Patton Oswalt tweet: A Vanderbilt heir is grilling the candidates on socialism.

[Fumesucker]

I rarely use this smiley but...

[mainstreetonce]

1. Good one

...

[Stinky The Clown]

2. Perfect!

Cooper is TERRIBLE

[valerief]

3. Right. That didn't escape me either! nt

[niyad]

4. interesting, I was just thinking about his bloodline.

[reformist2]

6. Excellent. Sometimes we forget how much the 1% dominate our culture.

[valerief]

7. Love these tweets of his:

I think what hurt Lincoln Chafee the most was the "Feel the Chafe" slogan.

If you shaved and scrubbed a crazy prospector you'd have Lincoln Chafee.

I think @SenSanders closing statement will just be the CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM end credits music.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

12. Lol. I couldn't put my finger on it but "crazy prospector" is spot on.

[zentrum]

8. Excellent point!

[bettyellen]

9. but he hands it off to others to ask questions about racism and immigration

as well as eventually global warming. WEIRD.

Like Wayne Newton on MSNBC, WTF?

[Fumesucker]

11. You can tell what he thinks is imporant and what not so much ..

[eggplant]

19. He handed it off to the black guy to introduce the black guy's black guy question. Ugh.

CNN wanted a free-for-all, I assume because they want the Ds to look at unhinged as the Rs. Cooper was certainly trying to stoke that with the absurd number of hostile questions. I'm surprised he didn't get to the "when did you stop beating your wife?" question.

[bettyellen]

27. True. But I think most of them handled it well. And it didn't feel like it was too scripted, so I

think it was overall good, even though his questions got almost trollish, LOL, the candidates mostly had good answers. Showed a lot of Dem unity, and called out the Repub clown car for what it is- which is good.

[eggplant]

38. Agreed. n/t

[SoapBox]

10. Oh...

Doh! I never even thought of that.

[daleanime]

15. +1

[2naSalit]

30. Ha!

I never knew that! But I'm not surprised.

[TexasBushwhacker]

13. However, his mom is not leaving him money

and he says he's grateful for that.

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/anderson-cooper-receive-inheritance-mom-gloria-vanderbilt/story?id=23132894

[Fumesucker]

14. Do you have any idea what those sorts of connections get a person?

He wouldn't be where he is without them.

[TexasBushwhacker]

23. I'm sure he's aware of that

He has had the best education that money can buy and, as you say, connections that are extremely important. But to write him off as a trust fund kid is unfair. There is no trust fund. It's like Obama's success is all because of affirmative action.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderson_Cooper

[Fumesucker]

29. That expensive education didn't buy him any brains

Cooper's retort to Bernie Sanders regarding Denmark having health care for all was that Denmark only has 5.6 million people.

He's an entitled idiot.

[Chakab]

24. Indeed. He went from doing the overnight news on ABC to being one of the top media personalities

in the country in a very short period of time.

[melman]

34. Don't forget The Mole!

They never should have let him do news again after that nonsense.

[Renew Deal]

39. He has some amount of talent

And he will cover any story. He helped himself.

[Eric J in MN]

16. Sanders said Denmark

...has healthcare-for-all.

Anderson Cooper replied, "Denmark only has 5.6 million people."

Cooper's reply makes no sense. Insurance is about spreading risk. It's easier for a big country to spread risk than a small country.

[Arugula Latte]

18. I never understood that argument -- "the US is much bigger!"

Yeah ... and?

More people paying in, right?

[nilram]

33. Yeah, we have more people--and we have more doctors!

Also thinking, "your point?"

[reformist2]

40. +1. Also, the argument, "our country is more diverse - it would be too hard!!!"

It makes no sense. Both arguments dismissing what they do in Europe are diversions.

[JDPriestly]

25. Good point!

Besides, in Austria, for example, single payer insurance does not mean that you have only one insurance company.

I would like to see us return to non-profit insurance companies. We could make healthcare more affordable that way without cutting, maybe even while increasing, the incomes of nurses and doctors and others who provide our healthcare.

We should take the profit of out healthcare. Any excess money earned should be reinvested in better equipment and care.

[TexasBushwhacker]

31. You can still pay executives millions

when you are non-profit, but you cannot be a publicly owned company paying dividends to stockholders either.

However, one thing we do have that works pretty well is Medicare, so our "single payer" is already set up. Insurance companies would have no choice but to work with them and accept their payments or go out of business. For profit would probably become not-for-profit eventually.

[JDPriestly]

35. I have Medicare and Kaiser. Kaiser is about as close to the kind of organization

you might have with a single-payer plan in some respects.

When we lived in Europe, however, we could pick our primary care provider from just virtually any doctor because most of them would take us. We could switch doctors every few months if we wanted to.

So that was single-payer in so far as picking your doctor -- all were on your plan with in my experience (which was not at the wealthy end of the financial scale) the choice of nay doctor. That is not true with Kaiser.

But in terms of the well organized preventive care system and the all-encompassing care, European single-payer systems were like Kaiser.

We loved the European single-payer system. The French care was beyond reproach for our needs. The French know how to deliver healthcare.

In Europe, illegals are taken care of because they are usually from other European countries and have reciprocal insurance policies.

My brother-in-law needed care while traveling in Scotland. They did not ask him to pay for anything. We really need single-payer insurance. Single-payer refers to the fact that money is taken out of paychecks according to ability to pay but care is given according to your need. It's real insurance. Very complete for healthcare and dental care.

[Oilwellian]

37. How many millions do Medicare & Medicaid already serve?

We already have the infrastructure in place. Bernie needs to answer that question better.

[closeupready]

17. Actually, no, he won't be an 'heir', he isn't inheriting any of that fortune.

His mother, Gloria, stated recently she has made it clear to him that she's not leaving the fortune she earned herself to him or her other children. Further, of the original Vanderbilt fortune, she inherited only a small trust (like $3M or something), and her father, William, lost his own inheritance and died in massive debt.

The Vanderbilt family is fascinating to me (the wealth, the history, what the railroads did, the homes they built, etc.), and the opulence of their lives makes a very seductive story, but that wealth is gone and it's been gone for ages now.

Finally, it's funny to me that he jokingly laments that people never want to talk about his father, Wyatt Cooper, who was born dirt poor in Alabama; instead, people only want to talk about his super-fabulous mother, lol.

[Fumesucker]

20. Do you think he would be where he is without those connections?

ETA: Sanders said that Denmark has health care for all, Cooper retorted that Denmark only has 5.6 million people.

How is that a relevant argument?

[closeupready]

22. The connections likely helped; same as with many in

Ivy League schools admitted in part on the basis of 'legacy admissions'. Like it or not, connections help, but that's not unique to the US or wealthy US families.

As to your point about Denmark, I agree that Cooper's retort was illogical, and even counter-intuitive.

With regard to issues which hinge upon strong central government agencies exercising control (as with arms controls), population size would be relevant insofar as smaller populations are easier to control than large ones. But as you argue above, if insurance is about pooling risk over the largest population size, then actually, the argument that 'Denmark makes single payer work for a smaller population size' works in FAVOR of those who propose single payer in 330 million population sized US.

[TBF]

41. So you're defending an elitist and your choice is Bernie for president?

Do you have any idea how ironic that is?

[closeupready]

43. How is Anderson Cooper an "elitist"?

I happen to like him because he's openly gay, and he's done some amazing journalism, like the 60 Minutes story on Fluffynut/Plumpynutt. Yes, his mother is from an elite family (though she's always seemed liberal to me - and in fact, she's stated publicly that "I never felt like one of them/a Vanderbilt&quot , but his father's family was LITERALLY dirt poor, and wouldn't that EQUALLY make AC a man of the people? If not, why not?

[TBF]

44. Being a Vanderbilt trumps the dirt poor father -

it has opened doors for him the rest of us have slammed shut in our faces. I'm glad he's at ease with his sexual orientation, but it doesn't make me defer to him because he happens to be gay. He happens to be gay - I happen to be straight - that is how we were born.

It doesn't make me hate him personally or anything like that either - he may well be very nice - what I am arguing against is the economic system we have in this country that makes just small portion of folks fabulously wealthy while the rest have no chance.

[closeupready]

45. And I don't disagree with any of that, so are you spoiling for a fight or something?

?? I don't like Ken Mehlman just because he's openly gay, so no, that's not the important point to me.

AC has more privilege than most, but so did Ted Kennedy, and yet, we didn't hold that against Teddie. What one's family WAS is NOT who you ARE today, unless we are subscribing to some kind of India-like caste system, and I don't think anyone favors that.

I've admitted it before, and I'll say it again, I consider myself a liberal capitalist.

[TBF]

46. What? Why the personal attack?

That's fine you can consider yourself a "liberal capitalist". I don't care what labels people care to use. In the end all that matters is which side they're on. I'd have more faith that Anderson Cooper is on the side of the workers if he did much less red-baiting.

[JDPriestly]

28. With the exception of maybe Rachel Maddow, newscasters are not hired for their

brilliance or education.

[Chakab]

26. Do you know what year she inhereted that "small trust" in and how much it was worth at the

time in 2015 dollars?

[TexasBushwhacker]

36. $2.5 Million in 1925, $65 Million in 2014 dollars

a big chunk of change for sure.

[Melurkyoulongtime]

21. I was wondering if anyone was going to bring that up!

Good on him

[TBF]

42. Even more amusing are the DUers defending the Vanderbilt. nt

[ReRe]

32. LMFAO

[Blue Owl]

47. Very rich

[Senator Tankerbell]

48. A real "man of the people"

People with 10k square foot mansions.
http://patch.com/connecticut/avon/want-to-take-a-video-tour-of-anderson-coopers-new-ct-home