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[TempAcc]

Have republicans in general been screaming for war in these last 8 years, though? Many families with people in the military vote republican and hold a good ammount of sway among republicans, and all I've been hearing from that crowd recently has been "bring our boys home", which is something that was very halfassedly done and never actualy completely executed.

And ye, pretty much everyone wants the US to stop catering to the saudi's interests left and right and pretending that saudi arabia is some sort of enlightened bastion of human rights.

Obama's ambivalent foreign policy of heavy military intervention against some people and leniently bowing down to others raised a fair bit of eyebrows and has likely alienated a whole lot of moderates and at least some more anti war democrats. Plus, I'm pretty sure that to this day nobody takes his nobel prize seriously. Hell, even the most lefty of my friends have called and continue calling that out.

[Phmcw]

He barely got through a weakened version of the health care Romney proposed, and now it's going away.  But he should have gone farther?

Trump promised a "better" version of the healthcare reform. We'll see what he does but a part of the peoples that voted for him think that the democrats didn't go far enought.

Also my whole point is that Obama's administration was much less shy when it was abot going to war, yes.

He deployed the military to liberate people/introduce democracy, like Republicans always scream for, yet he went too far?

Nobody can say that with a straight face, and Trump won the republican primary on an anti-war/interventionism platform. Ron Paul's idea are definitely playing a role here.
The elephant in the room is that there are two radically different wings in the republicans that don't agree on anything. Since both voted Trump, this will be interesting.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, the neocons are waning on the right ever since the Dubya era ended. They had their shot, started two wars in the name of their batshit ideology, and made pretty much the entire country hate them.

[Frumple]

The reason many of Trump's poorer supporters don't like Obamacare is because it made them choose between expensive & bad health insurance and paying for other things in their budget.  And then, if they chose the latter, they got fined.  Sure, it made it "easier" to buy health insurance, but it also screwed up lots of people's coverage and made things more expensive.

Well, the "good" news is we're soon going to be able to rebuild it from the ground up, because it looks like Trump's going to gut it from what I hear.

Wasn't there a provision for the poor in there, that waived the fine?  *checks*  Yeah:
http://obamacarefacts.com/obamacare-mandate-exemption-penalty/  (click through the intermediary page)
Basically, if you make under 10K a year or the healthcare would be 8% of your budget, you're exempt.
So it's not like people were going into debt from these fines...

It wasn't like it actually made things more expensive for the vast sodding majority of those poorer supporters, either. Or anyone, really. ACA has slowed down the rise of healthcare costs in most parts of the country, as far as anyone has actually been able to tell. If it hadn't been there, most folks would be in the same damn position except worse off with worse treatment.

... mind you, believing it did is a lot of the reason many people, conservative and not, have for wanting to scrap the thing. It's just that belief is by and large straight up bullshit, reinforced by repetition and volume more than absolutely everything. There's exceptions to that for specific areas, where it hasn't slowed down the rise, but that's usually less ACA implementation's fault and more their bloody legislature et al screwing them over, yet again.

Have republicans in general been screaming for war in these last 8 years, though? Many families with people in the military vote republican and hold a good ammount of sway among republicans, and all I've been hearing from that crowd recently has been "bring our boys home", which is something that was very halfassedly done and never actualy completely executed.

Conservative sentiment that I've seen on that has frankly trended towards pretty close to being able to be called a DID symptom. There is a big "bring our boys home" message, but at the same time the message is borderline hyperaggressive when it comes to things like ISIS, Iran, etc., etc., etc., and there's also still serious support for expanding the military (which, by extension and no matter how much some folks like to try to claim otherwise, increases the extent it's used, as well) and adopting very belligerent foreign policy (sometimes hand in hand with increased isolationism, but don't ask how that works), i.e. basically goading other parts of the world into reacting violently. It's a sort of talking out both sides of their mouth thing, where they call for one thing and then call for other things that are diametrically opposed to said thing with similar or greater fervor.

If support for military aggression has really pulled back much on the conservative side of US politics, I haven't really noticed it, basically. There's been some overall conversation composition shift and some narrative is working against it nowadays (bring 'em back, et al), which is perhaps a bit of a change, but if the shoe drops and trump declares war on turkmenistan or some shit (never mind all the procedural borderline impossibilities involved in that), I can't really see much of the conservative parts of our electorate doing much to rally against it. It'd be nice to be surprised, but I'd be surprised if I was surprised

[Strife26]

The classy thing to do would have been to turn it down. Probably would have been a great PR move as well.

Instead he gave a stirring defense of Just War doctrine that will likely be referenced as much or more than his first inaugural or we shot OBL speeches.

[McTraveller]

One big problem with ACA is it is incapable of reducing overall costs except perhaps by strange effects; the "reduced rate of health cost increase" is kind of a red herring, because individuals with 15% annual increases in premiums don't "feel" the fact that in 10 years, they will have averaged only a 5% annual increase instead of a 10% annual increase.  Put another way - "front loading" the cost increases is very painful (and politically difficult).  Essentially ACA is about cost shifting not cost reduction - the way to see it is the ACA is tailored to "get better value for the health care dollar you are spending" not "get the same care for less money" - and those are fundamentally different goals.

The other issue is that ACA doesn't by itself actually address any of the root causes of why health care costs are so high; it does nothing to reduce costs of pharma approval, doesn't do anything to address the increasing barriers for individuals to become health care providers (So many medical professions, for instance, now require PhDs where they previously required only Masters - that move guarantees higher costs, not lower!).

[martinuzz]

Meet Trump's newly appointed head of National News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7J2Nnl7Ano

[Neonivek]

Doing some looking using this visa overstay report and these stats on illegal Mexican immigrants, I think it is safe to say that, as of now, there are more illegal Canadian immigrants coming into the country than there are illegal Mexicans.

Yeah but we had to find someplace to put our rapists and murderers.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

This claims that there's around 100,000 new illegal Mexican immigrants per year these days, meaning that while I can't claim a greater number of Canadians are coming in, they are roughly equal.

Does that mean Trump may try to build a wall between the United States and Canada after the one between the US and Mexico?

[Wolfhunter107]

As it turns out, there is.

[martinuzz]

Trump's geography lessons haven't come to that part yet. He's still at the part where you have to memorize state capitals. 'Other North American Countries' is expected to be taught to him next semester.

[Neonivek]

Trump's geography lessons haven't come to that part yet. He's still at the part where you have to memorize state capitals. 'Other North American Countries' is expected to be taught to him next semester.

Well Canada is just another American State is all.

[scriver]

You searched for Kanada, didn't you, you frenchie bastard.

[Strife26]

Trump's geography lessons haven't come to that part yet. He's still at the part where you have to memorize state capitals. 'Other North American Countries' is expected to be taught to him next semester.

Several weeks later, the US formally withdraws diplomatic recognition of all Central American countries.

[martinuzz]

Meanwhile, the US sent no delegation to the talks between the Syrian government and various moderate rebel factions, initiated by Turkey and Russia. The formal excuse was 'too busy with transition of power'. The talks seem to be leading nowhere though, with the rebels' refusal to talk directly to the Syrian government delegation.