Another thing that would be interesting to hear is your feelings about other government "entitlements". For example social security or Medicare, or how about veterans benefits? One thing that I have difficulty with is seeing Republican congressmen sit there and pontificate about the evils of "big government" and yet they'll suck at the public tit with their best health coverage in the world and think nothing of it. If they truly believed in their principles then they should refuse their congressional health coverage and either pay for their own healthcare out of pocket or at least with commercial health insurance, but you know that will never happen. Don't you see this as just a bit hypocritical?
I believe that it’s a total mistake on Obama’s part to even make the attempt or pretense at bipartisanship. There is no thing that can be proposed that will gain any noticeable Republican support, their only point is to water the bill down as much as humanly possible and in the end vote against it. At this point attempts to act in a bipartisan manner only erode support from his base.
The real determinants of what, if anything, gets passed are the Blue Dog Democrats. You have the RINO’s and we have the Blue Dogs. To me, Max Baucus is far more of a problem than someone like Joe Wilson.
This, as i see, it, is the crux of your argument, here. I would agree with this, on the whole, except for two words:
Adolf Hitler.
Hitler was a politician with his own set of principles. He was charismatic, as Obama is, used the economy to great effect, as Obama has, and was motivated by much, much more than simply being re-elected. He realized long before that he wasn't going to have to worry about it, anyway. Obama is an idealogue, and is proving that out by choosing fellow idelogues for positions of power in his administration. He writes convoluted and vague legislation that is a nearly hundred times longer than the average bill, and gives the presssured legislatorsonly a couple days to read it, if they actually do, anyway.
Fidel Castro led a popular revolution against an unpopular dictatorship, then declared his own, revolutionary government to be a communist dictatorship. Hugo Chavez has emerged as another, similar example. Ho Chi Minh; kind of a stretch, but he fits in here.
Isn't all this pretty much, by the way, how your side says Bush caused himself to be elected and re-elected? But now that it's your guy in there, well, he'd NEVER do anything untoward; anything unconstitutional. Well, another word for you: "czars".
From "American Thinker":
That is a deliberate check the Founding Fathers intended to give Congress over the Executive Branch. But could the House impeach or how could the Senate convict an Obama commissar, who had never been confirmed by the Senate and who held a position not created by Congress? Cabinet secretaries and heads of agencies are accountable both to the president and to Congress. These commissars, on the other hand, could not be impeached and removed from office because they do not, formally, hold an office.
This is very dangerous. The leader, in this case Obama, becomes more than the office itself. The structure of government morphs into the structure of the party. Stalin, in large measure, did not wield his awful power as the head of the Soviet Union or chief of the Soviet government: he did, in fact, often brag that he was simply a member of the Communist Party, an ordinary Soviet citizen. Hitler did combine the offices of Chancellor and President, but his real power was as leader of the Nazi Party, not an official of the German government.
When separate parts of government blend together, when rules of procedure are simply bypassed, when the distinction between political parties operating within government are transformed into political parties (through a system of commissars) operating as the government, then any nation with established, stable, and republican institutions has entered a very deadly phase.
The patterns are already ominously clear. Legislators, quite literally, vote for legislation not yet written (which rather sounds like Hitler's Enabling Act.) Judicial nominees make only the vaguest pretense of adhering to ideals of impartial administration of justice (Hispanic Justice and Aryan Justice may sound different to some people, but they are not.) Now commissars are replacing cabinet secretaries -- and we should stop letting Obama define the changes. He is not appointing dozens of "czars." He is creating a party-state system of political commissars."
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/07/not_obamas_czars_but_his_commi.html
How many people actually vote for, or support, a "dictator"? A person whom they know and truly believe, from the get-go, is going to brutally oppress and murder? How many politicians who end up as dictators actually run on the Political/Cultural Tyranny platform? Obama is no Hitler, to be sure, but he's in the same vein. Bush may have tap-danced around the Constitution a little, but Obama is quietly subverting in ways Bush never even, in eight years, attempted. And besides, Bush had the War on Terror banner to hold up.
Obama's weakening our position there, however, in trying to make nice with hateful savages and fanatical killers. What's his excuse, then?
If you don't then it's really hard to have an honest back-and-forth.
Don't become so entrenched in your own rhetoric that you begin to believe it yourself.
I mean I can actually understand most of the craziness at town hall meetings and the like because it actually served a political purpose. I don't agree with all the strident screaming and yelling but I have to admit it was effective at distracting folks from the real issues at hand and making it seem like there is more opposition than there really is. It's the squeaky wheel getting the oil syndrome. I get that.
But this Hitler and communist talk is just crazy for crazy sake. It really doesn't help your case and it makes you seem really out there. This goes back to the days of McCarthyism and the John Birchers. To be kind it borders on paranoia at the very least.
Just be careful not to drink the Kool-Aid.
On that, we can agree.
Yes.
All I want is what Obama said he was going to fight for back in 2008 when he was a candidate - access to a health plan at least as good as what he had as a Senator (Today Show interview).
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Like I said Obama is a politician 1st and foremost. Promising more than you can deliver is a time honored tradition. If I recall correctly Ronald Reagan campaigned on a balanced budget platform and ended up taking the debt from less than 1 trillion to almost 4 trillion.
And talking about legislating from the bench how unprecedented is it for the Chief Justice to tell the lawyers in a case that they have a month to change their arguments so that the court can overturn the prohibition on direct corporate campaign spending that's been in place for the last 100 years. If that's not legislating from the bench I don't know what is.
A Democrat county screws up, Democrats try to rig the recount, demand another recount when they can't rig it enough, want special rules applied only to counties where to their advantage, try to use the Democrat State Supreme Court to circumvent the rules after the fact and it's the right that were the bad guys.
The sad part of the 'theft' legend is that it was the left which, unhappy with the result, tried to 'steal' Florida by changing the rules (which they wrote in the first place, BTW) after the election.
It's also not what he's trying to deliver. This isn't just 'failing to deliver on a campaign promise' - it's much more bait-and-switch than that.
Anyway RW brought this up, not me. To me it's ancient history that I stopped losing sleep over a *long* time ago.
This is particularly true of veterans with their Tricare. First let me state categorically that I do not begrudge veterans any of the benefits that they have. In fact I'm happy for them. However it just seems to me that they should not begrudge to others the level of care that they have.
I'm not suggesting that Tricare should be provided free or even subsidized, just let the rest of America purchase into the same plan on a cost basis. Forget Medicare for all, I'd be quite happy with Tricare for all. So let me hear from all you right wing fanatics about how evil Tricare is.
But whatever. I personally feel no need to defend every word that Obama has ever uttered. From my point of view he's caved in to the demands of the right *far* too much and is not nearly progressive enough for me. I'd still take Obama over Bush any day but then I'd vote for a baboon in estrus over Bush so that's not really saying all that much.
That doesn't require violating the spirit or letter of the the tenth.
Looking more & more like that's exactly what you did.
I could respond but I won't as it would deteriorate the newly found civility in this thread.
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Not at all; I see lots of similarities, and I call'em as I see'em. Look at the people he picks for these "czar" spots; I mean, for God's sake....Van Jones, for one, is an admitted Communist. Rahm Emmanuel and several others in his cabinet (and his pick for the SCOTUS, for that matter) are anti-gun fanatics and hardcore vets of the war against the 2nd Amendment.
Don't become so entrenched in your own rhetoric that you begin to believe it yourself.
Look who's talking; do you wanna be the pot or the kettle?+LOL+
I'm gonna jump ahead for a minute:
Gore might have indeed won, had he actually been able to throw out the military and absentee ballots, as he tried to do.
But Bush cheated, right? You're right, though; this is all ancient history, and has absolutely no bearing on today's issues. Unless of course you ask the idiots in the black "9/11 was a Neo-Con Setup" t-shirts I saw in DC today, screaming obscenities at us peaceful marchers, who simply laughed at them.
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It's one thing to say things like this. It's entirely different to believe it yourself. The Diebold thing is probably as out there as the birthers. The cheating thing is not cheating per se but the way florida went and how the supreme court came down on it and essentially decided the election left a pretty bitter taste and yet it's the right that goes on and on about legislating from the bench.
But you said it---in post #28, in answer to my reply above it. So then, something is only crazy if it doesn't help your argument? Wow....you're right, you ARE a left-winger.
This makes you look a little paranoid yourself, don't you think? To be kind, it seems like you just got yourself a refill of the Kool-Aid.
How about responding to something that's more related to the topic like my comment about Tricare for all?
There, take the above shot as an example. To me, it's funny. I know it's not productive to the conversation and I know I'll probably take a good handful of shots in return but so what. It's funny. Does everything have to be so god awful life and death serious? It just makes you seem a little more human if you can follow up your rant likening Obama to Hitler and Stalin with a comment to the effect that you at least can see how others may think that is "out there" as well.
So how about that Tricare for all thing?
I've heard many say that the health insurance industry is not really part of the problem. The argument is that their profit margin is so low that it's not really an attractive business to be in in the first place. And since their profit margin is so low there really are not any savings that can be gained by the so called "public option".
In another thread I posted a link to a credible and neutral report from the Physicians for a National Health Program who reference a study done by Mark Litow of Milliman, Inc. that takes into account the "hidden costs" of Medicare along with an analysis of health insurance industry overheads.
You can find this article at http://www.pnhp.org/news/2006/january/cahis_claim_of_medi.php.
The bottom line is that Medicare's administrative costs are 5.2% and the private sector's administrative cost's are 8.9% but when you include commission, premium tax and profit the health insurance industry's total overhead is 16.7% .
Note that the 5.2% overhead of Medicare is noticeably higher than the 2.1% overhead that is usually claimed by proponents of NHC and the 16.7% health insurance industry overhead is noticeably less than the 20% to 40% that these same NHC proponents claim.
But based on even these numbers that implies an 11.5% cost savings which is not insignificant. However there is one very significant health insurance industry overhead that goes unmentioned even in this supposedly neutral analysis and that is advertising.
However the above information is really only a backdrop to the point I'm trying to make in this particular reply which is based on a CNN report, Rick Sanchez Investigates Corruption in Politics.
The way to get at the true story is to follow the money and the above report points out that in the first 8 months of 2009 alone there has been a record $375 million dollars spent to influence the healthcare debate mostly by the Health Insurance Industry.
$375 million dollars spent in only 8 months over and above all their normal advertising. That's a lot of cash for a 3% profit margin business.
Just follow the money.
Interesting. What's your basis for this estimate?
'Scuse me. They're physicians and have a vested interest by definition (yours) so their propaganda can't possibly be credible and neutral, and certainly can't be trusted.
The actual estimate by the Washington, D.C. is between 60,000 to 70,000 protestors, both pro and con.
However as I pointed out when I first mentioned it the bias simply points out the *direction* in which such information is skewed. So either it is a fair report or if it's not fair it would be slanted to be in favor of the direction of bias which is against Medicare and for the health insurance industry.
Basically I could make the same argument with numbers far more favorable to my case. In this case Medicare's published overhead is 2.1% versus the 20% to 40% estimate of the health insurance industries. But instead I selected more neutral numbers to make the same case.
However you only cherry pick one point out of a post where that wasn't even the predominate point and spend only the time it takes you to write a single sentance. What about Tricare, what about $375 million spent predominately spent by the health insurance industry in 8 months. Where is your "substantive" contribution to this discussion? What arguments are you making and what data are you providing to back up your claims? None that I can see.
It's pretty easy to sit on the sidelines and piss out an occassional one-line snot response to a post that someone has bothered to spend time and effort on. At least RW seems to take the effort to try and respond to most of the points I raise.
Guess you needed the [sarc]...[/sarc] tag.
Gotta love that.
Here's a good summary of why some of us don't trust the government's promises, no matter who they come from (although, in the instances cited, they came from Democrats, by pure cosmic coincidence I'm sure).
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