monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Having an opposing opinion is being a dick? Not seeing things and the world the way they do makes me a dick? If that's the case, this whole website is filled with dicks and bitches. The only person I'm personally rude to is Izzy but that is an in-kind response. I'm actually one of the nicest people you can know.

Is answering this now a condition that "the rest of the left" doesn't get banned or something else?

I've noticed, Baldimo, that you constantly ask members totally private questions. For me, it's good enough that TSA knows my eating habits, my bank accounts, addresses of my friends and of my preferred accommodations, my recent travels in and outside Europe etc etc. You can ask them for these data ...

Who do you have on ignore? This also goes for the rest of the lefties here on a2k.

Private questions? What country they live in, what they do for a living and how old they are? I've asked no question I wouldn't answer if asked.

The basic party-wide argument has been that if only Republicans could do away with the hated monstrosity of Obamacare, they’d be able to deliver a replacement that delivers health care to everybody (including the poor and sick) while lowering costs and cutting taxes and getting rid of Washington mandates — in other words, a plan that delivers the good stuff in the ACA without the bad. As long as repeal was not an actual possibility, Republicans could maintain this stance without having to create a plan that would accomplish this, or answer for that plan’s likely outcomes or the true priorities it reflects. Thanks to the CBO, that years-long dodge is no longer possible.

Our doctors are under intense pressure not to treat freeloading foreigners who come over here to sponge off the NHS.

The plan, the CBO concludes, would take more than $1 trillion away from programs targeting poor and middle-class families, to fund an $883 billion tax cut targeted at the wealthy … “No legislation enacted in recent decades cut low-income programs this much — or even comes close,” Robert Greenstein, the … president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities … says.

Who do you have on ignore?

But the way the bill achieves those lower average premiums has little to do with increased choice and competition. It depends, rather, on penalizing older patients and rewarding younger ones. According to the C.B.O. report, the bill would make health insurance so unaffordable for many older Americans that they would simply leave the market and join the ranks of the uninsured.

The remaining pool of people would be comparatively younger and healthier and, thus, less expensive to cover. Other changes would help make health insurance skimpier — cheaper, but with deductibles that are higher than those criticized by Republicans under Obamacare.

I think you have here encapsulated the reasons why Democrats lost most of their former constituents in the last election and why they (and you, it appears) still don't understand what happened.

I think you may have it backwards. My impression is that the Democrat/media hysterics are what is fading in its effects. The shrill noise has been going on for a long time but nothing concrete has emerged from it. People are tuning it out.

You hear it from Republicans, pundits and even some Democrats. It’s often said in a tone of regret: I wish Obama had done health reform in a bipartisan way, rather than jamming through a partisan bill.

The lament seems to have the ring of truth, given that not a single Republican in Congress voted for Obamacare. Yet it is false —demonstrably so.
(...)
When Barack Obama ran for president, he faced a choice. He could continue moving the party to the center or tack back to the left. The second option would have focused on government programs, like expanding Medicare to start at age 55. But Obama and his team thought a plan that mixed government and markets — farther to the right of Clinton’s — could cover millions of people and had a realistic chance of passing.
(...)
At that point, Obama faced a second choice – between forging ahead with a substantively bipartisan bill and forgetting about covering the uninsured. The kumbaya plan for which pundits now wax nostalgic was not an option.

The reason is simple enough: Obamacare is the bipartisan version of health reform. It accomplishes a liberal end through conservative means and is much closer to the plan conservatives favored a few decades ago than the one liberals did. “It was the ultimate troll,” as Michael Anne Kyle of Harvard Business School put it, “for Obama to pass Republican health reform.”

And he said, "The President clearly believes that a picture says a thousand words. Well, I think so too". Then we saw this photo comparison: