What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[dps]

Really wish Der Trumpinator would stop referring to North Korea in terminal language. 

Adios, Timmay.  Enjoy your 3rd degree burns before your radiation sickness takes care of things.

I work right next to the Sejong Government center, my death would be instant! 

Ah, that's no fun.  I was hoping you'd suffer.

[viper37]

Someone mentioned preventive medicine up-thread.  Well, if everyone quit smoking, cut back on their eating, and exercised more, we'd live longer on average and probably reduce our health care costs.  We don't need health insurance, or even the intervention of a doctor or other health care professional to do any of those things;  we certainly don't need a single payer system or any government action to do them.  If the assertion that it will save lives is the main argument in favor of Obamacare or any other government program to provide health insurance coverage, then we should also bring back prohibition and outlaw tobacco products.  And instead of legalizing other recreational drugs, we should spend more money on enforcing existing drug bans.

In your current healthcare system, you do not need to see a doctor prior to seeking any kind of specialist, is it not?
In that case, no, you would likely not see to a doctor to do that.

But, in Quebec's case, I need to see my doctor so I get to see a nutrionist in the hospital and a kinesiologist for a training program adapted to my condition.  If I was a smoker, I would also need my doctor to get medicine to help me cure the addiction, same if I'm a drug addict.  A diabetic would likely need help to correctly balance his food requirements with his condition, he might need a specialized nurse to help him adapt his medication to changing conditions, before he requires a doctor.

Same goes if you have any kind of mental disease.  Stigma aside, if you're feeling depressed, on burnout, borderline schyzo, you need access to appropriate care, wether it be on your own volution or because you are forced to attend therapy. You may not need a psychiatrist, you may only need a social worker to help you realize your problem (say, compulsive hoarders), but you likely need help.

So in a way, you may not need to see a doctor, but you need some healthcare professional's help, and these fees would be covered by an health insurance.

Of course, there's more to "healthcare is free, yeah!" to guaranteed accessibility of service.  Make anything costs less, and people will seek to use it, for real problems or imaginary problems, and this can lead to a shortage of available healthcare services (longer waiting lists to see a specialist or to undergo surgery).  That's were the franchise can help.

It's all bullshit.  We want to be able to be gluttons, get drunk and stoned, and do anything and everything else that's bad for our health;  and in a free society we should be allowed to make those choices.  But then we also want to turn around and have someone else pay for the care we need when we get sick as a result.  Fuck that.  I don't use tobacco products or any illicit drugs, but I do drink occasionally, and I certainly don't take good care of myself when it comes to diet and exercise;  but I don't think it's right to ask anyone else to subsidize my choices.

You can drink all your life and live up to 100.  My dad is a chain smoker, he's remarkably healthy.  One of my uncle has serious mental health problems.  He is a chain smoker too, worst than my dad.  But he can't stop.  If he does, his medication would become inadapted to his condition, and he risk undergoing another chronic episode, and this time, there might be no one to tell him he should see a doctor.

It's all simple.

Someone born with an handicap, or a chronic genetic disease will require a lot of healthcare during his life.  Is it right to ask society to pay for him, knowing he will be a drag on resources, and will never get better?  If he is born into a poor family, he's pretty much fucked.  Is that really allright that you can't get the best healthcare options because you were born sick?  Would it be more humane to euthanize these people?  Because if you refuse them healthcare in these conditions, by saying stuff like "they need to get a job, they'll have an insurance" or "they need to take better care of themselves", that pretty much amounts to it: you do not want to care for people unfortunate to be sick.

I had a surgery at 19.  basically, they cut me from the button belly to the back.  For nothing.  They thought I had a serious congenital problem and it turned out I had nothing wrong.  I'm sick since then.  I only learnt recently that the surgeon "likely hit a nerve" while cutting me.  I used to be an athlete, breaking endurance records for physical conditioning.  My wrestling coach admired my determination, even if I wasn't the best of the class (by far). 

Everyone here who has met me or seen my FB picture will laugh at that idea of me being a slim, athletic guy.

One year later, that was over.  Before I even started working full time.

No private insurer would insure me, except for life, at huge premiums.

Under your proposed system, I wouldn't even have healthcare at all, except the very basic medicaid, in States that haven't cut it for people like me, who are now overweight and are constantly injured while trying to train.

See, getting sick, it's not just a measure of eating well and doing exercise.  It helps, for sure.  It reduces the risks of some diseases. But my mom was relatively slim for a women of her age.  She more often than not ate well.  We had fries maybe once in a week, on Sundays.  She barely even touched greasy foods like chips.  She always hate fresh veggies and fruits from the garden.  Yet, she died at 59 from colon cancer.  That was her second cancer.

One of my uncles, he died before the age of 50.  Heart attack.  He had a bad earth, the doc said he had the heart of a 90 years old.  He made is first infarctus in his 30s.  He was or normal body weight, even thinner than his ideal weight.  Of course, he drank a lot, that never helped him.  But before his first heart attack, he barely drank more than a glass here and there.

One of my other uncles, he was slim.  He was built, he was a construction worker.  He likely tried all drugs on earth in his time.  He couldn't keep away from the bottle, he couldn't keep away from prison.  He never got sick.  In the end, he drowned in a pool, in november.  Completely drunk.

My other uncle, he's been overweight all his life, except for the short time my aunt put him on a diet at the same time as she did it.  He too had a hard time staying away from the bottle. He never did any exercise, and he was a teacher for all his life.  He's in his mid 70s and still kicking.

I don't think health is that simple.  Not that I'm a specialist, but I really can't see how someone could say "all you have to do is take care of yourself".  I've seen a lot of people, good people, in total top shape, they could have shamed many hockey players with their level of training, and yet, suddenly, they got sick.  Real sick.  In their early 20s.

Disease, there's just no stopping them.

And then, there are accidents.  Accidents happen.  A drunk driver hit you.  You have no insurance because you train 4 times a week and health well.  You come out of coma with a 120k$ bill.
So you declare bankruptcy.  You don't pay the hospital.  So they increase their costs to cover a certain % of losses like this.  And then healthcare suddenly costs a lot more than it should and not everyone is covered.

That's probably why you need some form of public, non discriminating and affordable health care.  Insurance companies aren't evil, but they need to turn a profit. And they can't cover everything as that would make for too expensive premiums.

As much as I hate it, govt intervention is pretty much a necessity in health care.  It shouldn't be your only option.  It shouldn't mean that all hospitals are suddenly managed by the government.  It shouldn't mean a doctors wage will always be negotiated with the Healthcare dept of Massachussets/Maine/Arkansas/etc.   but it means, at some point, you need universal coverage, because it is more effective that way.

[Fate]

One thing I don't understand.  If the US chooses not to save some of the people who can be saved, it follows that the health care cost should go down.  Yet all the evidence points to the fact that health care is a lot more expensive in the US.

It's more complicated than that. We do not have universal health insurance, but we do have universal health care.  US emergency departments cannot refuse to treat deadbeats who show up at the door (thanks to Ronald Reagan).

The Republicans think they're going to save money by cutting funds from Medicaid and putting people who make <20k out of the range of affordable health insurance. What happens is these people just show up at the ED and consume the most expensive kind of health care. It's much cheaper to manage these people as outpatients with their Medicaid card.

[jimmy olsen]

America

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/07/04/the-greatest-threat-facing-america-is-our-own-president/?utm_term=.58d9ad7f49a3

The greatest threat facing the United States is its own president
By David Rothkopf July 4 at 2:02 PM

David Rothkopf is the author of "The Great Questions of Tomorrow." He is a visiting professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Last week, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, I moderated a panel on U.S. national security in the Trump era. On the panel, former CIA director David H. Petraeus offered the most robust defense of President Trump's foreign policy that I have heard. Central to his premise were two facts. First, he argued that Trump's national security team was the strongest he had ever seen. Next, he argued that whereas President Barack Obama was indecisive to the point of paralysis, such as in the case of Syria, Trump is decisive.

Toward the end of the conversation, we turned to Trump's erratic behavior and I noted that for the first time in three decades in the world of foreign policy, I was getting regular questions about the mental health of the president.


I asked Petraeus, a man I respect, if he thought the president was fit to serve. His response was, "It's immaterial." He argued that because the team around Trump was so good, they could offset whatever deficits he might have. I was floored. It was a stunningly weak defense.


That is where we are now. The president's tweeting hysterically at the media is just an element of this. So too is his malignant and ever-visible narcissism. The president has demonstrated himself to have zero impulse control and a tendency to damage vital international relationships with ill-considered outbursts, to trust very few of the people in his own government, and to reportedly rant and shout at staff and even at the television sets he obsessively watches.

Whether he is actually clinically ill is a matter for psychiatric professionals to consider. But when you take the above behaviors and combine them with his resistance to doing the work needed to be president, to sitting down for briefings, to reading background materials, to familiarizing himself with details enough to manage his staff, there is clearly a problem. Compound it with his deliberate reluctance to fill key positions in government and his wild flip-flopping on critical issues from relations with China to trade, and you come to a conclusion that it may be that Trump's fitness to serve as president is our nation's core national security issue.

Not only does the president diminish the office with his pettiness; he also shows disregard for constitutional principles including free speech, freedom of religion and separation of powers, and he operates as though he were above ethics laws. Daily he shows he lacks the character, discipline, intellect, judgment or respect for the office to be president of the United States. In normal times, this would be worrying. But look at the news. North Korea is moving closer to having the ability to deliver a nuclear weapon to the United States. A confrontation is coming that will be a test of character pitting North Korea's unhinged leader, Kim Jong Un, against our leader.


Later this week, he will sit down with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hamburg, Germany, during the Group of 20 meeting. Quite apart from the political optics of rewarding a man who attacked the United States with to help get Trump elected with such a meeting, the summit reveals why it is so dangerous to have an erratic president. Much of U.S. foreign policy comes down to personal diplomacy conducted by the president and his actions in the wake of such meetings. If a dedicated enemy of the United States and opportunist such as Putin determines to take advantage of Trump's narcissism, ignorance, paranoia, business interests or brewing scandals, he will do just that. If he sees Trump's behavior as a tacit endorsement of his own thuggishness, he will seize the opportunity. Could Trump enter the meeting with good advice from the team that Petraeus and others admire so much? Yes. But they can't undo Trump's record, nor can they, we have learned, always shape the behavior of a man who has shown repeated propensity for ignoring the advice of his best allies. That is one reason, according to reports, that European officials are deeply concerned about the outcomes of the meeting that will take place in Hamburg this week.

The United States has had a wide variety of presidents; we have as often been victimized by their errors of judgment as we have benefited from their leadership. But the stark reality is that objective analysis reveals that we have never before seen a president so unfit for office. Even President Richard Nixon at his moments of darkest paranoia was a professional public servant who understood the office and the stakes associated with it. One might, on this Independence Day week, have to go back to King George III to find a head of state who so threatened America. But there is no precedent for one whose character is so obviously ill-suited to the presidency.

At the end of the Aspen session, a gentleman approached me and asked why I had made the conversation so ad hominem by questioning Trump's fitness. I explained that when we have a system in which the chief executive is endowed with so much power, we regularly find that our fate in crises turns on the character of the president. For that reason, it is not the incivility of modern politics that drives us to question Trump's fitness; it is a respect for the lessons of history and for the national interests his profound deficits put at risk.

[CountDeMoney]

Meh, nobody wanted to listen, and nobody cares.  Except the trolls, they're happy.

[CountDeMoney]

A day late, a Siegy short.

National Security
Pentagon Considers Canceling Program That Recruits Immigrant Soldiers
Stupid NPR

The Pentagon is considering pulling out of a deal it made with thousands of noncitizen recruits with specialized skills: Join the military and we'll put you on the fast track to citizenship.

The proposal to dismantle the program would cancel enlistment contracts for many of the foreign-born recruits, leaving about 1,000 of them without legal protection from deportation.

The plan under consideration is laid out in a memo from Pentagon officials to Defense Secretary James Mattis. In the memo, obtained by NPR, high-level personnel and intelligence officials cite security concerns and inadequate vetting of recruits under a program called Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, or MAVNI.

The memo also cites "the potential threat posed by individuals who may have a higher risk of connections to Foreign Intelligence Services," and it refers to an "elevated" risk of an insider threat.

The recruitment program began in 2009 to attract immigrants with medical or language skills, such as surgeons or Arabic speakers. It allows visa holders, asylees and refugees to bypass the green card process to become U.S. citizens.

The founder of the MAVNI program, retired Lt. Col. Margaret Stock, said the security concerns are overblown. "If you were a bad guy who wanted to infiltrate the Army, you wouldn't risk the many levels of vetting required in this program," she said.

Noncitizens have had a long history in the U.S. military. Immigrants have been eligible to enlist since the Revolutionary War.

Three Defense Department officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to discuss the memo publicly, said the Pentagon is trying to balance national security concerns with the military's needs for specialized skills immigrants can provide. In some cases, the officials said, the Army wasn't using the program as intended, putting MAVNI recruits in roles that didn't match their skills.

Nearly 10,000 immigrants are in the MAVNI program, principally the Army, according to the Pentagon memo. The memo divides them into four groups based on their potential security risk, as determined by their level of vetting and their access to classified information.

Some already are serving in the military and have been flagged for enhanced security screenings, while others are awaiting basic training and would be separated from the military or have their enlistment contracts canceled.

About 1,000 of the recruits who have been awaiting naturalization would be at risk of deportation because their visas have expired. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had deferred action on deportation in these cases because the soldiers were in the MAVNI program.

The program has been frozen pending further review.

Questions about the program arose last year when officials discovered that some MAVNI recruits had offered false educational credentials, according to a legal brief from the Department of Justice. The brief was filed as part of a lawsuit challenging the Pentagon's decision to freeze the program.

The Pentagon responded to the discovery of some recruits providing fake university degrees by ordering security checks on all recruits in the program and barring new enlistments.

But that screening process has overwhelmed the Army's resources. According to the Pentagon memo, those security checks have "diverted already constrained Army fiscal and manpower resources from their primary roles."

Stock said many MAVNI recruits were left in limbo.

"The Army said you can ship to basic training after you complete the background checks. But now they've canceled all the background checks so nobody can ship to basic training," she said.

In one of two ongoing lawsuits, several noncitizens recruited under MAVNI and serving in the Army Reserve have sued. They argue that they were promised an expedited path to citizenship but that the Department of Homeland Security, at the behest of the Pentagon, has failed to process their naturalization applications, as required by law.

In the other case, the plaintiffs argue the Pentagon discriminated against naturalized U.S. citizens who were denied security clearances in the first terms of their enlistment. That meant that the military careers of the MAVNI recruits were effectively stalled out because they were unable to attend officer training school, for instance.

The lead plaintiff in that lawsuit, Kirti Tiwari, is a native of India, with a master's degree in molecular biology. He was selected as an Army nominee for NASA's astronaut program, but that plan was put on hold when Tiwari couldn't get a security clearance in his first term of enlistment.

The Pentagon has since changed that policy, but plaintiffs' attorney Neil T. O'Donnell said naturalized citizen soldiers still face discrimination because some haven't been allowed to enter basic training.

In the memo, the Pentagon acknowledges that freezing the MAVNI program and subjecting recruits to more screening could be legally problematic. For example, some of the recruits are already naturalized citizens who have been deployed around the globe. "There are significant legal constraints to subjecting this population to enhanced screening without an individualized assessment of cause," the memo states.

The memo also suggests devising a "public affairs strategy" before canceling enlistment contracts.

Stock, the founder of the program, said the proposal outlined in the memo could be a violation of the U.S. Constitution's Equal Protection Clause.

"They're subjecting this whole entire group of people to this extreme vetting, and it's not based on any individual suspicion of any of these people. They've passed all kinds of security checks already. That in itself is unconstitutional," she said.

[Ed Anger]

WTFLBGTQBBQ MATTIS?

[Ed Anger]

Lindsay Lohan has joined the Trump camp. A dynastic union between her and Scott Baio will shake the republic to it's core.

[CountDeMoney]

to it's core.

[Ed Anger]

It's late.

[CountDeMoney]

Yes, it is late.

[sbr]

Yes, it is late.

[Ed Anger]

I think my iPad spellcheck is fucking with me.

[sbr]

I wish I could blame spellcheck on my first attempt to type nuclear into Google a minute ago.

[CountDeMoney]

Yes, it is late.

I'm reading the latest issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists right now in another tab.

STOP LOOKING AT MY THOUGHT BUBBLES