However, due to wait times and service shortages, there have been discussions (which really do not go that far) about Tiering the health care system like I mentioned above.
There are already medical vacations, where people will travel to the states to get an operation done more quickly and pay for it out of pocket.
There is also a lot of things that aren’t covered which some Americans may think should be covered such as Ambulance services, hospital stays, medication and medical equipment.
It should also be noted that each province is responsible for their own coverage and I honestly think that individual states should cover their own expenses if they want to go to a single payer program. Therefore, if a state like Kentucky wants to keep the typical insurance coverage they can, while Vermont can move to single payer. Having the states dictate how much a doctor can charge for a checkup would be better than it being federally regulated as a place like Alaska may have a higher cost of living.
Ambulance services? How much does that cost? People here are afraid to call ambulances, I've seen guys say just call an Uber lol.
Here that bill is going to be pretty big. In the U.S., ambulances charge way more than they collect. It is that way all over the country. The reason is the collection rate. The ambulance company might send out 10 bills for $1,500 each. Two of the bills might be paid in full. Another bill will be paid by Medicare at $450. Two more by Medicaid at $105 each. The rest might go uncollected because the patient didn't have insurance or an address to send the bill. Once the $3,660 for all of that is collected and averaged across the 10 ambulance bills, a bill for $1,500 becomes a collection of $366, about 24.4 percent, which they think isn't all that bad.
TLDR: Ambulances send out bills asking for thousands of dollars hoping to get people to pay that to cover costs for people that don't pay.
" afraid to call ambulances, I've seen guys say just call an Uber lol."
How much regulation ambulances services are subjected and how much uber is?
I mean, do we want people who are transporting possibly critically ill or injured patients subject to the same regulation as someone who is using their car as a side-job on weekends?? I'm gonna vote no on that one.......
Yes, but regulations increase the cost of any service. I an not saying to make the system complete without any rule, only that a simplification of the rules could reduce the cost.
However, due to wait times and service shortages, there have been discussions (which really do not go that far) about Tiering the health care system like I mentioned above.
There are already medical vacations, where people will travel to the states to get an operation done more quickly and pay for it out of pocket.
There is also a lot of things that aren’t covered which some Americans may think should be covered such as Ambulance services, hospital stays, medication and medical equipment.
It should also be noted that each province is responsible for their own coverage and I honestly think that individual states should cover their own expenses if they want to go to a single payer program. Therefore, if a state like Kentucky wants to keep the typical insurance coverage they can, while Vermont can move to single payer. Having the states dictate how much a doctor can charge for a checkup would be better than it being federally regulated as a place like Alaska may have a higher cost of living.
Ambulance services? How much does that cost? People here are afraid to call ambulances, I've seen guys say just call an Uber lol.
Here that bill is going to be pretty big. In the U.S., ambulances charge way more than they collect. It is that way all over the country. The reason is the collection rate. The ambulance company might send out 10 bills for $1,500 each. Two of the bills might be paid in full. Another bill will be paid by Medicare at $450. Two more by Medicaid at $105 each. The rest might go uncollected because the patient didn't have insurance or an address to send the bill. Once the $3,660 for all of that is collected and averaged across the 10 ambulance bills, a bill for $1,500 becomes a collection of $366, about 24.4 percent, which they think isn't all that bad.
TLDR: Ambulances send out bills asking for thousands of dollars hoping to get people to pay that to cover costs for people that don't pay.
" afraid to call ambulances, I've seen guys say just call an Uber lol."
How much regulation ambulances services are subjected and how much uber is?
I mean, do we want people who are transporting possibly critically ill or injured patients subject to the same regulation as someone who is using their car as a side-job on weekends?? I'm gonna vote no on that one.......
Yes, but regulations increase the cost of any service. I an not saying to make the system complete without any rule, only that a simplification of the rules could reduce the cost.
It's not rules that drive up cost, it's people with no insurance or no money not paying anything so they charge everybody a huge amount then hope to collect from a few people to keep their profits high.
Trump and Barr have been asking other foreign governments for help in investigating the FBI, CIA and Mueller investigators. The US president has called on the Australian prime minister Scott Morrison for assistance, while the attorney general has been on similar missions to the UK and Italy.
It may also seem odd that Trump, having repeatedly claimed that the Mueller report was a “complete and total exoneration” of him over Russiagate, is now going to such lengths to try and discredit it.
And the information being requested has left allies astonished. One British official with knowledge of Barr’s wish list presented to London commented that “it is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services”.
As the impeachment hearings get more and more alarming for Donald Trump, with damning new evidence emerging every day, there appears to be increasing urgency in the parallel counteroffensives under way by the president’s team in an attempt to defend him.
At the same time, overshadowed by the publicity around the impeachment, is the ever-broadening investigation by William Barr, the attorney general, which the White House sees as a game-changer. An investigation which is seeking nothing less than to overturn the conclusion of the US intelligence services and special counsel Robert Mueller that Russia interfered in the last US presidential election.
The attorney general is focusing on the theory, aired on far-right conspiracy sites, and raised by Trump and Giuliani, that Ukraine framed Vladimir Putin over the US election in a complex triple-cross operation by impersonating Russian hackers.
The Trump followers’ counternarrative is that US intelligence and security services had deliberately, and wrongly, concluded that the Russians were behind the hacking. The real culprit, they allege, was a private company, Crowdstrike, which is run with an anti-Russian agenda.
Crowdstrike was a security firm hired by the Democratic Party to investigate the data breach and was the first of many, including western intelligence agencies, to find that Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, had carried it out.
According to the conspiracy theories, Crowdstrike has a Ukrainian base, and its founder Dmitri Alperovitch is a Ukrainian who set up Putin in revenge for invading his homeland. But Alperovitch, in real life, is of Russian extraction and is a US citizen whose family came to America in the Soviet era. Crowdstrike is based not in Kiev, but California.
Every aspect of the Crowdstrike conspiracy tale has been disproved. But this has not stopped Trump from demanding that Zelensky looks into it, albeit in a somewhat incoherent manner, in the now infamous 25 July call to the Ukrainian president.
There is no evidence that the special counsel’s inquiry started with Ukraine. And we are yet to see where the Barr’s one will end. But the global reach the attorney general has given the Trump counteroffensive ensures the repercussions, the accusations and recriminations will be far and wide.
Hidden deep in the implementation of Johnson's deal is agreement to implement EU standards on agriculture and technology. That would prevent a big UK / US deal. The present Brexit deal is pretty much unpalatable to leavers as well as remainers once you get into its details, which is why they tried to pass it in 3 days....
Those standards now only apply to Northern Ireland (rather than the UK as a whole as in May's deal). I agree that if Northern Ireland is following a different regulatory regime, that would complicate a future UK/US trade deal, but it would not prevent one - that's the same situation as the Brexit deal itself of course, where the rather weird customs arrangements proposed for Northern Ireland will undoubtedly be difficult to implement in practice, but haven't prevented a deal being negotiated. It's also important to remember that the Northern Ireland provisions will only continue if they retain the support of the Assembly at Stormont, so those provisions could be moot well before any US trade deal was completed.
The details of any future trade deal with the EU are of course still to be negotiated and those could have an impact on the sorts of deals possible with other countries. However, the references to a regulatory "level playing field" in the previous political declaration have been removed from the version negotiated by Johnson. I think that's a clear indication that a government led by him would be seeking to avoid anything which could constrain other deals.
While I agree that the more hard-line leavers still have concerns, I don't think there's any doubt that the current version of the deal envisages a significantly 'harder' Brexit than the previous one. That's why the Labour party have been banging on recently about the threat to environmental standards and workers' rights.
There's some binding stuff in the withdrawal agreement, and some in the non-binding political declaration which will 'guide' future negotiations. According to this expert on trade this will likely have significant effects:
I agree that it's a harder brexit though, there's no way to get to the customs union / single market outcome. The question is whether Johnson's deal is palatable to a Conservative party that is leaning ever further to the right and may baulk at how harsh negotiations will get once the UK is out of the EU and the gloves come off.
The points in that link both refer to the political declaration and not the withdrawal agreement (you can find both of those here).
Given the non-binding status of the former, it's difficult to know what the future impact would be in negotiations. However, I agree that there will be problems in doing comprehensive frictionless trade deals with both the US and the EU post-Brexit. The reasons for that are exactly the same as the current difficulty of getting a deal between the US and EU - both sides want such a deal to use their own standards. This article is a few months old, but sets out clearly the problems associated with divergent views of plant, animal and human health. This is a more recent article explaining in the context of the revised deal why the statements in the political declaration referred to by David Henig are likely to be a problem for future deals.
It's worth emphasizing again though that the problems are not the result of the deal itself, but the different systems pursued by the EU and US and the unwillingness on both sides to recognize each other's systems as equivalent to their own. This does not prevent in principle a free trade agreement: it's the non-tariff barriers preventing frictionless trade that are the issue, but it's true that the US has in recent years refused to do free trade deals that don't also address non-tariff barriers.
Trump has gotten mercilessly booed twice in the last week at major sporting events. And not at NBA games or tennis matches, where the crowds are certainly way more liberal than average. We are talking baseball and UFC here. When this guy isn't sealed off inside his rallies, he is clearly not only not popular, but loathed. Then again, sporting events take place in cities, and I doubt there is a major urban center in the country where he could even get a plurality of the vote. Again, he is going to "lose" by 4-5 million votes. But if he holds everything but Michigan and Pennsylvania, he will still get reelected. Democrats have to get those back and flip either Arizona, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida or Ohio. That will be the ballgame. I don't see Trump adding a single state to his column, and he will almost certainly surrender the two I mentioned earlier.
Note that due the government forced parent planning, there are much more man than woman in China. I just doesn't understand why Blacks suffer racism every were they go. Including Africa. Why this happens? Why they deserve it?
@SorcererV1ct0r: I'm not familiar with this story, but I think the anti-black racism in China is actually derived from anti-black racism in the West. Social attitudes in China about black people are essentially exaggerations of social attitudes in the United States, but several decades back. The Chinese really do not like the idea that they're X number of years behind the West on any given subject, but this is a case where it's profoundly true.
Racism isn't remotely as detested and socially unacceptable in most of East Asia as it is in the United States and Europe, and the problem of stereotyping isn't taken as seriously.
(Other stereotypes are common, too. It's not considered politically incorrect in China to say "Jews are good at making money" (in fact, people intend it as a genuinely positive thing), and there are a raft of region-specific stereotypes as well. I remember, back when I was studying at Beijing University, one of the exchange students asked our local teachers what they thought of the people of a certain province, and it didn't take more than two questions before the teacher said the folks of that province were all cheats and liars. A lot of folks hold a very dim view of people from Shanghai in particular.)
Notably, there were thousands of lynching in the United States in which random blacks were murdered by mobs for supposedly raping white women. I think in both cases, the men of the majority race, whether white or Chinese, are motivated by an instinct to keep foreigners away from "their" women.
Chinese men often actually have some similar suspicions about non-black foreigners dating Chinese women. I remember a warning about flirting with Chinese women in Beijing--someone was saying that you had to keep an eye out to see if any local men were giving you dirty looks, and if they were, you should back off, lest the men attack you for getting her number.
I'm not familiar with this story, but I think the anti-black racism in China is actually derived from anti-black racism in the West.
Is there any reason to believe that? It just sounds a little unbelievable to me. I'm sure China is perfectly capable of coming to their own cultural conclusions, and certainly isn't dependent on the West for it's views on anything.
@WarChiefZeke: China has absorbed a lot of ideas from the West, just like the United States absorbed a lot of ideas from Britain, which took a lot of its ideas from France, and all three of us borrowed a fair amount from Rome, which in turn borrowed from Greece. It's not condescending to point out cultural or ideological influences.
China definitely has its own set of cultural conclusions, but when it comes to perceptions of black people, where else would those ideas come from but the West? Black folks have only been in China for a hundred years, and to my knowledge, they've never been together in large numbers even in isolated enclaves.
It's not like China can build its perceptions of black people on its own experience with black people in China. Huge swaths of the country have never seen a black person in their lives.
Not defending the guys(they deserve to be severally punished by the law, IMO is a homicide with cruelty, unnecessary suffering to the victim, no chance to defend by a "banal" motive, but i don't know about Chinese law), but there are much more man than woman in China, and according to a friend of mine who studied 6 months on Asia, they see race mixing as something far worse than inbreeding. US in 70s had a similar mentality.
Anyone else voting in the US today? My state-level reps were all running unopposed, but there was school board, county commissioners and sheriff. Now I can go back to not reading the local news for another 11 months.
Anyone else voting in the US today? My state-level reps were all running unopposed, but there was school board, county commissioners and sheriff. Now I can go back to not reading the local news for another 11 months.
I voted today. Just mayor and city council on my ballot. Kind of refreshing really...
Anyone else voting in the US today? My state-level reps were all running unopposed, but there was school board, county commissioners and sheriff. Now I can go back to not reading the local news for another 11 months.
Me.
Virginia is having an important election today. We're on pace to win back both houses of the legislature for the first time since the 90s.
Massive Democratic victory in the Kentucky Governor race, a deep red state where Trump held a high profile rally with Rand Paul railing against impeachment less than 24 hours ago. Mitch MConnell is not sleeping well tonight.
Virginia is another sign that the GOP is now straight-up toxic in not only cities, but suburbs as well. Kentucky is the heart of coal country and the Democrat ran on a plan of transitioning workers OUT of the industry. Whatever Trump was selling in 2016 on the issue of coal is clearly not working 3 years later.
It looks like we're flipping both houses in Virginia today. Hugo is losing to Helmer in the Senate and, by my count, the Democrats are flipping 5 seats in the House of Delegates, plus picking up the open seat in district 80.
The fun story is district 30 where the Republican incumbent failed to file his paperwork in time and so didn't appear on the ballot. The district is so red that he's going to win as a write-in anyway. I guess the Trump version of the Republican party's love for incompetence extends far beyond Washington. <bad-ump-ssss>
Wow, a lot of 'we' comments here today. I would never use 'we' to describe Republican gains but I just don't identify with a party. I guess it's just not in my nature. Plus, way back when, I actually did join the Republican Party (briefly) all they did is bombard me with letters asking for money. Screw parties...
This is in addition to the fact that we've reached a point where every single defense of the Ukraine scandal has collapsed like a Jenga tower. There are no facts left to muddle, no goalposts left to move. We've reached the point where the only tactic left is naked tribalism. Lindsey Graham literally said today he wasn't even going to bother reading Sondlund's revised testimony, or that of Volker.
Wow, a lot of 'we' comments here today. I would never use 'we' to describe Republican gains but I just don't identify with a party. I guess it's just not in my nature. Plus, way back when, I actually did join the Republican Party (briefly) all they did is bombard me with letters asking for money. Screw parties...
Probably has alot to do with the fact that the Republican parties in both Kentucky and Virginia have been hellbent on blocking the Medicaid expansion in their states for years. This (along with Trump) has basically wiped out the Republican Party completely in Virginia (Bush carried it easily as recently as 2004) and lost them a governorship in a state that Trump won by 30 points. Matt Bevin was the state-level poster child for this tactic at weakening Obamacare. It cost him the election.
Wow, a lot of 'we' comments here today. I would never use 'we' to describe Republican gains but I just don't identify with a party. I guess it's just not in my nature. Plus, way back when, I actually did join the Republican Party (briefly) all they did is bombard me with letters asking for money. Screw parties...
By "we" in my post, I meant Virginians. I do tend to vote with the Democrats, but I'm not a member of the party.
The electoral college can still save him, but the shift away from Republicans in suburban areas is getting impossible to ignore. This is not a one year trend, this has happened 3 straight years. They have an iron-clad grip on rural areas but have now not only sacrificed every large population center, but now their ancillary cities as well, which are overwhelmingly white and not thrilled about tax hikes. Yet Trump is so repulsive to them it doesn't seem to matter.
Interesting take on the Dem's win in VA. Of course, since they will be presiding over redistricting now, they will inevitably alter it in their favor, so they will likely be more competitive there in the future.
I live near the north part of 28. They pulled all the stoplights and turned it into a limited access highway 8 or 9 years ago. They need to continue that all the way down. I only drive 28 on Tuesdays, but it flows pretty nicely where I am.
Apparently Sondland is changing his testimony to avoid later prosecution for lying to investigators, covering up his previous false statements by saying new information "refreshed" his memory. He is now saying there was an explicit quid pro quo in which the Ukrainians had to publicly announce an investigation into Hunter Biden so Trump could use the announcement as a political cudgel against Joe Biden in a presidential race, or else the Ukrainians would not have access to money granted by Congress.
Sondland is the same person that Trump first quoted "no quid pro quo" to defend himself. Now the Trump administration is faced with the prospect of discrediting the same person they once used to defend Trump.
You know, if Trump was THIS worried about Biden, there are any number of legitimate ways he could have tried to take him down. He could have juxtaposed his support of the crime bill in the 90s with his signing of the Federal prison reform bill (the only decent thing he has done as President). He could have gone after him for his position on a old bankruptcy bill that was surely influenced by so many credit card companies being located in his home state of Deleware. Or attacked his endless gaffes.
But no, Trump is frankly too lazy for that. He wanted the easy way out like he had his entire life. So he resorted to bribery and extortion using Congressional appropriated aide as his personal slush fund. But there is a work that people don't label Trump with nearly enough. He's a cheater. He wants to win by cheating.
I've used this analogy many times, because it's a game everyone is familiar with. Monopoly is a vicious game at it's core. It's about bankrupting your opponents. But there are rules. Sometimes these rules are altered (see all the money from fines being thrown into the middle of the board and whoever lands on Free Parking getting the pot as a wild card element), but these are agreed upon in advance before the game starts.
Now imagine one player in your game, on his firsr turn, sneaks an extra $100 bill from the bank. He is called out on it, but denies it, but since only one person saw, the table agrees to move on and let it slide. On his second turn, he does it again. This time, everyone sees, only this time the excuse is "well I thought that was allowed". Everyone then loudly explains this is NOT allowed, and moves on. On his third turn, he takes ANOTHER $100 bill, and everyone is up in arms. And this time his response is "Well I'm me, and you're you, and and I say I am allowed to do this every turn, and everyone can go fuck themselves". No rational or even semi-rational person would continue to play a game with this person involved.
Did you hear that Trump added a cleric to his party? She's casting Protection from Evil 10' Radius to guard him against the demons and witches of the Democratic party who "operate in sorcery and witchcraft" against him.
Comments
Yes, but regulations increase the cost of any service. I an not saying to make the system complete without any rule, only that a simplification of the rules could reduce the cost.
It's not rules that drive up cost, it's people with no insurance or no money not paying anything so they charge everybody a huge amount then hope to collect from a few people to keep their profits high.
It may also seem odd that Trump, having repeatedly claimed that the Mueller report was a “complete and total exoneration” of him over Russiagate, is now going to such lengths to try and discredit it.
And the information being requested has left allies astonished. One British official with knowledge of Barr’s wish list presented to London commented that “it is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services”.
As the impeachment hearings get more and more alarming for Donald Trump, with damning new evidence emerging every day, there appears to be increasing urgency in the parallel counteroffensives under way by the president’s team in an attempt to defend him.
At the same time, overshadowed by the publicity around the impeachment, is the ever-broadening investigation by William Barr, the attorney general, which the White House sees as a game-changer. An investigation which is seeking nothing less than to overturn the conclusion of the US intelligence services and special counsel Robert Mueller that Russia interfered in the last US presidential election.
The attorney general is focusing on the theory, aired on far-right conspiracy sites, and raised by Trump and Giuliani, that Ukraine framed Vladimir Putin over the US election in a complex triple-cross operation by impersonating Russian hackers.
The Trump followers’ counternarrative is that US intelligence and security services had deliberately, and wrongly, concluded that the Russians were behind the hacking. The real culprit, they allege, was a private company, Crowdstrike, which is run with an anti-Russian agenda.
Crowdstrike was a security firm hired by the Democratic Party to investigate the data breach and was the first of many, including western intelligence agencies, to find that Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, had carried it out.
According to the conspiracy theories, Crowdstrike has a Ukrainian base, and its founder Dmitri Alperovitch is a Ukrainian who set up Putin in revenge for invading his homeland. But Alperovitch, in real life, is of Russian extraction and is a US citizen whose family came to America in the Soviet era. Crowdstrike is based not in Kiev, but California.
Every aspect of the Crowdstrike conspiracy tale has been disproved. But this has not stopped Trump from demanding that Zelensky looks into it, albeit in a somewhat incoherent manner, in the now infamous 25 July call to the Ukrainian president.
There is no evidence that the special counsel’s inquiry started with Ukraine. And we are yet to see where the Barr’s one will end. But the global reach the attorney general has given the Trump counteroffensive ensures the repercussions, the accusations and recriminations will be far and wide.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry-latest-russia-mueller-ukraine-zelensky-a9181641.html
The points in that link both refer to the political declaration and not the withdrawal agreement (you can find both of those here).
Given the non-binding status of the former, it's difficult to know what the future impact would be in negotiations. However, I agree that there will be problems in doing comprehensive frictionless trade deals with both the US and the EU post-Brexit. The reasons for that are exactly the same as the current difficulty of getting a deal between the US and EU - both sides want such a deal to use their own standards. This article is a few months old, but sets out clearly the problems associated with divergent views of plant, animal and human health. This is a more recent article explaining in the context of the revised deal why the statements in the political declaration referred to by David Henig are likely to be a problem for future deals.
It's worth emphasizing again though that the problems are not the result of the deal itself, but the different systems pursued by the EU and US and the unwillingness on both sides to recognize each other's systems as equivalent to their own. This does not prevent in principle a free trade agreement: it's the non-tariff barriers preventing frictionless trade that are the issue, but it's true that the US has in recent years refused to do free trade deals that don't also address non-tariff barriers.
https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/10/30/opinions/fractured-states-of-america-polarization-is-killing-us-avlon/index.html?r=https://www.cnn.com/
He's a coward who hides in his safe space all the time; when he ventures out of his bubble it doesn't go well.
Remember he hired actors to cheer him when he rode down the escalator and announce he was running for president? Pathetic.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/01/donald-trump-campaign-announcement-actors-fec
Or when he posed as his own publicist "John Barron" and "John Miller" to describe how Donald Trump was totally having sex with ladies. SAD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonyms_of_Donald_Trump
Note that due the government forced parent planning, there are much more man than woman in China. I just doesn't understand why Blacks suffer racism every were they go. Including Africa. Why this happens? Why they deserve it?
Racism isn't remotely as detested and socially unacceptable in most of East Asia as it is in the United States and Europe, and the problem of stereotyping isn't taken as seriously.
(Other stereotypes are common, too. It's not considered politically incorrect in China to say "Jews are good at making money" (in fact, people intend it as a genuinely positive thing), and there are a raft of region-specific stereotypes as well. I remember, back when I was studying at Beijing University, one of the exchange students asked our local teachers what they thought of the people of a certain province, and it didn't take more than two questions before the teacher said the folks of that province were all cheats and liars. A lot of folks hold a very dim view of people from Shanghai in particular.)
Notably, there were thousands of lynching in the United States in which random blacks were murdered by mobs for supposedly raping white women. I think in both cases, the men of the majority race, whether white or Chinese, are motivated by an instinct to keep foreigners away from "their" women.
Chinese men often actually have some similar suspicions about non-black foreigners dating Chinese women. I remember a warning about flirting with Chinese women in Beijing--someone was saying that you had to keep an eye out to see if any local men were giving you dirty looks, and if they were, you should back off, lest the men attack you for getting her number.
Is there any reason to believe that? It just sounds a little unbelievable to me. I'm sure China is perfectly capable of coming to their own cultural conclusions, and certainly isn't dependent on the West for it's views on anything.
China definitely has its own set of cultural conclusions, but when it comes to perceptions of black people, where else would those ideas come from but the West? Black folks have only been in China for a hundred years, and to my knowledge, they've never been together in large numbers even in isolated enclaves.
It's not like China can build its perceptions of black people on its own experience with black people in China. Huge swaths of the country have never seen a black person in their lives.
I voted today. Just mayor and city council on my ballot. Kind of refreshing really...
Me.
Virginia is having an important election today. We're on pace to win back both houses of the legislature for the first time since the 90s.
Virginia is another sign that the GOP is now straight-up toxic in not only cities, but suburbs as well. Kentucky is the heart of coal country and the Democrat ran on a plan of transitioning workers OUT of the industry. Whatever Trump was selling in 2016 on the issue of coal is clearly not working 3 years later.
The fun story is district 30 where the Republican incumbent failed to file his paperwork in time and so didn't appear on the ballot. The district is so red that he's going to win as a write-in anyway. I guess the Trump version of the Republican party's love for incompetence extends far beyond Washington. <bad-ump-ssss>
Probably has alot to do with the fact that the Republican parties in both Kentucky and Virginia have been hellbent on blocking the Medicaid expansion in their states for years. This (along with Trump) has basically wiped out the Republican Party completely in Virginia (Bush carried it easily as recently as 2004) and lost them a governorship in a state that Trump won by 30 points. Matt Bevin was the state-level poster child for this tactic at weakening Obamacare. It cost him the election.
By "we" in my post, I meant Virginians. I do tend to vote with the Democrats, but I'm not a member of the party.
Sondland is the same person that Trump first quoted "no quid pro quo" to defend himself. Now the Trump administration is faced with the prospect of discrediting the same person they once used to defend Trump.
I don't know the details as of yet so I may change my mind though if it doesn't look like there was.
But no, Trump is frankly too lazy for that. He wanted the easy way out like he had his entire life. So he resorted to bribery and extortion using Congressional appropriated aide as his personal slush fund. But there is a work that people don't label Trump with nearly enough. He's a cheater. He wants to win by cheating.
I've used this analogy many times, because it's a game everyone is familiar with. Monopoly is a vicious game at it's core. It's about bankrupting your opponents. But there are rules. Sometimes these rules are altered (see all the money from fines being thrown into the middle of the board and whoever lands on Free Parking getting the pot as a wild card element), but these are agreed upon in advance before the game starts.
Now imagine one player in your game, on his firsr turn, sneaks an extra $100 bill from the bank. He is called out on it, but denies it, but since only one person saw, the table agrees to move on and let it slide. On his second turn, he does it again. This time, everyone sees, only this time the excuse is "well I thought that was allowed". Everyone then loudly explains this is NOT allowed, and moves on. On his third turn, he takes ANOTHER $100 bill, and everyone is up in arms. And this time his response is "Well I'm me, and you're you, and and I say I am allowed to do this every turn, and everyone can go fuck themselves". No rational or even semi-rational person would continue to play a game with this person involved.
Batshit crazy