Trump, our next president, promised to block AT&T/Time Warner merger

I support the goals of the ACA, but the law as written is a horrible hack which tries to implement a national health insurance system, without actually doing so or calling it that. It weaves together multiple semi-separate existing systems, adds in significant complexity and uses the threat of an income-tax penalty to try to get people to comply. The system only works well if it has broad subscription across healthy and unhealthy individuals, but as implemented many of the insurance pools are oversubscribed with unhealthy individuals, costing much more than the income to the plans can support.

In their attempts to lock in parts of the law so that an incoming shift of government couldn't easily change or repeal it, the Democrats hardcoded idiocies like a fixed date for the launch of the healthcare.gov website and features it had to have while leaving funding and development of the site a bit up in the air.

In a nominally functioning government, the ACA would have been a broad, general law laying out specific goals, requirements and mandates for compliance, delegating implementation and enforcement to a new or existing agency. But in the "regulations are bad, laws are good" environment in DC, processes and requirements which should have been regulations (which can be drawn up and vetted by a bureacracy under legislative supervision) ended up being in the actual law, which can only be changed by Congress and the President working together, which all but stopped after the 2010 midterm elections.

Add in the the Federal government is limited (by design) in what it can mandate individual States can do and you have this mess called Obamacare.

I don't support repealing it, I do support modifying it to make implementation more flexible, but that is almost certainly not going to happen under a Republican government.

Clinton didn't promise much, she didn't say much at all. She wouldn't have this problem.

It's extremely different - in the UK, private healthcare exists at the margins and most is done through the NHS. Whereas in the US system it's all private: ObamaCare doesn't actually provide any care for people. There are no ObamaCare federal hospitals. At best I think it spends some federal money on subsidising some kinds of insurance?

It also includes mandatory purchasing of health insurance, which (while necessary to make a fully private system work) is philosophically objectionable to most people.

(The NHS is a fully state owned system that nonetheless has an internal market, which some commentators have called "playing at shops".)

" I voted for Obama on pledges he'd end the war in Iraq and close down the constitutional abomination that is Guantanamo. 8 years later and here we are."

Obama earnestly tried to close Guantanimo.

He's a lawyer, and should have known better.

Guantanimo is a geostrategic issue - that only 'looks like' a Constitutional problem.

The problem is there are some very, very bad people in Guantanimo - and putting them through the American justice system would not work. Obama figured this out.

Paradox:

1) US Servicement are subject to a different legal system than Americans - harsher in many ways - but Dems wanted to put terrorist on US soil, subjecting them to regular courts - it would have been a farce.

2) US Soldiers are not the FBI. They don't do fingerprints. The kinds of evidence/investigation required to convict someone in US courts (meant for citizens) ... the defense attorneys could have easily kicked out the cases against the terrorists.

3) Many of these terrorists were caught on the battlefield. They could have been killed there - and none would have been the wiser. A young Canadian, was caught attacking US servicemen - and killed a medic. He was shot in combat, and was dying. US Special Forces arrived and medivaced and then applied super USA field medical technology to save this 'terrorist'. Then he was held at Guantanimo - in a really odd legal situation.

He was just a kid, but many of these guys are really, really bad characters, caught on the battlefield.

They don't belong in the US justice system.

So they go to Guantanimo and stay in limbo.

If you ask me - many of them deserve it.

As for the 'regular combatants' - that's too bad - I wish where were some way to reintegrate them, I think it happened with some.

Anyhow - the realities of the situation hit Obama - and the above issues are far to explain to Dems in a populist manner.

Obama orders people to die in drones strikes. Not so 'peace and love eh'? He does it because he has to, and he knows it.

Obama's 1st term was pretty good.

2cnd term, he didn't accomplish much, that said, he did not have the power.

Haha, our.