeting with Charles Koch, along with leaders of the brothers’ network of political organizations and other leading conservative donors, in Dana Point, California, for the Kochs’ annual summer strategy session. It was a private, invitation-only gathering, but someone taped the session; the recording was later made public by the website Undercurrents and written about in the Nation. Hegseth certainly had every incentive to impress his donors; but even allowing for that, the speech he gave to the group is worth quoting at length. It reveals much not only about the CVA’s central role in promoting the VA scandal and subsequent legislation, but also about its broader plans to undo worker protections and, ultimately, gut Big Government and unions.

Concerned Veterans for America is an organization this network literally created to empower veterans and military families to fight for the freedom and prosperity here at home that we fought for in uniform on the battlefield… . Now, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of months, you know about the crisis at the Department of Veterans Affairs. What you probably don’t know is the central role that Concerned Veterans for America played in exposing and driving this crisis from the very beginning.

After years of effort behind the scenes privately and publicly, the scandal eventually made national headlines when initially in Phoenix it was exposed that veterans were waiting on secret lists that were meant to hide the real wait times veterans had at VA facilities of months and months and months. Veterans literally dying while waiting on secret lists that benefited only bureaucrats.

In driving [inaudible] and monitoring this crisis, we utilized the competitive advantage that only this network provides: the long-term vision to invest and the resources to back it up. We focused relentlessly on both exposing the failures of VA bureaucracy and improving the lives of veterans, meeting our people where they’re at.

The Concerned Veterans for America issue campaign pushing for systemic reform of VA bureaucracy is of critical importance, we think, for three key reasons. First, it is going—it has produced and will produce more market-based public policy victories that will improve the lives of veterans and their families; second, it provides the perfect opportunity to educate the American people about the failures of big government; and three, to position us for the long term as a trusted, effective, and credible grassroots organization we can build upon… . Two pieces of groundbreaking VA reform legislation passed the House of Representatives with an overwhelming majority… . And Nancy Pelosi and the majority of collectivists voted for them. They didn’t like the bills, but they had to vote for the bills because they were outnumbered by a new, nimble, and principled movement of veterans… .

Ten days ago, the Senate struck a historic deal, a deal that Concerned Veterans for America was central to in every aspect, literally ensuring that the language stay focused on real market-based reform, and we pushed the ball across the finish line… . This bill would empower the secretary to actually fire a manager for cause … [and veterans] will literally get a card and the ability to visit a private doctor if they need.

The latter reform, which seems like a no-brainer to everyone in this audience, is a huge development, rocking the core of big-government status quo in Washington. The option for veterans to choose private care upends how the VA has fundamentally done business for the last seventy years, attacking the very heart of the failed top-down, government-run, single-payer health care system that’s failed veterans.

Throughout this effort, Concerned Veterans for America, along with our network partners, have intentionally broadened the debate to include big-government dysfunction generally, further fortifying a new skepticism that AFP [Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded political advocacy organization] and others have brought to what government-run health care does.

Hegseth closed out his remarks with a personal thank-you to Charles and David Koch and their team.

Note that the article is an extremely long piece of investigative journalism, and these are just a few small excerpts.

edited 6th Apr '16 8:39:14 PM by TheWanderer

| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
Demonic_Braeburn Yankee Doodle Dandy from Defective California Since: Jan, 2016
Yankee Doodle Dandy
#118411: Apr 6th 2016 at 9:07:20 PM

[up] Good read. We need that Kizer guy back in the VA.

Hillary Clinton ripped rival Bernie Sanders for his "unimaginable" position on guns.

Bernie Sanders: Maybe Clinton should apologize to victims of Iraq War.

A CBS reporter tweeted that she asked the Vermont senator about Clinton's calls for him to apologize to Sandy Hook victims because of his stance against holding gun manufacturers liable for gun crimes. Sanders reportedly responded by saying that Clinton should apologize to the victims of the Iraq War, which she voted in favor of as a senator.

Bernie Sanders: Clinton's not qualified to be president.

"Well let me, let me just say in response to Secretary Clinton: I don't believe that she is qualified if she is, if she is, through her super PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in special interest funds," he said. "I don't think you are qualified if you get $15 million from Wall Street through your super PAC."

Hillary Clinton says she isn’t sure Bernie Sanders is a Democrat.

“I know that Sen. Sanders spends a lot of time attacking my husband, attacking President Obama,” she told Politico. “I rarely hear him say anything negative about George W. Bush, who I think wrecked our economy.”

Yeeeeeeeah, the Dem Primary is definitely gonna get uglier as the New York Primary approaches.

edited 6th Apr '16 9:48:28 PM by Demonic_Braeburn

Any group who acts like morons ironically will eventually find itself swamped by morons who think themselves to be in good company.
AceofSpades Since: Apr, 2009 Relationship Status: Showing feelings of an almost human nature
#118412: Apr 6th 2016 at 9:31:59 PM

Clinton's already gone on record saying that voting for the Iraq war was a mistake, hasn't she? Eeesh, this Sandy Hook thing is uh... not making Sanders look good, gotta say.

Eschaton Since: Jul, 2010
#118413: Apr 6th 2016 at 9:57:44 PM

I'm wondering who's going to come out ahead in this exchange, and I think most of the back-and-forth is deserved, but some of it is definitely getting too sensationalist.

Sanders claiming Clinton not being qualified is in line with the thrust of his campaign, redefining what "qualified" means and looking at money influences it, and unsurprisingly the push-back to that alone has been enormous. Whether that's even an issue, or if Clinton has other qualifications that matter more, should be addressed. On the other hand, I don't give a damn about the Wall St. speeches, because I don't think we're going to learn anything we don't already know, so who cares? A politician pandering to their audience? Shocking.

I think Sanders should be pushed on his stance on guns, even though I understand where's he coming from, because I understand where the other side is coming from as well. And I'm curious to see if Clinton really would crack down on the entire gun manufacturing industry, assuming that's where gun reform needs to start. But the Sandy Hook angle makes this entire discussion ripe for emotional responses and manipulation.

Claiming Sanders isn't a Democrat: Well, technically he has been an Independent, so you got him there, despite his positions largely aligning with Democrats. And he has criticized aspects of the Clinton and Obama administration, though I'd like to believe that doesn't disqualify a person from being a Democrat. But associating him with Bush? I'd sure like to see some proof of that, because otherwise that's the kind of politicking I absolutely despise.

edited 6th Apr '16 10:08:24 PM by Eschaton

AceofSpades Since: Apr, 2009 Relationship Status: Showing feelings of an almost human nature
#118414: Apr 6th 2016 at 10:26:47 PM

I don't think she was associating him with Bush so much as criticizing him for not criticizing Bush. I have no idea what he was doing during Bush's era aside of being senator, though.

SeptimusHeap from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#118415: Apr 6th 2016 at 10:38:09 PM

Sorry, but on Sandy Hook I have to agree with Sanders - suing the gun manufacturer seems more like a feel good or revenge thing than like sound public policy, or even an effective measure.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#118416: Apr 6th 2016 at 10:39:16 PM

Not voting for Bush's expensive and destructive oversees wars?

Not a fan of his gun response though, I'd rather he have gone "being able to sue gun manufacturers isn't going to stop victims of gun violence dying, to do that we need common sense reasonable gun control and proper background checks and when we try and legalise suing gun manufacturers we drive people away from supporting things that will actually prevent gun violence".

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
desdendelle Hooded Crow from Land of Milk and Honey (Sergeant) Relationship Status: Hiding
Hooded Crow
#118417: Apr 6th 2016 at 11:09:09 PM

((Cross-post from the Israel and Palestine thread))

If his interview with the New York Daily News is any indication, the Bern is Bad for Israel(TM) and thinks that "over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza" (in 2014 in Operation Protective Edge). That's even more than what HAMAS said, for proportion (HAMAS said that a bit less than 2200 people were killed, about 80% of which were civilians; that number is about as trustworthy as they are).

On empty crossroads, seek the eclipse -- for when Sol and Lua align, the lost shall find their way home.
Demonic_Braeburn Yankee Doodle Dandy from Defective California Since: Jan, 2016
Yankee Doodle Dandy
#118418: Apr 6th 2016 at 11:20:11 PM

[up] Speaking of that, the Anti-Defamation League is calling on Sanders to correct his statement on the 2014 Gaza War.

edited 6th Apr '16 11:21:49 PM by Demonic_Braeburn

Any group who acts like morons ironically will eventually find itself swamped by morons who think themselves to be in good company.
Ramidel Since: Jan, 2001
#118419: Apr 6th 2016 at 11:26:37 PM

I don't think that "a narrow Bernie victory in pledged delegates being swamped by superdelegates" (which is currently on the "unlikely but very possible" track) would be nearly as damaging to the Democrats as a third-party Trump run would be to the Republicans. Again, Bernie's not going to kamikaze the party, most Bernie voters are also okay with Hillary, and crucially, Hillary's not going to get the blame for the superdelegates flipping off the people.

If anything results from such a move, it'll be movements within state Democratic Parties to change the rules that let Hillary win, along with Schultz getting kicked out of her DNC chair, and (as an outside bet) a possible 2020 primary against Hillary if Sanders can come up with an heir apparent.

PotatoesRock Since: Oct, 2012
#118420: Apr 7th 2016 at 2:45:38 AM

Harry Reid and Obama are considering a national park where the Bundys' cattle used to graze, now that much of the family is in jail or likely to be jailed.

Reid is pretty much going "Give no fucks" with his last term.

TheHandle United Earth from Stockholm Since: Jan, 2012 Relationship Status: YOU'RE TEARING ME APART LISA
United Earth
#118421: Apr 7th 2016 at 2:48:33 AM

[up][up][ and [up][up][up]

While speaking forcefully of Israel's need for security, you said that peace will require an end to attacks of all kinds and recognition of Israel's right to exist. Just to be clear, does that mean recognition of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state?

Sanders: Of course…that's the status quo.

Here's the main point that I want to make. I lived in Israel. I have family in Israel. I believe 100% not only in Israel's right to exist, a right to exist in peace and security without having to face terrorist attacks.

Truly, he seems terrible for Israel.

Why does this journalist keep insisting on putting "illegal settlements" in scare quotes?

Sanders:Look, why don't I support a million things in the world? I'm just telling you that I happen to believe...anybody help me out here, because I don't remember the figures, but my recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza. Does that sound right?

The journalist says they'll check this later, which they do.

Journalist: Okay, while we were sitting here, I double-checked the facts. It's the miracle of the iPhone. My recollection was correct. It was about 2,300, I believe, killed, and 10,000 wounded.

So he's clearly misremembering and got the wounded and the dead mixed-up; he was not claiming confidence in that number at all. Comparing this to Hamas possibly deliberately inflating numbers is disingenuous. He accepted the correction in the interview, so the only thing he should apologize for is quoting numbers he's not certain of out of memory.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
desdendelle Hooded Crow from Land of Milk and Honey (Sergeant) Relationship Status: Hiding
Hooded Crow
#118422: Apr 7th 2016 at 4:10:17 AM

((*Crossposting from the Israel & Palestine thread intensifies*))

@Handle: those aren't scare quotes. They're quoting Bernie, thence the quotes. Also, when I said "Bad for Israel(TM)", I was half-sarcastic. Couldn't pothole in the middle of a link, so. *shrugs*
Anyway, Superdark has a point, because I can't see anyone better than Bibi being elected PM — not to mention that, barring trouble with his coalition, he still has three years to go in the current term — and I can't see him taking Bernie any better than Obama. Which means more crap for Israel. =/

On empty crossroads, seek the eclipse -- for when Sol and Lua align, the lost shall find their way home.
FieldMarshalFry Field Marshal of Cracked from World Internet War 1 Since: Oct, 2015 Relationship Status: THIS CONCEPT OF 'WUV' CONFUSES AND INFURIATES US!
Field Marshal of Cracked
#118423: Apr 7th 2016 at 4:40:59 AM

so, is Israel going to go their standard attack route and accuse Bernie, a Jew, of being anti-Semetic?

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Luminosity Since: Jun, 2012 Relationship Status: Lovey-Dovey
#118424: Apr 7th 2016 at 4:45:51 AM

Sorry, but on Sandy Hook I have to agree with Sanders - suing the gun manufacturer seems more like a feel good or revenge thing than like sound public policy, or even an effective measure.

Agreed. Unless issuing the gun to the shooter was illegal under existing laws, the gun manufacturer has done nothing wrong. If it not being illegal under existing laws is a bad thing(and it is), then that's the problem with the legal system.

For that matter, Clinton seriously cracking down on a business is a prospect as likely as avian suidae.

edited 7th Apr '16 4:49:37 AM by Luminosity

FieldMarshalFry Field Marshal of Cracked from World Internet War 1 Since: Oct, 2015 Relationship Status: THIS CONCEPT OF 'WUV' CONFUSES AND INFURIATES US!
Field Marshal of Cracked
#118425: Apr 7th 2016 at 4:49:38 AM

didn't the Sandy Hook shooter steal the weapons anyway? or was that a different one?

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