Sanders Has a Point: What Good Are Private Insurers?; "A lot of the money goes to paying doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers -- but not as much as you might think."

He wants it stronger than it currently is, but I don't believe he intends to increase spending much to do it. Readiness and not being bogged down are part of it.

He was against Iraq before it happened. I don't know about Libya, but he's been vocal about Syria for a while, and it is still ongoing and an issue for the next administration.

I don't see why he wouldn't get along with Putin as well as any other candidates, many of whom frequently insist be is an outright enemy, including reflexively being anti-Assad since he's buddies with Putin. I'd say he's low on the scale of instigating shit with Russia and Putin vs the rest of the field, easily.

Yeah, he insulted Fiorina (to be fair, this was in a semi private setting with the journalist and was a pretty common reaction. He was correct, too, that people didn't want to vote for that face,) and Rand, both of whom are competing with him in something of a popularity contest. I wouldn't extrapolate from that to him, say, ribbing the Queen of England or whatever. And I also like Paul, and would love him as VP.

Yes, we should definitely consider whether his proposals and goals are agreeable. I kind of left that without saying. It's up to you whether you think enforcing immigration laws is valuable, or if we should basically continue with the status quo since no one is any more likely now to pass real reform than they have been for decades.

The whole racist and xenophobic thing I just find tired at this point. He's said a handful of things which, to me, require more than a little stretching to interpret as racist or xenophobic. Over the course of a long and public career. If you can't get past them, that's your prerogative, but I humbly suggest that if you find yourself ready to vote for someone you don't really like instead because of this, that you take a second look at those statements and decide whether they're all they are alleged to be. Because they look to me like he was making a clear point that illegal border crossing brings in an unpredictable amount of criminals and criminal activity, and not saying all Mexicans, all immigrants, all illegal immigrants, etc are rapists, but rather that we ought to secure the border to prevent those that are rapists etc from waltzing in, along with every migrant from tijuana to Chile who can scrounge up enough cash to pay a cartel coyote to bring him north. Which, frankly, is quite valid and without Trump would simply continue to be hushed.

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