Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech entrepreneur, announces 2024 presidential run

OnWis97 · February 2023

mrussel1 said:

It's like Marxism these days. It's defined as "things I don't like".

Every right wing insult/pejorative seems to eventually devolve into that. Replacing "PC" (and snowflake, etc.) with "woke" was kind of a stroke of genius because they're every bit as snowflakey as the left. So, they eventually glommed onto essentially the same phrase but only for liberal ideals. But those moments of brilliance always end up being short-lived and now you can be called woke for just about any reason, whether connected to the original meaning or not.

"Just another wokester supporting a bridge infrastructure bill."

Go Beavers · February 2023

Halifax2TheMax said:

“A lot of people are saying……”

Maybe letting outrage on right wing social media guide policy isn’t the best strategy.

Halifax2TheMax · February 2023

So keep voting those repubs into office. Its serving you well. Someone ought to tell Maggie Three Names that the South would be a third world country within 10 years of seceding. Gift article but notice the map of counties. It'd be interesting to see an overlay of congressional districts. Yea, but fuck Obamacare and lets sunset Medicaid and Medicare and now that we've been exposed, lets try to hide it (but shhhh, even that fails-read the full article). Repub playbook: under-educate your populace, keep 'em unhealthy and poor, gerrymander the disctricts to dilute power sharing, get them addicted to Faux, ignore facts and real-life data and blame dems, particularly Hillary, Obama and Brandon.

Today, we look at a big, fat map of credit scores reproduced from a recent economics paper. And while the map suggests any number of tantalizing questions, we are most intrigued by that big band of credit-score calamity that stretches across the American South.

Almost every corner of America’s most populous region — every race, every income bracket — appears to have low credit scores. But why?

With precious few exceptions, it looks to be a neatly regional phenomenon. We spent hundreds of hours scraping Airbnb listings to determine the true extent of the American South, but we could have saved a lot of time if we’d just drawn a line around the contiguous places with low credit scores.

The region’s poor credit means Southerners are paying more to borrow money, assuming they can qualify for loans at all. That sets them back in everything from car and home purchases to credit card rewards. Yes, even credit card rewards.

The researchers behind the map — Sumit Agarwal of the National University of Singapore, Andrea Presbitero of the International Monetary Fund, and André Silva and Carlo Wix of the Federal Reserve — examined 2019 data from 238 million credit cards and found that rewards programs such as American Express Gold effectively siphon billions of dollars a year from lower-income counties, many of them in the South, and transfer the cash to well-heeled enclaves loaded with professionals who tend to take advantage of such programs.

Our first guess about what might be happening here involves race. Almost 3 out of every 5 Black Americans live in the South, and they make up almost 20 percent of the region’s population. Centuries of slavery, sharecropping, apartheid and exclusion from many elite educational institutions left some Southern Black folks with little credit and even less collateral.

But when we ran the numbers, the Blackest parts of the South had roughly the same credit scores as the least-Black areas. And their scores were far lower than places with similar Black populations outside the South. So while race may play a role, it’s probably not the defining factor.

Next, we wondered about poverty. After all, the South has the highest poverty, lowest income and lowest education rates of any region in the country. And as you might expect, counties with lower income and lower college graduation rates tend to have lower credit scores.

Ranking the regions, 2017-2021

Table with 6 columns and 4 rows. Currently displaying rows 1 to 4. Sorted descending by column "Poverty rate"
REGION	POPULATION	BLACK POPULATION	MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME	POVERTY RATE	BACHELOR'S DEGREE OR HIGHER
South	125.4M	23.9M	$63,524	13.9%	31.6%
Midwest	68.8M	7.1M	$65,858	12.0%	32.1%
West	78.1M	3.6M	$77,477	11.9%	34.8%
Northeast	57.4M	6.7M	$77,015	11.6%	38.4%

Note: Education is among the population 25 years of age or older.

Source: Census Bureau's American Community Survey

DEPARTMENT OF DATA THE WASHINGTON POST

But in this case, demography is no match for geography. Even some of the South’s biggest, most dynamic cities — think Atlanta or Dallas — have the same below-average credit scores as their more rural Southern neighbors. Within every income bracket, the typical Southerner has a lower credit score than someone who lives in the Northeast, Midwest or West.

With the obvious factors ruled out, we were stumped. Until we called economist Breno Braga at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan D.C. think tank. Braga, who studies how credit-ratings data quietly determines so much about our lives, took about 16 seconds to diagnose the problem.

“The reason why credit scores are so low in the South has gotta be connected to medical debt, because that’s the most common type of unpaid bill that people have,” Braga said. And the South, he said, easily has the highest levels of medical debt in the country.

Of the 100 counties with the highest share of adults struggling to pay their medical debt, 92 are in the South, and the other eight are in neighboring Oklahoma and Missouri, according to credit data from the Urban Institute. (On the other side, 82 of the 100 counties with the least pervasive medical-debt problems are in the Midwest, with 45 in Minnesota alone.)

And sure enough, when you look at areas across the nation where adults are struggling to pay down medical debt, they have similar credit scores.

Medical debt may not be the only force behind the South’s credit struggles, but it appears to be a key contributor. So where did it all come from? And why is it concentrated in the South?

One answer is that the South is simply less healthy than any other region. Data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services shows that among Medicare recipients, the population for which we have the best data, those in the South are substantially more likely to suffer from four or more chronic conditions. And poor health tends to go hand in hand with people having overdue medical debt and poor credit scores.

But health alone does not solve the puzzle: Several Northeastern states struggle with chronic health conditions and have good credit.

A clue to the broader answer comes from a recent analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that medical debt “became more concentrated in lower-income communities in states that did not expand Medicaid” after key provisions of the Affordable Care Act took effect in 2014.

To reach that conclusion, Raymond Kluender of Harvard Business School, Neale Mahoney of Stanford University, Francis Wong of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Wesley Yin of the University of California at Los Angeles looked at detailed credit-report data from 2009 to 2020. (Mahoney is currently on leave to serve on President Biden’s National Economic Council.)

Of the 11 states that have yet to expand Medicaid, eight sit in the South, according to KFF, a San Francisco health-policy nonprofit. Southerners were more likely to be behind on medical debt even before the ACA, but the reluctance among the region’s mostly Republican governors to participate in the Medicaid expansion has increased the gaps between the South and the rest of the country.

In states that immediately expanded Medicaid, medical debt was slashed nearly in half between 2013 and 2020. In states that didn’t expand Medicaid, medical debt fell just 10 percent, the JAMA team found. And in low-income communities in those states, debt levels actually rose.

Continues.......................

https://wapo.st/3SmsLqv

gimmesometruth27 · February 2023

so does that mean everything i disagree with on the right i can call "sleeping"?

Halifax2TheMax · February 2023

gimmesometruth27 said:

so does that mean everything i disagree with on the right i can call "sleeping"?

Sure, they'd prefer that you slept through class or didn't even get out of bed to attend class. Except on Sundays, of course.

Gern Blansten · February 2023

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1628151593664217091

lol....expect more of this

Halifax2TheMax · February 2023

Club 45? Is that where they serve Colt 45 Tall Boys? Damn, I'm missing out!

mickeyrat · February 2023

https://apnews.com/article/politics-arizona-state-government-us-republican-party-united-states-2022-midterm-elections-83b69ddc64c94aad9f5cfb63d0af4f5a

Arizona state government U.S. Republican Party United States government 2022 Midterm elections Kari Lake Katie Hobbs Arizona

Kari Lake looks to harness her movement after Arizona loss

By JONATHAN J. COOPER

Today

PHOENIX (AP) — Brett Foto and his fiancee were vacationing in Phoenix last fall when they heard about a rally nearby for Kari Lake, then running for governor of Arizona.

No matter that they don't live or vote in Arizona. Lake was going places, an emerging star on the populist right, and they had to see her.

“We’re seeing something very interesting tonight,” said Foto, a 52-year-old sales representative who lives outside Denver. "We’re going to look back and say, ‘We saw her when we went to this little hangar in Phoenix.’”

Lake went on to lose that race to Democrat Katie Hobbs, a setback that would typically thwart political ambitions. But among conservatives, defeat has done little to erode Lake's standing. If anything, her refusal to acknowledge her loss only enhances her stature well beyond Arizona.

In the months since the election, Lake has popped up at former President Donald Trump's Florida estate and a palatial California hotel, where she unsuccessfully lobbied members of the Republican National Committee to defeat Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. A more recent swing through Iowa sparked speculation about whether she may run for president or angle for a role as Trump's running mate if he clinches the GOP nomination again.

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Wherever she is, she's doubling down on the formula that enthralled the Republican base but was rejected by a broader electorate: unflinching fealty to Trump, a relentless focus on unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, and tough talk about securing the U.S.-Mexico border with force.

Lake will have another chance to showcase her bond with the GOP base next month with a prominent speaking role at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Washington.

“She speaks MAGA,” Chuck Coughlin, a longtime political consultant in Arizona who was one of former Gov. Jan Brewer's top advisers, said, referring to Trump's “Make America Great Again” slogan. “She’s better than Trump in many respects. She’s a cultural warrior. She expresses their angst and anxiety over the way the country’s going.”

Meanwhile, Lake is continuing to fight her loss in the Arizona appellate courts, which rejected her election challenge Thursday. She vowed to take her lawsuit to the state Supreme Court. She held a campaign-style rally this month to draw attention to her case.

“Kari Lake is the total package. She’s articulate. She’s confident. She’s beautiful, but not in a threatening way,” said Linda Greulich, a 70-year-old retiree in Phoenix. “And I think if she wants to stay in politics, I see her going all the way to the top.”

The flurry of activity comes as Lake considers running for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Kyrsten Sinema, an independent and former Democrat. She met recently with National Republican Senatorial Committee officials in Washington.

Republicans outnumber Democrats in Arizona, yet they've struggled to win during the Trump era. The GOP lost three straight Senate races in Arizona as ticket-splitting voters who mostly support Republicans refused to vote for candidates closely aligned with Trump.

Eleven percent of voters identifying as Republicans voted for Hobbs last year, compared with just 4% of Democrats who voted for Lake, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of more than 3,200 voters in Arizona.

Sinema has not said whether she'll run for a second term, a decision that could have a monumental impact on the battle for control of the Senate. Democrats worry a three-way race between Sinema, a Democrat and a Republican will scramble the formula that's worked so well for them, creating an opening for a candidate like Lake.

Other Republicans looking at running include Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb. Also considering a bid are Jim Lamon, Blake Masters and Karrin Taylor Robson, candidates in 2022 for either the Senate or governor.

Lake is pushing back against those in the GOP trying to move past claims of election fraud that have proved toxic in swing states, including Arizona, where Lake and three other Trump-backed Republicans lost their races. She told Iowans, who are proud of their role in vetting presidential hopefuls, to press candidates about “where they stand on stolen elections."

“We need to make sure all of these candidates think that election integrity is a No. 1 issue,” she said.

Lake was a news anchor for nearly 30 years in the Phoenix market. She left the Fox affiliate in 2021, saying journalism had strayed into advocacy. She began her campaign for governor a short time later, channeling Trump with frequent attacks on the news media she left behind.

She records every interaction with reporters, often posting contentious exchanges on social media and earning plaudits from her fans, and she still attracted unprecedented attention from global media.

Money has continued to pour in for Lake since her loss. Her campaign raised $2.6 million from Election Day through the end of the year, with the biggest haul coming on the day the race was called for Hobbs.

She's raised more money through a nonprofit group her advisers created in December, which doesn't have to disclose details about its donations and has become her main fundraising vehicle.

Foto, who saw Lake on his Arizona vacation, was not deterred by her loss to Hobbs and hopes she'll take another stab at running for office.

“I pray for that to happen and I pray for that for this country,” Foto said by phone. “I think we need people like her to make sure of a strong future for all of us.”

Halifax2TheMax · February 2023

Does anyone give this guy a snowball chance in hell in winning the nomination, or is just an audition to be Deathsantis' running mate?

Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech entrepreneur, announces 2024 presidential run

A young, rich and little-known tech entrepreneur who calls “wokeism” a national threat announced Tuesday night he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination.

Vivek Ramaswamy, 37, announced his candidacy in a five-minute video posted online. In it, Ramaswamy downplayed the importance of tax policies and the science around the coronavirus in favor of liberating what he says are voices that have been unfairly silenced.

“Maybe you disagree with each other about whether corporate tax rates should be high or low,” Ramaswamy says in the video. “Whether ivermectin treats covid, and that’s fine. But those are details. We still agree on the most basic rules of the road …”

A spokesperson for Ramaswamy did not respond when asked for the candidate’s views on corporate taxes or ivermectin, which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warns against using to treat or prevent the coronavirus.

“If you ask me, the best measure of the health of American democracy is actually the percentage of people who feel free to say what they actually think in public,” Ramaswamy said in the campaign-launch video. “And right now we’re doing abysmally.”

Ramaswamy says in the biography on his website that he founded Roivant Sciences in 2014 along with other health-care and technology companies. He said he created Strive Asset Management last year to restore “the voices of everyday citizens in the American economy by leading companies to focus on excellence over politics.”

Ramaswamy, who wrote the books “Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” and “Nation of Victims,” was dubbed “The C.E.O. of Anti-Woke, Inc.” in a recent New Yorker profile.

Earlier this month, Fox News host Tucker Carlson praised Ramaswamy’s criticism of efforts to curb climate change as “one of the smartest observations I’ve heard in, I can’t remember — a long time.”

But despite his success in the business world and appearances in conservative media, Ramaswamy enters the 2024 presidential primary race far less known than most of his opponents.

Other Republican candidates for the 2024 nomination include former president Donald Trump and 51-year-old Nikki Haley, who served as United Nations ambassador during the Trump administration and was governor of South Carolina before that. Both Ramaswamy, who was born in Ohio, and Haley, who was born in South Carolina, are children of immigrant parents from India.

Ramaswamy is honing a popular message among Republicans, aimed at defeating progressive ideas they loosely define as “wokeism.”

“Faith, patriotism, hard work and family have disappeared,” Ramaswamy says in his video, replaced with what he calls “covid’sim,” “climatism,” and “gender ideology.”

“If you question that orthodoxy,” he adds, “they call you a bigot, a homophobe, a climate denier, a racist.”

“This is psychological slavery,” Ramaswamy said. “And that’s created a new culture of fear in our country that has completely replaced our culture of free speech in America.”

And this from the comments section, which I did not know:

As someone from India, I find this funny. Vivek Ramaswamy is truly out of his mind!

He will be accepted in this country as the CEO of a company with his brown skin and Indian name. But Republicans even if they read/agree with/follow his economic ideas are NOT EVER going to vote for a Brown dude with a non-Christian name. He should have learned from Obama that this is a party that regards dark skinned people with non-Christian names as being the Anti-Christ.

Why else would Nimrata Randhawa work so hard to reject her Sikh roots, marry a Christian, convert and change her name to Nikki Haley?

Republican Vivek Ramaswamy announces he is running for president - The Washington Post

Go Beavers · February 2023

Her name at birth was Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, then she married a guy with the last name Haley. I don’t know anything about her religion, but I do know republicans aren’t voting for anyone other than a self identified Christian.

Gern Blansten · February 2023

https://twitter.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1628337114688499712

gimmesometruth27 · February 2023

i saw desantis declared wokeness dead. good, because nobody in the gop can even define it.

OnWis97 · February 2023

gimmesometruth27 said:

i saw desantis declared wokeness dead. good, because nobody in the gop can even define it.

That seems like an odd thing for him to say. Doesn't wokeness being dead pretty much render him useless?

static111 · February 2023

Gern Blansten said:

https://twitter.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1628337114688499712

Everyone I talk to. And they're all regular Americans. LOL

Go Beavers · February 2023

OnWis97 said:

show previous quotes

gimmesometruth27 said:

i saw desantis declared wokeness dead. good, because nobody in the gop can even define it.

That seems like an odd thing for him to say. Doesn't wokeness being dead pretty much render him useless?

He’ll fabricate another non-existent “threat”, then defeat the threat. It’ll be a never ending succession of victories.

Gern Blansten · February 2023

Go Beavers said:

show previous quotes

OnWis97 said:

gimmesometruth27 said:

i saw desantis declared wokeness dead. good, because nobody in the gop can even define it.

That seems like an odd thing for him to say. Doesn't wokeness being dead pretty much render him useless?

He’ll fabricate another non-existent “threat”, then defeat the threat. It’ll be a never ending succession of victories.

We haven't had a good caravan for awhile. Maybe there will be a caravan of woke trans Mexicans with Covid that we can fear soon.

Halifax2TheMax · February 2023

Go Beavers said:

show previous quotes

OnWis97 said:

gimmesometruth27 said:

i saw desantis declared wokeness dead. good, because nobody in the gop can even define it.

That seems like an odd thing for him to say. Doesn't wokeness being dead pretty much render him useless?

He’ll fabricate another non-existent “threat”, then defeat the threat. It’ll be a never ending succession of victories.

Deathsantis is all bluster but no wind. Well, hot air, I guess. He withdrew or isn't following through on his cancellation of that woke corporation's, Disney, tax exemption. Create the kerfluffle, act all faux outraged, threaten, bully and intimidate, and then move on to the next self-created kerfluffle and/or faux outrage. Its quite the schtick and it'll play well nationally and internationally. He's even got the hand gestures and arm waving down.

Gern Blansten · February 2023

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1628742683979051008

mickeyrat · February 2023

Gern Blansten said:

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1628742683979051008

you know when a tractor trailer incident occurs, soil remediation is always a step in accident response. from fuel spilling from fuel tanks to HM freight spills.

the difference here is trucking companies dont own the roads(despite how some drivers think!) the state is in charge and rail companies own their tracks and have the easements.....

tempo_n_groove · February 2023

static111 said:

show previous quotes

Gern Blansten said:

https://twitter.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1628337114688499712

Everyone I talk to. And they're all regular Americans. LOL

It's birds of a feather with her. My crazy republican family members have been touting this stance for a while that a civil war is coming.

GOP

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Ranking the regions, 2017-2021

Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech entrepreneur, announces 2024 presidential run

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