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Boston: The Hub of Brat Pack-dancing future congresswomen

Phoenix - Lisztomania - Boston University Brat Pack Mashup

Back in 2010, when she was a BU student, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez danced in this BU Brat Pack mashup (she's the one in the dark-gray T-shirt).

Speaking of Boston and future congresswomen, here's our own Ayanna Pressley reading from Maya Angelou's "On the Pulse of the Morning" back when she was still a city councilor:

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Comments

I guess this adds to the explanation as to why she has no clue how the US Government is structured.

"Hey you
You dance like those ******** I see'
In old Molly Ringwald movies" - Bloodhound Gang feat Joey Fatone

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I'm sure she spent the entire four years she was at college singing and dancing.

You troll.

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Judging from the affluent neighborhood she grew up in, I bet she got a lot of sailboating and Hamptons partying in also...

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And here I had hoped that you had just drowned in a sea of poor little white bigot tears.

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because people never, ever misspeak - especially not our dotard president or his minions...

i'm glad the people who fear AOC are so vocal, it makes it easy to spot the racists and misogynists among us.

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How do you remember to breathe?

She's buttloads more qualified than your favorite Orangutan in Chief

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Wow, you conservatives are obsessed with her.

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She did a college thing in college ... WOW UNQUaLIFIED

Not like it was Skull and Bones or anything like that ... nooo.

I guess to be qualified, she would have to:
*get a doc to commit perjury to keep her out of the military
*raw dog a porn star while wife 3 recovered from child 5
*drive her assistant/mistress/girlfriend off a bridge while drunk and walk away
*diddle an underage page and lie about it, then get reelected
*sext a prostitute repeatedly
*beat her partner senseless and lie about Mexicans/Blacks
*take a wide stance on toe tapping while firmly ensconced in a public water closet

Yes, her betters in government are far more qualified to act like frat douches and worse once out of college. So dancing in College is unqualified. Got it.

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So I guess you never did anything silly in college? Just stuck to those books and never made any friends? We just got a new SCJ who probably attempted to rape multiple women and was/is a raging drunk in college. Apparently that wasn't enough to disqualify him from office. AOC literally just made a silly video with her friends, and had a partially middle class upbringing. As if all Republican congressmen grew up as dirt poor farmers.

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Alexandria Ocasio Sanchez might annoy me with her veiwpoints, but she is VERY cute!

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Nice! So does that balance out for you then?

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Answer when you're down licking the heels of the 1%.

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well thank god a woman's value is mostly determined by looks, so that we can be assured your overall opinion is mixed-to-positive. definitely don't know what we'd do without the guiding star of another dude's judgements on another lady.

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I see a girl featured prominently who appears to be wearing a dark blue T-shirt with red stripes on the sleeves and briefly at the end a girl in a white or light gray T-shirt who gets much less airtime. Which one is she?

Either way, gotta love AOC and Pressley for knocking off career, entrenched Democrat white men and bringing the Democrat/Socialist party further left for all to see.

It was also interesting to recently learn (barely reported) that AOC left the Bronx at age 5 for wealthy, suburban farm country in Yorktown Heights with her parents, dad being a successful architect. Hardly the Bronx Tale but apparently too good for the media to check out prior to the election. God Bless them both.

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Ocasio-Cortez had the nerve to grow up in a house? What an impostor!

(I can't claim credit for this meme you only recently learned about that happened the better part of a year ago.)

Also, this thread is exactly what women face when running for office. Let's see, we have CapeCoddah saying she doesn't know how the government is structured because she probably misspoke once or twice, Bugs Bunny commenting on her looks, and Fish capping it off with being horrified that she doesn't fit in to the stereotypical girl from the Bronx trope perfectly. (That would be like saying that someone who moved from Dot to Marshfield wasn't OFD enough if they said they were from Dorchester.)

Congrats, you all won the dipwad lottery. Maybe if you spent 1/10th of the time concerned with googling "AOC not really from the Bronx" or "AOC bikini" or "AOC idiot" or whatever and worried about whether Trump is remotely qualified to be in office you'd find something interesting. (And, no, I don't want to see him in a speedo either.)

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Calling someone cute is not inappropriate, it’s not like it said I wanted a Pajama Party with her and my wife.

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You probably don't want to read what some of my middle-aged female friends want to do with Justin Trudeau, Beto O'Rourke, and Idris Elba.

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Beats the hell out of a book club I suppose.

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But we kind of envision more of a timeshare arrangement.

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Ewww, other than Elba, there is no accounting for taste

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OMG SHE'S MIDDLE CLASS! is the most baffling conservative storyline since "Paul Ryan is a legislative genius."

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you do realize that Yorktown (or suburban farm country as you call it) is mostly a blue collar or middle management white collar town? If you have cash - and want to live up there, you live in Chappaqua with Billary or Bedford or maybe Mount Kisco. Even more blue collar 20 years ago when OAC's dad moved there.

That said - AOC and Ayanna and the rest of the increasingly socialist Democrats are going to have to get real about where the money is going to come from for all their programs. They seem to be of a generation where they think there's an ATM out there with spare trillion or two in it that they can draw on. Bottom line - while the new tax laws do undertax all of us - there aren't enough 1%ers to fund this stuff, 89% of Americans have between zero and 2 nickels to rub together and the other 10% are who actually pays for all the things we enjoy (think doctors, lawyers, architects, middle and upper middle management types etc). I help them save for college and retirement and trust me - they are pretty tapped out. If we do find this magical pot of gold, there's this deficit thing that will blow up the house if we wait too long and that needs to be taken care of before we have free college and medicare for all.

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You'll note above, I am very not cool with this tax sham. But that 2 trillion is not an annual number. I think that's over 10 years.

Her numbers and ideas make about the sane amount of sense as the GOP's. Only in the other direction.

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It's interesting that it works in every other industrialized nation, but you don't think the wealthiest country in the world could afford it for some reason.

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Tax rates are higher in just about every other industrialized country, and they get what they pay for. Some countries provide less than others, and the tax rates reflect it.

I do think the Congress (and I am looking at both parties when I say this) is going completely off the rails when the rule that says that you can only increase spending when you can show where the money for the spending is coming from is being attacked on all sides. But hey, I'll be dead when Ocasio-Cortez is of retirement age, so she can deal with the debt payments.

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if I could just GO to the doctor or hospital and be helped without a month or more of red tape dealing with insurance companies, doctor's offices, or hospital billing departments. I'm not even sick, I am relatively healthy. I can't imagine the BS you go through if you have some kind of life-long disease. People who are against this are either morons or they are outright saying their time is worthless, and that the system we currently have, where healthcare is a for-profit industry, is totally fine the way it is.

By the same token none of these knuckle draggers seems to care where the money comes from when it comes to bombing brown people halfway around the world, tax breaks for the wealthy or building a ridiculous wall across our southern border. Those things its ok to blindly write a check for, but not healthcare or education. Seriously GET BENT. Then they wonder in amazement at why they get called "deplorable" 'evil" or get compared to Nazis. Take a deep breath and a step back and read again what you are saying/typing. IT SOUNDS TERRIBLE. That's because it is.

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To your first paragraph, for most people, it would be a net zero proposal- you pay more in taxes, but (assuming you are going the Canadian route) you no longer have to pay for insurance, and if your employer is pitching in a percentage to your insurance, that could be more in your pocket/taxes paid (or payroll tax.) The one thing your average American would have to be convinced is that a government funded system isn't going to end up eating more and more of the budget, much like Medicaid is now.

As to your second paragraph, I would say that defense is a different thing altogether. Defense is what it is. Other nations look to the US as a defender. Ironically, our President has noted how untenable this is, and I don't see many on the left agreeing with him when he ponders why we still have soldiers in Syria.

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Morons: Scared and falsely righteous people, clinging to the Just World Fallacy, pretending that people only get sick because they deserve it, "why should I have to pay for somebody who eats nothing but mcdonalds to get a heart transplant", etc, so they can wrap themselves in a fake sense of security that THEY will never be sick, THEY will never develop something and need millions of dollars in medical care, THEY are "smart" and "make good financial decisions" and could never be bankrupted.

Alternatively, you have the people profiting from it directly: a family member has type 2 diabetes, tons of weird other (possibly related) issues, but doesn't see the doctor regularly because schedule issues and the time it takes to deal with it, because his very demanding job... as a medical implant salesman. needless to say, he loves the current system, even though ostensibly it's killing him.

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The "just world" fallacy is the one that lets you believe that because you're a moral and righteous person, if something bad happens to you by sheer impersonal bad luck, then the rest of us have to bend over backwards to help you no matter how bad of a card you drew.

Yeah, there's the dumbasses gunning for Darwin Awards by eating themselves to death, but there's also the people who through no fault of their own suffer a debilitating stroke at a young age, or discover way too late that even though they're in the prime of their lives have incurable cancer. That stuff happens too, and as much as the instinct toward empathy and self-preservation makes you want to believe that there's a magic button somewhere that if we just push it will cure all disease and take all the ouch out of the world, there isn't one.

Suffering is part of the human condition. Maybe it builds character, maybe it's God testing you, or maybe it's just bad shit that happens to good people for no reason at all, but the incontrovertible fact is that it does happen and you can't prevent it. Maybe you can transfer it around the edges: trade crippling physical pain for a not-quite-as-crippling financial burden, or maybe you can't. Maybe you can lower the risks for yourself by watching what you eat and taking care of your own body, but that's just working around the edges.

But what all sorts of people like to do is live in a fantasy land where there are magic words you can say to the universe, like "socialism" or "medicare for all" that fix all the booboos and have no downsides at all to them. Life doesn't work that way. You can establish single-payer healthcare the way they do in the UK, and it will work for a while, but after that initial honeymoon period, people will stop going to medical school if the pay is crap and you'll be reliant on importing physicians into your country from poorer countries the way the have to in the UK (one of the arguments against Brexit was that medical care would suffer because it would be harder to bring in foreign doctors). That's going to work for a while, but it isn't sustainable in the long term because you can't expect people to work for less than they can command forever.

You can have a quasi-governmental option like medicare and medicaid. But that's just going to paper over the problem. Hospitals lose money on medicare and medicaid patients. And hospitals whose patient populations skew heavily medicare and medicaid have less money to work with than hospitals that aren't, and care suffers because doctors and nurses and medical technicians aren't chained to any place...they have to be paid market rate so you either have to have fewer of them for more patients or people of lesser quality who will take a lower salary.

You can have entirely governmental options like the VA. But because of the culture of a regrettably large fraction of the federal workforce in this country, that just begets corruption and waste and lower quality. You could say that that's just because the private sector lures away the good people and if there were no private option, then all the good people at BI and MGH and the like could work at the VA...and that'd be true until it isn't. Remember what's happening in the UK...they can't get enough Brits to go med school, they have to import people from abroad. You put in an NHS over here, you'll start having that problem here too. And there are only so many third worlders with medical degrees to go around. If people aren't going to med school because they don't think they'll have a career worth having at the end, you can't keep papering over that forever.

Adulthood is being at peace with all of this in some measure.

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A concise analysis of Roman's lengthy diatribe:

Hey, suffering happens and it is a part of life. So I will not help you if you need help and the government should not help you. So basically just f*ck off and die and decrease the surplus population.

And I am not even going to go into your simplistic and incorrect logic regarding:

single-payment health systems
Philosophy of Suffering (although I could recommend a very good book)
Socialism (or any other "ism")
And the idea just because systems are flawed, they do still serve a need, and should not be discarded

The idea of having empathy for others, Roman, is not tied to a button or anything else for that matter. It is basically giving a sh*t for others which, from reading your words, it is quite difficult to ascertain. Yes, "stuff happens" but we humans have a duty to help relieve suffering where we can. You know the old adage: Those that are given much, much is expected?

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Any time I see a post from Roman, I just imagine that it's coming from Dan Aykroyd's character in "The Great Outdoors" (also named Roman). It works, because they're both obnoxious blowhards who are completely full of shit.

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That's cool bro

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Did your keyboard break shortly after you started typing this? Where is your standard 10,000 word wall of text that nobody is going to read?

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I must have read that wrong. You couldn't possibly have just said "I'm so secure in my solipsism that I don't need to read anything. It's either superfluous or blasphemous and I'm just here to troll, yo"

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You're correct. If you review my post, you won't find any of those words.

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Let's work backwards from an extreme strawman case:

The New Horizons spacecraft, that recently returned a new year's day photograph of the the asteroid 2014 MU69, and three years ago returned spectacular photographs of Pluto and Charon, has cost American taxpayers several hundred millions dollars. Ditto for the Orisis-REX spacecraft that recently entered orbit around the asteroid Bennu and the Juno spacecraft currently taking pretty pictures of Jupiter, and on and on and on. The part of the NASA budget that looks up as opposed to looking down is about ten billion dollars per year and has been for the last few decades.

If an average "bad" hospital bill is about 100k, then for ten billion a year you can pay 100,000 of those per year. Nothing that gets put on a rocket and sent on a one-way trip hundreds of millions of miles from Earth helps anyone down here, but at the cost of sending a few tens of thousand aerospace geeks packing, you can relieve about a hundred thousand people from the spectre of potential financial ruin through no fault of their own.

There's a serious school of thought that takes the unapologetic position that pissing away finite public resources on celestial vanity projects while people are going into bankruptcy for mere bad luck is immoral. Ditto for foreign military adventurism down on Earth, for even small values of adventurism like maintaining a fleet of nuclear-capable stealth bombers, twenty aircraft carriers, and hundreds of ballistic missiles. The topic of this thread might even agree with most of that, given that she recently accused the Pentagon of having more money in their rounding errors than would be necessary to pay for free shit for everyone.

So why don't we scrap NASA? Why do we have the National Science Foundation pay for telescopes on the top of Mauna Kea and supercomputers in New Mexico?

Sure, there's the rent-seeking baloney and pork that comes from having a big project that's spreadable around congressional districts and campaign contributors, but there's also another simple fact that utilitarians of the "we humans have a duty to relieve suffering" bent should not lose sight of:

A civilization's merit isn't based only on it's averages; it's also based on the spread: the heights it drives itself to achieve, and on the lows it allows itself to tolerate. Reaching high is a nonlinear process: the rich are the ones who tend to get richer. Poverty relief is also nonlinear: you can't just cut every man woman and child a middle class paycheck and expect that they will all start to lead middle class lives. This is called the Pareto principle. And it means that if you want to reach up, you have to give up on something else. A rising average helps, but doesn't ensure that it's easier. But it does mean that you can't lop off the top and spread it around. It'll just get pissed away and instead of a single point of greatness, you'll just have a lot of mediocrity.

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Only problem is we pay too much.

(except for the VA where the government runs everything - now there's a perfect example of what true single payer would do to our medical system)

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yeah, what a nightmare the VA is. definitely wouldn't want wait times guarenteed under 30 days or they pay for you to go wherever you want. or a wide variety of available mental health and psychological care. or appointment slots that can be over twice what they are in the private sector, letting doctors have more face time with their patients and reducing the administrative pressure to get people in and out the door with the absolute minimum discussion of concerns or complex matters.

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Talk to someone who's been actually sick and had to go to the VA.

Talk to someone who works for the VA.

Hell, just read the Boston Globe.

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we could put together a study run by trained professionals to evaluate the overall level of care given to patients in VA hospitals. Maybe the study could even be run by phDs at some well-respected academic institution such as Dartmouth. Maybe it could even be linked by the commenter you're replying to so you could read it and address the specific points it raises rather than assume it's based on PR materials.

Nah, that'll never happen. The "Roman reading something" part of it, anyway.

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Researchers compared performance data at VA hospitals against non-VA facilities in 121 regions. In 14 out of 15 measures, the VA performed “significantly better” than other hospitals, according to results from the study.

The same "performance data" the VA was caught doctoring? That data?

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdga/pr/va-employee-charged-falsifying-medi...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/04/va-healthcare-dela...

https://www.disabledveterans.org/2015/11/10/veterans-affairs-caught-fals...

Get your head out of your ass, guy.

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using data from Hospital Compare, a Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Studies (CMS) website which provides information on how well hospitals provide recommended care to their patients. These measures included 30-day risk-adjusted mortality rates for four common diseases—acute myocardial infarction, COPD, heart failure, and pneumonia—plus 11 additional patient safety indicators.

but yeah scheduling fuckups originating from delays in the benefits office from 2014 are the real measure here

anyway you're right, a dartmouth guy who admits he went into his study thinking the VA numbers were better than they actually were and was critical of the system is definitely the only positive study.

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If the VA was the entity putting the correct treatments into the patients' medical records on which the study relied, then it's suspect. Period.

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Medicare is actually more of a single pricer, not single payer. A version of this I support -base universal coverage with ability to supplement coverage. Contrast this with the VA which is truly a single payer program and reportedly more of a mess than the rest of the system.

You also ignore the fact that Medicare is broke and getting broker by the minute. Not sure how the Koch report addresses this, but in reality, for Medicare to work prices need to go up. Way too complex to fix in a blog.

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I dunno, seems to me that the fact that she's living rent-free in your head should concern you more than Yorktown Heights. But you do you, Fish.

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the communist agenda of the American Progresive sect: healthcare and education for all, supported by higher taxes as demonstrated in countless developed nations, freedom of religion and sexuality for all people not just majority groups, and criminal justice reform that reflects the changing attitudes toward race in this country.

Truly shocking proposals, laid bare at long last.

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Even if I didn't know anything about her, her ability to raise the blood pressure of America's angriest gammons is delightful.

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I LOVE the fact that conservatives and alt-right types are losing their minds over this.

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It's the same as how conservatives LOVE the fact that liberals and lefty types have been losing their minds over Trump.

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Because a teenaged girl harmlessly dancing in a video she made while in college is the same thing as every damn thing Trump has said and/or done over the course of his lifetime.

Let's compare!

  1. Paid extramarital sex with porn stars that was eventually covered up by illegally using campaign finances?
  2. Joking about assaulting women by grabbing their genitals?
  3. Defending white supremacists/Nazis?
  4. Making fun of POW American soldiers for being captured?
  5. Stating that "avoiding STD's in 1980's NYC was 'his version of Vietnam'".
  6. Dodging Vietnam.
  7. Lying through his teeth about anything and everything on a seemingly hourly basis?

I could keep going, but it's late.

I'll give you another shot. Got a better response that you'd like to try?

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wtf is this cringe bullshit

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after the midwife pulled you from her womb.

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Wow, this is low.
People take things way too seriously.
Deep breaths.

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Is that 8 years ago a newly minted member of Congress was an undergrad at BU. I mean, she was, what, a sophomore then?

Other than that, sophomores at universities do a lot worse than appear in cheesy music videos, so I think we should all remember that.

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Thank you for the Ayanna Pressley reading of Maya Angeolu's "On the Pulse of the Morning".
It is beautiful and uplifting. <3
Thank you for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez video. It is nice to see BU students having fun.
Both are BU grads. BU students put the work into earning their degrees. I am proud of both of them and look forward to their future accomplishments. <3

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LOL at the all the losers triggered by this. She's cool and fun, oh no!

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"The unemployment rate is low because people have two jobs."

That's a scary level of stupid.

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You, not her.

Spoken like someone who has never had to have two jobs like Congressperson Ocasio Cortez has had to.

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That's not what she said.
Congrats on having two jobs!

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I'm voting 100% Republican from now on because they NEVER say stupid things.

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Trade wars are easy to win.

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Calves the size of cantaloupes.

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Deficits don't matter.

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Didn't she basically say that, too?

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She said anyone thinking magic money arrives with tax cuts needs to STFU about rationing health care.

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Did Dick Cheney praise her intelligence?

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Charles Durning in the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas! That is the best song and dance of a sidestepping politician.

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