Month: May 2016

Vice President Joe Biden told ABC News on Tuesday that while he would have made for the "best president," he was not able to devote himself to a campaign after the death of his son, Beau Biden.

"I had planned on running. It’s an awful thing to say. I think I would have been the best president. But it was the right thing, not just for my family, for me," Biden told ABC's "Good Morning America" in an interview that aired on Wednesday. "No one should ever seek the presidency unless they're able to devote their whole heart and soul and passion into just doing that. And Beau was my soul. I just wasn't ready to be able to do that."

So he was going to run until Beau died last summer. Wow. That makes me wonder how the primary would have turned out in hindsight.

Yesterday presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton repeated her stance that we would reform Obamacare with a Public Option or Medicare Buy In. From Bloomberg:

At a campaign stop Monday in Northern Virginia, Hillary Clinton reiterated her support for a government-run health plan in the insurance market, possibly by letting let Americans buy into Medicare, to stem the rise of health-care costs. “I'm also in favor of what's called the public option, so that people can buy into Medicare at a certain age,” the Democratic presidential front-runner said during a roundtable with local residents at the Mug'N Muffin coffee shop. “Which will take a lot of pressure off the costs.” While Clinton long has supported including a public option in the insurance market, her campaign said she was floating the idea of letting Americans not yet of retirement age buy into the Medicare system as one way of accomplishing that. She's also open to creating a separate government-run option on the Obamacare exchanges. The idea of a government-run insurance option long has been favored by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, but it was stripped from the final version of Obamacare legislation in the face of firm opposition by Republicans and the insurance industry. Clinton has endorsed a public option on her website, though it seldom comes up on the campaign trail.

Martin Longman has a thoughts on the coming landslide and what it will mean for the two political parties. I have similar, but different thoughts.

I see some are taking a Washington Post headline as gospel from God and are concern trolling Hillary as a result. The reality is Donald Trump has already reneged on his supposed tack to the left. He “backtracked on his remarks about raising taxes on wealthy Americans, saying the rich might simply get a smaller tax cut than he originally proposed,” Reuters reports. Said Trump: “I’m not talking about a tax increase. I’m talking about a tremendous tax decrease, OK? I’m not talking a raise from where they are now; I’m talking about a raise from my low proposal.” Trump is going to do this all election long. Trump says one thing that sounds like a complete departure from not only his past proposals and statements and carved in stone GOP orthodoxy, have some idiots in the press go nuts over it, declaring that Trump is now the GREAT LIBERAL CANDIDATE, and then Trump takes it all back later in the day. Let's not fall for it time and again.