Journal smittyoneeach's Journal: Democrats are gonna need a bigger lie 38
"You know, this is the ultimate nanny-state patronizing," Krauthammer said. "The president steps into your life and says you should be spending on x and not on y. It is bad enough that the government is taking a lot of your hard-earned money in taxes. It is bad enough that you're over-regulated in just about every aspect of life. Bad enough the government wants to control so many aspects of the economy and of the culture. But here he is stepping into your living room and kitchen table and saying you're overspending here and there. And this is why I say it is the embodiment of this hyper-liberalism. It's the perfect example. It's as if the Republicans couldn't have invented something more demonstrative of what this kind of nanny-state liberalism is about and it's precisely how the president is telling you to spend your money after taxes."
After Jolly beat Sink in FL-13, the quest for a bigger lie than ObamaCare is going to be a tough one even for champion purveyors of falsehood.
The more interesting point, though, is that the GOP is going to be faced with a mandate to do something for which it really hasn't shown much stomach: delivering on its platform.
Bigger than these lies? (Score:1)
Why? They're already living one (Score:2)
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You make winning the last two Presidential elections sound like a bad thing.
For anyone who ever hoped to see liberalism take hold in this country, it most certainly was. Unless the country splits into two (or more) new independent nations soon, it will likely be decades before we ever get a chance to actually reform the health care system or any of the other ridiculous social injustices in this country.
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The Affordable Care Act was never, at any point, other than a river of lies, with headwaters in hell.
If I had a lot of confidence that the GOP would actually deliver some reform and help people, and let the free market minimize the "ridiculous social injustices in this country", I might get all partisan on you abo
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I don't understand why Obama's status as the true face of liberalism eludes you
Because what he has done - the bills he has signed, and the actions that he has taken - as president have been anything but liberal. There has never been a conservative president who would not have signed the Health Insurance Industry Bailout Act of 2010 into law. Not. One. Single. President. He has also extended the further regressive tax cuts that were started by the previous administration, and supported an array of other handouts to the wealthy and big businesses.
There is nothing liberal about
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There has never been a conservative president who would not have signed the Health Insurance Industry Bailout Act of 2010 into law. Not. One. Single. President.
I'll give you Nixon.
We have seen for decades now that the free market is not a source of opportunity.
Contradictory. You can't bury a market in regulation and then claim it's free. Barack Obama is proving Friedrich Hayek correct in the most expensive and painful way possible.
Alas, there are some religiously Socialist types, potentially including you, whose faith in the foolishness of Socialism is unbreakable.
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There has never been a conservative president who would not have signed the Health Insurance Industry Bailout Act of 2010 into law. Not. One. Single. President.
I'll give you Nixon.
You're joking here, right? It was under Nixon that this whole disaster took root. Nixon approved the health insurance industry as a great victory for America when he was president. You'd have a hard time keeping him away from an opportunity to feed it more money (and consumers).
We have seen for decades now that the free market is not a source of opportunity.
Contradictory. You can't bury a market in regulation and then claim it's free
We have the least regulated market of any industrialized nation. You have to go to places like Somalia or Afghanistan to find markets with fewer controls. Saying that we have done something such as "bury [...] in regulation" i
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We have the least regulated market of any industrialized nation. You have to go to places like Somalia or Afghanistan to find markets with fewer controls. Saying that we have done something such as "bury [...] in regulation" is absurd to say the very least.
Sorry, a 9' stack of ObamaCare regulations just laughed itself into a snowstorm and buried the northeast. You twit: our total count of regulators rivals the populations of Somalia and Afghanistan. Oh, and then your girl constantly 'feels' things about the laws that have been passed. I realize that, to some buffoons, an 'unregulated' market constitutes anarchy, but you've just got to know that your religious worship of regulation is killing the economy.
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We have the least regulated market of any industrialized nation. You have to go to places like Somalia or Afghanistan to find markets with fewer controls. Saying that we have done something such as "bury [...] in regulation" is absurd to say the very least.
Sorry, a 9' stack of ObamaCare regulations just laughed itself into a snowstorm and buried the northeast. You twit: our total count of regulators rivals the populations of Somalia and Afghanistan.
That random assertion that you just pulled straight from your nether regions does not in any way refute my statement of the US having the least regulated markets in the industrialized world. I guess maybe it made for good copy for you, but it does not help your argument in any way, shape, or form.
Oh, and then your girl constantly 'feels' things about the laws that have been passed
Who would this "girl" of mine be? I don't recall discussing any girl earlier. Are you referring to Hillary Clinton? I don't recall her doing anything about any laws since leaving the senate.
regulation is killing the economy
There are other m
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That random assertion that you just pulled straight from your nether regions does not in any way refute my statement of the US having the least regulated markets in the industrialized world.
So, my clear hyperbole is bad, and your unsourced random assertion is as true as Anthropogenic Global Warming?
Who would this "girl" of mine be? I don't recall discussing any girl earlier. Are you referring to Hillary Clinton? I don't recall her doing anything about any laws since leaving the senate.
I was referring to the one who signed the Affordable Care Act into law and now just makes arbitrary, convenient changes to it. Probably to condition you not to expect Congress to do anything about the law.
There are other markets with more regulations that are doing just fine.
You wave hands emphatically enough to keep a Boeing 777 in the air. You do understand that the economy. Is. Not. Doing. Just. Fine?
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That random assertion that you just pulled straight from your nether regions does not in any way refute my statement of the US having the least regulated markets in the industrialized world.
So, my clear hyperbole is bad, and your unsourced random assertion is as true as Anthropogenic Global Warming?
Can you show me a market in a first-world nation that is less regulated than the one in the US? No, of course you cannot. None exists.
Who would this "girl" of mine be? I don't recall discussing any girl earlier. Are you referring to Hillary Clinton? I don't recall her doing anything about any laws since leaving the senate.
I was referring to the one who signed the Affordable Care Act into law
So you just arbitrarily assigned a different gender to President Lawnchair, just because?
There are other markets with more regulations that are doing just fine.
You do understand that the economy. Is. Not. Doing. Just. Fine?
The strongest economies right now all have more regulations in their markets than the US. The few economies that are less regulated are found in third-world or developing nations and many of those are themselves deteriorating. Why would you want to emulate the latter instead of the
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So you just arbitrarily assigned a different gender to President Lawnchair, just because?
I'm going to stun you with this one: the President is no more a girl than his name is "Lawnchair".
The strongest economies right now all have more regulations in their markets than the US.
I'm going to stun you with this one: regulation is not economic activity. Our regulator over-reach has produced an over-damped system [wikipedia.org]. I suppose, in your inverted world-view, that you can blow away a significant chunk of the workforce, and then say that unemployment is low [theblaze.com]. Because "the recovery". Also "Bush". Now, if we want to be Obama apologists and claim that the Progressive Project was out of gas, and this
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So you just arbitrarily assigned a different gender to President Lawnchair, just because?
I'm going to stun you with this one: the President is no more a girl than his name is "Lawnchair".
So why did you call him my "girl"? What was the purpose of that label?
The strongest economies right now all have more regulations in their markets than the US.
I'm going to stun you with this one: regulation is not economic activity
You can make that claim if you want, but it does not in any way refute what I just said. I asked you if you could name a successful economy anywhere that has fewer regulations in its market than what we have in the US and you have been unable to do so - because no such economy exists. There is no evidence anywhere that your call for fewer regulations on the US markets would be beneficial to anyone outside the very highest economic ec
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So why did you call him my "girl"? What was the purpose of that label?
Variation. If it bothers you, you may s/girl/no talent rodeo clown/ or s/girl/#OccupyResoluteDesk/ or s/girl/Keystone Keynesian/ at your leisure. I find your interest, itself, interesting.
I asked you if you could name a successful economy anywhere that has fewer regulations in its market than what we have in the US and you have been unable to do so - because no such economy exists.
You have never offered any proof of this assertion. Perhaps the unable one is YOU.
Nobody has proposed a true alternative that would give the insurance industry any reason to be the least bit afraid.
And so, if we're going to demonize the insurance industry, how do we reform this situation? I say: competition. What say you?
You use it, but you have no clue whatsoever what it means. You would do yourself a favor to find a different word instead since you have no interest on understanding what socialism is.
And you have failed to offer anything beyond a textual sneer. I'm guessing that the Socialist emperor has no clothes.
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So why did you call him my "girl"? What was the purpose of that label?
Variation. If it bothers you, you may s/girl/no talent rodeo clown/ or s/girl/#OccupyResoluteDesk/ or s/girl/Keystone Keynesian/ at your leisure.
When you discard the conventions of language to that degree, our ability to communicate is severely hampered. At the very least you could stick to one silly nickname if you insist on discarding reality. Hell you can call the president commander damn_registrars if you want, since you insist that there is no difference between us. Just stick to one. When you have an ever-growing laundry list of insulting names for him it is impossible to know when you are talking about him - as opposed to talking about a
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I say that we already know competition is absolutely not the answer in terms of health insurance. it might be OK for car insurance, life insurance, hair insurance, or any of a variety of other forms of insurance, but it does not work for health insurance. Increasing competition between insurance companies will only increase the cost of delivering health care and make it more difficult for consumers to get the care they need. I have argued for decades that health insurance here needs to be a single payer system - just like in the rest of the developed world.
I don't believe you, and I don't think there is economic research to support this assertion that health care is "special". I think that's a line of hooey spewed by hucksters.
I do agree that you and your cohorts should be free to set up your own single payer system and knock yourself out. I simply wish to retain the liberty to remain separate from what I'm confident is a scam.
I'm guessing that the Socialist emperor has no clothes. Feel free to demonstrate otherwise
Being as we don't have a socialist emperor, there is no need to demonstrate any further.
Regret that the common literary reference to the Emperor's New Clothes [wikipedia.org] eludes you as readily as common sense eludes you
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I say that we already know competition is absolutely not the answer in terms of health insurance. it might be OK for car insurance, life insurance, hair insurance, or any of a variety of other forms of insurance, but it does not work for health insurance. Increasing competition between insurance companies will only increase the cost of delivering health care and make it more difficult for consumers to get the care they need. I have argued for decades that health insurance here needs to be a single payer system - just like in the rest of the developed world.
I don't believe you, and I don't think there is economic research to support this assertion that health care is "special". I think that's a line of hooey spewed by hucksters.
How do you suppose clinics pay their non-healthcare staff? By this I mean the receptionists, the office managers, and the billing people. These people generally don't have advanced degrees (some haven't been to college at all). Do you think they do their work for free? Someone has to pay them.
Their pay comes from the total revenue that goes in to the clinic. The revenue they get from patients and from insurance companies pays the doctors, nurses, and all the staff (including the staff that only sp
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Look, my wife did a Master's program in public health
Good for her, if she exists and actually did that. With all the lies and bullshit you have been willingly spouting I'm not sure if I should believe this statement.
More so, I know people who have graduated from MPH programs. I know that they vary widely in scope and focus. In fact simply saying you have an "MPH" is barely more informative than saying you have a "PhD". There are MPH focus areas that don't actually touch on topics relating to the delivery of health care.
Can we agree that the marketplace for healthcare in the U.S. is screwed up beyond all recognition?
It is screwed up, alright. But
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Good for her, if she exists and actually did that. With all the lies and bullshit you have been willingly spouting I'm not sure if I should believe this statement.
OK
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Good for her, if she exists and actually did that. With all the lies and bullshit you have been willingly spouting I'm not sure if I should believe this statement.
OK
Lately you have had no qualms against spouting off bullshit if it supports your worldview, and calling it fact. I actually have a good friend who completed his MPH recently, and I have known other MPH students as well. I know that there is a fair bit of diversity in study in that, and that there are plenty of very valid MPH courses of study that would not on their own add value to a discussion about how much of the American health care spending is wasted on insurance industry-driven bureaucracy.
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Being as you don't seem to have even the slightest idea of how to identify socialism, let alone any sense of how it is supposed to work, you have no credibility to talk of such a matter.
Whatever.
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Being as you don't seem to have even the slightest idea of how to identify socialism, let alone any sense of how it is supposed to work, you have no credibility to talk of such a matter.
Whatever
To call Obama a socialist, one must - at the very least - have a poor understanding of either Obama or socialism (many exhibit poor understanding of both). You have called Obama a socialist on more than one occasion, and also on numerous occasions claimed to understand Obama well. Hence if we are to take your assertion of understanding Obama to be valid (which is an awful assumption but we can run with it for now - or at least, allow you to bury yourself with it and accept the hypothesis that you believe
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Marxism is a pile of hooey, and apologists will eternally claim that it simply has never been implemented correctly. Fall off the planet, sir.
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Obama was billed as a Socialist savior.
Only by the conservatives. People who actually aspired to socialism never viewed him as such and the democrats themselves were far too cowardly to dare bill their own candidate as a socialist. Now, granted, Obama has been orders of magnitude more conservative - and will be remembered as such in history once the dust settles on this administration and independent historians evaluate him for his actions - than what the democratic party was aiming for, but he was never billed by his party or his campaign as
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Only by the conservatives.
Oh, how casually you blow by the creepy child worship [examiner.com]. I guess it harms The Narrative.
You're not qualified to make such a statement. You clearly don't know socialism beyond conservative talking points
Socialism is a scam, a preaching of "The Kingdom of God, hold the God" and will always tend toward economic stagnation or worse [jrbooksonline.com]. 2+2=5, you'll never get sons from sodomy, and Socialism is a scam. May enlightenment find you, sir.
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Only by the conservatives.
Oh, how casually you blow by the creepy child worship. I guess it harms The Narrative.
You only again showed how little you know about socialism by referencing that. I tried to watch the video but the lousy examiner site crashed my browser (by filling it with flash ads) before I was able to click the youtube link.
However if the claim that the children were praising Obama as if he were some kind of deity, then this is not even close to how socialism works. You were supposed to be supporting your alternate reality claim of Obama being sold to us as some sort of great socialist revolutionar
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Rousseau was as wrong as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, with similar negative effect upon political history.
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fine shades of nuance
No. There are no "fine shades of nuance" here.
You simply don't know what you're talking about when it comes to socialism. You might be knowledgeable on other political matters, but here you are just simply 100% dead fucking wrong. This isn't two people debating whether the sky is blue-grey or grey-blue, this is one person saying the sky is blue-grey and the other person saying Elvis Presley was the NBA's all-time top rebounder. We are so far apart in our interpretation of reality that we aren't eve
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On the other hand, the vehemence of your denials could be seen as an endorsement of my viewpoint.
Denials? I'm not denying anything. I am pointing out the obvious fact that everything you have said so far about socialism on slashdot has been 100% bullshit. I don't know if you have been making it up just to troll me, or if you actually believe the fact-free conservative talking points you keep repeating here, but as best I can tell you haven't made a single factually accurate statement on socialism here yet.
If anyone is in denial, it is you.
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From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. [nytimes.com]
I promise to do my best to simulate taking something you say seriously.
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I promise to do my best to simulate taking something you say seriously.
Is all we need to see in order to vali
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I mean, after all of your effort to re-brand Obama as a conservative, you have the laughable gall to bemoan my calling this tripe "Socialism"?
The two labels are not even remotely close to being equivalent in relevance or basis in reality.
I have provided factual data to show that what Obama has actually done as president will result in him being remembered as the most conservative president to date. His actual actions have been demonstrably more conservative than Bush Jr., Bush Sr., Nixon, Ford, Hoover, and even St. Ronald the Redeemer. This is very well documented.
There is not a single bill that he has signed that Reagan, either Bush, or
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I have provided factual data to show that what Obama has actually done as president will result in him being remembered as the most conservative president to date. His actual actions have been demonstrably more conservative than Bush Jr., Bush Sr., Nixon, Ford, Hoover, and even St. Ronald the Redeemer. This is very well documented.
Bwahahaha. I halfway think you believe yourself.
There is not a single bill that he has signed that Reagan, either Bush, or Nixon would have rejected. Not. One. Single. Bill.
I get it! You consider counterfactuals to be "proof". It's all so clear now.
Calling it socialism is requires a complete discard of reality. Of course, you don't know anything about socialism, so the discard is not quite as difficult from your starting point.
I'm fully aware that I'm contending with a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire_cat [wikipedia.org] and you're going to substitute verbal evasion for rational argument.
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There is not a single bill that he has signed that Reagan, either Bush, or Nixon would have rejected. Not. One. Single. Bill.
I get it! You consider counterfactuals to be "proof". It's all so clear now.
You could disprove it with one bill. Just. One. Single. Bill.
Go ahead, try. Find me a bill that Obama signed that Reagan would have vetoed. I'm not going to hold my breath, because there isn't one. Not even the budget or the tax code - both of which are demonstrably more conservative and regressive than what we had under Reagan - would have been vetoed by St. Ronnie.
I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for you to find a nonexistent bill.