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[mainiac]

She symbolizes to many apathy and a lack of progress that has frustrated the nation for the last 16 years.

The last 8 years have seen healthcare reform finally pass after fifty years of failed effort, gay marriage, the end of two wars with major ground troop deployments and the US government being the only major rich economy to avoid getting completely and utterly fucked sideways by a global economic crisis (idk, you could count Canada as major)

The Clinton agenda calls for a public option, a massive minimum wage hike and minimum wage indexing, ending the gender pay gap, immigration reform, hundreds of billions in infrastructure spending and a new infrastructure public bank arrangement and free college for tens of millions of people.

There is something seriously fucked up in this country.  Progressives see an agenda that Bernie Sanders wouldn't have run on in 2004 and they call it stagnation.  I have had people unironically tell me that Ted Cruz is the republican establishment.  I've seen Barney Frank being attacked as a tool of the Wall Street bankers.  It's okay if you think Clinton is too timid.  I disagree but it's a legitimate position.  But there isn't just no sense of a larger view before you insist that you know better.  Everyone is a fucking constitutional scholar these days because they read an article or two.  Everyone understands the intricacies of Washington even though they couldn't name three members of the cabinet or what the last major bill in Congress was.  It's seriously fucked up.

I think the reason why Clinton does so well with minority and queer people because we are still close enough to this shit to actually care about reality.  A queer person over the age of 25 or so doesn't wonder if America has changed, they fucking know it.  They remember shit from 15, 20 years ago that would never, ever happen today.  You are taking a monumentally important shift and just casting it aside.  And it's that same monumental fucking ignorance you are applying to everything else.

I'm gonna go cry myself to sleep now.

[TheDarkStar]

At the very least, the US president is only one of the many important people in the government. Important, yes (and probably the person with the most concentrated political power), but most decisions are still made by other people.

PPE:  15 replies in the time it took to post this.

[Orange Wizard]

Yeah. That's how political classes work. You have enough money that you can afford to sit around and talk politics all day long, discuss policy, broker deals, and appeal enough to people that the country doesn't break in the process.

Doesn't make them smarter or better suited to the job. Randomly-selected civilians might well be a better way of filling seats than career politicians.

...

The last 8 years have seen healthcare reform finally pass

Reforms that were pretty shit, frankly

gay marriage

Passed by the Supreme Court, and subject of dozens of attempts to override it by rebellious states

the end of two wars with major ground troop deployments

Also started another one, so vov

and the US government being the only major rich economy to avoid getting completely and utterly fucked sideways by a global economic crisis (idk, you could count Canada as major)

The GFC wasn't really economies getting fucked sideways so much as an inconvenience, and that's hardly because of wise and efficient policy decisions

[Starver]

So what you are saying is Hipsters as a whole are Nazi's? Or that Nazi's were the first Hipsters thus making Hipsters a derivative of Nazi's?

Fact: The greatest crime commited by Nazis was their abuse of apostrophes.

Yeah. Definitely that.

[Rolepgeek]

I mean, I'd sorta be alright with that as long as there was a screening process. It's like jury duty, except you do it for eight years and are paid a lotb of money.

Also, I'd be pretty damn okay with political stagnation so long as local governments continued getting their shit together. And they are. Piece by painstaking piece, but they are. Sometimes for the wrong reasons, mind, but those seem to be dealt with well enough. The broader political stuff that both needs changing and can be affected by our highest legislative body isn't going to happen anytime soon without a nigh-literal revolution, anyway.

But, yeah. My parents thought I might be a conservative for a while...I consider myself a moderate liberal. I'm probably actually a center-wing liberal who likes compromise more than most of out current politicians, at least.

[Egan_BW]

everyone says that there's something fucked up about the american political system right now
but what if they're all wrong
what if this is actually everything going perfectly fine, but none of us notice

[Frumple]

The last 8 years have seen healthcare reform finally pass

Reforms that were pretty shit, frankly

... the benefits have been pretty significant, OW, and quite a fair number of the provisions that's been involved were badly needed. Like, the ACA and related stuff gets shat on a lot but great frothing chunks of that shit is basically (and sometimes literally) fabricated and it has really kinda' been seriously fucking helping on a lot of fronts vis a vis medical care in the US. You can make the argument that that's not exactly difficult considering the state of things before (I've mentioned before that literally beheading most upper management in the medical field would probably have helped too, ferex), but... still. US healthcare is definitely doing better now than it was expected to be doing at this point before the ACA went through. Long damn way to still go, but it's actually going to an extent now.

You mean, of course, the part where, in spite of him pissing off most of the Republican party, to the point that there is an incredibly vocal block that flatly opposes him, he still manages to be equal to Hillary in the polls?  Because that seems like one hell of an accomplishment here.

Barely managing to tread water (if that, because again, he's been losing those polls pretty consistently so far as I've been able to tell, even if the margin is not particularly large) when you're getting gargantuan chunks of free publicity against someone that's been under the fire of a constant media assault for literally decades, while managing to basically cause the party you're ostensibly representing to implode and get more of the constituency to vote against you (and this the bloody republican party, who are almost freakishly party-line these days) than for at the same time is... not what I'd call an accomplishment. I mean, it's sorta' impressive, in a sense, but it's not a good sort of impressive.

Much like his business career, he probably would have been doing better at this point if he had just shut up and let things coast. Instead he's managing to take pretty much every bloody advantage under the sun and still come out behind. It's almost like a mirror clinton, really. She's got gigantic heaps of disadvantages and is still managing to come out at least on par, and generally ahead.

[Rolepgeek]

everyone says that there's something fucked up about the american political system right now
but what if they're all wrong
what if this is actually everything going perfectly fine, but none of us notice

Wait forty years and we'll find out

[Orange Wizard]

... the benefits have been pretty significant, OW, and quite a fair number of the provisions that's been involved were badly needed.

Oh yeah, you guys are doing way better now than ten years ago. Problem is that's not a very high bar.

[Dorsidwarf]

There is something seriously fucked up in this country.  Progressives see an agenda that Bernie Sanders wouldn't have run on in 2004 and they call it stagnation.  I have had people unironically tell me that Ted Cruz is the republican establishment.  I've seen Barney Frank being attacked as a tool of the Wall Street bankers.  It's okay if you think Clinton is too timid.  I disagree but it's a legitimate position.  But there isn't just no sense of a larger view before you insist that you know better.  Everyone is a fucking constitutional scholar these days because they read an article or two.  Everyone understands the intricacies of Washington even though they couldn't name three members of the cabinet or what the last major bill in Congress was.  It's seriously fucked up.

I think the reason why Clinton does so well with minority and queer people because we are still close enough to this shit to actually care about reality.  A queer person over the age of 25 or so doesn't wonder if America has changed, they fucking know it.  They remember shit from 15, 20 years ago that would never, ever happen today.  You are taking a monumentally important shift and just casting it aside.  And it's that same monumental fucking ignorance you are applying to everything else.

Yes, but if I say "emails", "Crooked shillary" and "lesser of two evils" from my air-conditioned $600,000 suburban house typed on my $3000 computer that I use to look up more articles about how bad Hillary is, that all goes away.

[DJ]

Well if you've got a 600k house you're definitely in the minority. Most of the working class has seen their real income decrease slowly but steadily. And the young have zero chance of getting a decent paying job right out of school so they can start their own families while they're still young, and that was pretty much a given fifty years ago, so yeah, things have objectively gotten worse.

[mainiac]

Reforms that were pretty shit, frankly

... the benefits have been pretty significant, OW, and quite a fair number of the provisions that's been involved were badly needed.

You are talking about is giving dignity to millions of people.  OW doesn't give a shit to stuff beyond dank memes.  I.E. stuff that is fun to spoiled affluent white teenagers in another country like him.

Well if you've got a 600k house you're definitely in the minority. Most of the working class has seen their real income decrease slowly but steadily.

This is something that can be quantified.  You can look these things up.  This literally took me five seconds to find: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

You can even look up the income of Sanders supporters easily and see that it's above the median and no different from Clinton supporters:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/

[DJ]

Interesting how that excludes the period I was talking about where people could actually afford to start a family right out of school on just one paycheck.

[penguinofhonor]

In the time it took you to type that, you could've found more complete numbers.

But hey, better to just assume you're right.

[DJ]

Well, OK, I was wrong, the working class income has pretty much stagnated while the wealth they produce with their work has increased by orders of magnitude. Doesn't exactly sound fair.

Also, how is that dollar value conversion done anyway? Average price of everything? IMO it'd be more relevant to just look at the price of essentials, namely food and shelter. Sure, food is getting cheaper all the time, but real estate prices have grown a lot compared to 50 years ago, so the overall cost of essentials has increased much faster than the overall prices of everything.