“Hmmm. I think I may be losing this argument. I know! I’ll change the subject and no one will notice!”
Given how simple Carney’s statement was, it would have taken you less time to type a proper rebuttal to my argument than what you actually typed.
So I don’t buy it. And of course, it’s not a huge deal, that’s the kind of spin administrations use all the time. But it’s no less annoying, so I thought I’d vent on it for moment.
Rebutting you is useless, though, because you’re a weaselly moron who doesn’t acknowledge adverse facts. Making fun of you is at least entertaining.
Why would I even have to acknowledge them? Every thread has hundreds of views for every post. If my arguments are truly that lame, then rebuttals destroy them effortlessly and hundreds of people go “ahhh, that Marley guy is right, he’s made me think.”
But oh yeah, this board is almost all liberal, so you’re right, there’s no point. On a more balanced board, the wider audience matters a lot more than the poster you’re directly debating with. On SDMB, which is more echo chamber than debate forum(at least on politics), it works the opposite way.
No, they don’t have to. For most, it’s cheaper to just pay the fine if they really don’t want it. It may not stay that way for long, but it is now.
But it’s also true that millions who do want insurance will be able to get it in a relatively affordable form. We’ll have to see how that works out, of course, but it’s a fact.
I don’t like the mandate any more than many people do, and I wish it had been declared unconstitutional, but it wasn’t and it isn’t going to be the end of the world.
You certainly make it tempting by making statements like this about the time it takes to debunk an argument being correlated to the number of words in the argument. But, again, at some point most have realized that we’re just rebutting your half-thought-out talking points that you don’t really believe or don’t really care about except as weapons in boring word debates.
All right, that’s true, but it’s also true that the administration a) wanted to make it mandatory, and b) still expects people to sign up, and c) still taxes them if they don’t.
OK, I will rebut you. It is a meaningless semantic niggle from a government that issues thousands, maybe millions of words per day. No one but you and partisan hacks like you would seize upon it as having the kind of import you are trying to attribute to it.
THERE.
Let’s see what good it does me…:rolleyes:
Well, I’d agree with that. But it still pissed me off.
Now that you’ve agreed that you are a partisan hack, rather than one striving to fight ignorance, will you go NOW?
You know, I’m a big fan of civility. I totally agree that many individuals on these boards — left- and right-leaning both — often act in unnecessarily vicious ways. So DebatePolitics sounded at least a bit interesting to me. And literally the first thread I opened starts off like this:
“Great, now Boehner is threatening to default”
“It isn’t his call. A decision to default would fall on the President.”
“thanks for proving my point about the republican base. using whole sentences, would you like to clarify your silly delusion?”
A few posts later:
“Do you give the same advice to Harry Reid […] or do you just shill for the Democrats?”
Civility on display! Truly a utopia of reasoned, measured debate.
No, it means under the old “free market” deal, millions were not able to sign up for affordable insurance. Now, they are able.
The “free market” approach failed. It cut millions of people off from needed health care, except at ruinous costs. People went bankrupt; people lost their homes. The new system balances costs.
Call if “socialism” if you want, but it means that millions will have access to affordable care, who did not have that access previously.
edited to remove gratuitous insult (though God knows you deserve it.)
Yes, and those not desperately trying to find that “gotcha ya” would have been aware that the opposite of “being able to buy affordable insurance” is “not being able to buy affordable insurance”, especially given that the inability to buy affordable insurance was the problem ACA was intended to fix (the clue being in the name “Affordable Care Act”).
Only a partisan hack should be angered by obviously self-serving spin? THat would make Jon Stewart a partisan hack for hating on Crossfire then.
It’s mostly not like that, and secondly, they don’t carry their issues with each other outside of threads, into new threads, a behavior I didn’t even know was possible until I got here.
BTW, I noticed one of the more prolific denizens of this board is also on debatepolitics.com. I don’t want to call him out, but I’ll PM him and maybe he’ll share his opinion on whether this board is more or less civilized, and whether it’s more or less intelligent.
Oh, and BTW, Marley said something wrong in the Chris Christie thread, and then did EXACTLY what you guys hate me doing, shifting to firmer ground while not admitting error.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=16753801&postcount=91
I don’t have a problem with it, and I don’t see why anyone else would. I don’t need to be seen as “beating” Marley, because anyone following the thread would already see that he had made a mistake. He shifted to a better line of argument and we went from there. What is gained by rubbing people’s noses in their shitty posts?
If you’ll wait patiently a server will come to your table with a steaming cup of WAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH. If you put as much effort into being correct as you put into whining, you wouldn’t be wrong all the time.
First of all, I wasn’t wrong. I did make one error (regarding Republicans trying to block the Civil Rights Act). I didn’t bother trying to make a long list because it’s not worth my time in the first place and because I wasn’t interested in enabling yet another one of your attempts to hijack a thread. So I went back to the main point I’d been making, and lo and behold you admit it’s on firm ground. Of course you haven’t acknowledged that in the actual thread. You’re still weaseling around and trying to show that Republicans are being victimized by a principled interpretation of the 10th Amendment.
And no, this is not what people “hate” you doing. It’s quite different. The criticism here is that you spout a lot of bullshit, and when you’re called on it, you change the subject as fast as possible, and once you think you’ve distracted everybody, you repeat the exact same bullshit even though it’s already been demonstrated that you were wrong.
Don’t worry- you won’t be.
We’re hoping you’ll stop making shitty posts. But your response to that - and pretty much everything else - is “No fair! I don’t wanna!”
So, if you have a history of being called out on bullshit, you don’t want it to be easy to call you out on bullshit in the future?
I knew this already, but your priorities are seriously screwed up.
ETA: Oh, and there are plenty examples of prolific posters on various, other boards being known and called out for their behavior. Just another example where you’re wrong. It just wouldn’t be one of your posts if you didn’t have some erroneous tidbit.
Meanwhile, a non-partisan, information technology source, reports on how the Obama administration botched the healthcare.gov rollout. Basically, the way government usually screws such things up: they cared more about cronyism than expertise:
How political cronies built – and botched – Healthcare.gov
The biggest problem with Healthcare.gov seems simple enough: It was built by people who are apparently far more familiar with government cronyism than they are with IT.
That’s one of the insights that can be gleaned from the work done by the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that focuses on government transparency. In a report filed this past week, the group examined why the system broke as horribly as it did: The contracts awarded to those who built it were, by and large, existing government contractors with “deep political pockets.”
“All but one of of the 47 contractors who won contracts to carry out work on the Affordable Care Act worked for the government prior to its passage,” the report reads. Some of the names ought to be familiar: Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Deloitte, and Booz Allen Hamilton, all of whom assumed different roles and worked on different aspects of the project.
As familiar as those names might be, especially to those who follow Beltway lobbying practices, few of them would be as commonly associated with large-scale IT projects as, say, Google, Amazon.com, or Dell would be – especially when it came to building the public-facing components of the system. (Techdirt concurs.)
Why did they get the work? The report hints at a likely reason: The companies were big lobbyists, with “some 17 contract winners reported spending more than $128 million on lobbying in 2011 and 2012.” Granted, some experience with government work is vital for any contractor, and the federal procurement system is geared to favor those already doing government work, but Sunlight pointed out that the list tips heavily toward those with both existing contracts and political leverage.
What happened to “change”?
Maybe you need a blog.