Followed by half a dozen posts mocking Republicans, Bush, neo-cons, the religious right, Rush Limbaugh, yada yada. For every person who tried to seriously discuss the issue I’m trying to discuss, there are half a dozen like gonzomax, ElvisL1ves, or Der Trihs who dive-bomb the thread with boilerplate attacks or anti-capitalism rants.
Post #124. But I’d be delighted to dig up more.
No, it was short for the ‘end-of-life consultations’ that the Dems wanted included in the bill. The GOP tried to paint that as a plan to tell people it was time for them to up and die.
And as you point out, we currently let the market ration health care. Guess that’s the ‘invisible hand of death’ or ‘Adam Smith’s Reaper’ or something. Sure, either somebody or some mechanism has do decide what will and won’t be paid for, because we can’t devote an infinite quantity of resources to health care. But to the extent that the GOP talks about rationing these days (which they do, just not under the aegis of ‘death panels’ or the like), their objective seems to be to scare people with the prospect of rationing, as if there is none now, rather than making an argument that government rationing is worse than free market rationing.
Sam’s right. The Tea Partiers aren’t the standard sort of Republicans. They’re message-driven. And that message is Ron Paul! Ron Paul! Ron Paul! They’re largely those exact people, using those exact chains of communication. There ain’t that many of them, they ain’t that smart, and a good percentage of 'em are nucking futz about some damn thing or another. Including every form of bigotry imaginable.
It really depends. There are different variations on ‘hard right’. Let’s look at the various impulses that drive the ‘extremes’, and see how palatable they are:
Conservative Populism: economic isolationism, hatred of of the UN, the feeling that big government is the enemy of the ‘little guy’, distrust of academics, etc.
Religious Conservatism: Creationism, against stem cell research, thinking there’s a war on Christmas, yada yada.
Libertarianism: Belief that government is way too big and needs to be scaled back dramatically. Anti-regulation.
I think those are the main strains. In many cases, they overlap. You can find lots of religious conservatives who are also populists. You can find many that pay lip service to libertarianism but really only dislike big government when Democrats run it. etc.
Likewise, we often talk about the ‘extreme left’ as a single concept, but really there are many divides on the left as well, of varying degrees of electability.
Can a winning formula be found on the ‘far right’? Maybe. Looking at the polls and general attitudes among the population today, I think you could probably build a successful party around libertarian principles. I don’t say this just because it fits closest to my own beliefs, but by looking at polls such as the latest Gallup poll.
For Republicans to win, they have to capture the independents. But that doesn’t mean they have to support liberal causes. The independents lean center right. A plurality of them decribe themselves as social moderates and fiscal conservatives - libertarian, in other words. They’re probably not hard-core libertarians, but in general they think that the left wants too much government, and the right wants too much social control. That’s why they’re stuck in the middle.
So… If someone came along who strongly supported smaller government, free-market reforms of health care, a focus on economic growth through making it easier to do business, and yet who was reasonably moderate on social issues (say about where Barack Obama is), I think Republicans could build a big movement around that. The Religious right wouldn’t like it, and the Pat Buchanan populists wouldn’t like it, but enough of the center would be attracted to it as to replace them. And besides, whether they like it or not, those other Republicans aren’t going anywhere.
There has already been a successful candidate like this: Arnold Schwarzenegger. Forgetting what he actually did when he was in office, let’s remember what he originally ran on - cutting government dramatically, lower taxes, fiscal responsibility, but reasonably liberal social policies. And he won on that message - in California.
If the Republicans can find a candidate like that, they will have a winner. Dede Scozzafava was not that kind of Republican. She supported card-check for unions. She supported the stimulus package. She had only minor problems with the health care bill.
The Republicans need someone who is demonstrably intelligent and charismatic, because they’re sick of good ole’ boy Republicans like Bush. They really want someone who can put up solid, well-reasoned arguments against Obama’s big economic liberalism. If they can find someone like that, a lot of them will overlook modest socially liberal policies such as decriminalizing marijuana and some additional support for gay rights. On abortion, they’ll settle for someone who simply says he or she personally disagrees with it, but who won’t go after Roe v Wade. Bush won on that position, after all.
Yes, I actually did. Why don’t you go back and look? Go back and see what I said about the prescription drug benefit. Have a look at what I said about his steel tariffs or farm subsidies. Go back and look at what I said about the Terry Schiavo nonsense. Go back and read what I said about the Harriet Miers nomination. Go back and read what I said about Bush’s stem cell policies. Go back and read what i said about the Bush Administration’s handling of Iraq before the surge.
I think your memories are tainted by the one or two big issues on which I agreed with Bush. But in general, I was no apologist for the Bush administration. When when I did take the side of the administration, it was often not because I liked what they were doing, but because the attacks on them were so over the top and ridiculous. I’ve complained many times on this board that I hated having to be the one to defend Bush, because on any other board I’d be the one complaining about him. But around here, the anti-Bush attacks often went so far over the top that I was forced to take the opposing side.
This is what McConnell said:
I don’t find that particularly extreme, considering that this has happened already in countries with socialized medicine. Is is scare-mongering? Sure. He’s phrasing it in a particularly frightening way. That’s what politicians do. But is it wacked-out paranoid conspicary stuff? Not at all. The current plan will cut $500 billion from medicare. It’s hard to see that happening without some cuts in coverage for someone. Britains NIH makes determinations about who will get treatment all the time.
Here in Canada, there was a woman who had a problem with vision degeneration and headaches. She couldn’t get in to see a neurologist for weeks. She mortgaged her home and used the money to go to the U.S. for diagnosis - and was found to have a fast-growing brain tumor. She had surgery within a couple of days and is well now. Had the U.S. not been available to her as an option, I think it’s fair to say that our health care system would have killed her.
My own Grandmother suffered in pain daily for several years while sitting on a waiting list for knee surgery, because she was old and therefore not a high-priority case. So to me, this isn’t theoretical or far-fetched.
I agree with you that the end-of-life consultations that Palin used in her attack against ‘death panels’ was false. But she just picked the wrong target. The health care plan does create advisory boards who will determine payment schedules for various medical treatments, and their determination will consider things like Quality-adjusted years of life. This is what’s done in Britain’s NIH today.
Yes, this is more of a philosophical debate about the mechanism for rationing, rather than whether or not rationing will exist at all. It exists now, it will exist under any government plan. It’s the health care equivalent of socialism - goods are scarce, and not everyone can have what they want. Given that, would you rather have access be controlled by the income of the people who want stuff, or would you rather have government determine who should get their ‘fair share’ of scarce goods?
My belief is that there are very good arguments why government is very bad at this kind of resource allocation, and that there will be significant negative unintended consequences from government intervention.
And my answer is: yes. Free market rationing is much preferable to government rationing. For many reasons, but that’s a subject for another thread.
I used the wrong term, and I apologize. What I meant was “the right wing of the party”, among which I include neocons, teabaggers, birthers, racists, anti-abortion wackaloons, and any other folks nutty enough to draw Hitler moustaches on Obama pictures.
If you want to exclude the neocons from that group, go right ahead. But as the originators of the whole “American Century” scheme to basically take over the world, I’m pretty comfortable putting them among the other nutcases.
Scozzafava backs the Democrat
Apparently she didn’t have “taking one for the team” in her, and now Newt Gingrich has decided she isn’t really a Republican after all:
Type “Sam Stone” into the “Search by Username” box.
Choose posts that are, say, a week ago and newer, and show results as threads.
Might also be helpful for you to restrict your search to GD, since you rarely debate in the Pit.
Doing that, I know that the GD threads you’ve been involved in most recently are this thread, Obama v. Fox, the hate crimes bill thread, the “My heart is broken about Obama” thread, the Honduran coup thread, Ahnold’s ‘fuck you’, the Home Depot cashier, etc.
That tells you where you’ve been debating lately, so that’s where you need to check to see if anyone’s responded to your most recent posts. My personal attitude is that you really only need to check back to threads you’ve posted to in the past 2-3 days; after that, AFAIAC, it’s perfectly reasonable to have moved on.
This doesn’t directly find responses to your posts, but it reminds you of what threads you’re actively engaged in, that you might should open and eyeball for responses.
Well, you’re leaving out the bizcons, who have been so important in funding RW think-tanks, media, etc., and who are not the same as libertarians. Consistent libertarians are hostile to government regulation of business and industry, but also hostile to all the favors government does for established business interests – fat sweetheart contracts, bailouts in times of crisis, etc.
You’re also ignoring that fact that conservative populists, or paleocons, in the mold of Pat Buchanan and America First, are also economic populists, in the tradition of Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan, and are as hostile to big business as to big government. It makes for an unstable coalition.
Look at the 2009 study linked in post #82. Given a full range of choices, only 2% of Americans can be classified as “libertarians.”
Again, see also the Pew Political Typology – last updated 2005 (though I understand they’re going to do again in 2010), but they’ve been redoing this study periodically since 1987 and have observed no really dramatic shifts from one study to the next. How many of the typology groups could get behind a consistent libertarian platform? Not the Enterprisers – they believe in military intervention abroad, which libertarians do not. (A big military establishment is biggummint of the costliest kind.) Not the Social Conservatives – they believe in state regulation of personal lives in all kinds of non-libertarian ways; they also believe corporations make too much profit; and they’re hostile to immigration, while I believe libertarians favor an open-borders policy. Not the Pro-Government Conservatives – they believe in economic regulation and a welfare state. Not the Upbeats – they take a positive view of the government we have now.
Other than the prescription drug benefit, this is all pretty small potatoes.
Sam, I don’t need to. I remember debating you on that issue. I remember in early 2006, how you said we were getting things under control. (Here’s an instance of such happy horseshit.)
One or two? I guess you can wrap them into one or two. Iraq and the war on terror covers a lot of ground. But I don’t remember your being on the side of the angels on torture, warrantless wiretappiing, secret prisons, detaining captives indefinitely and depriving them of habeas rights, the ‘unitary executive,’ the politicization of prosecutions by the DOJ, etc.
There you go again - you’d have objected to all the aforementioned abuses, if the people criticizing them hadn’t been so shrill.
To borrow Atrios’ phrase, it’s all the dirty fucking hippies’ fault.
Again: the awful DFHs made you defend the indefensible.
Cry me a river.
OK, then I got the wrong McConnell lie.
As a non-American, you are surely aware that there are numerous models for universal health care. If every country’s UHC, or even a lot of them, looked like Britain’s, there might be reason for McConnell to say that UHC eventually gets you to the British system. Except that’s hardly the case, is it? So absent a particular basis for arguing that the bills currently under discussion would take us to the British system, rather than France’s or Germany’s or Sweden’s, there’s really no reason to believe that, is there? So McConnell was just MAKING SHIT UP and using it to scare people.
Just like I was saying. Sorry if I got the particulars wrong. but thanks for reminding me of what he actually said.
The cuts are coming from Medicare Advantage, the program where the government subsidizes private insurers to compete with Medicare.
It’s like money lying on the sidewalk, from the POV of the taxpayer, and elimination of the subsidy doesn’t hurt Medicare beneficiaries, either.
Well, yeah - every system is going to leave someone in worse shape than some other system. But OTOH, we leave 45 million people uninsured on any given day, and even the insured might well find that their insurance effectively disappears when they actually need it.
Not having insurance is estimated to kill tens of thousands a year in the U.S.
My own Grandmother suffered in pain daily for several years while sitting on a waiting list for knee surgery, because she was old and therefore not a high-priority case. So to me, this isn’t theoretical or far-fetched.
Sounds like you’re confusing a bunch of stuff. Medicare recipients would continue to get Medicare as is. People getting insurance through their employers now would do the same. The people who would be using ‘the health care plan’ are those who don’t have insurance at all now, so they’re getting a better deal.
[quoteYes, this is more of a philosophical debate about the mechanism for rationing, rather than whether or not rationing will exist at all. It exists now, it will exist under any government plan. It’s the health care equivalent of socialism - goods are scarce, and not everyone can have what they want. Given that, would you rather have access be controlled by the income of the people who want stuff, or would you rather have government determine who should get their ‘fair share’ of scarce goods? [/quote]
The U.S. is the only country where people go bankrupt because they got sick. I think the answer to that one is obvious. The free market is really fucking up people’s lives in this one area. It’s hard to imagine government doing worse. And based on Medicare and the Veterans’ Administration medical system, it’s easy to see it doing a damned sight better.
There’s your belief, and then there’s the relative track records of people’s health care in the U.S. versus other countries - or even American non-veterans under 65 versus what veterans and the elderly get.
Remember the ‘Czar scare’ from earlier this summer? How soon we forget! Obama was “appointing a virtual army of ‘czars’ — each wholly unaccountable to Congress yet tasked with spearheading major policy efforts for the White House” according to
Eric Cantor, the #2 Republican in the House. Oogabooga!
He was soon echoed by Kay Bailey Hutchison, who isn’t part of the Senate leadership, but is thought of as pretty sane - not some nutcase like Inhofe or Coburn or DeMint. Hutchison said that the czars "undermine the Constitution’s guarantee of separated powers.” Oogabooga squared!
With apologies to 1960s one-hit wonders ? and the Mysterians,
The people who describe themselves as “economic conservatives” have had plenty of opportunities to vote for people who talk the talk of smaller government–that is, pretty much every Republican in any office in my lifetime. But most of those voters aren’t willing to cut their own government services; they just wish the government would stop spending so much money on other people. So that’s why government doesn’t get smaller even when those who talk the small-government talk are running things.
That’s the problem with your libertarian coalition. Even if you get them together, you’ll never get them to agree on an ox to gore.
As for Hoffman, the Teabaggers are not exactly going against the Republican tide by supporting a candidate who’s a strong social conservative and talks the talk of an economic conservative, since at least 90% of elected Republicans could be described that way. Despite her backing by the GOP infrastructure, Scozzafava was the one who was outside the mainstream. And I can’t blame Republicans for finding a candidate more in line with their party’s current interests; after all, I’ve been wishing for Democrats to find the balls to kick Joe Lieberman to the curb for years now. Parties aren’t sports teams; they’re coalitions of people with similar beliefs and interests, and people who actively work against those interests shouldn’t be part of the party’s leadership.
But I think I’ve figured out what makes Hoffman so appealing to the Teabaggers, and it’s perfectly exemplified in the statement he released on Scozzafava’s exit from the race:
(I apologize to anyone who was playing the Right-Wing Boogeyman Drinking Game, and best wishes for your recovery from the alcohol poisoning.)
This is one of the characteristics that seems to bind the Teabaggers together: high levels of butthurt. Sarah Palin plumbed previously unexplored depths of butthurt victimhood in her campaign, and her rhetoric struck a chord with those who feel that everybody is out to get them and destroy their way of life. I had hoped that this would go away as Palin faded into the background, but it’s no surprise that other candidates would pick it up and run with it.
Remember when the White House encouraged folks who come across lies and scare tactics about health care reform to email the White House Office of Health Reform and get the straight story?
Of course you do.
And GOP Congresscritters Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Eric Cantor (the #2 Republican in the House) took up the baton from wingnuts Limbaugh, Malkin, etc. and accused the White House of wanting Americans to report on each other, monitor citizens’ speech, and catalogue their names, email addresses, and so forth.
Then there was the “setting terrorists loose in the U.S.” meme. Remember how if we closed Gitmo and imprisoned the detainees here, or brought detainees to the U.S. for trial, we’d be setting terrorists loose to wreak havoc in America?
What a year it’s been - I’d forgotten that one myself until I got in the Way-Back Machine this morning. White noise, relative to some of the other bullshit that’s been going on.
It was ridiculous, of course: terrorists involved in the 1993 WTC bombing, the 1998 Kenya/Tanzania embassy bombings, and other crimes, have been imprisoned on U.S. mainland soil for quite some time, and nobody’s been the least bit concerned. So this was just one more bogus effort on the part of conservatives and the GOP to get people scared over nothing.
Need more examples, Sam? I haven’t even gotten to the Sotomayor debate yet, and that should be exceedingly fertile ground, given the shit the GOP flung around about her.
WTF does that have to do with a possible 3rd party forming on the right?
This Hoffman/Scozzafava thing is interesting enough without anyone needing to toss in the kitchen sink.
There’s only room for a third party on the right if the GOP doesn’t fill that space itself. My point here is that the GOP is adequately pandering to the crazies; there’s really no room there for a right-wing third party that’s to the right of the GOP, without getting into LaRouche territory.
Also, our OP made a claim about teabaggers being nice, friendly people who simply wanted limited government, and the crazies we associate with the teabagging movement weren’t at all representative. My point here is that the more mainstream elements of the Congressional GOP probably wouldn’t be spouting the stuff they’re spouting, if they believed Sam’s claim about the teabaggers. (It’s one thing for Bachmann to be crazy on her own, but when it’s Cantor or Cornyn or Hutchison, you have to ask who they’re trying to keep happy, and why.)
RTFirefly: I’m not really getting the point of your last posts. Republicans are trying to make Democratic programs look bad? Oh the horror. Good thing Democrats would NEVER do that to Republicans. It’s politics. Get used to it.
In any event, each one of the items is disputable. Certainly Bush had a lot of Czars. So what? What matters is what they do, how transparent their actions are, and how much power the President delegates to them. Apparently the ‘pay Czar’ was given complete carte-blanche to decide what the CEOs of the TARP companies would get paid. He’s even said that he basically decided what it should be all on his own. The process is completely opaque to everyone. He doesn’t have to talk to Congress about it. That’s a hell of a lot of power to put in the hands of one man. You don’t need to be a fear-mongering conspiratorialist to wonder if this is a good thing.
As for setting terrorists loose in America, I hope you know the difference between the people in Guantanamo and the terrorists actually arrested by police. The problem with the Guantanamo prisoners is that they were NOT arrested by police. They were captured by the military on the battlefield or in raids in hostile territory Therefore, there were no Miranda rights offered, no chains of evidence, etc. This makes trying them in a court of law problematic, and my understanding is that Guantanamo was used because of a loophole in the law - if those prisoners are brought onto U.S. soil, they have a right to be tried in court, and because of the nature of how they were captured, they will probably be set free. In America.
Why do you think Obama isn’t closing Gitmo? Don’t you think he wants to? He isn’t closing it because he doesn’t have a good alternative. My opinion on it has been the same since Gitmo was opened - it sucks, but I don’t have a better idea. It’s a case where the legal system has not caught up with the reality of 21st century warfare.
As for the ‘snitch list’, are you denying that the White House didn’t set up a web site to have people report on anti-administration activities? The reason this has traction, btw, is because this administration is going out of its way to attack American citizens who oppose it more than any administration has since Nixon. Whether it’s Fox, Rush Limbaugh, or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the White House is ‘punching back twice as hard’ to quote Rahm Emmanual. This may be okay for a campaign to do, but it’s not appropriate behavior from the White House. Those people are citizens, and the Obama is now the head of government. He has no business doing things like attempting to organize media boycotts and launching attack dogs at people who criticize him. That’s supposed to be the work of organizations like Move On and Media Matters, who don’t have the force of arms behind them.
Where were you, Sam, when Bush launched Karl Rove and his attack machine at everyone and his wife for daring to oppose White House policy? Do the names Joe Wilson or Varerie Plame ring a bell? Or the excuses of poor performance put out after the firing of the US Attorneys? Bush’s White house was practically an attack industry.
And the request was not to report ‘anti-administration activities’ in any case. It was a request to report inaccurate information being distributed so the White House could respond.
Yes. I’ll deny it. This is lunatic fringe stuff. The website was for people to post what kind of disinformation was flying around about health care so that the White House could correct it. There was no “list,” nor did it have anything to do with “anti-administration activities.” Surely you KNOW this.
