What I love about Democrat politicians is how they treat their supporters as if they are ignorant, stupid and easy to manipulate. Other politicians attempt to do the same but typically are more subtle.
You are absolutely right Comrade KarmaKarma! Canadian politicians do the same.
What I love about you Comrade KarmaKarma is you do the same with almost childlike glee.
What I love about you Comrade KarmaKarma is how you wear your self-loathing for the USA on your shirt sleeve.
The Swamp That Trump Built A businessman-president transplanted favor-seeking in Washington to his familyâs hotels and resorts â and earned millions as a gatekeeper to his own administration.
What I love about Trump is how he treats his supporters as if they are ignorant, stupid and easy to manipulate. Lots of politicians attempt to do the same but typically are more subtle.
The idea that you can easily take the higher-up GOP folks and easily find video of them contradicting themselves, or telling their followers things that are demonstrably false, but people keep voting for them...it's mind boggling. It's clearly a demonstration of how gullible they know the body of the Republican Party has become.
Easiest example: they rail against the "elites," and elect this guy - who defines himself as an elite. And the GOP lap it up as a success. A "Christian" who pays for sex while he's cheating on his third wife while she's pregnant, ignoring that he's married to the only First Lady who's pretty much shown us all her goods.
And the defense? Sling mud at other people, hoping to distract the criticisms. It's so patently obvious and ham-handed it's depressing that there are people who can't see past it. And those people, when confronted, respond by saying that they've bought a gun. WTF? Really?
Doesn't it remind you of professional wrestling's kayfabe? Or a pantomime show in England? Some people don't care that Trump is fake or doesn't fulfill his promises—they just like the show and the meme of a Big Man fighting on their side.
I firmly believe that conservative talk radio and shows like Fox have over the years built up a narrative of how the world works. Average folks are getting screwed over and disrespected by Big Government and Big Business. Libs are weak, cowardly weasels. Government programs screw things up and/or are massive rip-offs.
Trump tapped into that. He had the angry talk show personality and he was (supposedly) rich and powerful and effective. He had great success in ripping the GOP a new hole. His candor and nastiness was a refreshing change from the hollow people in the GOP like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. And then ran against HRC whom the right wing politicians and talking heads made into the personification of the Evil Left.
Trumpworld has set up the backstory for Trump to claim that he's running to drain the swamp and help the little guy. Bring back coal, kill rip-off trade deals, stop immigration, etc. Most of us believe that Trump's campaign cooperated with groups within and aligned with the Russian government, while pro-Trump folks believe that the left fabricated that cooperation in order to stop Trump's quest to reform a corrupt Washington. That phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Zelensky? Perfectly fine by the lights of Trump supporters who AFAICT also see the impeachment process as something like a coup to bring Trump down for no good reason.
We went through the same mass delusion with Bush II and the invasion of Iraq. We were attacked for no good reason by cowardly sub-humans (like Pearl Harbor)! Find the WMDs! Fight Al Qaeda in Iraq before they come here! It took a long time for Americans to stop believing those stories because they played into older narratives—the US as the innocent victim of an unjustified sneak attack, America as the defender of freedom against vicious zealotry (it was Communism during the Cold War, it became "Islamic fundamentalism" with Iraq). The scary thing is that the scale fell from Americans' eyes back then (with Hurricane Katrina, the lack of WMDs, Abu Ghraib, etc) but they're not falling off today. Trump supporters still love him despite Trump's strenuous efforts to avoid responsibility for containing the coronavirus (no federal program for testing or contact tracing) or promoting safe practices, insufficient medical supplies, insufficient education of Americans about the disease). He's largely left rescuing of the economy to Mnuchin and some members of Congress even though small businesses are failing in masses and evictions are skyrocketing.
The coronavirus isn't contained. The economy is sliding backwards and without new stimulus will crater badly. But Trump supporters find comfort in the narratives they've been fed and see Trump as the hero in something like a modern folktale. It's like the modern Batman movies: sure Batman isn't all sweetness and light, but he's fighting to save a dysfunctional system that's about to be taken over entirely by corrupt and greedy forces from within.
If you see Trump as something like Batman, you'll forgive him all sorts of bad behavior and failures. You don't have anyone else to root for. It's really troubling that so many people have stopped thinking for themselves and just trust what a world-class conman says, regardless of how false and stupid his words are.
What I love about Trump is how he treats his supporters as if they are ignorant, stupid and easy to manipulate. Lots of politicians attempt to do the same but typically are more subtle.
The idea that you can easily take the higher-up GOP folks and easily find video of them contradicting themselves, or telling their followers things that are demonstrably false, but people keep voting for them...it's mind boggling. It's clearly a demonstration of how gullible they know the body of the Republican Party has become.
Easiest example: they rail against the "elites," and elect this guy - who defines himself as an elite. And the GOP lap it up as a success. A "Christian" who pays for sex while he's cheating on his third wife while she's pregnant, ignoring that he's married to the only First Lady who's pretty much shown us all her goods.
And the defense? Sling mud at other people, hoping to distract the criticisms. It's so patently obvious and ham-handed it's depressing that there are people who can't see past it. And those people, when confronted, respond by saying that they've bought a gun. WTF? Really?
What I love about Trump is how he treats his supporters as if they are ignorant, stupid and easy to manipulate. Lots of politicians attempt to do the same but typically are more subtle.
What I love about Democrat politicians is how they treat their supporters as if they are ignorant, stupid and easy to manipulate. Other politicians attempt to do the same but typically are more subtle.
Joe Biden's a Communist. He's half-Chinese. He's built a fortune taking bribes from China and investing in re-education camps in western China. He will sell your mother to the gypsies for a bag full of hamsters. Yes.
What I love about Trump is how he treats his supporters as if they are ignorant, stupid and easy to manipulate. Lots of politicians attempt to do the same but typically are more subtle.
For my recent book American Oligarchs, I interviewed scores of former Trump executives, employees, business associates, and partners. Very few wanted to go on the record, for fear of the retaliation that Donald Trump makes real every day. But the stories they told also corroborate the contention of Mary Trumpâs lawsuitâthat Trumpâs entire business model is fraud.
âWe're taking care of our seniors. Youâre not vulnerable. But they like to say 'the vulnerable.' But youâre the least vulnerable. But for this one thing, you are vulnerable. So am I.â
President Trump claims heâs bringing down drug prices again, but the details of how are skimpy
The Trump administration floated a similar idea in 2018, which met with swift criticism from some of its usual supporters, such as Americans for Tax Reform, a right-leaning advocacy group that opposes tax increases. The criticism was marked by TV ads warning that this approach to drug costs was a step toward socialism. We found that claim to be Mostly False. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services estimated at that time the resulting savings from such a plan would be 30%, but it was never enacted.
Multiple experts questioned Trumpâs claims about how much costs would come down as a result of the more recent proposal.
Thatâs in part because the full text of the executive order has not been published, and so classifying the presidentâs statement as true "requires a leap of faith," said Benedic Ippolito, a resident scholar who studies health care costs at the American Enterprise Institute.
(...)
And this isnât the first time Trump has made this promise to the American people.
"He promised to lower drug prices as part of his campaign in 2016 and has done absolutely nothing of substance about drug prices at all while heâs been in office," Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard, wrote in an email.
Promises, promises...
Some punditsâespecially those indisposed to the Presidentâclaim that these executive orders are merely âsymbolicâ without any policy impact. That isnât true. The Trump administration was very close to finalizing the Part B IPI rule in 2019; all it would take to finish it is to change the formula to the most favored nation versionâa relatively simple task. Once the rule is finalized, it will probably take another year for purchasers and others to organize around the new regulatory system.
The Part D rule, on the other hand, will take time for the Trump administration to develop and seek formal public comment. If Trump loses in November, and Biden wants to undermine the order (out of partisan pique or friendliness to the drug lobby), that portion of the order is at greater risk.
Do you actually read anything you post, beyond the headline?
"In our analysis, we used prescription-drug market data from IQVIAâs MIDAS database.2 The data we examined cover the year 2018 and span 33 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, including the United States.3 We did not restrict our analysis to prescription drugs, as certain insulins are available over the counter in some countries (including the United States)." https://www.rand.org/pubs/rese...
