StrangeSox

I'm sort of skeptical that MC is only 45 minutes from downtown Chicago. Maybe in the middle of the night with no traffic or road construction? ss I was just giving you some inter-state rivalry ribbing!

an article in the Trib from earlier this year on the dropping population in Illinois: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/b...1220-story.html I freely admit that if not for nearly all of our friends and family being in the Chicago area, my wife and I would have fled to somewhere on the west coast already. Gonna be interesting to see what increasing temperatures do to all of the migration currently heading to the sunbelt over the next few decades though.

We get the joy of not having the shame of being from Indiana and calling ourselves Hoosiers (Illinois is definitely a tire fire)

While that's true, Illinoisans can always point east and say "At least we're not Indiana."

‘Everything’s in Danger’: Illinois Approaches 3rd Year Without Budget

Maybe not that much chaos, but employer-covered plans would undoubtedly get worse as well. Annual and lifetime caps would come back, claims denials would go up, who knows what services would or wouldn't be covered. Fun fact I learned yesterday: prior to the ACA, 88% of plans on the individual market didn't even cover maternity care.

This was from one of Corey Gardner's offices in Colorado. Disabled citizens staged a sit-in to demand a meeting with their government representative. The sit-in lasted 58 hours before they were thrown out of the office by the police on orders of Gardner. No meeting has been granted. Several of these people have been charged with crimes, including interfering with a police officer for refusing to show how their wheelchair works. More and more Republicans are refusing to hold town halls, refusing to speak to their constituents, even turning off their phone systems or letting the voicemails fill up until they're full. They're refusing to be held accountable by the people they claim to represent. They're refusing to even talk to them, to hear their concerns. Instead they're having them arrested for daring to demand that their voices be heard.

This whole Joe/Mika story is getting a bit more interesting now that Trump called Scarborough a liar and Joe is accusing the WH of colluding with the National Enquirer to blackmail a critical journalist into silence.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Jun 30, 2017 -> 08:21 AM) The ACA is just toast. We elected a complete maniac who's sole purpose is to destroy Obama's legacy. Now, when the Senate deal falls, he's simply going to repeal the ACA. I give up. The American people don't matter at all. By the way, even us lucky souls on cushy corporate healthcare will be f***ed in repeal. They need 60 votes to repeal the ACA. Because it reduces the deficit, they can't use reconciliation. They're absolutely going to keep sabotaging it as much as possible, though. I don't know how well that's going to work as a political strategy because they've been explicit about doing that. QUOTE (Brian @ Jun 30, 2017 -> 08:31 AM) If AHCA doesn't pass and he just repeals Obamacare, what is the healthcare system we'll have? Anarchy? The rules would go back to what they were in 2009, which are actually really, really terrible in retrospect. But the bigger impact would be the absolute chaos and market collapse it'd cause across the country.

Mendoza has a video out explaining exactly how screwed the state is financially and why if a budget isn't in place by midnight tomorrow. https://twitter.com/ILComptroller/status/880203897679351808 Call your state reps and senators and call the governor tomorrow

So if Smith really was in contact with Flynn, this is direct collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia. Sort of makes all of the right wing media "collusion's probably not even a crime! besides if there was collusion it's over now so who cares" defenses from the last week make a little more sense. Some background on the trial balloons about collision https://twitter.com/bad_takes/status/879089...src=twsrc%5Etfw

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gop-operative-...770851?mod=e2tw

Illinois Senate Republican leader Radogno steps down I wonder what the real impasse on the budget here is. Madigan does suck, but it's not like he and Cullerton have had a problem working with Republican governors in the past. Behind-the-scenes talk from Radogno's camp seems to indicate a lot of dissatisfaction with Rauner.

CBO out with additional analysis scoring the bill from 2027-2036. Medicaid spending under GOP bill = 26 % lower in 2026 than it would be under extended baseline, gap would widen to about 35 % in 2036

The economic impacts of climate change

QUOTE (greg775 @ Jun 29, 2017 -> 02:58 PM) The fact some prime time media outlets discussed the possibility of this with no facts or no basis in fact shows how far we've fallen as a society. Can you picture a grade schooler: "Daddy what are they talking about on TV about the President? What did he do?" Can you imagine if we elected a man who bragged on tape about grabbing women by the p****? man that would be pretty awful! Pee tape is real and the entire country will watch it Black Mirror-style when it is released!

The Steel dossier is a real document that exists and was circulated around various campaigns and media outlets prior to the election. The thing with the pee tape is that nobody really seems to think it's implausible that Trump would actually do that because he's spent decades bragging about his hedonism. It's the most absurd part of the dossier, but all of the financial and Russian mob tie allegations would be a much bigger deal if true. It's a raw intelligence/opposition research document though, so it definitely shouldn't be taken as all 100% verified and true information.

WH not complying with House requests for information

QUOTE (Leonard Zelig @ Jun 29, 2017 -> 02:25 PM) elaborate? One of the things from the Steele Dossier that was published back in January was that Russia has Kompromat of Donald Trump having a couple of Russian prostitutes peeing on a bed in a Russian hotel because the Obamas once slept in it. My post was just a throwaway joke based on caulfield's "Pee coming again?" line. I believe that pee tape is real simply because of course it would be in the world we now inhabit and it'd be hilarious, but there's not been any more evidence beyond that original dossier.* *There have been a whole lot of "no comment"s from intelligence community people under oath regarding "salacious materials the Russians may possess" and Trump has offered up unprompted denials of it a few times so you never know!

Speaking of domestic voter suppression, here's what Trump's "voter integrity" committee is actually up to: https://twitter.com/vanitaguptaCR/status/880479649817649152 Requesting full voter rolls including name, last four of the social and party affiliation for every state for every voter going back to 2006. Laying the ground work for massive disenfranchisement. With control of most states and their stolen SCOTUS seat, they can put an awful lot of awful things in place to ensure they aren't held accountable by citizens at all. All of this to solve the non-existent problem of voter fraud (will solve the real problem of people voting D though).

QUOTE (bmags @ Jun 29, 2017 -> 01:16 PM) If Joe Scarborough said something like this about Melania he'd be fired and would struggle to make a media comeback. And that would be the right thing to do. The faux protestations from Republicans are pretty funny considering Trump said far, far worse things on many occasions during the campaign.

pee tape is real

Qatar hosts tens of thousands of American troops and is a CENTCOM base. But because Saudi Arabia threw Trump a party, we're apparently going to throw them under the bus.