Obamacare doesn't redistribute from "the wealthy" to "the poor". For "the wealthy", health insurance is an insignificant expense.

Insignificant my ass. If you think anyone making over 93k in any urban center (California, NY, wherever) can afford an additional 5k a year in medical expenses without breaking a sweat, you're seriously deluded. Or perhaps you'd like to redefine "wealthy"? Obama certainly did.

Calling those plans "junk" was a euphemism. They were outright bullshit bordering on fraud. So, if a 20-something has a catastrophic event, how much will he be helped by a plan that is capped at $10,000/year?

I beg to differ. Before ACA, I had a HDHP HSA that was capped around 5 or 6k a year for my family. Now it _IS_ 10k a year, and my premiums are higher (all because I don't fall within the preferred "subsidies" segment of our society)

McDonald's posted 5.5 BILLION in profit for 2012. They can pay their workers (well) above minimum wage.

They're a large company with a large number of employees. Economies of scales matter. Paying $15 minimum wage for instance would mean a 50% reduction in profit: http://247wallst.com/retail/20...
The Walmart case is even worse, at 80% profit lost.

That's a big deal. You're not talking pennies.

When has he ever tried to work with Congress you ask? TRY EVERY TIME. From the begining, he has tried to work with Congress.

I'm sorry, but no. Unilaterally writing bills and expecting your opponent to come on board when you give the smallest of nods to their ideology is not working together. He said it himself: "They can come along, but they have to sit in the back". The Democrats (including Obama) assumed the 2008 election was a mandate on their policies (rather than the anti-Bush movement it really was). As such, they had no intention of giving serious attention or equal time to any Republican ideas.

But every time he offer an olive branch they petulently slap it away, because to them the definition of compromise is "we get everything we want, or else."

It's very ironic that you say that, because I see the exact thing happening on the other side. And if you go by what actually _passed_ into law, Obama is entirely getting his way, as we've seen no substantial spending cuts (Mandatory spending remains entirely untouched), and taxes have been hiked about 3 times (once in Obamacare, once at the fiscal cliff crisis, and I forget the other time).

while Obama did have the stronger hand, he was willing to make concessions to gain passage of the bill, and ended up having to do exactly that. To earn the bare minimum of Republican support needed to get the bill past a Senate filibuster, the White House had to swallow steep cuts to state education programs and other liberal priorities.

The _entirety_ of education spending is a rounding error in the federal budgets. Look at the amount of dollars raised from the tax increases. Then look at the amount of dollars that came from reduced spending. And you'll clearly see why the Republicans balk and demand more concessions. This isn't a 50-50 effort. Obama wants 5% spending reduction and 95% tax hikes. And he's getting it.

âoeWeâ(TM)re not here to cut deals and get crumbs and stay in the minority for another 40 years,â Cantor said at the time.

I don't blame him after observing the last 6 years of one-sided partisan billcraft.

President Obama sought out the Republicans and asked them for ideas during the drafting process.

Again, you're nuts. The Republican ideas were summarily rejected. He was giving lip services at best. You forget this bill was written while the Dems held a supermajority in Congress. The final bill was 100% written behind closed doors by Democrats, _not_ a bipartisan committee.

Speaking as a die-hard liberal, Obama has screwed up a fair number of things. He was also handed a really bad situation, with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent botching of the occupation, and the collapse of the mortgage industry and effects across the whole economy. I'm not sure a president since Lincoln has stepped into a worse situation.

I don't buy it -- that excuse stopped working when he hit term two. GW Bush had to deal with the dotcom collapse. Reagan had to deal with the savings & loan crisis. Many presidents don't have the best starting territory. Some have fantastic starting territory and get lauded in spite of it (see Clinton during boom times).

Trying to "excuse" a failure in office because of situational considerations is Rationalization at its finest. Always someone else to blame.

You're part of the problem and you're wrong, because you're only focused on short-term thinking. Change is slow, and a vote matters even if you don't win "today's election", because it's public opinion and sentiment that matters. The parties _mold_ themselves around it. If they know they can get you to continue to vote for them without changing, they'll never change. The entire fact that libertarians are on the rise now in the Republican party is because a movement was started and maintained back then, even knowing they weren't going to sweep/win any elections: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Someone should tell these deniers we already have a consensus on the effect of salt on blood pressure.

I think there are two main factors driving this: - Up until about the 70s, there was no competition for labor...the US was its own market and very few people ever even left the country for extended periods. - The labor/management balance has shifted dramatically in favor of management.

Actually, I believe the main cause was women entering the workforce. In our parents and grandparents time, most married women didn't work. Now they do. Effectively, we now all work twice as much to get the same stuff simply because inflation has made it that way.

It's the literal definition of bigotry - a general dislike of a large group for reasons that have nothing to do with anything that group can control, or anything that applies to all members.

Actually the definition of bigotry has nothing to do with whether you can control it or not. In fact, the term bigot originated with hating heretics and foreigners: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

It can apply to anything from "I just don't like republicans" to "I just don't like religious zealots" to "I just don't like rich people" or "I just don't like Americans" or "I just don't like nerds". Blanket dislike of groups of people exists all over the world, many times for things out of their control. Often it's because of behavior exhibited by their group. But that could be applied to homosexuals as well, at least of the flaming variety.

I also find it odd that you believe you can just easily choose your personality/political views/religion (particularly personality). Alot of that stuff is really baked into a person through their life experiences. You can't just wake up one day and "be different" with the flip of a switch.

Now you can ask me why, in such a system, you would feel -motivated- to work twice as hard if it just makes the commune as a whole, instead of yourself, slightly wealthier, and that's a perfectly valid question. You probably wouldn't feel motivated to work twice as hard and spend 20 hours a day in the fields. Why is that "bad"? I expect you would be motivated to do something else with that time... create music or art, teach the children to fish or program computers, or perhaps you will experiment with new farming techniques to try and discover a better way of farming so that commune will collectively have to work even less, enabling everyone to spend even more time on non-farming pursuits... or whatever else you find personally fulfilling instead of trying to amass excess wealth. Are you going to try to convince me that this would be somehow a "worse" system?

Now who's loaded the argument. You assume that the majority of people are going to use that free time contributing to society. In reality, that's likely far from true. Most people would spend their time drinking beer, watching tv, or general recreation/laziness activities. Just look at what people do with their free time now. Look at countries with short work weeks. The Dutch average 29 hours a week at work (http://money.cnn.com/gallery/news/economy/2013/07/10/worlds-shortest-work-weeks/). Tell me: are they the pinnacle of innovation? What are they doing with their free time? Now I'm not saying it's not a good thing in general to have a shorter work week, but trying to claim people would automatically use the vacated time for the greater good of society is incredibly disingenuous.

You haven't met many CEOs, have you? Those that are CEOs or owners of small companies are indeed extremely busy. They also make shit money. Those that make the obscene salaries on the other hand have enough time for mistresses, hobbies and extra-curricular activities - far more so than any working drone underneath them.

You do know that most large companies started small, right? And that many of those obscenely paid CEOs went through the "extremely busy/shit money" period? I always saw the "obscene period" as a payout for the years/decades you worked building something successful, because as you said yourself: those years aren't pleasant, or easy. Of course, this doesn't account for the CEOs that fail and just bounce from company to company in high positions, but I believe that's a different problem.

Voting third party is a waste of a vote pure and simple. That is until they go grass roots and start having a bottom up support structure. They would be better off infiltrating the existing parties like the TEA party does and stand their ground that way.

You act as though the tea party wasn't going after big positions too. Ron Paul didn't pull in many votes during the presidential election, but his campaign helped leaps and bounds for progressing the movement. You're far too short sighted in your belief that a third party vote is a waste of a vote. Even gaining visibility and/or sending a message helps in a big way to progress your cause.

"not as good at gerrymandering"

You obviously haven't seen California's maps.

Or Maryland's: http://www.newrepublic.com/art...

The burden of proof is on the one making a claim. So when someone wants to claim that gun ownership does not increase violent crime, that person has to prove that claim just as much as someone claiming it does.

Proving a correlation and stating no correlation have different burdens of proof. The latter is merely the null state. It'd be different, on the other hand, to say that making gun laws looser decreases violent crime (because again, you're trying to prove a correlatory connection). Saying guns have no effect/correlation is a different, and lower, burden of proof.

The problem is not guns, it's gun culture. Canada just has less of it.

The problem is not gun culture, it's culture (namely, crazy people).