No it doesn’t. First, your smug and condescending tone is off-putting. Secondly, you failed to attempt to comprehend my point. Finally, you’re simply wrong, making your condescension very amusing.
The analogy is not only flawed, it is horribly misleading. Ordering a sandwich can be simplified because it is a simple task. Does WaWa’s have a touch tone keypad for applying to be a franchise? If I wanted to move my existing WaWa’s to another location, is there a touch tone keypad I could use for that?
The size and scope of the Medicare system is also a bit larger than WaWa’s deli.
Finally, if there is no pressure for the federal government to make things easier for the people who interact with it, explain all of the things I can do online to interact with Medicare. What about electronic claims submissions and processing? What about efiling of your taxes?
The idea that businesses and the business model are to be held up as the standard of efficiency is a conservative fantasy. The conservatives who make this kind of stupid claim are the same ones who will bitch to me about trying to reach customer service at Verizon. Sheesh, the stories and beliefs that you all will buy into just to benefit the wealthy is just remarkable.
They lean “Forward”, thank you very much. Unlike Fox, MSNBC has journalistic standards and accountability. Witness Ed Schultz’s suspension. They may lean Democratic, but the news they present is not unfactual. Compare that to Fox, where they don’t mind lying and deception in the least. (oopsies, we put another “D” next to the name of a Republican caught in a scandal).
Fair enough. They edited the video in such a way that it overemphasized the point. Romney was pandering to the locals and screwed it up, which is really pretty common in national politicians, and he did a bad job of describing technology he is not very familiar with, which is also not unusual for politicians or, say, 65-year-old men like Mitt Romney.
Reminder since he’s been in the news recently: in 2004 John Kerry went to Wisconsin and called Lambeau Field “Lambert Field,” which was even dumber. I see I failed to post anything about the obvious similarities between Romney and Kerry before this week, and I’m very annoyed about it now that the Obama campaign has announced Kerry will ‘play’ Romney in debates, The Daily Show covered it, and everybody else has noticed.
So, where is the center, then, by which we can determine who leans in what direction? If MSNBC offers reporting that favors a policy that a majority of Americans favor, are they “leaning left”? How much does one’s definition of leaning left or right depend on one’s own political persuasions? Is there really any such thing as a “centrist”, someone who’s views are perfectly balanced on that point between left and right?
Perhaps we should say “favor policies supported by Democrats” as opposed to “favoring policies supported by Republicans”. That’s a lot easier to judge, no?
In that case, MSNBC leans “Democratic” and Fox leans “Republican”.
MSNBC leans “forward” and Fox leans…, well, draw your own conclusions!
This board is dominated by the liberal set, to whom Fox’s perfidities are a matter of Gospel. And now you want to craft a rule that if the few conservatives can’t leap on each and every looney leftism, and deny it, it’s considered accepted?
It’s time to bring some competition to the federal government."*
[/QUOTE]
Yes! Someone needs to set up a new government to compete with the one we’ve got, and let the free market decide which is the best. I like it. What could possibly go wrong?
Even if one has never used it for a sandwich (there are several other places besides Wawa where one might have), given all the other technology that’s around I’m finding it a bit hard to credit the idea that anyone–Mitt Romney, steronz, or most anyone in the country–is amazed by this mundane device.
Mitt Romney is “out of touch,” but I don’t count this item so much as evidence of that, as of his need to really reach for something to say. This is the best example he can come up with?
If MSNBC cut it off after “amazing,” they did him a favor. Ended there, I only smile gently at his golly!-ness. In the context of, apparently, trying to make a political argument, he comes off more as bereft of inspiration and a little desperate.
It sounds like there is a 37 page document that includes several different types of forms and lots of instructions. The form that one would submit for the change of address is two pages long, one of which is merely a checkbox. So it seems dishonest at the least. The implication is that one fills out 37 pieces of paper, which is off by about 94.6%.
It’s not a lie. But it’s pretty close to the shoddy ham-fisted nonsense the OP is rightly calling out MSNBC for. I guess all we can hope for in terms of honesty and objectivity in political discourse these days is that we get equal portions of bullshit from all corners of the political spectrum.
My take on this whole ‘debate’ is that there are things that local government is good at, things federal government is good at, and things the private sector is good at. And there are worthwhile discussions to be had about which entities can best handle which areas of public life. But no one is having those discussions because we’ve all opted instead for a big, meaningless circle jerk of Gotcha Ya’s. This isn’t Romney’s fault, of course, but he’s playing the game like the rest of us. He has shown during his tenure as governor that he can be a reasonable, efficient politician, but he’s apparently decided he’d rather be president.
Come on now. I’m not going to go back and watch the speech again right this minute, but Romney either said or very strongly implied that the guy had to fill out a 33-page form three times just to change his address. The idea was not that he received a long form in the mail, it’s that he had to fill out a mind-boggling amount of paperwork.
