A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:Signym, people like you are the reason why "Medicare for All" won't get passed without melodrama within the Democratic Party. Too many Americans are too finicky. Add into that political mixture 100 Senators pulling in 50 different directions because of the built-in structure of the Federal government and it becomes impossible to please the Signyms and a super-majority of Congress.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
This thread is looking more and more like SECOND's soapbox.
SECOND, I rarely come here, and you're the reason why.
"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND
The Coming Drama with Democratic voters over Medicare for All
www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/2020-could-be-test-medica
re-alls-popularity/581746/
As more Democratic politicians propose moving beyond the Affordable Care Act, the party may be steaming toward the same iceberg that sank Republican efforts to repeal the law.
During the ACA debate, Republicans failed to recognize the degree to which their traditional priority of minimizing government involvement in health care could threaten the financial security of the older and working-class whites now central to their electoral fortunes. Similarly, Democrats may be underestimating how much of their new coalition — which increasingly relies on well-educated whites in major metropolitan areas — may resist entrusting the health-care system entirely to government control and ending private health insurance.
The Medicare for All debate sharpens that tension because voters overwhelmingly receive insurance through their employers — and polls show that the vast majority of them are satisfied with that coverage.
The idea of trying to completely eliminate private insurance unnerves many veterans of the health-care fights. After the ACA’s passage, Obama — who had famously promised that those who like their insurance plan could keep it — faced a huge backlash after only a few hundred thousand people in the individual insurance market were forced to give up coverage that did not meet the law’s standards. Ending private insurance would affect the 181 million Americans who today receive health insurance through their employers, according to census figures.
The Center for American Progress, a leading liberal think tank, implicitly reflected that perspective last year when it issued a universal coverage plan that allowed those with private insurance to maintain it if they preferred. “We did that because we want to have a system where everyone in America has health insurance, but you don’t face the legitimate concern that people have about losing coverage that may even be better than the Medicare plan that’s available,” said Neera Tanden.
Support among the general public in the Kaiser poll plummeted to just 37 percent when respondents were told it could eliminate private insurance companies. Support sagged to the same level when respondents were told it could require most Americans to pay more in taxes. (The taxes needed to pay for it would almost surely be less than what Americans now pay in insurance premiums.)
More at www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/2020-could-be-test-medica
re-alls-popularity/581746/
Personally, I am on Medicare. It could be extended to everyone. If that is too much to get around the GOP obstruction, maybe it could be extended to only the uninsured. But even that will be adamantly opposed by the GOP.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The Great Texas Immigrant Voter Hunt Shoots Itself In the Foot
AUSTIN — Last Friday afternoon, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton took to Twitter to blast out alarming news.
“VOTER FRAUD ALERT,” the tweet said. “The @TXsecofstate discovered approx 95,000 individuals identified by DPS as non-U.S. citizens have a matching voter registration record in TX, approx 58,000 of whom have voted in TX elections.”
The tweet ricocheted across the internet for two hours before the state sent notice of the explosive number of suspected non-citizen voters to county election officials, who are charged with verifying the initial findings and purging any ineligible voters. The state had been working on the analysis since March 2018, but it took the elections officials less than a day to spot glaring errors. By Tuesday, the original list of 95,000 had been cut to roughly 75,000 names.
“I can’t speculate as to why the original list had mistakes,” said Williamson County Elections Administrator Chris Davis, who is President of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators and was among the first to notify the state of inaccuracies. “We weren’t, my county, wasn’t consulted on search parameters or methodology.”
The sequence of events spotlights a rocky rollout that put far more emphasis on splashy numbers than accuracy.
All 366 registered voters on the list sent to McLennan County election officials, for example, were incorrectly flagged and had already proven citizenship, the Waco Tribune-Herald reported.
More at www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/texas/article/Texas-officials-l
aunched-voter-purge-with-big-13579145.php
Election officials in Texas’ largest county say they have already cleared about 18,000 voters in the Houston area who the state had wrongly flagged as potential noncitizens.
Harris County special assistant attorney Douglas Ray said Wednesday he expects to find more mistakes as the state backpedals on claims that tens of thousands of illegal ballots had potentially been cast since 1996.
www.wacotrib.com/news/elections/state-all-on-local-list-of-potential-n
oncitizen-voters-are/article_20771942-538d-506d-bcad-7e7ca79e261d.html
By the time this fiasco is completed I’ll be surprised if they find more than a dozen noncitizens.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Russia nuclear treaty shelved
“For too long, we have been held back by self-imposed limits while foreign competitors grow and they advance more than we have over the years,” Trump said.
Some experts are skeptical. “Nobody in the administration has laid out what the action-reaction cycle looks like as the United States makes all these moves — building new warheads, withdrawing from treaties, pursuing new missiles,” said Jon Wolfsthal.
“The enemy gets a vote,” he added. “The idea that we’re going to do these things, and they’re going to stand still, is nonsensical. They’re going to respond for both political and military reasons.”
If a new arms race begins, it will be expensive. For the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office said, the cost of nuclear upgrades has increased to $494 billion. It might end up costing much more than that if Trump starts an arms race while he claims he is only catching up with where Russia already is today.
www.pressreader.com/usa/houston-chronicle/20190202/281479277652393
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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David Dunning:
People really don’t make the distinction between facts and opinion. So if you survey Democrats and Republicans right now, of course they differ in terms of their priorities for the country and their theories of where we should take the country.
But they also differ in what they think the country is. They really differ in terms of “is the economy doing well?” “What’s the record of the Obama administration?”
These are factual questions. What’s impressed me in the past few years is how much people not only author their opinions but author their factual beliefs about the world.
I ask people a lot of questions in political surveys where I think the answer they ought to choose is, “I don’t know.” And that answer is there for people to give, and they go right past it. We’ve asked, for example, factual questions about the United States, like, “Is teenage pregnancy at an all-time high?” Or, “What’s the financial shape of Social Security?”
We know what the facts are, and we ask people about the facts. Not only that, we put incentives into the survey that are designed to make people honest, borrowing some techniques from economics.
And basically, what we get is Democrats and Republicans differ wildly in terms of what they think is factually true about the world.
What I’m trying to figure out is can we actually diagnose whether these beliefs are authentic or not?
We did try to see if we could figure out if “birther” views that Barack Obama was not born in the United States were authentic. That is, when a person says, “Barack Obama was born in Kenya,” does that look and act like a real belief? And the answer appears to be yes. People seem to be uncomfortable about saying, “I don’t know.” That’s one thing we’ve never been able to get people to do.
I have to admit that over 30 years of research, I often think the correct answer to the question I’m asking you in a survey is, “I don’t know.” But people give me an answer other than “I don’t know”.
How do you get people to say, “I don’t know”? I don’t know.
More at www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/1/31/18200497/dunning-kruger-effec
t-explained-trump
An expert on human blind spots gives advice on how to think
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Yup.
I'm not surprised that Vox didn't also include a counterpoint to the other side as well.
How's this for one?
So we know that Hillary scrubbed her server clean and had her people take hammers to all of the phones. Was there anything truly damning as far as evidence goes that somebody would go to such great lengths to hide it?
Yanno what? I don't have the answer to that one. It's okay to say "I don't know".
And yeah. I don't know if Obama was born in Kenya or not either. He could have been. Birth certificates that old are easy to fake in photoshop.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Yanno what? I go through life betting based on probabilities. That article mentions “superforecasters” — which is that people who think not in terms of certainties but in terms of probabilities tend to do much better in forecasting and anticipating what is going to happen in the world than people who think in certainties. There is a high probability that Trump owes $550 million in taxes that he avoided by fraud.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Yup.
Yanno what? I don't have the answer to that one. It's okay to say "I don't know".
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-sc
hemes-fred-trump.html
One of the biggest "mysteries" of the 2016 campaign was why Trump did not release his income tax returns. The harder Trump fights to keep his returns a secret, the less mysterious the reason: he cheated. He really doesn’t want an auditor who has more accounting information than Trump wants the auditor to see. He’d never voluntarily let an auditor dig deep into areas of his business where the bodies are buried. No IRS auditor ever has. They only had what Trump gave them.
www.cnn.com/2019/02/03/politics/treasury-house-democrats-president-tax
-return-fight/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Yanno what? I go through life betting based on probabilities. That article mentions “superforecasters” — which is that people who think not in terms of certainties but in terms of probabilities tend to do much better in forecasting and anticipating what is going to happen in the world than people who think in certainties.
Yup. It's not often that I say anything is certain anymore, is it?
Two years of sobriety under my belt and you might have noticed that I'm always talking in percentages.
Some of the goons here think I'm a dummy for this, and because I just don't outright buy anything that is printed in news sites that speak to their disposition.
The older I get, the more I realize I don't know a fucking thing. Young me would have been extremely troubled by this, since young me thought that I was the bright shiny center of the universe.
It's liberating to finally grow up and realize that you're just another speck of dust in the universe. Not only does that lift a lot of weight that you were unnecessarily putting on your shoulders, but you realize that it's alright not to have all of the answers.
I've thought about that quite a bit as I was growing up. I had vivid memories of my parents saying that certain things were or weren't true when I asked them questions as a kid. As I grew up, I realized that a lot of those answers were full of shit. It didn't mean that my parents were lying to me, or even that they were necessarily wrong given that they grew up in a much different time period than I did. But I don't have any memory of either of my parents ever saying "I don't know".
I think that's comforting, from a child's perspective, never hearing your parent's say "I Don't Know". "Of course my parents know everything", you think, since for a large part of your extremely young life they typically are your greatest role models.
Unfortunately, I think that puts a lot of pressure on you when you grow up, maybe subconsciously, to have all of the answers yourself.
I make it a point to say "I Don't Know" to my niece when she asks me something that I really don't know the answer to. She's not yet old enough to really digest that, or at least have a meaningful conversation afterward, but when she is, I do intend to tell her that it's alright to admit that you don't know the answers to everything, and if you're really interested in a subject you can research it and get your own answers instead of relying on somebody else's "knowledge" to get the answers.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Self-directed study of Youtube and Twitter propaganda. That goes well...
https://montrealgazette.com/news/quebec/i-didnt-incite-mosque-shooter-
conservative-pundit-ben-shapiro-insists
Ben Shapiro is a stochastic terrorist. Of course he won't admit it. Neither have Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity, to name just a few.
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Quote:Maybe because some people are doing well and others aren't. Like in France, URBAN France is doing well because of financialism, rural France is suffering. And how well you PERSONALLY are doing affects your POV on how well you think the country is doing.
David Dunning:
People really don’t make the distinction between facts and opinion. So if you survey Democrats and Republicans right now, of course they differ in terms of their priorities for the country and their theories of where we should take the country.
But they also differ in what they think the country is. They really differ in terms of “is the economy doing well?”
Quote:It depends on what aspect you're looking at. He presided over an ever-increasing wealth gap (It's not like the rate of increase even slowed down compared to GWB), destroyed just as many nations, shredded the Constitution even more, added more to the Federal deficit, and presided over an even worse drop in manufacturing. Plus, he shoved the population into the maw of private health insurances with a sweetener of Federal tax dollars. OTOH, he was great at "social" issues, presiding over LGBTQ issues like nobody's business.
“What’s the record of the Obama administration?”
Quote:with complex answers.
These are factual questions
Quote:Can one have a "factual belief "? Facts are based on reality. Beliefs defy facts. I think this is an oxymoron.
What’s impressed me in the past few years is how much people not only author their opinions but author their factual beliefs about the world.
Quote:I've taken phone surveys. They really, and I mean REALLY, press you for an answer other than "I don't know". I've had to insist on "I don't know" many times, especially if they were asking a compound question.
I ask people a lot of questions in political surveys where I think the answer they ought to choose is, “I don’t know.” And that answer is there for people to give, and they go right past it. We’ve asked, for example, factual questions about the United States, like, “Is teenage pregnancy at an all-time high?” Or, “What’s the financial shape of Social Security?”
Quote:All "beliefs" are authentic. Whether you believe in a six foot white rabbit or the god of ancient Israel, there is no way to prove or disprove a belief.
We know what the facts are, and we ask people about the facts. Not only that, we put incentives into the survey that are designed to make people honest, borrowing some techniques from economics.
And basically, what we get is Democrats and Republicans differ wildly in terms of what they think is factually true about the world.
What I’m trying to figure out is can we actually diagnose whether these beliefs are authentic or not?
Quote:Like I said, I've had to insist on that answer. I'd be curious what kind of incentives they offer for honest answers; they seem a little secretive on that point.
We did try to see if we could figure out if “birther” views that Barack Obama was not born in the United States were authentic. That is, when a person says, “Barack Obama was born in Kenya,” does that look and act like a real belief? And the answer appears to be yes. People seem to be uncomfortable about saying, “I don’t know.” That’s one thing we’ve never been able to get people to do.
Quote:Another correct answer is ... "When you ask me this question, are you asking about X or Y?" Because sometimes the questions themselves are unclear.
I have to admit that over 30 years of research, I often think the correct answer to the question I’m asking you in a survey is, “I don’t know.” But people give me an answer other than “I don’t know”.
Quote:
How do you get people to say, “I don’t know”? I don’t know.
HA HA! Funny. Maybe he needs to tweak the incentives attached to his survey? Clearly, the assumptions that he's using about WHY people answer with certainty are flawed bec
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