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@ TAR, obviously support structures are critical. I was being dismissive of religion in and of itself being a meaningful support structure. Having an imaginary friend isn't equal to having real people in ones life that care for them. Some may get that at church but simply attending church or being religious alone probably doesn't help much.

@ iNow, that is very interesting. One of the things that had been guessed in pervious posts is that perhaps not having support structures like religion and family was a factor. In surveys the South leads the country as most religious. So it would appear that religion is not a factor in limiting the deaths. http://www.livescience.com/19317-religious-states-revealed-survey.html

@ Phi for All, a few years ago I was part of a car pool. There were 4 of us taking turns driving for a week at a time. We all lived in the same complex. I have never enjoyed driving. One of my first jobs as a young adult was route delivery in a box truck. After a couple years of that my taste for drive stayed sour. So the weeks I drove I just stuck to the simplest most straight forward route to work. Regardless of anticipated conditions I just drove the route with the least number of turns and lane changes. The other car pool members regularly lamented that I drove too slow and would recommend various "short cuts" I could take to avoid lights, traffic, or ect. Eventually we all agreed to a challange of sorts. We used a stop watch to time how long it took each of us to get to work. Clock started exiting the complex and stopped at the front gate of work. Our whole week worth of driving (5days)was averaged. Of the 4 of us all times averaged out to being within 2 minutes of each other and my time was the second fastest. All the zig zagging through side streets to avoid lights, passing other drivers, and etc was simply not beneficial. No one accepted the outcome of course and we ran the expirement a few more times but the conditions were never as controlled. Different people felt unexpected traffic or hitting lights shouldn't count against time. So we agreed to only compare "absolute best times" vs "absolute best times" but not surprisingly some emergent condition always prevented the perfect scenario for an "absolute best time". ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ @ overtone, conservative talking points have done a good job creating the facade that all sins vs minorities ended with the Civil War. Segregation is totally glossed over while unfair housing, banking, and employment practices which studies have exposed are present to this day are treated as silly conspiracies theories. Of course trends exist for a reason. We know whites ave considerably higher incomes, are less likely to be arrested, more likely to attend Universities, and etc. conservatives don't deny those facts or that trends always have a cause. So what causes that trend; enter the conservative paradox. Conservatives deny racism. So by their logic the problem is that minority simply don't work as hard or aren't smart as whites. Hmm, they are not racist, racism don't effect anything anymore, but minorties are lazy and stupid.......

@ TAR, encouraging people to do better doesn't serve as a plan of action or a usable stratedgy to accomplish something. If it were that easy teachers and professors could just show up once a year, provide students a list of books to read, and dismiss the class. Businesses would have no need for refresher training or front line supervision. Just encourage responsibility and for every to do better and walk away. It doesn't work that way. Humans evolved as a cooperative species. We do best when doing things together because each individual has different strengths and different points of view that diversify ideas. Structure helps discipline and organize our cooperative efforts. Fairness is necessary to ensure the cooperation is worthwhile for all participants. You acknowledge the privilege plays a role but then are dismissive about the size of the role plays. Yet urban sprawl/white flight was and is driven in part by families looking to gain advantages for their children. That is why having a highly rated public school in a neighborhood pushes up the home values. We say out loud to each other that it is all about hardwork and playing by the rules but then we bend over backwards trying to get out kids in to special programs and schools. Parents taking on multi hour communes to ensure their kids get specific support. So we say it is about individual efforts but our actions say otherwise. Our actions say that we all understand that opportunity trumps effort 9 times out of 10. You say since LBJ we have do enough to help people. Scholarships and what not are in place so people (minorities specifically you meant) don't have excuses for being poor. Well first off fewer today are poor! And secondly you are totally ignoring the impact of our bias legal on them well as the extra opportunities provided to those who have parents with the means to raise then in beautiful sprawl new suburbs with top rated schools. Also, I am sick of the attitude that monorities are a burden to this country and don't pull there on weight. The most biggest economic states in the country that produce the most goods and intellectual property are diverse ones. Lots of minorities in California, New York, and Texas yet those states lead this country in technology, agriculture, energy, finance, and etc. States like Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho have populations that are above 90% yet are not the economic drivers of this nation. They are are white conservative utopias. so please stop asking when minorities with get it together as though they are dragging the whole country down. They are not!

I think part of Phi for All's point is that we need to stop viewing people as a problem. Stop viewing people as disposal percentages the way many corperations do. Just because a person is between jobs, injuried, disabled, old, poor, etc doesn't mean they should combatively be viewed as burdens that threaten the American way of life. Rather, I view you as an assest to the country TAR. Perhaps your usefulness to help a corperation turn a profit has been calculated by them to be diminished but you are still a parent, neighbor, spouse, friend, citizen, and etc. You still matter. You should have a govt that is still interested in you. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'Track Palin, a 26-year-old Iraq veteran, was arraigned Tuesday on charges of domestic violence assault, interfering with a report of domestic violence crime and possession of a firearm while intoxicated. Track was handcuffed and arrested Monday night following a dispute with his girlfriend at the Wasilla home he shares with his parents, according to police documents.' http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/01/20/sarah-palin-son-track-palin-charged-with-domestic-violence/79059664/ Seems fitting for a "What's wrong with America" thread. Sarah Palin supported the Iraq war. Yet here she is blaming the Iraq war for her son's domestic violence arrest. Ironically those of us who were against the Iraq war pointed to things like PTSD and the cost to our individual soldiers prior to the war. Their lives and their health are one of the many reasons why war must be a last resort and not merely a preferred option. Yet here Palin is, war supporter, claiming Obama and those who oppose war don't understand the costs of war as a means of excusing her son's behavior. It is unbelievable!!

@ Willie 71, Reagan's administration invented the Welfare queen and regularly used inflammatory racial language to discuss safety net programs. Food Stamp became code for lazy minorty, welfare became lazy and or promiscous minorty, Mediciad became irresponsible minority parent, and etc. It was and has continued to be so aggressive and persistent that it is impossible to discussion such programs without discussing race.

The GOP as a party has been pandering to racists since Nixon used the Sourthern Strategy. It wasn't until Reagan that the nuts actually started trying to run the asylum. It seems that Bush's failure (a clear failure of right wing policies) followed by a black president has finally pushed them over the edge. The GOP establishment has no control anymore. Trump clear evidence of that. It actually makes me very hopeful. We might see a shift in the Republican party where they turn their based on the fringe right. That could lead to a hand full of years where moderates in both party's work together.

@ TAR, do you anticipate Sanders will win the Nomination?

So everyone here must individually acknowledge and refute Waitforufo's posts personally point by point even though facts have already proven them either outright wrong or pointless to the discussion by other posters?

@ TAR, Sanders/Biden?

No "valid" points; just talking points conservatives often repeat. Waitforufo is debating iNow's facts with diatribes about inexperienced workers and Warren Buffet. Sarcasm and poor people shaming do not prove a single point about taxation or economics. Rather it simply infers that perhaps winners and losers is the natural order of things and losers belong at the bottom. That the status qou works and people need to just need to suck it up rather than fuss over stats, history, and law. An aroused teenage boy is pro discussion too when a female says no but he's still wiggling for an angle. You are being labelled a conservative here because you are exhibiting a conservative tone. You're confronting facts with opnions and then insisting that opinions deserve equal consideration to facts. One can attempt to have a discussion about whether or not 2 + 2 = 5 but shouldn't be surpirsed when others in the discussion are assertive of facts and demanding of legitimate evidence. So basically poor people in America are the problem with America and not a problem within America. More broadly poor people globally are a threat. Billions in China and India will eventually want food, clean water, and housing which you see as too burdensome. You are advocating for a caste system right down to injecting racism as a primary justification. Blacks are poor because they are lazy and or stupid while the rest of the world having anything is something to be worried about because "they" aren't "us". Thoughout world history this has been tried. Throughout U.S. history this has been tried. We had slavery, child labor, segregation, and currently have an undocumented immigration employment crisis. It never works. Finding ways to force people into undesirable labor has been an ongoning battle since before biblical times. The collateral costs eventually catch up and erode gains. Plus it is simply wrong.

Aside from enforcement of current laws how is the rest to be achieved? You say question the medical profession and ask for better protocols but stop short of any suggestion on how such can be done regulatory wise then go on to say less lawsuits and regulation on how they apply their trade. It seems contradictory. Holding people more responsible while taking away legal channels like lawsuits and regulation doesn't make sense. We all want kids learning math and science but how will your suggestion be achieved; more money, different testing standard, new curriculum? This is an election year and some of the things we hope for may actually be addressed by the people we elect. Free community college is being talked about, Obama's DOJ hasn't gone after any of the states that have legalized pot, immigration reform has been on the table for a decade with multiple administrations making pushes, and taxes are always an issues. Surely there is actually policy being pushed you are interested in and niot merely loose ideas about personal responsibility. Not to say being responsible isn't important it just isn't executable policy. Being responsible isn't a plan.

@ TAR, what would you like to see done to improve this country? Should we pass a flat tax, make community college free, privatize social security, legalize pot, repeal the affordable healthcare act, invest more into clean energy, build keystone, build high speed rail, defund the EPA, amnesty, a great Mexican border wall, or what? Life lessons and emotional appeals aside what do you actually what to happen? Many politicians campaign on what they think is bad but having an opinion is not equal to having a plan. I will start with some of the things I would like to see happen jut to move the conversation. And of course no single candidate represents these things 100%. Elections are always about finding the person which is most electable that will do the largest portion of what you hope: - Legalize pot federally, allow it to be purely a states issue, and decriminalize all drugs. By decriminalize I mean treat with rehab and fines rather than prison. Reason being we have the worlds largest prison population and half of it is nonviolent drug offenses. That is costing local govt billions upon billions and rending millions of our citizens unemployable. - Immigration reform needs to happen. Doing nothing only keeps in place a system that isn't working. Having millions of working adults office the books only hurts GDP and creates more work for multiple enforcement agencies. Bush's guest worker program was actually pretty good imo. If people are here and working give them a permit and let them stay. - Free community college; I am conflicted on this issue. I think too many young people do pursue degrees in things that do not benefit themselves directly or society broadly. I also think a lot is learned from hardwork and too many young adults today put work off too far into adulthood in pursuit of education for education sake. That said the debt weighing the next generation down is a real thing and must be addressed. Ultimately I don't have to approve of everything people choose to go to college for. more than ever a degree, at least a 2yrs degree, is an absolute must for anyone starting a career. we have to help otherwise the debt will eventually stall other investments housing, start ups, and sarting families. - Taxes need to be raised for the highest marginal earners. For all the talk about "job creators" imo govt investment is the greatest job creator of all. It has been government investment that has made Satelites, jet engines, the internet, and etc possible. Fed Ex, Uber, and so many more use roads built by our govt and GPS created for our military . Metros, subways, trolleys, buses, and etc shuttle workers around allowing for commerce. No one in the United States is getting wealthy without the foundation which has been laid in tax dollars. I do not view a tax as a penalty. I view it as a usage fee. - Foriegn policy, nothing in a vaccum! We are part of a world community and should cooperate with our allies. Talk to other nations. Talk, talk, talk, talk, and then when talks fail talk a few more times to ensure that our last resort is truly a last resort. If violence is a must than we shouldn't be left without allies going it alone.

@ CharonY, good call. This is something I had not considered. Not only do whites have more access to Doctors but Doctors treat them differently. This article is from 2008. Assuming the trend in unchanged the 23-37% grow in prescribing narcotics is probably anoth third worse by now. "The study appears in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association. Prescribing narcotics for pain in emergency rooms rose during the study, from 23 percent of those complaining of pain in 1993 to 37 percent in 2005. The increase coincided with changing attitudes among doctors who now regard pain management as a key to healing. Doctors in accredited hospitals must ask patients about pain, just as they monitor vital signs such as temperature and pulse. Even with the increase, the racial gap endured. Linda Simoni-Wastila of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, School of Pharmacy said the race gap finding may reveal some doctors’ suspicions that minority patients could be drug abusers lying about pain to get narcotics." http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22463720/ns/health-health_care/t/prescribing-gap-may-leave-blacks-more-pain/#.Vp1H01I0fIU

Republicans reflect with great pride on the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers. The 40"s and 50"s are treated as an idealic time in this countries history. Yet FDR was basically a socialist, the top taxe rate in 1950 was 91%, Dwight Eisenhower was to the center left of Hillary Clinton. Repiublicans are always talking about bringing America back, returning to American values, getting the country back, and etc yet have no actually deserve to return any of the tax rates and govt programs from those decades they so celebrate. Perhaps it is the Fox Effect but most Republican supports seem unable to untangle policy from rhetoric. They hate big govt and wasteful spending yet worship Reagan who expanded the the size of govt and broke records with his spending.They are against activist courts yet have the federal society out there training the next generation of conservative judges to be activist judges who apply political ideology to law. Where is the truth? What do Republicans honestly support? Why can't they every just be honest about their views? Is it all just cynicism with a splash of racism or do Republican how true policy positions that are advocated openly?

iNow, I agree whole completely with the access to prescription dugs. Good job putting together the numbers. I had posted something similar earlier but was unable to support the tought well as you were. Add access to firearms (whites are more likely to own firearms) and there is a clear recipe for bad things. Women commit suicide at lower rates across the board in every country worldwide from what I have seen. There is nothing specific to the USA about that. My guess is that it has to do with hormonal differences that impact the way humans deal with stress. There are studies out there that examine how men and women respond to physical pain/stress. So I guess the question there would be trying to figure out if or how much differently the brain handles emotional vs phyical stress. "There is some experimental research that suggests the pain modulation systems between men and women may be different," LeResche says. "Females may also have an additional system that uses estrogen." http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=51160

@ CharonY, you are correct. iNow also mentioned the increase in drug overdoses. I have mostly focused on suicides bit the article from the OP actually references the death rate of white males and includes drugs and alcohol. So the question why? What is specific to whites that could explain this? I, perhaps naively, assume the most people in the United States have relatively similar lives. Much is made of race in political debates but on the street level most are watching Star Wars, visiting Disneyland, eating Turkey for thanksgiving, and etc. What could be so different amongst/for white males to explain this?

We know Al Quada was in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We know Osama was either in Afghanistan or Pakistan. We knew that is where their training ground were. We knew Al Quada had no useful relationship with Saddam. We knew terrorist training camps were niot in Iraq. We knew Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. It exploits those who died on Sept.11th 2001 to pretend we invaded Iraq for them. It is incredibly desrespectful to their memories and the intellegence of this thread to say you still believe in 2016 the Iraq invasion was about 9/11, it wasn't. It is well documented that the Bush administration was looking for a way into Iraq prior to 9/11. "From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," says O'Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11. "From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime," says Suskind. "Day one, these things were laid and sealed." As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap." http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bush-sought-way-to-invade-iraq/

@ TAR, you are moving the goal posts now. I never said 100% of any group is one thing or another. Obviously there are Black Republicans (Rice, Keyes, Carson, Powell, Thomas) and white liberals (Sanders, Pelosi, Gore, Brown, Ginsburg) and everything in between. My point is not to state why anyone votes the way they do but rather I am using the statistics to show that the way people vote is consistant. You are trying to make a case that people swing; liberal when young and conservative when old. The stats do not support that. Election after elections the demographics are consistant. If individual candidates race, policies, religion, and etc swung voters than we would not see the statistical consistance we see election after election.

@ TAR, as I had mentioned when I brought SA up I wasn't able to find clear information that I felt was relevant to this thread. It seems the suicide rate is higher in SA for Black SA than it is here in the U.S. for white males. It also seems as though Whites in SA did go through and increase from the 70's through the 90's but that has since ended. None of the numbers mirror what is happening in the U.S.. It doesn't not appear the loss of power of Whites in SA supports your view with regards to the suicide rate here in the U.S.. Besides, we know things like access to firearms and drugs do play a role. So I am not how we could mirror those satistics to SA even if we wanted to.

@ TAR, everything you are saying Saddam did basically happened before the first Gulf War. When Saddam invaded Kuwait we responded correctly and pushed him out. Post 9/11 there was no reason to turn our attention toward Saddam based of stuff that happen prior to the last military campaign against him. The most all the 9/11 perpetrators we from Saudi Arbia including Osama Bin Landen. Yes the Taliban was protecting Al Quada. We (USA), had armed, trained, and protected then for a time as well. That was the gov't we helped establish. More over if we had to go after those who were haboring terrorists why did we ignore Pakistan in favor of Iraq? Isn't that the border Al Quada hiked across to flee? Isn't that were Osama Bin Laden was living (next to a Pakistani military Academy) when we finally caught up with him? Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

@ John Cuthber, I think it is also worth pointing out that the firemans of our forefathers were less capable and emergency services less able. I think in context of a family owning a single shot fireman for protection a hundred years ago when they had no ability to quickly access help bares no similarity to the situation today. Not only can firemans more rapid & accurately deliver a higher volume of bullets but emergancy services are a phone call or security alram system away. No sending a boy with a lamp on a horse back out into the night to find help. Law Enfocrcement can be on seen in minutes with body armor, firearms, helicopters, and etc. More over homes themselves are no long wooden cabins. Homes have security systems, cameras, bars on the windows, and etc.

@ TAR, This country is becoming more diverse. A higher portion of the population above 50yrs is white than below 50yrs old. Whites vote 59-64% Republican. So it follows that older voters are more likely to be Republcan. Your numbers do not reflect swing voting. They reflect the changing demographics between Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials. To prove your theory you would need to isolate the demographics of voters by age and show that they differ from the over all demographic. Instead they appear to follow what the overall demographics tells us..The larger the pool of white voters (older voters) the more conservative and the larger the diversity (young voters) the more liberal.

And this counters statistical evidence how?

At this point calling Iraq a huge mistake is not even a partisan statement. Trump, Cruz, Carson, Paul, and etc have all stepped forward and said as much. Only Republican presidential candidate still will to defend Iraq happens to have the last name Bush. Bothsides agree that Iraq was a mistake. That goes for the whole coalition of willing. Ask Tony Blair how feels about it today or the British people. Iraq did not create ISISor the Civil War directly but it did add fuel to the fire by destabilizing the region in pushing into the border regions. Iraq made Syria worse. I think bothsides agree about that too. The partisan divide is on what should be done. Everyone understand how we got here. Right, the choice was to stop it or embrace it. Whether or not Obama was the President it would have started. The same can not be said for Iraq. The Bush Adminstration created that mess. The Arab Spring is a mess that Obama is force to deal with. Big difference. As like previously stated I am not sure there was a way to have stopped it. We could have fought against it but that would have probably lead to the more radical violence in it calling for attacks against the U.S.. Then we have them plus ISIS plus Al Quada to deal with. Are we the world's police? Is everything that happens a result of us not doing enough to stop it? There are things we should not attempt to control in sovereign nations. We should not inject our wants and values in to everything everywhere if we feel it isn't happening on our terms. The collateral effects tend to not workout if our favor. We allowed the poppy grows to do business because A - they were feeding us intel (at least we thought) and B - we thought it helped keep the peace. Production doubled under US control.