Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Thom Hartmann Program" channel.

  1. I've been wondering about this sort of thing for a while. We tried to institute universal care in WA during the early '90s and had to back off when the system imploded. It's made little sense to me why we couldn't extend the ACA at the state level and provide guaranteed care to anybody who either had out of state insurance or who had residency in the state with employers paying into the system. Extending it to other blue states via a compact should be doable.
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  2. Because this isn't about them, they'll get there's, it's too late to address that. What this is about is Gen X and onward that are getting progressively more and more screwed. If nothing is done, by the time I retire, the trust will be paying out less than what we paid in. Meaning that I would have been better off just saving the money on my own rather than putting it into the social security program, and I'm only in my early 40s.
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  3. It took me a moment to parse that out. That's the thing right there. He failed to get anything substantive accomplished, and ultimately the people running the party are still just as corrupt as they were before. He could have taken his ball and gone home after one of the last two primaries, and probably wrecked things for the part enough that somebody would have recognized what was going on. But, ultimately, he started simping for his friend Joe and sold out his own supporters. I don't know who would even vote for him this time around, given how little he cares to fight for what he believes when it comes to his friends.
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  4. Allowed? If they had critical thinking to begin with, they wouldn't be in churches that discourage it. It's hardly every Christian denomination and church that require people to so bereft of critical thinking to be members.
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  5. You don't get to be a billionaire if you're not selfish and greedy. Becoming a millionaire is definitely possible without severing your connection to others, but being a billionaire means that you've accumulated so many resources that you don't need, that it would be a full time job to spend all of it.
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  6. A lot of this happens as the result of mergers. A local Catholic hospital was allowed to buy the other big hospital on the area. Most of the offices are rented by the doctors and medical clinics located there, but because of Catholicism, none of those doctors are allowed to offer any services which aren't permissible by the Catholic Church. If it's a mall clinic, or there are other options, it's not so bad, but when that becomes such a significant portion of the healthcare services, they shouldn't be permitted to dictate what 3rd party clinics located on their property do.
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  7. This reminds me of the Catholic orphanages that moved out of the state when they were forced to place some of the kids with gay couples when they otherwise met the standards. Truly, they are small minded and petty about these things, even if it destroys other people's lives.
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  8.  @1233-h1  As I heard it, she narrowly avoided being arrested for domestic violence in the incident.
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  9.  @Sailor-Dave  That's one of the reasons why nobody uses cast iron for structural elements any more. Cast iron is almost exclusively used for cookware and stoves because it's strong until it finally snaps. Steel will typically deform before it finally breaks, which allows engineers to identify a bridge that's likely to fail before it does. On a sub, any sort of failure is fatal. It might start out as a pin prick leak, but that will expand in a matter of seconds, assuming that the hull doesn't already fail enough to completely implode. Stress moves through materials in ways that aren't always obvious.
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  10.  @peterjohnson1091  Yes, one of the local Catholic hospital systems was permitted to buy the largest hospital in the state. It led to a situation where the doctors leasing space were expected to adhere to Catholic doctrine with respect to what medical procedures could be performed rather than just what the state permits. So, a bunch of the reproductive related care was suddenly not available from the hospital. Its a pretty large complex of several mid-rise buildings with hundreds of medical practices there.
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  11. We used to make people that were cited for jaywalking attend educational classes to help stop the practice. I've been driving late at night and seen people dressed completely in black crossing the street. Well, not so much seen as inferred their presence as the only thing I could see is the retroreflective lane markers disappear briefly as they walk past. But, we've decided to stop enforcing all traffic laws except the ones that apply to cars.
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  12. Yes, but the Desert Eagle has been around for ages and if i doesn't puncture the body armor, it will pack enough of a punch that the organs on the other side will be severely damaged.
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  13. One of the things that they've done around here is change the timing on some of the intersections so that all directions get a red light for a few seconds to allow pedestrians to get far enough into the street to see and be seen. It is somewhat less effective if you've got people turning on red and doing so without properly looking though.
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  14. And yet the Democrats won't do anything about those voting laws to make it more accessible. It's pretty clear that the Democrats don't want to win, and I, for one, am more than happy to oblige them. They clearly don't want my vote because they refuse to do anything to help me, so I'm voting 3rd party or for whomever is challenging the incumbent.
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  15. If it were practical for them to only employ and treat fellow believers, it would be less of an issue. The problem is that there are a bunch of non-believers that get trapped by it.
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  16.  @joeymitchell5467  you should get out more. Bernie has the best chance of beating Trump, it's why the President is so concerned that he might be the pick. He's the only candidate trying to win votes rather than donor bucks and pointless endorsements. He's also the only candidate that thinks the people should have a say in the eventually President.
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  17. TBH, as long as you do a real stop, right turn on red isn't much of an issue except right when the light is turning and pedestrians step into the crosswalk. That's a pretty narrow scenario and not one that lacking a right turn on red is likely to do much about.
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  18.  @chuckecheese5251  she didn't though, the primary was rigged in her favor. She started with hundreds of delegates before the first vote was cast. Even then it took well into the process for her to win. After which she just assumed that she was entitled to or votes and wound up losing to one of the least competent, least qualified candidates ever.
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  19. The difference is that in most of those cases, there's years of chances to change their minds and they aren't swamping the healthcare system. The obese aren't preventing cancer patients from receiving treatment, covid patients are. I don't think that They're subhumans, but it's morally reprehensible to boost their treatment above cancer patients and people who had limited opportunities to avoid getting sick. The vast majority of the hospitalizations are in the unvaccinated.
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  20. To be fair, they haven't yet hit the bottom. But yes, referring to them as Soviets isn't accurate.
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  21. Keep in mind that they've repeatedly ruled that pretty much any contributions that aren't explicit you will engage in corrupt act X if I give you this bag of money to do so are legitimate actions. So, this shouldn't surprise anybody that they're engaged in t he same thing.
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  22. Her point is that they don't have pockets of people that have been abused by the medical system there. They didn't have the Tuskeegee experiment there, and they didn't have medical professionals that thought that black people didn't feel pain the way that white people do and withhold appropriate medical treatment because of it. Don't get me wrong, at a certain point, people do just need to move on, or at least reevaluate whether things are still the same, but Denmark doesn't have the same historical baggage discouraging people from seeking vaccines that people in the US sometimes have.
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  23. When one of the local Catholic run hospitals wanted to buy the biggest hospital in the state, that sort of thing was a serious concern for everybody other than regulators. And, most of the doctors working there are just leasing space, they aren't actually acting under the direction of the hospital. They just want offices where they can refer people to other medical specialties that are located nearby.
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  24.  @thesoundsmith  LOL, good one.
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  25. Property tax is arguably the only tax the normal people should be paying. There are a lot of government services that only exist due to people owning those properties and the tax encourages the local authorities to do things that increase property values. I wish people would stop complaining about property taxes, If you're actually paying property taxes directly, then you're either wealthier than average or you are incredibly irresponsible and deserve what's coming.
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  26. And yet the Las Vegas shooter years back would never have been able to gun down all those concert goers from that hotel window with something shorter. The fact of the matter is that it's more an issue of weapons getting into the wrong hands and having too many bullets lined up for shooting in the magazine. Just simply, limiting the rounds to something reasonable and putting safeguards into place to keep known dodgy people from getting their hands on these weapons would do a ton to improve the situation.
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  27. I don't see what the alternative is other than to enact strict limits on non-vaccinated patients unless there's a limited exemption for not being able to get the doses due to medical reasons.
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  28. Iran is kind of complicated. I have Iranian in-laws that speak openly about wanting the US to stage a coup to re-establish the Shah. It surprises me that they don't seem to realize that they have the Ayatollah over there because the US already tried to reinstate the Shah only to have the people revolt and leading to the current state of affairs. (Admittedly, they had relatives that worked for the Shah in arts and education, so probably not the most accurate depiction of popular sentiment) Iran itself is kind of an interesting case where it was a relatively liberal place in terms of personal freedoms in that part of the world under the Shah, but clearly there were issues that led to the revolution.
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  29. True, although that should rarely happen as very little power is used when a car is just sitting there.
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  30. I was intrigued by the idea of ending 4 direction intersections and designing cities on a grid of hexagons so that basically all intersections meet at a 120degree angle, and you can see all other traffic more or less at once. There's the obvious issue that you'd have to tear down entire cities to make it happen, which is why it likely won't happen unless we somehow get and survive WWIII. Locally, we've had tiny roundabouts for decades, but over the last 20 or so years they've become more common as folks get tired of people t-boning each other because they can't be bothered to stop on rural roads. The roundabouts are making in roads into the cities as well, but there's the issue of finding space in already built cities that makes it a bit of a problem.
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  31. One of the arguments I saw, back during the second Iraq war, about why the protesting would go nowhere, was that nobody was being drafted and so there wasn't anywhere near the personal investment of knowing that your number could be called any day. If you didn't want to fight in that war, then you generally could just not sign up. The only people who fought in it from America that might not have wanted to be those that signed up before 9/11 and a bunch of national guardsmen. For most other people, it was a choice to not enlist to some degree. I do think that there should be a draft and that any assignments of the draftees should be done without knowledge of whom they are, specifically to prevent the rich and powerful from getting out of it that way.
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  32. I'm not personally a fan of banning the turn on red. I think it makes more sense to do things like extending the sidewalk to the traffic side of the parking lane. It both prevents cars from parking too close to the corner and gives the pedestrians a more protected place to stand where they can see and be seen.
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  33. I haven't personally noticed people being more aggressive with their right turn on red over the last couple decades. I could be wrong, but I think it's a lesser factor than a lot of other things.
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  34. I'm voting them all out of office. I only vote for 3rd party candidates unless there's none on the ballot, in which case I vote for the challenger. Both sides are hopelessly corrupt on anything and everything important. Even at $3.5tn, the bill is way too conservative to make up for all the intransigence and delays that have kept things from being addressed in a timely manner.
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  35. It might have been justified early on, but at this point it's self indulgent and asking for trouble. It's low quality thinking and we'll never get past it while feelings are this much more important than rational thought. We're at a point where cancer patients in many areas can't get treated because the unvaccinated are sucking up all the resources. I don't wish ill on anybody, but we need to be rationing health care so other people can get some. Go door to door, go to people's job sites and vaccinate anybody that well get it, but limit the bed space for the unvaccinated so that other life threatening conditions can be treated.
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  36. We know that the Democrats aren't interested in running, so he's got a good chance with how cowardly the GOP politicians are.
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  37. The problem is that neither side here has clean hands. One side wants to remove the information about the civil rights groups. The other wants to pretend like there are no white ethnic groups that suffered and suffer from racial oppression. Anti-white racism in schools is so bad that I gave up on teaching because I refused to be a part of the problem. It's sad that we can't call out bigotry no matter what skin color people have or their particular gender. Teaching students about racism targeting people of color should not require blaming all white people in general, regardless of whether the individual had anything to do with it or even benefitted from it. Russians were banned from significant portions of the US during the cold war. The German language was completely banned from public instruction and it was a case revolving around that which prevents governments from banning languages from instruction. Anti-Irish racism was so bad that in some areas, business owners would hire black people over them because, and I quote, "At least black people can keep a clean house." Not to mention that most of the slurs and stereotypes targeting black people were originally used by the British to target the Irish.
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  38. And the only thing that could make that happen is an actual 3rd party. The Democrats are worthless.
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  39. Please stop lying. Natural immunity is the best immunity if you survive intact. That was settled ages ago. Anybody claiming otherwise is an anti-science nutter. The only reason we have vaccines for anything is that not everybody that contracts these things does survive in good shape afterwards. If we cared at all about getting through this as quickly and safely as possible, vaccines would have only gone to those with increased risk of side effects. The reason being that we get all these variants as a result of preventing them from spreading naturally. We don't have a vaccination, still after years, which is effective at preventing transmission. Without that, there is no way of vaccinating our way out of the pandemic, we're just creating new variants. If we want to actually have sensible public health policy, we need to remove Faucci and get somebody who actually knows that lying to the public is wrong. How many more times does he need to admit to lying before people stop listening to his idiotic advice?
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  40.  @falconquest2068  They found the body much more recently, before that point, there wasn't anything they could do. One of my dad's marine buddies stole his car and got busted for a dui in it. It hadn't been reported as having been stolen, so they had to ask him. He opted to say that the car was loaned, but he wasn't required to. Without him saying it was stolen, there was no case possible for theft.
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  41. They aren't getting the same vaccine that's available in the US. So, it's hardly relevant, all the people dying from the shots or none of them isn't relevant when the shots they're getting aren't available in the US.
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  42. Not to mention medicare for all and hazard pay for essential workers. Biden could give us all medicare with the stroke of his pen and he has chosen not to. Same goes for student loan cancellation. He's continued to delay the payments, which is really difficult for the borrowers because we don't know when or if we're going to have to pay anything back.
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  43. And yet, I didn't get hazard pay from the feds, they gave pretty much everybody else money. I did get some hazard pay due to the city, but I'll have to give most of it back because of my student loan that Biden refuses to wipe out any of the student loans. He also refuses to give us medicare for all.
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  44. For those of us that are males that are also gay or bisexual, in particular, it was a nasty trap as you weren't legally allowed to serve, but even after Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Harass, Don't Pursue was instituted, there were still huge numbers of people thrown out of the military and not receiving their honorable discharges. That was extremely expensive and damaging to all those involved for reasons you're fully aware of. A consequence of it is that most military personnel were fine with it as long as they weren't at risk, but it was precarious where being a threat to somebody else's promotion could be enough to get a complaint that would wind up destroying lives. Removing the draft helped that, but now that things are legally integrated, the draft should return with some teeth to ensure that the rich and powerful are not allowed to avoid their share of the commitment.
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  45. TBH, property taxes are arguably the most legitimate taxes you can have. As far as schools go, the issue there is that when the courts forced WA to properly fund education at the state level, it resulted in Seattle and a few of the more populated areas to send even more money than normal to parts of the state that didn't have their stuff together. The city winds up funding most of the state, while most of the rest of the state keeps sending politicians to the capital to undermine the city's ability to generate money whenever possible.
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  46. I gave up on waiting. I didn't have much debt, but having had the pandemic scuttle my career plans, I'm now making roughly 2/3 of what I was expecting to make. I've been working at a grocery store and the Dems absolutely shafted us on hazard pay. They had a proposal when they knew they didn't have the votes to do it. But when they did get into power, they didn't even try to get anything passed. I don't particularly begrudge those that were at home on unemployment, but the bonus payments that were handed out alone were more than I was making being out in public so that other people didn't have to. A little bit of student loan relief for having my plans scuttled by the government isn't a lot. Because of that whole thing, I will not ever vote for another Democrat or Republican except in the case where there's no 3rd party candidate running and even then only to vote the incumbent bum out of office. It's just so disgusting how much they failed the country and people like me.
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  47. That's the thing, he's not even try. The same way that the Dems didn't even try to get hazard pay for essential workers after they had the ability to actually do it. The only reason that these debts exist in the first place is the failure of the government to adequately fund higher education and allowing student loan money to go to fees that don't serve any sort of legitimate educational purpose. It's not a complicated problem to solve. Colleges aren't going to start cutting back on the BS wastes of money if they have to find students that can afford to pay the related fees without a loan.
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  48. That's interesting. As a grad student if I want to get a federal loan, it's over 10% right now. I'm fortunate enough that my parents can add my debt onto their line of credit for a fraction of that amount, but I wonder about those folks who can't do that. 10.5% is the low end of credit card interest and unlike a credit card, you can't wipe that out in bankruptcy court if you have to.
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  49. The smart and the elite going into the military? Seriously? Perhaps before we started being involved in perpetual wars that was the case. The military itself varies a lot, perhaps if you're focused on those that are officers, that might be true, but the people who wind up in the military do so for various reasons and represent various levels of ability. For many, the military is the only way they're going to go to college as they aren't bright enough or connected enough to make it happen. You have far more enlisted members than you do officers and the bar to clear for enlisting is extremely low. It wasn't until relatively recently that they've had to start turning people away who lack a high school diploma.
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  50. I hate those. I can legally turn, but who knows if it'll be safe to do so at any point during the cycle.
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