it's not like it wasn't being debated for six months prior

It was not. A general concept was being publicly debated, but not the actual bill, which was being crafted behind closed doors (even though Obama promised in his 2008 campaign that all negotiations would be conducted "live on C-SPAN". What actually happened was the Democrats on capitol hill not only did their work behind closed doors where the citizens could neither see nor hear any of the actual negotiations, but they actually changed the locks on the doors so that no Republicans could get into the rooms to participate... so much for "openness"

it's largely what Massachusetts has had for years prior

That alone is a reason to run away from it screaming....

oh, and was originally created and promulgated by Republican think-tanks

No... one think tank (Heritage Foundation, which is closely tied to republican business interests) suggested the individual mandate as one solution to the problem of Democrats offering "free" healthcare to everybody; like many insular groups seeking a simple answer to a complex problem they latched onto the "personal responsibility" part of the mandate and did not adequately realize what any rank-and-file conservative could easily see: any such mandate would be applied to the middle class, but the poor and illegals (all the people currently getting "free" care) would be exempted and still be getting "free care"...

it's not some massive dumping of cash into Obama's offshore account.

nobody important said it was

Its transparent, you can read it

No, it was put together in secret, voted on without being read, and it granted huge power to a vast army of government bureaucrats, none of whom are elected or in any way accountable to the voters. These bureaucrats, most of whom will never be identified to the American people, are currently writing THOUSANDS of pages of new regulations. They are still writing the regulations that govern the parts of the law that are now in place and what's now in place is just a tiny portion of what will start kicking-in in 2014. They will still be writing the regulations a decade from now. You cannot read something which is still being written or is still in the fanciful imagination of some bureaucrat

its complicated BECAUSE THE U.S. HEALTH SYSTEM IS COMPLICATED, it's a sincere effort to solve a big, complicated, longstanding problem.

No, it is complicated because an army of lawyers, lobbyists and politicians all sought to bring into reality a century-old wet dream of the Left (free universal health care) while protecting all the self-interests of the lawyers, lobbyists and politicians involved and ignoring the fundamental problem of the promise of "free stuff"... namely that some people must work to make/provide the "free stuff" (in this case, doctors, nurses, scientists, engineers, technicians providing care, drugs, devices, supplies, etc) and those people (the providers) have a basic human right to be properly compensated. If this had been a "sincere effort" as you put it, the it would have been done out-in-the-open with all negotiations "live on C-SPAN" and we would not now be learning (news broke yesterday) that the Democrats in the Senate and the Obama administration kept their negotiations with big pharma so secret that they kept the details away even from the house Democrats. The House is currently seeking details of this deal and the administration is refusing to hand them over

Yes, Ben Nelson got a bribe. Congress took it back from him later, look at the Congressional Quarterly if you want the details.

Half the Democrats in congress got special deals if you include all the exemptions, carve-outs, subsidies, etc that were handed out like candy by Obama and Reid and Pelosi to various Democrat interest groups... and given that the rules are still being written, people are still finding new stuff...

People have been trying to get similar legislation passed in America for nearly a hundred years,

Yeah and Democrats spent a hundred years insisting that blacks were not human and should be owned as property and treated as cattle. The fact that a Democrat wants something for a hundred years is not a recommendation I would ever want to follow without some other, much less evil, qualification

they were supposed to call the whole thing off because of one last-minute hold out?

YES because that's how we do things in civilized societies where we cast (and count) the votes. Feel free to move to some country where the tradition is to bully laws into place without casting and counting votes...

Is it not clear that Congressman Nelson simply wanted a bribe, rather than him having substantial issues with the legislation?

Your point? If you think somebody wants a bribe he should be ignored and his vote ignored? The bigger problem is that this monstrosity was conceived in corruption, birthed in bribery, and swaddled in subsidies and you are shocked that a corruptible politician presumed a little corruption was in order?????

Yes the bottom-line price of this legislation and the system it creates kinda-sorta is an estimate. Given the size of the system, the vagaries of predicting medical advances, etc, there's absolutely no way to write laws for any system where the bottom-line cost were absolutely known in advance.

If something is so big and complex that you deeply desire an equally big and complex pile of crap to regulate it, you have already failed. You have approached the problem in entirely backwards way. It's a bit like saying "uncle bob has a problem getting to work, hmm... people all over have problems getting to work...hmmm... lets create a massive complex government operation to move all the people on Earth to and from work everyday!!!!! YAY!!! WOOHOO!!!! When what you really should have done was helped uncle Bob yourself, enlisted the help of friends and neighbors and co-workers as needed, etc.

The Tea Party. Basically everybody slept through George W. Bush's two terms as he blew through tremendous chunks of taxpayer money - giving tax breaks up the wazoo, laying out a huge new medicare benefit, created the largest new bureaucracy in fifty years, entering us into a war just on his own whim, apparently. I didn't see a single tea party person throughout all of that. Suddenly a Democrat comes to office, and every dime his administration spends is an affront to LIBERTY! TO THE BARRICADES! BUT WAIT WHILE I STAPLE THESE TEA BAGS TO MY HAT!

Well, in the real world where most of us live, there are no Time Machines... so a TEA party that forms when people who have been busy living their own lives and taking care of their families (and getting slowly boiled like the proverbial frog-in-a-pot) are shocked into action by a sudden massive power grab over their very LIVES (Obama taking over healthcare) is in your mind not legitimate because it does not have a time machine to go back and get upset at Bush43 (or Clinton, or Bush41...) ?!?!?!?!!?

WOW.... just... wow.... that's some planet you come from

Well, let's see now...

Democrat congressman Charlie Rangle, who WROTE many of the tax laws could not figure them out and ended-up cheating on his taxes

Obama's Treasury Secretary ,Timothy Geitner, WHO WOULD HAPPILY SEIZE YOUR PAYCHECKS AND PROPERTY AND TOSS YOU IN JAIL for tax evasion, could not do his taxes, and when caught cheating blamed Turbo Tax (hence his nickname "Turbo Tax Tim")

The tax code is now thousands of pages of legalese written and re-written by full-time staffs of lawyers and lobbyists and is so complex that even lawyers hire other lawyers to help them with their taxes... but you seem to think an engineer with no formal training in the law generally, or tax law specifically, is an idiot if he needs help on his taxes?????

OK, genius, spend the next two days reading the ENTIRE U.S. Tax code and then return here to give a full report on what you have learned... I predict you will have learned that the tax code is so complex, and written in such mind-numbing lingo, that you still have no idea what it says or how to comply with it. Hint: even the IRS admits it does not understand the tax laws and they have argued in court that citizens should not trust the answers they are given by the IRS in response to requests for help. DOH!

When you attack a person's religion, you get a reaction, all the more so when your attack has provable substance

For the left, it is an article of faith that government works and that it can solve problems better than individuals can. As such, when a conservative or a Libertarian highlights government waste or fraud or abuse (particularly of the no-brainer, ANY idiot could see THIS sort ) he might as well be nailing a list to the door of a medieval Catholic church door... there will be some repercussions both from those within the church hierarchy and from their supportive masses.

Actually, he's more correct about this than you seem to think;

There were far fewer abortions before modern birth control, though for more complex reasons; Society frowned on extra-marital sex and single-motherhood, the government social safety net was not there to support single mothers, and with no birth control or legal abortions available, women were simply less likely to engage in extra-marital sex... and also less likely to have illegal abortions in the event they did become pregnant.

There have been something like 40 million abortions in the USA since the practice was legalized. The problem for some on the right is that this is a complex equation that is not directly reversible. They saw the sexual activity ramp-up after "the pill" and legal abortions became available and it seemed a simple relationship... but the culture shifted. If you take away, for example, "the pill" today, it's not likely that extra-marital sex will be reduced (the societal stigmas are gone, and there are other options) nor can you predict the choices pregnant women will make re abortion; the stigmas against both abortion and single motherhood are gone, there is a safety net should they choose not to abort, men are now more willing to marry a woman who already has children (this used to be a barrier), etc.

Personally, I never trust anyone who thinks the Bible say the Earth is 6000 years old... as an engineer I actually believe in something called "reading" and also being informed about a subject before making assumptions about it. The Bible (whether viewed as a religious document, or as a significant bit of literature) NEVER says how old the Earth is... anybody, religious or non-religious who thinks it does is not engaged in rational discussion.

Oh, and I also never trust an Engineer who believes in space aliens; Space aliens are an article of faith without any reputable evidence for their existence...

Please tell me you're being sarcastic. If not, start here [mediamatters.org].

Epic Fail. MediaMatters is:

1. Funded by one of the world's last remaining unapologetic Nazi collaborators
2. Specifically setup to attack Fox News
3. Tax-exempt (so much for rich liberals "paying their fair share")
4. Run by a guy who hates conservatives (David Brock is gay and is at war against the religious right, which many think Fox is aligned with)
5. Part of a vast web of political organizations on the left that help rich liberals funnel un-taxed money into the political fight (move on, NDN, CAP, etc...) and work to intimidate advertisers into pulling ads from any broadcasts they disagree with

The Tea Party was created by Republican strategist Dick Armey

That's correct, and former congressman Dick Armey is NOT Fox news (though he has appeared there, along with Democrats like Lanny Davis, Juan Williams, etc.) but the fact that somebody is invited on to comment on the news does NOT mean that the guest and the network are interchangeable

and promoted relentlessly by Fox News-

No... it was COVERED by Fox news while other networks did their best to ignore it (and Fox covered the degree to which other networks who always cover "movements" were not covering the TEA party, which REALLY upset some on the left). The left gets confused by this because they only think something is legitimate news if it is covered in the media they control

it was never intended to be grass roots.

Wrong. It was specifically setup to be grass-roots, which is why there are no "leaders" and why Dick Armey is only involved with one part of it (his part ran those silly buses around the country)

Amusingly, it's actually grown some legitimate roots since and has proved more difficult to control than the establishment would like.

Wrong again. The GOP establishment detests the TEA party and is terrified by it. The GOP establishment has lost several of their senate and house members during GOP primaries... it's actually pretty funny to watch; the GOP establishment types think they can run the world, but they lack any ideas or energy so they NEED the TEA partiers for that... But the TEA partiers have their own ideas (which often don't include letting establishment-types pretend to know how to run the world...)

What does some crazy pope-guy have to do with religion??!?!?!?!?

That's just hillarious! If I had any power to mod that post, I would have modded it to the maximum and tagged it "pure comedy"

Everytime one of the AGW charlatans is exposed as a crazy doodle-bug, people who previously fawned over him say "that guy?!?!? he's nutters! why are you listening to HIM!?!?!?!

Hint: No normal person would have ever HEARD of James Lovelock had it not been for the fact that he and his ideas were elevated to the lofty position he held by supporters of AGW. It would be like a bunch of Catholics shrieking that everybody else was being irrational by associating the Pope with the Catholic Church.

can't stop laughing at your post... thanks! I needed a lift tonight!!!!!

This is false

Nuclear is remarkably cheap, nearly in-exhaustible, and carbon-free (this is proven every time some navy launches another nuclear powered ship or submarine). Why does it take decades and billions to build a power plant on land? Simple: In the 1970's the left in the US discovered that they could dissuade utilities from building new plants with the thousand-bee-stings of government regulations/hearings/etc and lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit by which they meant to kill-off the industry they hated so much. They did not succeed in killing the industry; what they succeeded in doing was removing much of the profit and therefore the motivation to design and build cleaner, cheaper, and safer newer models of plants. They succeeded in getting the industry to struggle mightily to keep older more dangerous plants online decade after decade because there was no real (as in: "it works outside of the college campus and internet echo chamber") way to provide the required energy in the US without the nuclear component. In fact, if you wired the whole US to run on windmills and solar panels, you would still need a large number of nuclear and/or gas-fired plants to stabilize the grid (from moment-to-moment, day and night, cloudy and sunny, on superbowl sunday, etc. Solar and wind are not reliable (in the technical sense of being constant,certain, and controllable) and cannot do what nuclear/gas/coal/etc can do (ramp-up and down on-demand to compensate for energy demand) ) Wind turbines are a novelty if you need an energy grid to run a civilization without rolling blackouts everytime some new video game comes out and all the kiddies fire-up their X-boxes at the same time, or everytime half the country cooks a holiday turkey or tunes into some sports event...

In short, by trying to kill nuclear with armies of lawyers and bureaucrats, the environmentalists only succeeded in making all of us less safe and making our lives more expensive. Nothing the left-wing activists do is ever subjected to cost-benefit-analysis...

And it's a standard AGW tactic to label all criticism as "denialist" (a dishonest tactic meant to associate AGW skeptics with Hitler and the holocaust)

Notably, when you labelled the previous poster a "denier", you provided no rational input to undercut what he posted... so readers ought to presume that the actual information stands as unchallenged.

Rhetoric is no substitute for rational dialog, logic, and the scientific method...

The more one studies AGW the more it appears to be a religion:

1. It is defended as dogma, rather than with science.
2. it has two dieties (Gaia and the flying spaghetti monster) and its adherents feel compelled to attack other belief systems (I note you link to "the God movie")
3. It is loaded with results which either cannot be verified or cannot be reproduced. (no climate models being used to predict the future also work to explain all known past events, and "researchers" in the field have a proven record of data hiding, data manipulation, and data loss)
4. There are sacred scrolls (hidden computer codes and data)
5. There are saints who may not be challenged by the unwashed (Hansen, Al Gore, etc.)
6. There are heretics (many scientists, engineers, meteorologists, etc have been denounced for not accepting the teachings)
7. There are "wise men" who block acceptance/publication of other scrolls that disagree (climate researchers manipulated the peer review process so that no skeptical papers would be published... and then they criticised all skeptical writings as "not peer reviewed")
8. They have a collection plate for offerings (carbon taxes)
9. They sell indulgences (carbon offset purchasing)
10. They grant salvation to the poor and needy (exemptions from carbon regulations for third-world countries even though their carbon in no different from anybody else's and therefore as dangerous to mother Earth)
11. The have started an inquisition (with government panels calling "polluters" to testify at hearings and explain how they will reform themselves and various government leaders pledging to destroy certain industries...)
12. The leaders of the faith exempt themselves from the rules (this is more from the cult-end of the religious spectrum) which they apply to others (they fly on private and chartered planes, ride in limos, and live in multiple excessive residences. Indeed, governments are some of the largest polluters and consumers of carbon fuels while they turn the screws on "the little people" jacking-up the prices for the energy they need to get to work and heat their homes)

The similarities go on, and on, and on, as far as they eye can see... Oh, and none of the above applies to any real and valid field of science

Everytime a scientist or engineer who is not a "climate scientist" speaks out against anthropogenic global warming, the AGW fanboys (most of whom are not themselves scientists or engineers) flood internet message boards with shrieks that the skeptics are not qualified to speak on the subject because their degrees are not in climate science...

Hansen has degrees in physics, math, and astronomy...

He lacks a degrees in the following applicable fields:

1. Geology

2. Chemistry

3. Petroleum engineering

4. Climate science

He is, therefore (by AGW fanboy standards), speaking outside his field and his input is not valid.

Live by the sword, die by the sword

Ahhhh yes....

Let's compare all those highly-accurate satellite temperature measurements with the satellite data from only 200 years ago when Ben Franklin lofted the first earth observing satellite.... oh, wait, ....nope.... I guess we have no such data. Oh, alright, lets use the highly-calibrated thermometer data from way back 200 years ago when some sea captain measured the temperature somewhere (plus or minus 200 miles from a point in the mid-Atlantic) using his very accurate mercury thermometer that was carefully calibrated to the NIST standards.... oh, wait, nope.... no such traceable calibration and the candle-light made reading that thermometer within 1/10th of a degree relative to a scratch in the brass frame a bit tough.... not to mention that the guy was tired and did not see any reason to worry too much about being too precise...

That was not working too well... let's use the hyper-accurate temperature measuring device all Americans prefer to use when they can afford it: tree rings. Yes, a thermometer from 200 years ago has a few calibration issues and the satellites were not very good 200 years ago, but everybody who believes in science knows that a tree ring or some muck from the bottom of a river is accurate to within 1% of a degree! Why, I for one, chop down a tree and check the tree rings for every morning....why bother with a thermometer when an axe and a precise temperature tree are available?

All the hype about "record" and "all-time" high or low temp data is manipulative and speculative. There were no humans (not scientists, nor even amateurs) taking and recording temperature data on 80% of the North American continent before 300 years ago, and the planet is at least 6000 years old (Grin) so we are statistically blind to most of the temperatures for world history. If you plug-in the actual age of the Earth, you know that we know, with calibrated precision, next to nothing about the long-term "global temperature". Comparing data from highly-accurate, calibrated and traceable, modern scientific instruments to creative and imaginative speculation about past temperatures is extremely dishonest and anti-science, but a great way to write a paper and get more taxpayer funds for another year of "research", which beats the hell out of flipping burgers

I'm no luddite... I used to design and build scientific instruments and now work in aerospace, but I am outraged but the so-called scientific climate studies that are done by people who have (and I will be charitable here) apparently forgotten some of the most-basic rules of science in order to score political points or stay popular with their peers. Rules like:

1. Different data sets measured two different ways with two different types of instrument cannot be honestly compared without a common calibration.

2. Data collected with two identical instruments still cannot be compared if one of them lacks traceable calibration

3. You can never gain absolute precision by using additional imprecise data. (in other words: if you sum-average or in other ways lump-together a bunch of data that is accurate to 1 percent, you may get a more-precise idea of what your imprecise measuring device thought it saw, but you have absolutely not obtained a better-than 1 percent measurement of what was actually there... and such data manglng actually reduces absolute precision)

They used to teach this stuff in first-year science classes several decades ago...

Yes, it was a record setting warm winter in the contiguous 48 states... but it was an extremely cold winter in Alaska (see ABC news story for example) and in parts of the former Soviet Union.

If somebody wanted to select just those parts of the global temperature data for this past winter, he could honestly write a story with a bold headline shrieking about record cold weather and then warning about the potential nightmare of a new ice age, lamentations about man's impact of the planet, etc. all designed to manipulate the public (the story would be honest about the data subset, but would obviously be misleading and manipulative in the larger sense). The point is that one should always be wary of anybody on any side of an argument when they run with a data subset whose boundaries are political lines on a map rather than some boundary that isolates the data within the boundary from affecting or being affected by things outside the boundary.

"Data" is only valid/important/relevant when it is not manipulated, adjusted, pre-selected, etc.

The Nouveau guys and the distro guys brought the "hate" on themselves

First, the Nouveau guys did a remarkable thing (a very good effort at reversing a very complicated thing and providing a somewhat functional result), but then it was jammed into the distros before it was ready and in a way that was just amazingly annoying. Hint to Linux distribution people: if you are going to bundle a buggy, not-really-ready driver into a release, make it an obvious obvious checkbox-type option at install time like this:

Install super-buggy and annoying, very slow but ideologically-pure-as-the-wind-driven-snow video driver people say usually works as long as you do nothing serious and do not care about performance video driver [x]

I originally thought this project sounded admirable and wished the developers well, but I now despise this driver.

Part of the problem is the oft-cited and completely dishonest use of the word "free" by some open-source advocates. "Freedom" is not, and never should be: "freedom for me to demand that you do things my way". Open source advocates often rant about "freedom", particularly for the users of software... but then they erect completely unnecessary barriers/annoyances to try to manipulate those very same users into only using certain software, or only using it in certain ways. I use Linux precisely because I value my freedom, and that includes my freedom to do anything I want with that software... but that includes one of the most important freedoms of all: running proprietary code. When somebody does something that blocks my use of proprietary code, or prevents that code from doing certain things, or reports proprietary code as "tainted" (an act that serves no legitimate purpose other than to scare less-educated users away from proprietary code) he perverts the very notion of "freedom". Installing a marginal open source driver automatically (without asking at install time) in a manner that makes it just an annoying extra task to get rid of it (and keep it from continually rising from the grave to attack again) is an act that just baits users to hate the auto-installed thing.

I run multiple proprietary and very specialized CAD applications which run perfectly on Linux with the proprietary Nvidia drivers... we get a better user experience on Linux than on Windows (for non-video driver related reasons). With the Nouveau drivers, the applications are essentially unusable, therefore Nouveau harms the reputation of Linux... it makes newer releases of Linux look buggy and in need of manual tweaking and fixing. The Nouveau driver must be manually removed and replaced with real Nvidia drivers that actually work. Then, when the systems auto-update certain components, things break and we have to re-install the proprietary drivers (again, making Linux look buggy, when it never was before). This is a new pain-in-the-butt we never used to have to deal with. Ever since Nouveau went into the build, nearly every IT problem we have (and all the wasted time solving it) is tied directly to the presence of Nouveau. I now want the project to die a fast and painful death.... though I am open to it rising again and re-entering the distros someday when it is fully functional (speed and compatability are a very basic part of functionality). Video drivers are very unlike many other drivers; they can have a critical impact on everything in the system in ways that a printer driver, for example, does not. It's a major screw-up to auto-install a known-bad driver into a system by default. Note: bad in this context means "does not function properly and with the proper speed on all associated hardware" rather than "waaaaahhhhh! the programmers would not give me their source code! waaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!"

Fanboys who say the Nouveau drivers work great ( as long as you only do certain things, or only use certain cards, and as long as you do not care about performance, etc... ) should just go back to their e-mail, twitter, and web browsing (and other tasks so simple they can be done on a tablet) and let those of us who need our systems to really work, in a stable manner, with excellent performance, decide when a driver is finally minimally acceptable.

Ethically you want to do what is closest to your heart if you will, but unfortunately you need to eat, and usually this involves doing the opposite of ethical (or at least far from what the ideal-ethics tell you)

Why is it ethical for hundreds or perhaps thousands of people who do not even know you (most of whom will never even say "thanks", some of whom might even hate you if they met you) to use the product of your work for free? Why is it unethical for you to be compensated for thousands of hours of work?

Giving something away for free may well be a laudable act of personal generosity, (unless you are a huge software company attempting to kill your smaller competitor by giving away a free web browser, in which case some of the very people on Slashdot who say this is ethical will blast you as evil) but that does not make the choice to not give your work away for free unethical in any locale I am aware of that does not have Rod Serling standing in the corner smoking.

I suspect that a large number of the people who are always saying everything should be open-sourced and handed out for free are living in mom's basement on an allowance, or living on government assistance, and have therefore never become familiar with the basic laws of economics. 5-year-olds always think everything ought to be free because they have never had to work and people have always provided everything to them for free. Adults know that food, shelter, clothing, medicine, etc. all cost money (because the people who provide those things also need money for the things they need) and it is therefore honest and ethical for one man to compensate another man for the products of his labor. In ancient practice, people spent most of their time struggling to provide themselves with the things they needed to survive. In advanced societies we specialize; I do not hunt and kill animals or plant and harvest crops or make clothes or build shelters.... I do narrow very technical things for which I receive "money" which i then give to people who specialize in providing me with meat and grain and a house, etc. This is not unethical.... this is extremely ethical as it respects each person according to his/her talents and work and advances civilization. This system has fed, clothed, housed, and healed more people than any other system in the history of planet Earth.

It's less innocent that you imply

(a) NBC parent company GE is is bed with Obama, NBC gives positive press coverage to Obama

(b) The GE CEO is on Obama's jobs council and got NO public heat from Obama as he exported jobs to China

(c) under Obama GE pays no taxes (how much money is this worth to them?)

(d) Obama will not get re-elected unless the "black vote" is energized and turns-out for him this fall

(e) A good whitey-kills-innocent-black-child story can rev-up the black voters, re-elect Obama, and keep the tax breaks for GE/NBC flowing...

It's a tidy-little corrupt crony story... And NBC will not tell us who made the very deliberate edits to the tape... maybe it was a secretary leaning back in her chair answering the phone while operating the tape machine with her foot...