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Todd Eastman
climber
Bellingham, WA
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Mar 24, 2015 - 08:17pm PT
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Imagine...
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apogee
climber
Technically expert, safe belayer, can lead if easy
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Mar 24, 2015 - 08:18pm PT
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Argle Bargle!
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Craig Fry
Trad climber
So Cal.
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Mar 24, 2015 - 08:24pm PT
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crankster
Trad climber
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Mar 24, 2015 - 10:24pm PT
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You can't make this stuff up.
A day after announcing his White House bid – which included beating on the Affordable Care Act, his favorite punching bag – Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, says he’s signing up for Obamacare.
Yes, you read that correctly: The man whose signature applause line is a promise to “repeal each and every word of Obamacare,” went on Healthcare.gov and got himself some benefits. Hypocrisy? Sure, but not in the way you might think.
Cruz had been covered through his wife’s employer, Goldman Sachs. If some insurance plans are Cadillacs, hers was a chauffeured, solid-gold Fleetwood, reportedly worth some $20,000 a year -- around half of Texas’ median income. Heidi Cruz is taking a year or so of unpaid leave to help him on his campaign, though, so her health care coverage evaporates along with her likely very substantial paycheck.
Now, the senator – or maybe an aide, or an intern or campaign volunteer or someone – will schlep to the computer, log on to Healthcare.gov and hunch down over the keyboard to do the Obamacare two-step to get coverage for the upcoming year.
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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Mar 24, 2015 - 10:44pm PT
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Oh the Irony!
The other Repubs will skewer him for it. I'll bet he backs out. He'll have to if he really wants the nomination.
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apogee
climber
Technically expert, safe belayer, can lead if easy
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Mar 25, 2015 - 08:07pm PT
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A highly edited chop-job from James O'Keefe and his notorious spin-job Project Veritas?
SHOCKING.
Or in other words:
Yyyyyyaaaaaaaaawwwwwwnnnnnn.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Mar 25, 2015 - 08:26pm PT
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Only a yawn for a prog as they would consider it a "progressive" norm to have an ISIS club on a university campus.
Complete with "coaches".
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apogee
climber
Technically expert, safe belayer, can lead if easy
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Mar 25, 2015 - 08:35pm PT
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Ever heard of editing, TGT?
Nah, didn't think so. You just swallow that sh#t hook, line & sinker like every thing else fed to you by Drudge, Breitbart, and Murdoch. Human centipede-like.
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crankster
Trad climber
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Mar 25, 2015 - 09:02pm PT
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How can he breathe in that rightwing media bubble?
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
Terence Wilson greeneck alleghenys,ny,
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Mar 26, 2015 - 07:10am PT
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LOlL^^^^
What positive and progressive things beside your self serving special interests are you Republicans FOR ?
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apogee
climber
Technically expert, safe belayer, can lead if easy
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Mar 26, 2015 - 07:22am PT
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FEAR.
FEAR FEAR FEAR.
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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
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Mar 26, 2015 - 07:24am PT
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Holy crap, kos. That .gif was great.
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Craig Fry
Trad climber
So Cal.
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Mar 26, 2015 - 08:23am PT
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Trillion Dollar Fraudsters
by Paul Krugman, NY Times
MARCH 20, 2015
By now it’s a Republican Party tradition: Every year the party produces a budget that allegedly slashes deficits, but which turns out to contain a trillion-dollar “magic asterisk” — a line that promises huge spending cuts and/or revenue increases, but without explaining where the money is supposed to come from.
But the just-released budgets from the House and Senate majorities break new ground. Each contains not one but two trillion-dollar magic asterisks: one on spending, one on revenue. And that’s actually an understatement. If either budget were to become law, it would leave the federal government several trillion dollars deeper in debt than claimed, and that’s just in the first decade.
You might be tempted to shrug this off, since these budgets will not, in fact, become law. Or you might say that this is what all politicians do. But it isn’t. The modern G.O.P.’s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics. And that’s telling us something important about what has happened to half of our political spectrum.
So, about those budgets: both claim drastic reductions in federal spending. Some of those spending reductions are specified: There would be savage cuts in food stamps, similarly savage cuts in Medicaid over and above reversing the recent expansion, and an end to Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies. Rough estimates suggest that either plan would roughly double the number of Americans without health insurance. But both also claim more than a trillion dollars in further cuts to mandatory spending, which would almost surely have to come out of Medicare or Social Security. What form would these further cuts take? We get no hint.
Meanwhile, both budgets call for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including the taxes that pay for the insurance subsidies. That’s $1 trillion of revenue. Yet both claim to have no effect on tax receipts; somehow, the federal government is supposed to make up for the lost Obamacare revenue. How, exactly? We are, again, given no hint.
And there’s more: The budgets also claim large reductions in spending on other programs. How would these be achieved? You know the answer.
It’s very important to realize that this isn’t normal political behavior. The George W. Bush administration was no slouch when it came to deceptive presentation of tax plans, but it was never this blatant. And the Obama administration has been remarkably scrupulous in its fiscal pronouncements.
O.K., I can already hear the snickering, but it’s the simple truth. Remember all the ridicule heaped on the spending projections in the Affordable Care Act? Actual spending is coming in well below expectations, and the Congressional Budget Office has marked its forecast for the next decade down by 20 percent. Remember the jeering when President Obama declared that he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term? Well, a sluggish economy delayed things, but only by a year. The deficit in calendar 2013 was less than half its 2009 level, and it has continued to fall.
So, no, outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It’s a modern Republican thing. And the question we should ask is why.
One answer you sometimes hear is that what Republicans really believe is that tax cuts for the rich would generate a huge boom and a surge in revenue, but they’re afraid that the public won’t find such claims credible. So magic asterisks are really stand-ins for their belief in the magic of supply-side economics, a belief that remains intact even though proponents in that doctrine have been wrong about everything for decades.
But I’m partial to a more cynical explanation. Think about what these budgets would do if you ignore the mysterious trillions in unspecified spending cuts and revenue enhancements. What you’re left with is huge transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts. And the simplest way to understand these budgets is surely to suppose that they are intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do: make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer.
But this is, of course, not a policy direction the public would support if it were clearly explained. So the budgets must be sold as courageous efforts to eliminate deficits and pay down debt — which means that they must include trillions in imaginary, unexplained savings.
Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were never sincere? Yes, it does.
Look, I know that it’s hard to keep up the outrage after so many years of fiscal fraudulence. But please try. We’re looking at an enormous, destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry.
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apogee
climber
Technically expert, safe belayer, can lead if easy
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Mar 26, 2015 - 08:36am PT
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Actual (ACA) spending is coming in well below expectations, and the Congressional Budget Office has marked its forecast for the next decade down by 20 percent.
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apogee
climber
Technically expert, safe belayer, can lead if easy
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Mar 26, 2015 - 08:36am PT
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Actual (ACA) spending is coming in well below expectations, and the Congressional Budget Office has marked its forecast for the next decade down by 20 percent.
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apogee
climber
Technically expert, safe belayer, can lead if easy
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Mar 26, 2015 - 08:36am PT
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Actual (ACA) spending is coming in well below expectations, and the Congressional Budget Office has marked its forecast for the next decade down by 20 percent.
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apogee
climber
Technically expert, safe belayer, can lead if easy
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Mar 26, 2015 - 03:43pm PT
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Didja read this, TGT?
Actual (ACA) spending is coming in well below expectations, and the Congressional Budget Office has marked its forecast for the next decade down by 20 percent.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Mar 26, 2015 - 03:52pm PT
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My wife had a preggers patient yesterday who lost her insurance, while pregnant,
due to the ACA. She was not a happy camper. The patient, that is.
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