Progressives (Liberals)

As to coldjoint's comment, my local DMV is much improved from what it was thirty years ago; it's clean and it runs efficiently. And it's still there.

Insurance programs are varied and widespread, although there is a universal insurance mandate in Germany, but not in the United States.

Hospitals across the northern U.S. serve large numbers of Canadians

Unlike in the United States, appointments in Canada for elective and specialist procedures are determined by priority and need, rather than people who can afford to pay more to see a doctor quickly. While it is true that there are longer wait times in Canada for such procedures, there is no reliable, official data on the number of people traveling from Canada to the United States, said Victor Rodwin, health policy and management professor at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service.

“What we do know is that the numbers of people who come from Canada to the United States for surgery are very small,” Rodwin said.

from Canada to the United States for surgery are very small,

Progressive policies run on excuses...

How does mentioning a well-run DMV amount to an "excuse" for "progressive policies"?

Greg Sargent
@ThePlumLineGS
@BernieSanders
' $34 million fundraising haul is staggering.

After the last debate, I suggested Sanders may be emerging as the official progressive frontrunner, and that seems truer now than ever. The treatment of him as an afterthought remains strange:

https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/20/debate-buttigiegs-loss-is-klobuchars-gain/?arc404=true#annotations:18687189

Sorry. George don't answer questions. He makes statements that one should accept as fact. He like the pope is infillible.

Clearly hightor has never been to a California DMV office.

(...)

Last year, I wrote a piece outlining numerous disquieting elements of Tulsi Gabbard’s record; since the announcement of her presidential campaign, the article has gained renewed attention. At the time, the congresswoman from Hawaii was the object of much admiration from the Left for her fairly early endorsement of Bernie Sanders, and the idea of the piece was to better inform left-wing and even liberal readers about the lesser-known, but seriously concerning, aspects of her record: aspects like the fact that her foreign policy is not nearly as antiwar as she claims it to be, that she supports various authoritarian, nationalist leaders, and spent a significant amount of time prior to 2016 winking at the increasingly Trumpian right.

Over the weekend, Michael Tracey took exception to the piece, in particular my account of Gabbard’s well-documented hostility throughout 2015 toward Obama’s Iran Deal, a diplomatic success of his presidency that Trump made it his mission to shred once in office (which he has). Tracey pointed out, correctly, that I neglected to mention Gabbard voted for a September 2015 resolution in favor of the Iran Deal, a measure that all but one of the Republicans present voted against, with the support of only twenty-five Democrats. He argued that fact contradicted the claim in the article that Gabbard “vigorously opposed” the agreement.

It’s certainly an important bit of context that should have been included in the original article. But a closer examination of Gabbard’s stance toward Iran before that point reveals a lengthy, well-documented history of hostility toward Iran and diplomacy with the country.

In June 2013, a sea change in Iran-US relations took place. Iranians elected as president the reformist-backed Hassan Rouhani, a former nuclear negotiator respected by international diplomats who wanted to end the impasse over Iran’s nuclear program, reestablish relations with the West, and find a way to ease the sanctions crushing the country’s economy. The Obama White House responded that it “remains ready to engage the Iranian government directly” for a diplomatic settlement. The Iranian government, for its part, relayed a message to the Obama administration that Rouhani wanted direct negotiations with the US over its nuclear program. It was the best opportunity for finding a diplomatic solution to the standoff in years.

What was Gabbard’s response? Two months after Iranian voters had rebuked the country’s hard-liners, who had long argued negotiations were futile with a US they saw as bent on Iran’s destruction, Gabbard co-sponsored and voted for the Nuclear Iran Prevention Act of 2013. Against the advice of US diplomats, the bill aimed to reduce Iran’s oil production by 80 percent, after sanctions had already reduced the amount by half since 2011. As Jim McDermott, one of the twenty mostly Democratic lawmakers to vote against the bill (a list that included Maxine Waters, Justin Amash, and even Beto O’Rourke) put it: “It’s a dangerous sign to send and it limits our ability to find a diplomatic solution to nuclear arms in Iran.”

The fact that most Democrats — indeed most of the House — voted for the bill doesn’t make Gabbard exceptional within a hawkish Democratic Party. But it hardly tracks with her image as a trailblazing rebel rejecting national security orthodoxy.

Gabbard had a habit of repeating common national security establishment tropes on the issue. She suggested at one point that in Yemen, Iran had “ground that they are controlling,” suggesting that the Houthi rebels in the country are merely the country’s puppets, a highly contested assumption to say the least.

In 2014, she called Iran “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.” By contrast, a year later, when asked about the potential for Saudi Arabia to develop nuclear weapons in response to a potential Iranian nuclear arsenal, she said it was “understandable” because Iran was “right on their doorstep.” Bear in mind that Saudi Arabia has been connected in varying degrees to terrorists over the past few decades, including through its involvement in the September 11 attacks, while Iran is both encircled by one nuclear power at the same time as its chief regional adversary also secretly owns as many as hundreds of nukes.

(...)