Let's Talk About Politics

A blog for liberals, conservatives, and anybody in between.

[lets-talk-about-politics]

Forbes: Could Biden Cancel Some Student Debt Through Executive Action?

While President-Elect Biden begins preparing for his transition to the White House in January, advocates for student loan borrowers are already pressing him to take quick action on student loan debt once he takes office — even if it means bypassing Congress.

One of the benefits of a Biden victory is the ability to address the student loan crisis and bring massive relief to people burdened by crushing debt. Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer have endorsed the next president eliminating, through executive action, $50,000 of public student debt for every borrower. 

This would be an unbelievably powerful action, getting rid of student debt for the vast majority of student borrowers. I can say personally that it would be transformative for me, as it would get rid of a combined $100,000 of debt between my wife and I. It’s the kind of policy that would make it easier for me to purchase a home, save for retirement, and put away money for emergencies and other important expenses.

There will be incredible pressure on Biden to address this crisis while he’s in office, and I for one hope that he makes this a priority in 2021.

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NY Times: Key Justices Signal Support for Affordable Care Act

At a Supreme Court argument Tuesday, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh suggested that striking down one provision would not doom the balance of the law.

Looks like the Affordable Care Act will live another day. With Kavanaugh signaling during oral arguments that he would only sever and eliminate the individual mandate from the rest of the law, and with Roberts explicitly saying that he’s not looking to eliminate the entire law, it appears as if there’s at least 5 Supreme Court justices unwilling to get rid of the ACA.

This is incredible news for the tens of millions worried about protections for pre-existing conditions, as well as guaranteed coverage for maternity care, prescription drugs, and emergency care. Hopefully, Biden will be able to build on the existing framework of the law and expand protections to provide people with better, cheaper health care.

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New Yorker: The Biden Era Begins

American democracy has survived Donald J. Trump.

It’ll take decades to undo the damage done by Donald Trump, if that damage can be undone at all. And we’ll still likely suffer from the effects of partisan polarization for years to come, with our branches of government bitterly fighting one another for control.

But faced with the immediate threat of fascism and authoritarianism, we as a country decided to do something about it. We mobilized at a level unlike any seen in American history and defeated a right-wing nationalist incumbent, an accomplishment that many countries under the same pressures have not been able to do.

Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States. Whining and crying from Trump supporters, Republican politicians, and Trump himself cannot stop that. The election was decisive, more so than many others in recent history, with Biden likely receiving more than 5 million more votes than his opponent. Lawsuits alleging voter fraud have been laughed out of court, and pleas to the Supreme Court from Trump and his supporters will certainly fall on deaf ears.

We have many bitter fights ahead of us, and American democracy is still under threat. But we’ve stopped the worst from happening, and that’s cause for celebration.

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Slate: Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide

From New York to Los Angeles, police officers escalated the national unrest.

Police around the country have responded to the protests over George Floyd’s murder by beating and abusing protesters, maiming or disfiguring them with rubber bullets and firing tear gas at peaceful gatherings.

This is the real story. Our country has fostered a violent, abusive, militarized police force that often allies itself with white supremacy and fascism. The brutal and sadistic violence they are inflicting on American citizens during these protests is a blight on our country. It’s shameful. It’s disgusting.

And if you’re more worried about whether protesters are breaking windows and burning cop cars than you are about police violence, you’re part of the problem.

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Washington Post: ‘Who’s going to take care of these people?’

As emergencies rise across rural America, a hospital fights for its life

Nobody talks about the death of rural hospitals. In some rural areas, the closest hospital is 50, 100 miles away, and in an emergency, that means that people begin to die.

According to this article, emergency room visits in rural hospitals increased by more than 60 percent over the last decade, but margins are getting tighter and the number of doctors working in rural hospitals is decreasing. Even in hospitals that are still running, certain services are being cut because they can’t afford to keep running them. This predominately affects people who need those services the most, such as pregnant women.

In some rural hospitals, the only staff still left are there because they know that they’re the only thing between their communities and collapse. But even that isn’t enough. As staff at these hospitals decreases, the hours the remaining staff have to work increases, while the pay remains the same.

This is a crisis. And if we don’t find a better way to fund these hospitals, more and more people will die.

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NYT: ‘Threatening the Future’: The High Stakes of Deepening School Segregation

In a multiracial America, school segregation looks very different than it did in 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education. But it still persists.

Nothing turns liberals into conservatives faster than the issue of where their kids go to school. Case in point: schools are most severely segregated in the most liberal states in the country, and Latinos are the most deeply segregated racial group.

Much of this is because school segregation is most endemic in major cities. San Francisco, Boston, New York City, all of these cities have suburbs that try to section themselves off from poorer areas predominately populated by people of color, and actively respond in a negative fashion to integration attempts.

Is this hypocritical for a group of people who claim to be inclusive? Of course. Wealthy liberals have always supported policy that only boasts small, incremental gains for poor PoCs while allowing them to stay in their upper-middle class white enclaves. Even many self-described progressives take a NIMBY approach when cheaper housing is proposed in their communities.

It’s shameful how liberals and even some progressives wall off their wealthy white communities like Trump wants to wall off the country.

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NY Mag: Abortion Is Morally Good

Liberals must avoid falling into the traps the anti-abortion movement sets for them.

It’s hard to describe just how extreme many pro-life views on abortion are. If you believe that “abortion is murder,” then it follows that you believe that there’s an baby genocide happening right now, in America, that is greater in magnitude and longer-running than the Holocaust many times over. You believe that one of America’s major political parties is complicit in this, and that more than half of the country’s citizenry condones it.

Now, there aren’t many pro-life people who would admit to believing this, probably because there aren’t many pro-life people who actually follow through the logic of their beliefs. The pro-life movement has largely been taken over by grifters and extremists (remember Ben Shapiro talking about Baby Hitler at the March for Life?), and has no real operating principle aside from “owning the libs” anymore.

Obviously, abortion is not murder. A fetus is not a person. And so painting abortion as this ultimately sad choice is bizarre. Sure, a fetus is a possibility, and choosing the direction of your life can be sad because you wonder what the path not taken would have led to. But abortion is, more often than not, liberating and relieving. And it’s okay to acknowledge the reality of that.

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Slate: The Heritage Foundation’s New, Secretive Clerkship Boot Camp Is Going to Further Trumpify the Courts

Are you an attorney who has accepted a clerkship with a federal judge in 2019? Congratulations! The Heritage Foundation has a program just for you.

The court system in America is just a battleground for partisan warfare. The more ruthless side will win.

The Heritage Foundation, which has become more and more activist over the years, has created a secretive clerkship program whose sole purpose is to “indoctrinate a new class of clerks with reactionary views that they are expected to implement through their work in the judiciary.”

This program is also very secretive. Participants have to sign a strict nondisclosure agreement swearing that they won’t tell other people who teaches the academy or what they say during their courses, and vow that they will use what they learned to carry out the ideological goals of the Heritage Foundation. It shatters any notion of impartiality, creating a group of partisan clerks to staff partisan judges. 

When Democrats say that they’re thinking of ways to “pack the courts,” this is why. At this point, the judiciary in America is broken. It’s partisan warfare all the way down.

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NPR: Many Native IDs Won't Be Accepted At North Dakota Polling Places

The Supreme Court has upheld a state law requiring voters' IDs to have street addresses, which many reservations do not use. Native American groups are now scrambling to prepare for Election Day.

Republicans in North Dakota are attempting to keep Native Americans from voting. The Supreme Court recently upheld a law that required voter IDs to have street addresses, only “Native residents often use P.O. boxes for their mailing addresses and may rely on tribal identification that doesn't list an address”.

This is clearly racially-motivated voter suppression, and could keep thousands of Native Americans from voting in the midterms. It is part of a wider Republican effort to keep minorities from voting across the country, passing voter ID laws that disproportionately affect black, Native American, and other minority voters.

This also goes to show what will happen now that a conservative majority is entrenched in the Supreme Court. Conservatives typically condone voter ID laws either because they believe the lie that voter fraud is an issue, or they want to oppress minorities to win elections. Conservative SCOTUS judges are no different, and do not care about democracy as long as they serve the causes of the Republican Party.

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Washington Post: Crown prince under scrutiny in journalist’s disappearance even as Saudis search for exculpatory explanation

Mounting evidence points to Mohammed bin Salman’s involvement in the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi.

The Trump administration is participating in the cover-up of the torture, murder, and dismemberment of a journalist. It cannot be ruled out that this cover-up is happening because the Trump family has extensive business ties to Saudi Arabia.

It is obvious at this point that Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, was involved in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. US intelligence indicates that this was done to silence Khashoggi as a critic of the Saudi government. This makes it especially egregious that Trump would first assert a conspiracy theory that “rogue killers” murdered Khashoggi, and then compare MBS to SCOTUS judge Brett Kavanaugh, claiming that due process should prove MBS innocent until proven guilty.

We do not know the depths of corruption in the Trump administration, but it is likely far, far worse than we can imagine.

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Republicans are relying on big donors to carry them through the midterms, because their policies are widely unpopular with a large portion of the populace.

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Is that a black panther fist tattoo on your wife's arm?

lol no. Love the geniuses on this site.

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These leftist mobs are out of control.

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Been quite for a while has your "team" been even embarrassing even you lately?

Hey weird stalker,

This is probably as good a time as any to tell everyone that work and life has kept me crazy busy, and I haven’t had time to post anything in a while.

But I should probably post something soon, right? I’ll post something tomorrow for sure. You all can hold me to it.

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I was wondering since you just ignore the actions of the left. Do you have anything to say other than the right doesn't take sexual assault serious.

Oh, I wouldn’t put it like that. I’d use stronger language: “the right doesn’t care about sexual assault survivors.”

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What do you think about the #walkaway movement?

“There’s little actual evidence to suggest that #WalkAway represents a mass conversion of millions — or even thousands — of Democrats to the Trump Train since Straka’s video. Instead, the #WalkAway hashtag is going Conservative Internet viral on the same hope driving recent pro-Trump support of Kanye West: that the country is on the verge of a mass conversion to conservative thought, a Great Awakening of sorts. And the thing about anticipating an awakening is that it never actually has to happen for the idea of it to go viral.”https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/07/02/the-walkaway-meme-is-what-happens-when-everything-is-viral-and-nothing-matters/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c893ac1d8bba

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So the narrative has went from he felt me up and a high school party 35 years ago no evidence, no witnesses, no evidence that they even knew each other. Then gang rape, well shit that's not working either. Then a day or two of hes a blackout drunk. All with no evidence, nothing to back anything up. Now today we are at throwing ice at a bar in college. Your party is tearing itself apart. Its embarrassing. Keep it up that red wave is coming!

I’m going to respond to this “RED WAVE YEAHHHHHHH” anon with an excerpt from an Axios article that illustrates the almost hilarious self-own nature of that perspective:

“The president's contempt for mainstream polling and the media may come back to haunt him in November. Several top Republican operatives working on the midterm elections told me Trump's fanciful "red wave" predictions could depress Republican turnout and, ironically, serve to make any blue wave even bigger.

What we're hearing: One of those strategists told me he's detecting something interesting — and concerning — from focus groups of Trump voters. "You have Trump-MAGA loyalists, and their friends on Fox, who have reached a point of not believing polls and media people telling them things are going wrong, that I believe is actually causing the Republicans problems," the strategist told me, granted anonymity in order to be candid.

"We've seen it in focus groups, with Republican base voters, where you'll come up with a hypothetical that the Democrats win, and people are like, 'That's not going to happen, that's stupid.' ... They're like, 'Oh, to hell with this crap, we were told Trump wasn't going to win. It's bullshit.'"

https://www.axios.com/2018-midterm-elections-trump-red-wave-predictions-republicans-9a192d1e-547d-4fe9-827f-08e24c55cc70.html