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Discussion: National Day Observations

I’m making an executive decision. Happy Mel Brooks day!  He is 100 years old today. 1900 more to go!

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Discussion: The Rose Garden and White House happenings: Voters have to make a choice

  

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Discussion: The Rose Garden and White House happenings: Voters have to make a choice

 !

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Discussion: The Rose Garden and White House happenings: Voters have to make a choice

mtierney said:

when you have reached retirement age, after paying into the system for decades,  and are then on the “receiving” end, will you ask yourself that question?

fyi, I am on the receiving end of Medicare. I'm not retired because unlike yourself, I missed the cutoff for full retirement at 65 and I need to wait to collect SS. Another screwing that people born after the midpoint of the Baby Boom have been subjected to.

Here's the thing, I don't look resentfully like you do at other Americans getting "free stuff" from public funding. At various points in my life I got "free stuff" like public school, college grants and loans. I received free tuition for grad school at Rutgers, paid for by the taxpayers in NJ. Let's not even get into every other "free benefit" we get, from highways, to parks, to assurances of clean water and safe food.

But after I was gainfully employed, my family and I paid taxes to NJ, Maplewood, NYC, NYS as well as the federal government. A lot of taxes in fact.

but that's how it's supposed to work. The healthy, employed people work and pay taxes. The young, the old, the sick, the disabled get "free stuff" to help them get a start in life, or a more comfortable end, or a dignified present.

Your disparagement of people who rely on what you contemptuously call "free stuff" is really small-minded and mean.

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Discussion: Off leash dogs

This is not an animal control issue. It's a police issue. 

The animal owner is breaking the law.

That being said, Maplewood PD refuses to enforce the leash law in Memorial Park.

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Discussion: The Rose Garden and White House happenings: Voters have to make a choice

I'm convinced @mtierney that your disdain for Democrats is abstract. I doubt you would dislike most of us, if we were all out under the stars on July 4th singing the beautiful patriotic songs most of us enjoy.

I'm going to be filled with hope, inspired by President Obama's recent speech at the opening of his Presidential Center.

I'll be thankful for the freedom that I enjoy being born exactly at the right time in the right place, (NYC)

I'll renew a promise to be politically active, exercising my right, to work on the causes that I care deeply about.

I hope the same music fills your July 4th with love for your fellow Americans.

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Discussion: The Rose Garden and White House happenings: Voters have to make a choice

Mtierney,

When you were, say, 25 years old, what was the tax rate on wealthier families?  What percent of workers were unionized?  How well was income distributed?

And you think the problem is Democratic Socialism?  That’s the symptom of more and more Americans feeling an economic squeeze and desperately trying to find politicians who genuinely care. 

Trump does not care and his anti-Woke and anti-immigrant and anti-women policies aren’t part of any solution. 

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Discussion: The Rose Garden and White House happenings: Voters have to make a choice

mtierney said:

Many of you discount the 70+ million Americans who voted for DJT — their very existence is a fantasy uber liberals just hope will go away. 

As a result, recognizing the void, the DNC is quickly being taken over by the National Democratic Socialist Party.

Don’t say I didn’t warn the working class who live in the suburbs and  travel into NYC every day who will be underwriting all the free stuff Nyc’s mayor has promised  to provide — for just their vote for national socialist Democrat party.

Never in our lives would anyone have believed that 9/11 could have happened! A handful of zealots could turn the WTC into rubble! 

 Today’s triumphant Social Democrats believe that if they could use enough ridicule against Trump — a  giggle really — and, along with their anti-Trump focus, the Socialist Democrat movement stepped easily into the breach provided.

It surely doesn’t bode well for the tax-paying working class who will underwrite the socialist takeover.

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Discussion: The Rose Garden and White House happenings: Voters have to make a choice

joanne said:

Once every three weeks, I use Ajovy self-injector to prevent and to control my chronic migraines.  In the US, I’d pay $US 340.47 per shot (in my dollars that would be just under $500.   Every 3 weeks.  Just so I can safely move around my house, and not look drunk, if I leave the house. 

In $Aus I paid $7.50 this week for the same medication. That’s $USD 5.17c.  Which nation is better looking after its people and helping productivity???

GoSlugs said:

Taking people's health care away will probably be a wake up call for many. Democrats hard fought to let people keep their health care but, ultimately, they just didn't have the numbers to defeat the fascists. In 2028, if polls are any indication, that will change.

Voters, you know.....

In the words of the director from the Coen Brothers movie, Hail Caesar! "Would that it were so simple."

I have health insurance through my job. My health insurance plan has a deductible of $3,500 which, compared to the deductible I had when I was on "Obamacare" isn't too bad. A deductible is basically an amount of cash you have to pay for healthcare yourself first before the insurance company will cover the costs it agreed to.

I was prescribed a drug that costs $500 for a month's worth of doses. The doctor's office sent the prescription to my insurance company and at first they refused to cover the cost of that drug until I had a follow-up for some other treatment I'm doing, so I have the follow-up without buying the prescription drug and my test numbers are heading in the right direction so we go back to my insurance company and they say they'll cover the cost, but only after I've spent my deductible. 

Now, with various other doctor visits this year, I've spent about $1,300 of my deductible so far this year, leaving over $2,000 left that I have to spend myself before they'll cover my prescription (which even when covered I'll have to pay something for), and if nothing else happens that requires anything medical, I would have to pay $500 for the next 4 months or so before I'm fully covered for this prescription. It's June already, so it would be October before the price of the prescription becomes affordable. That means I have October, November, and December of cheap drugs until January comes, my insurance plan resets, and then I'm back on the hook for a $500 drug again until that deductible is paid off.

Meanwhile, next year my insurance plan's rules could completely change and I might no longer qualify for coverage for that drug anyway. And what's worse is that any one of our other American MOLers can and likely will chime after this and list all the possible ways to either get around this Byzantine system, or say it never works that way, which just makes the system worse - because then you realize that there really is no system here, it's just dollars flying back and forth (mostly forth) and people getting sicker.

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Discussion: War in the Middle East

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

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(Ursula Le Guin via Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves

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