American Politics Thread 2013: I'm a cool Rodham grandma in the USA

booker will run for president one day, it's not gonna be anytime soon though

Biscayne Bay
where the Limbaugh Cubans play all day
and wonder who'll they pick after Rubio lets'em down

he has really nothing to run on except 'good at twitter' right now

I'm imagining Booker as President flying all over the country to help senior citizens restart their air conditioners and furnaces

Booker should run – he's already a product of DLC thinking.

the person who was pimping Gillibrand to me said flat out that nobody's excited about Hillary.

Which is weird, because a lot of the conservatives I know who used to hate her now kind of think she'd do a good job as prez

i'm not sure i could vote for a man who doesn't immediately let a woman he's just met know how much he would like to suck on her breasts.

nobody is excited about hillary because she is not running for president yet

since this is now the "right wing watch / PrezStakes 2024" thread, just let me know when balls starts chemo.

nobody is excited about hillary because she is not running for president yet

a lot of people think she's been running for 20 years

ha i know a ton of freaks excited about hillary, they've been filling my facebook wall w/ puma fan fic for five years now.

hillarymania will get pretty bad on both sides

hillary fan fic has got to be amazing

it is, I mean even morbs reads this thread

i've seen conservatives say she wouldn't be bad too but that was 'in comparison to obama' who they fucking hate. when she runs it's going to be a year full of benghazi crap .

would you rather have a year of Biden dumbshit moments?

because that highlight reel is way, way funnier

Good news!

Gillibrand

A NY blue-dog moderate does not seem like she would excite too much of anyone but DLC types

I am not Gabbneb. I swear.

Also, I suspect that Gillibrand would excite many closeted, one-handed typists

The Dem nom goes to whoever hires the Obama campaign teams from 2008/12.

I'm not sure they come as a package deal.

Pres nom speculation really needs to be quarantined in its own thread, tbh.

yes, my apologies. We used to rely on Gabbneb to revive that

The OFA tech leads in particular have all filtered into startups.

In more proximate news, McAuliffe leads internationally renowned dipshit Ken Cuccinelli by 7 in polls.

Our gopher-cheeked GOP congressman announced this morning he's done after this term. Weirdest and best political news of the day around here.

He can make more money now as a lobbyist, right-wing personality, etc. Hopefully more of them do the same.

Quit now and avoid the rush to fill all available space at Fox News.

these numbers will n doubt recover some by election time but theyre still interesting re how much people hated the shutdown/debt limit brinksmanship http://politicalwire.com/archives/2013/10/21/nearly_half_want_to_replace_everyone_in_congress.html

funny how almost all the incumbents will still win

same as always

A NY blue-dog moderate does not seem like she would excite too much of anyone but DLC types

― curmudgeon, Monday, October 21, 2013 7:46 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

She'll just adapt her positions to whatever makes her most electable.

need more of this sort of thing http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/10/21/making-republicans-pay-a-price-for-climate-science-denialism

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/10/kathleen_sebelius_blamed_by_republicans_for_healthcare_gov_problems_gop.html

wouldn't mind seeing her go tbh

They think they got a substantial assist from the president’s Monday speech, where his fellow Americans were asked to remember that Obamacare was “not just a website,” and given the phone numbers to call if the pages didn’t load. All that was missing, snarked Republican Study Committee chairman Rep. Steve Scalise, “was an offer for free T-shirts to the first 100 callers.”

lol signing up for something BY PHONE?!?!

Is there any reason why they couldn't just extend open enrollment? If the congress actually wasn't awful, I mean.

its my understanding the the administration can postpone all the dates and whatnot if they deem it nesdisary, no congressional approval required

oh yeah this is pretty bad

Government officials and contractors ran a test to see whether the web portal could handle traffic from tens of thousands of users simultaneously, and the site crashed after a simulation in which only a few hundred tried to log on at the same time, according to the Post.

Sources close to the project told the Post that key testing of the website didn't take place until the week before the official launch. As late as Sept. 26, the sources said, no test had been carried out to determine whether a user could complete the enrollment process from beginning to end.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/report-obamacare-site-failed-test-just-before-launch

more polling http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/10/22/the-morning-plum-outside-the-conservative-bubble-gop-sustains-epic-damage

GOP manufactures crisis, overloads government worker and management resources, government looks bad. both sides bad

naw i dont think you can hang this one on the republicans sry

Well, the implementation was definitely rushed, and the problems hushed down, and I would guess that has a lot to do with the crazy state of government these days, and fear of the lies the right-wing media would spin out of it. But even so, it is still the dems fault.

NPR story this morning said that HHS & CMS (Medicare) had asked for more money to set up the exchanges years ago and that Congress(Republicans in House) blocked that; and so HHS had to hunt around within their own budget.

they spent $300m dollars to build that website! not enough money was not the problem

or $100m or $600m depending on sources, regardless they threw comical amounts of money at this thing

Maybe. Also, though, I think this issue re the selection of the contractors is making the rounds again:

The purchase of one of these contractors, Quality Software Services, Inc. (QSSI), by UnitedHealth Group, a major healthcare conglomerate, has sparked concerns about a potentially uneven playing field.

QSSI, a Maryland-based contractor, in January won a large contract to build a federal data services hub to help run the complex federal health insurance exchange.

It will be working with several other contractors, including CGI Federal, Inc., to create the technological architecture for the exchange.

The quiet nature of the transaction, which was not disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has fueled suspicion among industry insiders that UnitedHealth Group may be gaining an advantage for its subsidiary, UnitedHealthcare.

UnitedHealth Group’s acquisition has caught the attention of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee. He has expressed alarm over what he calls a lack of transparency in setting up a national insurance marketplace covering more than 30 states.

He asked Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in an Oct. 19 letter for a full account of contractors hired to set up the national exchange and a list of administration officials who signed off on those awards.

http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/265659-conflict-of-interests-concerns-raised-as-obama-races-to-implement-health-reform#ixzz2iSgZMKoj

That's from 2012 btw

the recent shutdown cost the government $24B. just to make a point. the fed could've spent $10B developing and advertising the shit out of the ACA site and that wouldn't be half what ted cruz's little shutdown stunt cost