illinilaw08

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 6, 2017 -> 10:01 AM) In the 21st century? Not really. If you are aligned with a political party, you know you have a minimum of 35 to 40% of the country that will make excuses for you, no matter what. Party has become more important than honest, integrity or anything else to the vast majority of voters. Nixon had a 24% approval rating when he left office. At the lowest points in GWB's presidency - including right before the '08 election - GWB held a 25% approval rating (all per Gallup). Voting and approval ratings based exclusively on political party are not some 21st Century phenomenon.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jun 1, 2017 -> 02:51 PM) That is the 100 billion dollar question. I don't think anyone here really disputes the concepts. The issue is how to implement it. So far, many people smarter than me have failed to come up with a way. I don't really know that the bolded is true. Granted, it has been hard to keep up with this thread, but there seem to be a lot of people who think that racism - institutional or otherwise - no longer exist and the field is level. Or policy that attempts to level the playing field is, in fact, discriminatory against white males. Or that the factors that create institutional poverty in rural white communities mean that white privilege does not exist. That's why to me, the most important step in this debate is to acknowledge that white privilege is a thing that exists. Only once that has been established can you ever get to the policy question of how you level the playing field...

QUOTE (greg775 @ Jun 1, 2017 -> 01:41 PM) What is the white privilege thing then? A concept? The basis is to get whites to check their privilege or demand they state they are privileged. They are not setting up booths in restaurants and bars where you come up and check your privilege so what's the point of it then? Ideally it would be a basis for policy. How do we level the playing field so the privileges that are afforded to white males are afforded to everyone?

QUOTE (greg775 @ Jun 1, 2017 -> 12:58 PM) Even some of the people who earlier in the day marched with the white privilege people got accosted in the library. I mean it should go both ways. The white privilege monsters don't even know who they are approaching in some cases. Take the time to get a clue and don't accost your own supporters. Don't accost anybody. Leave me alone, please. Greg, that news story is like two years old. Do you really think there are roving gangs of "white privilege monsters" accosting white people all over the country? But... you also posted today that we need to be worried about ISIS beheadings within the US of A. So... I'll just echo that you have an odd worldview.

QUOTE (JenksIsMyHero @ Jun 1, 2017 -> 10:03 AM) Here's the problem though, and someone mentioned this to you before but you never responded: Ok great, we all agree, whites are privileged. They get a leg up. So what? What's the next step? Should white people pay more? Should white people feel sorry for winning the life lottery? Very few people out there believe that we should treat minorities differently than whites. We all object to racism and discriminatory practices. OK, so that's the baseline. What you're suggesting, I guess, is that white people should go beyond that. But the reason why white people (as a generalized whole) object to that is because not all white people are in positions that are well enough to pay more/be discriminated against. That's my objection to affirmative action or minority preferences when it comes to contracting. On a macro level that may seem like a good idea, but on the micro level you're making a victim out of an otherwise innocent person based strictly on their skin color. So, I'm still curious, now that we're all aware that we are privileged, what next? I'm not sure this part is as true as we would all like it to be. As to the rest of this, I think the point with "white privilege" is a simple acknowledgement that it exists. We've previously talked in these threads about how people with African sounding names are discriminated against in hiring (don't have the time to pull back up those posts). So once that becomes common knowledge, then maybe people in hiring positions stop striking those candidates because of their name on a resume. There's policy that tends to favor affluent neighborhoods (particularly re: using property taxes to fund schools). That policy gives an advantage to kids in relatively affluent neighborhoods - areas that are majority white. The point here is this - once it becomes accepted wisdom that whites have a certain leg up (generally speaking), we can start looking at the root causes of that privilege and finding ways to truly level the playing field thereby providing equal opportunity to all races and genders.

QUOTE (raBBit @ May 25, 2017 -> 04:20 PM) How many presidents have had kids pushing 40? Both are unelected family members. I don't see the difference. I didn't know tradition was that important to everyone. Every other president was against gay marriage is Trump wrong simply for bucking that tradition. Rabbit: Every first lady picks a cause in office. For Nancy Reagan is what "Just Say No." For Michelle Obama it was healthy eating and let's move. For Laura Bush, it was education and women's health. I could go on. What is unprecedented is the POTUS creating positions in his administration for his adult daughter and her husband. Kushner and Ivanka have not merely carved out a single issue they are passionate about. Rather, they advise the President on all issues, despite having no real qualifications to be their advisers. If you cannot see why those two fact patterns are entirely and completely different, I don't know what to tell you...

QUOTE (bmags @ May 24, 2017 -> 01:30 PM) I'm kinda surprised Leitao is overseeing this major push, just since he's not really "new" and wouldn't have any fresh new angle to sell. Wonder if school really opened up some purse strings to coordinate with the new stadium. Did they pay the La Lumiere guy a lot for an assistant? JCL was at LaLu. So that's the connection there. Will be interesting to see how long Heirmann can keep alive the connection with LaLu and whether he can branch into new areas by the time that connection dries out. Is this a short term bounce?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 24, 2017 -> 09:07 AM) You are using simple statistics to try to say something that really isn't true. Misunderstanding a statistic to make a perceived social statement doesn't make it a fact. As I said, if it were a fact, you would be able to prove it by showing that affluent blacks are raising poor children at a higher rate than other races are. If it were truly a racial problem, you should be able to remove things like generational wealth and educational achievement and still see the same issue. Can you prove that? I don't believe you can. And yes, when people like you consistently send the message that you need to deal drugs to make money, it has an effect on young minds. When you constantly send the message that you are black so you won't succeed because you aren't white like me, it has an effect on young minds. When you have parents who were raised to believe the messages that you are preaching here about not succeeding because of race and the like, it has an effect on young minds. The only barrier between people like you and the child's success is an educational system that has to attempt to unbrainwash them into believing that their one true ticket out is education. And really that goes for anyone. Let's not pretend that generationally poor white areas of the country see some huge success rate that generationally poor black families don't. Generationally poor white areas are, I think, somewhat different than generationally poor black areas. Most generationally poor white areas are rural areas. People settled there for industry and then industry fled. High relocation costs and increased cost of living in urban areas are among the factors keeping generationally poor white areas poor. Those are certainly problems that need to be addressed, and are not easy problems to answer. That's different than the generationally poor black areas. Discriminatory education and housing policies (among other things) helped create pockets of poor, disproportionately minority areas in big cities. There are jobs and industry in those cities, but generations of minorities lacked the same degree of access to those jobs. The degree of access is better now, but there is still progress to be made. I agree that education starts at home in the vast majority of cases. And that a higher education is the ticket to escape generational poverty. But let's also not pretend that the reasons for generations of poor families in Appalachia are the same as the reasons for generations of poor families in Englewood.

QUOTE (bmags @ May 24, 2017 -> 09:10 AM) Well, you can look at Canada for a model of more limited service but with a 30% private insurance industry still there. I would be supportive of this. It, after all, would not be so different than dental, except people would have the government insurance to fall back on for surgery. Americans consume more healthcare than other nations for often elective things. Concierge could let them pay for more services, but ultimately for most getting insurance for 3-4 scheduled checkups per year plus the governmental insurance. Is that *worse* than what we have now? I'm not so sure. 1 it would encourage some decrease in the use of excess healthcare. We've seen such sluggish growth and some of it has to be due to going to such a service heavy industry like healthcare which has shown very little ability to scale in a way that decreases pricing. (i.e. we are a 2017 hospital, we all have machinery for MRIs and CT scans paid for many times over, we should see competition that decreases the price we ask for these machines, except actually we will charge same amount or increasing amount to hide the costs that we incur from our inefficient health care system) I would be open to it. I think there are better options, but universal, full stop, coverage so that nobody gets bankrupted from pregnancy or disease would be a big step. Would like to see mental health also covered. That makes sense. I read the original post as catastrophe policies were purchased on the private market. If it was catastrophic Medicare for all with a dental like model for ordinary care, that's a much more interesting idea to me.

QUOTE (greg775 @ May 23, 2017 -> 10:13 PM) I kind of agree with this. Doesn't that model ultimately restrict access to healthcare for people? My understanding of the concept of concierge medicine is that you pay an annual fee to your doctor in exchange for certain services. It's basically like paying a retainer to a lawyer. And as you use the services, the doctor eats away at the retainer. That model, it seems to me, would lead to fewer people having access to healthcare, because fewer people would be able to afford to put their doctor on retainer. Health insurance would exist literally for catastrophes. How, under this model, does someone living paycheck to paycheck access a doctor when they get strep throat, or for an annual physical?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 23, 2017 -> 11:50 AM) Historically Jews and Asians have fought almost all of the same economic hurdles that blacks have faced in this country. I'm not sure that's true. The first and most obvious one is slavery. Asians, Jews, and other immigrants faced different economic hurdles, but being chattel wasn't one of them. The second is Jim Crow laws in the South and discriminatory housing policy in the North. That's not to say that Asians, Jews and other immigrants haven't fought their own economic hurdles, but African Americans had to have a war fought to obtain freedom, and then historic legislation passed to put them on equal footing. To say that those policies haven't led to unique economic hurdles to generations of African Americans would be disingenuous. On policing (brought up earlier in this thread), poor, disproportionately minority areas have a very different police presence than an affluent suburb. I was a prosecutor in a large city, and I can attest to the number of police reports in the poorer areas of town that started with "police stop initiated because suspect had taillight out" and ended with an arrest for possession. Kids who make mistakes in poor, disproportionately minority areas have a higher likelihood of having a record while possessing drugs at a similar rate. And a conviction at 18 can have a massive impact on ability to get into college and get a job. The discussion should be more nuanced than "poverty not race" and "bad parenting."

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ May 22, 2017 -> 03:10 PM) he isn't saying 'you are gay, OFF TO CONVERSION THERAPY!'. Like ss2k mentioned however, you have some liberals who want to send all sorts of people to reeducation classes or such things because they said some 'bad words'. One worker in a place says somethgin that can be deemed 'homophobic' and the whole place has to be 're educated' and sent to sensitivity training. No options. Yep. Telling people not to use homophobic slurs and making them go to an hour long sensitivity training is totally the same thing as gay conversion therapy. The number of workers who have committed suicide because they had to forego using those slurs will forever stain the Progressive movement in the eyes of history.

QUOTE (greg775 @ May 21, 2017 -> 12:21 PM) If his TrumpCare plan is worse than ObamaCare then shame on him. I still don't understand the core issues. Ok Greg - here's my effort to explain this as simply as possible. Prior to 2008, insurance companies could deny coverage to someone because they had a pre-existing condition. Insurance companies could place a maximum limit on the amount of coverage you could use in your lifetime. They could exclude entirety categories of services - like maternity coverage - from people. The upshot of those policies was that people who had cancer or had been hit by a car or had diabetes were unable to obtain insurance period, or could no longer use insurance because they had passed their lifetime maximums. This led to lots and lots of medical bankruptcies, etc. Now, those people could still obtain treatment when they got sick, because a hospital can't turn someone away without insurance. But people who were using the ER as their doctor were unable to pay the bills. And when those bills ended up discharged in bankruptcy, that led to increased costs for everybody else. The Affordable Care Act comes along in 2008. It says that the insurance companies can't deny coverage because of pre-existing conditions. All their policies have to cover "essential services." There are no more lifetime maximums. And if you fall below a certain income level, you received subsidies on your insurance - subsidies that were paid for by increased taxes on the very wealthy. It also expanded Medicaid coverage to millions of people. Now, the ACA has problems too! Because insurance covers more, the cost of coverage went up for a lot of people. And deductibles went up as well. Also, some Republican states refused the Medicaid expansion (even though the federal government was paying for it). But more people had health insurance, and the number of medical bankruptcies should have gone done. The Republican bill wants to return coverage back closer to what our system was prior to 2008. The bill lets states decide if they want to make insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions. It sunsets the Medicaid expansion in 2020. Rather than subsidies based on income, it gives everybody the same tax credit for purchase of health insurance (so Bill Gates would get the same amount of credit as you would). It also doesn't force insurance companies to cover "essential services" anymore. For healthy people, insurance costs will probably go down. For people who are sick, insurance costs will skyrocket again. According to the last time the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office scored the Republican bill, 24 million people would lose access to health insurance as a result of the Republican bill (the new CBO score comes out Wednesday). Healthcare is complicated! I'm not an expert on it by any means, and the issues go a lot deeper than what I just wrote. But that is a Cliffs Note version of the issues in healthcare.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 22, 2017 -> 02:40 PM) Burying your head in the sand to what the other side is about didn't solve anything, which is what the vast majority of the US did over slavery. What is your argument here? Should the Civil War have occurred 40 years earlier? Or should the abolitionists have been nicer to the slave owners? One side of the slavery debate literally treated human beings as chattel because of the color of their skin.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 22, 2017 -> 02:34 PM) The part I highlighted is absolutely 100% true. Violence and attacks are OK as long as it is someone they don't agree with. What "violence and attacks" have been made in the name of gay rights? Also, I'm really struggling with the framing of this issue as a simple disagreement. One side of this debate attempts to deny equal protections to a class of people based on their sexual orientation because that's how they interpret their religion. That side also endorses "therapy" to try to force that sexual orientation out of that class of people. And their actions have directly led to an extremely high incidence of suicides among that class of people. This isn't a simple disagreement. Just like slavery and the Civil Rights Act weren't simple disagreements among people. Now, I certainly agree that civil disobedience is a more effective mechanism for reaching people who are undecided on the issue. And I think that insults don't go very far in reaching people. But the two sides of this debate are not battling for the moral high ground. And when you are talking about taking away people's equal rights under the law, you are somewhere beyond a mere disagreement.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 22, 2017 -> 02:12 PM) I see exactly this being said of people the left doesn't support. The Left supports sending intolerant people to "therapy camps" to get them to change their sexual orientation? I had no idea!

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 22, 2017 -> 02:11 PM) It was actually biblically justified at the time. Real progress on the issue of slavery really didn't actually get made because the North ignored the South. In fact the constitution tried exactly that by punting the issue forward a couple of decades, and then just ignoring some more. How did that work out? It took a four year war to fix. I'm not sure I understand this argument here. History shows that one side was in the moral right on slavery and one side was horribly, horribly wrong. There's no even moral footing in the slavery debate. Just like there was no even moral footing on Nazism, or Jim Crow, or, over the last couple decades, LGBT rights.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 22, 2017 -> 12:26 PM) I think what is being lost on many these days is that tolerance and intolerance are 100% subjective to a persons point of view. When you start drawing lines and saying it is OK to hate or discriminate, the high moral ground becomes almost impossible to own. One persons low life, is another person's life style. This logic is exactly why we never bridge gaps, and it is all an artificial attempt to keep the masses divided and easier to keep under one tent. I think that's a very overly broad way of looking at the world. I mean, slavery was 100% subjective to a person's POV. So was integrating schools and getting rid of Jim Crow. At what point is pointing out intolerant behavior wrong? If you don't point out the intolerant behavior, social norms never change.

QUOTE (Harry Chappas @ May 17, 2017 -> 10:36 AM) A financial instrument that is going to help the younger generations is the 401K. My mother passed away and left me $15K in life insurance and $15K in a 401K that she gotten into later in life. She also left me a small house that was paid off. She lived on a pension mostly and some social security. If I stop contributing to my 401K at 60 and drop dead the next day, I will have some very happy heirs with their hopefully 7 figure 401K inheritence. If I had a pension, they get nothing. I never thought of this until my mother's passing. Inherited 401ks don't just sit there and grow. Make sure you look at the rules, because you will have to take mandatory distributions, and you will be taxed on those distributions. You have, like, 1 year to decide what to do with them.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ May 16, 2017 -> 07:09 AM) My wife and I have talked for years about doing a trip to Glacier National Park (which I haven't been to yet), and as a grand retirement party (in like 15-20 years) to rent one of those private train cars and take the train from Chicago to the park. Given the rate at which the glaciers are disappearing from Glacier, we are now dropping the train thing (which is expensive as hell) and just road tripping to Glacier next summer to get there much sooner. Legitimately concerned most or all will be gone by the time 20 years rolls around. I went to Glacier almost every summer as a kid. The park is sensational. My parents have some pretty crazy photos of what Grinnell Glacier looked like back in the late '70s and what it looked like the last time I was there (mid 2000s). The amount that it had receded, even at that time, was jarring. ETA: To echo SS, if you can get reservations at Sperry Chalet, it's absolutely a must-do. With Sperry Chalet as a base, you can get over to Sperry Glacier without any real difficulty, and the hike in over Gunsight Pass and across Lake Ellen Wilson is spectacular. But I don't think I would ever backpack in. The amount of grizzlies in the park generally, and the amount before you get to Gunsight Pass specifically, make backpacking back there an exercise that I would not be interested in doing. I think they have opened up Granite Park Chalet with limited services on the Highline Trail. That's a pretty awesome part of the park as well. And another place that I would not sleep in a tent.

QUOTE (CrimsonWeltall @ May 12, 2017 -> 03:46 PM) In 2017, this is very unpopular with most people. Yeah, but most people aren't the law and order wing of the GOP that holds both chambers of Congress.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 12, 2017 -> 03:18 PM) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/guess-...4b00ccaae9ea22e Isn't this the type of thing that should be very unpopular with Libertarians? Probably too much to hope for any level of bipartisan pushback...

QUOTE (JenksIsMyHero @ May 12, 2017 -> 12:45 PM) Bankrupt or not (not sure why this is a total negative, if anything it proves he's intelligent enough to use the system to his advantage), he's got a net worth of billions. Complete morons would have taken those millions and pissed them away. He doesn't have to be intellectually smart to have some intelligence. He obviously can read people. He can connect with people. He can, at least in some business deals, hire the right people to make money for him. Sorry, I hate the dude as much as you guys, but i'm not going to ignore reality and claim a guy that is worth billions has zero intelligence. That's just dumb. Perhaps the argument here is intellect vs. skill. IMO he's got some skills, which require a base level of intelligence. Professional athletes may not be ivy-league smart, but they have exceptional skill and intelligence in a specific area that allows them to excel. I think Trump has some level of that or he would have washed out decades ago. So, I think there's a difference between being smart, and having good ideas about policy or the ability to speak and act like an intelligent individual. Greg liked to bring up Ben Carson as a brain surgeon during the campaign. And it's true - Carson had to be intelligent to become a brain surgeon. But the ability to be a successful brain surgeon has nothing to do with developing policy or conducting oneself as the leader of the free world should. And that's the problem here. Trump is very good at selling himself. He probably has some areas of competency. But self-promotion and real estate development don't make you smart in the areas you have to be smart to successfully lead the country. Add to that the fact that his speaking is extremely poor, and he is impulsive to a shocking degree, and you are left with a man who has absolutely no qualification to be president of the United States. One last point here - Greg, Crimson had a point by point rebuttal to your questions. He even cited to an article showing how little of a grasp Trump has on basic American history. But you largely ignored that because, in your opinion, Trump defeated Clinton in the debates. Greg, why do you think Trump beat Clinton? What policies did Trump put forward at the debates that were, in your opinion, better than Clinton's? How did he convey his message better?

QUOTE (CrimsonWeltall @ May 12, 2017 -> 12:05 PM) It's impeccable? He has a long string of failures and American banks won't even loan him money because he's such a bad bet. I have no confidence that Trump could outperform a random high school student on a test of geography or foreign affairs. He's become infamous for his ignorance of history (http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/donald-trump-history-facts-236659), yet you think he's knowledgeable? Trump was destroyed in all 3 debates with Hillary Clinton. His knowledge of the issues is superficial, his tactics boil down to aggressively attacking his opponent and changing the topic. He frequently displays his ignorance of the basics of how government works and likewise makes huge errors with regards to history, science, and economics. He speaks, and writes, at a child-like level. His political views constantly flip-flop due because he is too intellectually lazy to think about, and develop, any principles. He lacks critical thinking skills, which leads him to believe in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. His responses in interviews are largely incoherent streams of thought with little direction. He's dumb, Greg. This is an excellent post.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 11, 2017 -> 01:13 PM) I'm doubtful this ultimately goes anywhere, but two House R's have signed onto the Dem bill calling for an independent investigator http://thehill.com/homenews/house/332981-a...nt-russia-probe I disagree with basically every policy position Amash takes, but he takes his job as seriously as anyone in Congress, and he isn't afraid to step out of line with his party.