StrangeSox

Yep. They're going to gut health insurance for the working and middle class in order to give a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the wealthy. Voters will probably still reward them for it.

Not everyone wants to embrace The Gilded Age 2.0. Starbucks being marginally better than the competition while still having a multibillionaire CEO is still emblematic of our ever-growing income and wealth gaps.

President's son says Democrats are "not even people"

I love dueling wapo/nyt breaking stories. Top Intel official told colleagues Trump asked him to intervene with Comey to get him to back off Flynn investigation. https://t.co/sYWyG00VdF E: Dan Coates, director of national intelligence. I had heard a rumour on another forum that this was coming a couple of weeks ago, and that Coates was visibly upset behind closed doors. He testifies tomorrow in open session.

Comey asked sessions not to leave him alone with Trump. https://t.co/9BTyAGkIop Sessions reportedly has threatened to quit in the last couple of weeks.

Nice job pitching out of that one

The Qatar situation was kicked off by fake news planted by Russian hackers. http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/06/politics/rus...isis/index.html

Where did I say I didn't want politicians? One of my complaints were running people with zero political/public service experience. I don't want Democrats to mimic the Republican party, and I don't think CEO's and celebrities are qualified to be POTUS. What about Schultz gets you excited and makes you think he'd excite the rest of the progressive base.

Senate Republicans are planning on holding zero hearings and zero public sessions on their health care bill. Trying to rush it to a vote by the end of the month. Early reports are that they're going to have the same state waivers that will likely cause insurance markets to collapse as the House bill. http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/06/s...l-timing-239186

How Donald Trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money Into His Business

Some digusting bigotry right in our own backyards, a couple of Muslim girls at a Pepe's in Hickory Hills getting yelled at. https://hatehurts.net/2017/06/06/disturbing...can-restaurant/

yikes

The country is more ideologically aligned with the parties than it was in the mid-20th, but we've been undergoing that realignment since Nixon and there was even stronger and more strongly enforced partisanship back in the heydays of machine politics in the 19th century.

The 27 Words Trump Wouldn’t Say Here's the commitment the president refused to deliver at NATO headquarters.

Think you'd just need a wifi/networked photo printer that has Apple's AirPrint feature.

Best of luck Yoda, and just remember that even with vision problems, people still lead full, healthy lives. Hoping for the best.

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Jun 6, 2017 -> 02:24 PM) It drives me insane when people say that. America is comprised of 50 states. By definition, all of it is "real America." The bolded is pandering to an ideal that wearing a flag on one's sleeve makes them more patriotic and better at being American than those fake Americans living in California. "Real America" are the parts of the country where hardly anyone lives and where the people who do live there rarely leave and live in monocultures, not the areas where tens of millions of Americans of all different backgrounds and beliefs live.

Sen. Mark Warner: More state election systems were targeted by Russians

QUOTE (bmags @ Jun 6, 2017 -> 10:55 AM) I can't help but read this and think it's a shortchanging this a lot. For some of these policies we want to succeed, it helps to see it succeed prior. Companies like costco and starbucks are useful to counter trends that you can't be profitable providing benefits to workers, etc. etc.. If you want to find a reality of where the few remaining sectors that low-education, low-skilled workers can go, you are going to look at services sectors but especially restaurant and retail. And retail is getting killed, so you are looking at restaurants and food-related jobs. "Retail and restaurant sectors grind their employees to dust" This is a bizarre claim, certainly would like to know compared to what. If anything, the issue is they push hours below full-time thresholds to prevent mandatory requirements. "and while Starbucks isn't the worst, they're still not great. " No, this is actually the point, they are actually great. It's a very low margin business and they manage to continue to push profits down to labor in a way that is not seen elsewhere and can hopefully be modeled. If every restaurant/retail area offered same benefits as starbucks you are talking about a huge upgrade to a large portion of the 20% of the US economy. "against sub-poverty wages" You say this as fact but his point was more nuanced and the most you can really say is that Starbucks is a member of the NRA which lobbied against it. But he has supported minimum wage increases and raised wages nationally prior to that prompting. "they use computer scheduling. Those are all terrible things and we shouldn't be accepting of them as a society." Come on. This is s***ty for labor and I think an area where regulation could help so that people can regulate daycare and 2nd jobs, but one of these things is not like the other. You guys don't want a CEO, think the lack of public service experience will hurt. I'd prefer one too. But the real argument here is that starbucks is bad for labor because it is big and makes money. ANd I would argue that it is good for labor because it is big and makes money, and has routinely invested more in its labor in a really difficult sector to so. A bunch of retail workers have lost their jobs. Let's hope they get absorbed into places operating like starbucks and costco and not walmart. I don't want a CEO, and I don't want more technocratic fiddling around the edges and hoping for CEO's to raise wages on their own while actively fighting against regulations requiring them to do so. Yeah, Starbucks raised their sub-poverty wages to still-sub-poverty-but-a-little-better levels, but it's still difficult for their workers to get full time with benefits, to get consistent and predictable schedules. Starbucks still fights against unionization and formal workers' rights. These workers are ground to dust by poverty and a system that exploits them. Meanwhile, Schultz is worth several billion dollars. I don't want "treated like s***, but a little better than Walmart" to be hailed as some sort of victory and worthy goal. It's a larger complaint about our economic system as a whole that Schultz, as one of the wealthiest people in the world, is a symbol of. What should the progressive base get excited about with him? A 5% raise on your $9/hour wage with no hourly consistency? Having some health care when what we'd like is a universal health care system comparable to every other developed country in the world? What political causes is Schultz actually championing here? And whether you think it's valid or not, there are a lot of people out there who would probably abandon the Democrats for a generation if our choices in 2020 are two billionaires. I don't like the purity politics, either, but at some point you need to actually stand for something important and meaningful. There are millions of people being left behind by the modern economy who are more than willing to check out or to give a big "f*** you" to the whole system and vote for the idiot reality TV star clown because of it. e: some of the above is speaking for myself, some is trying to express the criticisms you'd expect to see from the more progressive wing of the base.

Qatar is hot garbage and a literal modern day slave state. They're still an important ally in the Middle East for better or worse, and Trump isn't insulting the host of our largest regional military base out of some noble human rights stance against them. e: kinda weird but interesting to see US hegemony crumbling before our eyes though

I don't think it's a purity test to want something better than a wealthy CEO of a company that does better than the average in their horrible market known for exploitation of workers. Retail and restaurant sectors grind their employees to dust, and while Starbucks isn't the worst, they're still not great. They still push back strong against unionization and workers rights, against sub-poverty wages, and they use computer scheduling. Those are all terrible things and we shouldn't be accepting of them as a society. There can be a separate discussion of whether $15/ hour makes sense everywhere, but they don't even meet that standard in high col areas.

Eric Trump says he shares profit reports with his father. https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/872...src=twsrc%5Etfw

QUOTE (bmags @ Jun 6, 2017 -> 09:32 AM) Isn't this just the same optics-driven b.s. rationality that dems constantly fail on? "Oh what we need is a white southerner! Oh, what we need is a 4 star general!" If Schultz bursts onto the scene and is inspiring and creating a compelling progressive vision, his story will suddenly be an asset. And "There are worse CEOs" is kind of ridiculous, he is a very good CEO that specifically used his gigantic company to promote progressive labor ideas and social ideas. But no, let's make sure we get some 80 year old colgate professor to satisfy to make sure the Bernie wing knows how progressive they are. yeah it's a link to the IWW, but I'm not exactly going to laud Starbucks' labor practices after seeing how hard they fought against a unionization effort about a decade ago in Chicago. https://iww.org/node/2822 Starbucks is also one of many retail/restaurant companies using computer scheduling that seriously screws over workers. They have no predictable or reliable schedule, and they can't juggle two jobs which they often need to make ends meet working in these sorts of positions. It also makes trying to get an education or handle day care extremely difficult. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08...ling-hours.html Schultz has also been resistant to the "Fight for $15" campaign. They are better than many, but that's a low, low bar to clear. If I'm wrong and Schultz can put together a compelling progressive vision, great! I'm skeptical that that will happen, though, and I'd still be deeply worried about someone with zero political experience taking the top executive position again.

Supreme Court Strikes Down Yet Another Racial Gerrymander in North Carolina

Nevada's legislature just passed a radical plan to let anybody sign up for Medicaid It's on the governor's desk now, but they're trying to offer a Medicaid-for-all public option on their exchanges. It's a cheaper if less comprehensive alternative to the "Medicare for all" plan, and it would be really interesting to see how it would shake out.