Bernie 2016

[WAXXX]

Not having babies is literally the most necessary thing in the entire world.

 

this is one of the dumbest things i've ever seen someone type.

[konk]

I understand it's a lower cost solution, but there shouldn't be a higher cost alternative.

[Bladewillisisdead]

this is one of the dumbest things i've ever seen someone type.

Seriously? Have you never read anything before just now?

[Family Friendly Rap God]

Double check your math cause you fucked something up.

Simplified: Too poor to afford birth control? Unwanted child(ren). Poor person with unwanted children? More government assistance, another person on this overcrowded planet that is running out of resources, and another person forced to live a shitty life of poverty.

If you say that people who can't afford birth control shouldn't fuck I will burn this entire thread to the ground with all of us still in it.

Vicious fucking circle

[WAXXX]

Seriously? Have you never read anything before just now?

 

myself not included.

[konk]

People don't get medically necessary surgeries all the time because our healthcare is shit. Not because they're not medically necessary. You need a lesson in cause and effect, my friend.

I'm not following this logic, but I think my statement was more a personal belief and less one that is costing taxpayers money.

Okay. When I said "want I was referring to cosmetic.

[dreamover]

I'm not following this logic, but I think my statement was more a personal belief and less one that is costing taxpayers money.

 

Your logic was that because there's more expensive "non-medically-necessary" surgeries that prevent conception and they're not covered by insurance... that is why birth control is not covered by insurance.

 

I don't understand what personal belief you were basing your statement on. 

[konk]

Your logic was that because there's more expensive "non-medically-necessary" surgeries that prevent conception and they're not covered by insurance... that is why birth control is not covered by insurance.

I don't understand what personal belief you were basing your statement on.

Not what I meant, but I like it.

I just don't think it should be covered because there are procedures/medicines that other people want but insurance doesn't cover it.

[konk]

Does insurance cover hysterectomy/vasectomy?

[dreamover]

Does insurance cover hysterectomy/vasectomy?

 

Insurance typically does cover vasectomies (not reversals) but only covers hysterectomies if a doctor says it's medically necessary. how's that for a double standard??

[Bladewillisisdead]

Insurance typically does cover vasectomies (not reversals) but only covers hysterectomies if a doctor says it's medically necessary. how's that for a double standard??

Right?

I can't wait to have insurance so I can get a vasectomy. No babies 4 lyfe.

[BuzzersonKillwell]

Buds. Bernie wouldn't like the fighting in here.

You're harshing his mellow.

[TheGhostOfRandySavage]

WWBD?

[futures]

Insurance typically does cover vasectomies (not reversals) but only covers hysterectomies if a doctor says it's medically necessary. how's that for a double standard??

This is a whole other issue that makes me so angry.

& Konk: just bc its not a necessity to you doesn't mean it should automatically not be a thing that should be included in the ACA. You sound like you work in Congress.

You obviously have never dealt with the side effects of menstration. Using a condom or just not having sex ever will not stop a woman's hips from expanding every 28 days so she can shed the lining of her uterus. Does that sound fun to you? Do you think it's painless? Birth control helps to curb the pain associated with a monthly period. This is something that women cannot help. It's out of our control. It simply isn't fair that women would have to spend $1000s monthly just to be in a little less pain.

If you want more reasoning to back this up, Google endometriosis and how the pill can help millions of women avoid surgery on their ovaries.

[konk]

I would consider that medically necessary. For the record, I am also opposed to vasectomy coverage. But I guess if they can get disconnected, women can get the pill.

[futures]

It's all medically necessary and a basic human right. We're all told to "practice safe sex" but I guess that means "only if you're a man." But I appreciate you seeing the other side of the issue.

[¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

I would consider that medically necessary. For the record, I am also opposed to vasectomy coverage. But I guess if they can get disconnected, women can get the pill.

 

[soundofsilver]

There are only 2 reasons I can think of that might explain why anyone wouldn't want everything covered by insurance.  

 

 

Religious beliefs - You can't say one group should be able to receive a service, when another cannot.  Discrimination.  Simple.

^^^

(these fine folks need to stay the fuck out of my healthcare, and stay in their corner)

 

 

Shareholder - Which, if you are hanging w us, here on VC, chances are you aren't one

 

 

Of course, you could be Bobby Jindal.  If you are, I think you have more important things to do other than debate a law that is now legal, but, we know you just can't help it.

[futures]

lol everything I've seen surrounding Jindal's campaign (especially the marketing decisions) have been mind blowing lol.

 

 

Oh & Here's that thing I read about the 2016 general election. I recommend every Democrat to read it:

 

Part 1

hey, so you like bernie sanders! i like bernie sanders too! i agree with his politics! he is doing better than people expected in the democratic primaries, which is cool!

what are you going to do if he loses?

because given the tone of the conversations i hear on this website right now– given the sheer hatred of hillary that’s emerging, given the overwhelming feeling that bernie sanders is amazing and the messiah and the only candidate that’s worth voting for in america– here’s what i see happening in mid-2016:

• bernie sanders, who despite his better-than-expected performance still has an unbelievably low chance of winning the primaries, loses the primaries to hillary clinton
• the leftist wing of the democratic party (that’s us– tumblr, yeah, but also the whole occupy-black lives matter-third wave feminist-young educated millennials crowd), having spent the past 10 months campaigning against hillary clinton, is overwhelmingly disappointed
• while a few people are willing to bite the bullet and campaign for hillary, energy is low, disillusionment is high, and many leftist americans don’t campaign, don’t donate, and don’t vote (or vote for third-party candidates, like the green party or the peace and freedom party)
• the republican party wins the presidential election.

(i literally shivered as i typed that last bullet point, btw– i know there are people voting in 2016 who were ten years old when obama was elected, and y’all may not remember much of the bush years. i was only 13 when bush left, but jesus christ– remember when hurricane katrina was overwhelmingly badly handled? remember when the patriot act passed? remember when the housing bubble collapsed? remember when the president said god told him to invade iraq? y’all wanna do that again?)

so what are you going to do if bernie sanders loses?

i need you to think about that now. i need you to not be surprised when it happens. i need you tonot put all your hopes in one basket.

you think the gop won’t be pouring all their resources into this election? you think the superpacs and the koch brothers and the oil lobbyists won’t be throwing their money at ballot boxes until they spit out the result they want? you think the rich and powerful and conservative won’t be bringing their best game? 

they will, and if we don’t work twice as hard as they do– no matter who the democratic nominee is– we are fucked.

i need you to be okay with the idea of hillary clinton being president of the united states, and i need you to make peace with that before she wins the primaries, so that you’re prepared and ready to campaign for her with all your might if she’s the democratic nominee.

because i honest-to-god believe this country will not survive another four, eight, twelve years of a republican administration.

 

Part 2 / reaction

#remember ralph nader? #I FUCKING WELL REMEMBER RALPH NADER #WE’RE NOT DOING THAT AGAIN. (viaswanjolras)

my hand to god i have seen so many posts on my dash that have been both heartbreakingly optimistic and absolutely mind-bogglingly uninformed (and naive, but that comes with time; information comes with googling the way the government of your own country works. fun fact: not all primaries are open primaries! i know! this is inconsistent! it is also the world that we live in and i don’t think we’re going to get around to redesigning the electoral system before november 2016. just saying) and, like every election year, i have sat down and thought, albeit briefly, about this possibility:

• the republican party wins the presidential election.

that is not a possibility that i can or will accept. i know we like to mythologize our figures here and put them on can-do-no-wrong pedestals, but, for god’s sake, to paraphrase: can we live in the real fucking world here, please? by all means, know that we can do better. by all means, know that we should. but here are some facts:

• the us electoral system is not going to change by november 2016.
• the notes on your tumblr post about bernie sanders’ ideology are not going to translate to votes.
• those votes are not as big a percentage of the voting population as you think they are.
• even if they were, bernie sanders is not going to be able to wave a magic wand and:
  • turn those ideas into policies
  • get those policies signed into law
  • get those laws implemented
  • they aren’t going to be perfect anyway.
• can you imagine the reactionary voting in the election immediately following that anyway.

this is not how politics works. you don’t vote a politician into office and then stand back and watch the world fix itself! you don’t get to do that. it takes work and it takes time and it takes, sometimes, the willingness to accept and keep pushing through lowered expectations. i’m happy for your optimism and i’m happy for your energy. we need those! don’t lose them. do, however, remember that there is context to this, because we live, again, in the real fucking world.

 

Part 3 / reaction

i know how a lot of people here feel about hilary. if i had my druthers, i would much rather have bernie sanders as president because his politics so closely align with my own. like, stunningly close. a-breath-of-fresh-air close.

but consider these words from an ancient, jaded, 34 year old fuck who voted for ralph nader in 2000…

none of us agreed with gore. i mean, not really, at least. he was republican-lite. first off, his wife tipper was a friggin’ censorship nazi, gore was a southern baptist who was mum on gay rights, and while he gave lip service to climate change, please note that an inconvenient truth had not been produced or filmed, and there wasn’t much in the way of supporting the kyoto protocols in his platform. he supported the limited military action in iraq, supported nafta, and supported driving our production overseas. there wasn’t much to his platform other than “less scary alternative to bush”. in other words, he was problematic as hell.

then there was ralph nader, a consumer rights advocate, a proponent of gay marriage before it became a mainstream cause to champion, against nafta, spoke out against the military industrial complex, was pro-union, and anti-corporate.

and i voted for him. proudly. in the general election. my reasoning was that nearly everyone i knew was voting for him (and everyone i knew were fellow college age leftists) so if enough of us got together and enough of us wanted that change to happen, then it would, right?

“well, we’re talking about the primaries,” i can already hear you say. and yes, we are. but consider this: if bernie ends up not winning the primaries, and no one turns out to the polls to vote for hilary so they can “make a statement” or because she’s “problematic”, or turns out and votes green or some other third party for those same reasons, then history will repeat itself with disastrous consequences.

here’s what happened on election night, november 7, 2000:

we waited.  we watched gore lose in battleground state after battleground state by just about the same number of votes that went to ralph fucking nader. bush took all the dip shits who thought he’d be a swell feller to have a beer with. and then florida and the recount and the republican party-led coup that stormed the voting recount, triggered the supreme court ruling and handed george w. bush control of the country.

the first thing bush did was reverse each and every executive order clinton had put in place over the protestations of a crybaby republican congress, and most of those executive orders were designed to protect the middle class from corporate america and protect our budget surplus from the military industrial complex. then bush instituted legalized class warfare: the tax cuts that benefited the wealthy and still do to this day.

then 9/11 happened.

if you’re 22 right now, then in 2001 you were 8 years old. in 2001, i was 20. i watched friends of mine who had joined the military because there were few other opportunities for them after high school get shipped to iraq and afghanistan and get their limbs blown off by iuds. there are people i knew, people i ate lunch with every day, who are fucking dead right now.

this country was an unchecked fascist dictatorship for six years. don’t believe me? here’s the dictionary definition of fascism. and here’s whathappened during the bush regime.

torture. suppression of the press. siphoning the nation’s wealth to the upper 1%, creating our current aristocracy. investments made by principle members of the bush regime in for-profit military-industrial corporations that were tasked with murdering hundreds of thousands of iraqis. sunsetting the assault weapons ban. the defense of marriage act. the creation of the department of homeland security. the loss of an entire city and fucking nothing done about it as people were drowning and starving to death in new orleans. no child left untested behind. a color coded number system on every day of the news telling americans how frightened they needed to be that day that hilariously enough coincided with how far bush dipped in the polls that week. he dipped, we went up to terror threat: orange. his poll numbers went back up. like clockwork.

between 2001 and 2005 us leftists who thought that there was no different than center-left democrats and right wing republicans got hit by a giant clue by four and watched the fucking republicans dismantle our safety, economic security, and our entire way of life. no, the centrists are not the same. the democrats and republicans are not the same. one faction sort of listens to us. the other doesn’t give a shit about us and actively promotes policies designed to kill and silence us.

…

so for all the “problematic” that you imagine a hilary clinton presidency could be, i want you to imagine a republican presidency (pick one) in which they want people like us fucking dead as pawns in their war games or fucking dying because they’ve stripped away the affordable healthcare act.

so please support bernie sanders. support him because if enough leftists make their voices known through his candidacy, then no matter what it will influence the dnc platform next summer. support him because we’re all passionate about returning america to a thriving, working democracy and flushing out the corporate lobbyist corruption that has held our entire government hostage for a decade.

but if he doesn’t win the primaries then you need to support hilary clinton. and i’m not kidding, i’m not being hyperbolic.  if the republicans win, then you need to start preparing yourself for life under a fascist state.

hint: it will help if you’re fundamentalist christian, wealthy, white, straight, male, and cisgender. 

otherwise, you’re fucked.

all of this. read it. i also lived through the nader debacle. vote for bernie in the primaries if you agree with him. i like a lot of his politics too. but then you must show up for hillary in the general election or we will end up with a third president bush.

three supreme court justices are very old and may die in the next presidential term.

www.rockthevote.com

#rockthevote

 

It's kind of an eye opener... we don't want history to repeat itself by voting Independent if Bernie doesn't make it to the general election. PLEASE READ.

[emacs]

Man I really can't agree with that.  I support Bernie because of his policies and ideals, not because of his party association.  Hillary is so much more centrist than Bernie it's amazing to me that they're both running for the same ticket.  This really plays into the trap of the two party system we have now, where people won't vote for a third party because they see it as a wasted vote, and those that do vote for a third party will basically have a wasted vote because of all of those who were afraid to vote.  I'd personally much rather vote for someone like Jill Stein than Clinton, or hell even write in Sanders because voting for either Hillary or a GOP candidate would be against my political beliefs.  For me, Hillary's policies are closer to the GOP's than they are to Bernie's, and it wouldn't make that much difference whether a republican or Clinton win at that point.

[futures]

It really would, though. Practically all of the GOP candidates want to get in there and reverse so much of what Obama has done thus far. It would be so damaging to the people of this country to allow them to do that. They'll get rid of the ACA, they'll try to ruin marriage equality, they'll allow for abortions to be illegal (see: Indiana), immigration will come down to racist opinions that will be read as fact... there's just too much that can go wrong. Even if Hillary is more moderate than Bernie, she won't reverse the progress we've had in the last 6-7 years. On top of the fact that such a high percentage of Americans already think Obama is too Socialist (which is seen as a worse thing than it actually is), do you really think they'll see Bernie and think "oh okay yeah, this isn't too bad"? No, they'll think he's even MORE extreme.

 

Republicans are banking on Democrats not going out to vote in 2016. After that, they're banking on Democrats to vote Independent, which is exactly what happened with Bush/Gore.

 

Think of what Chris Christie did for his re-election recently. He ordered for a special election for that open Senate seat to happen just a few weeks before his re-election. He knew that Cory Booker, a Democrat, was gonna win in a landslide for that Senate seat. He couldn't chance all those Dems to come out on his re-election day to vote him out of office for his 2nd term while also voting in Cory Booker to the Senate. He spent SO MUCH of the NJ taxpayers money to hold a separate special election for the Senate just so he could win his re-election due to low Democratic voter turn out.

[dreamover]

regardless, this isn't the same thing. Nader didn't run against gore in the primaries.

Bernie needs as much support as possible. Even if he doesn't win, he'll be debating with Hilary and she'll need to move to the left when she debates.

Saying Bernie has a small chance of winning doesn't help anyone. Bernie has the platform that excites the progressives that didn't vote in the last midterm election. He's raised more money from individual donations than Obama did in total at this point 4 years ago. I don't understand WHY Bernie can't win. Hilary's camp sure wants you to believe that. There is more buzz and interest in him now than i ever would have imagined a month ago.

Unfortunately, on the other side of the coin, Trump is doing much better than I ever imagined. People are sick of the status quo on both sides. Don't underestimate the 100 million+ people who didn't vote in the last presidential election.

[futures]

regardless, this isn't the same thing. Nader didn't run against gore in the primaries.

Bernie needs as much support as possible. Even if he doesn't win, he'll be debating with Hilary and she'll need to move to the left when she debates.

Saying Bernie has a small chance of winning doesn't help anyone. Bernie has the platform that excites the progressives that didn't vote in the last midterm election. He's raised more money from individual donations than Obama did in total at this point 4 years ago. I don't understand WHY Bernie can't win. Hilary's camp sure wants you to believe that. There is more buzz and interest in him now than i ever would have imagined a month ago.

Unfortunately, on the other side of the coin, Trump is doing much better than I ever imagined. People are sick of the status quo on both sides. Don't underestimate the 100 million+ people who didn't vote in the last presidential election.

 

It's similar in the sense that Gore is considered more moderate just like Hillary.

 

I'm not saying he doesn't deserve or need the support. What I posted was what to do if he loses to Hillary. What we want to do now is support him as much as possible so he can beat Hillary and become the Democratic candidate, obviously. But if that doesn't come to fruition, we need a backup plan. Especially considering not everyone has a say in the primaries.

 

Trump is the worst, lol. I know Lindsay Graham is sick of his shit already, but Idk if he's been fed lines about what to say about him. Still, I think that says a lot bc it's Lindsay Graham lol. Everyone else has been keeping quiet on that side of things, which is kind of worrisome. It's bad enough that Trump thinks what he does, I don't want to imagine the other GOP candidates agreeing with him on some of the things he's been saying. It'll be interesting to see how things go when they start the debates. Unfortunately they'll be splitting up the GOP folks, I kind of wanted to see them all on the same stage.

[dreamover]

I'm sure if Bernie loses the primaries, the republican candidates will need no help creating Hilary supporters on the left.

[Bladewillisisdead]

Buds. Bernie wouldn't like the fighting in here.

You're harshing his mellow.

Nah man, I've seen videos of Bernie getting heated. He tore Alan Greenspan a new asshole.