They are also big government ideas that are written into the platform of the Republican Party. The Big Government, Republican party.
No snark intended, but what are you referring to here? I’m a fairly liberal dude and I’m not getting the reference.
So, in 2004:
…In 2004, Bush’s bird flu czar was Stewart Simonson. He worked as an assistant secretary of health and human services for public health emergency preparedness. And although he had no medical experience or expertise in public health, he did enjoy a noted career as a Republican political insider.
from here:
Clothy, you joined in 2000. Show me in 2004 your outraged response to this bit of idiocy from Bush. Or admit you are an idiot. Either would be good.
Are you suggesting that liberals are behind the drug war?
Show your work, if you please.
I don’t know if liberals are behind the war on pain pills, but I have yet to see a liberal stand up and say that whether to use them or not is a decision between a patient and doctor that the government has no business interfering in. Given their absolutist position on abortion, you’d think they’d apply that laudable thinking to other issues. Or at least issues where the exact same logic applies. Either medical decisions are strictly between a patient and a doctor, or they are subject to government interference.
Big Government, the way you use it, doesn’t exist. It’s a bogey man. A phantom that people with small minds use in lieu of an intelligent argument.
Explain in detail what programs you think are unnecessary. If you say “Big Government” that tells us nothing except that you have no idea what specifically you want to cut. It’s a stupid person’s way of having something policy-wise to bitch about. Transcend your limits and actually think before bleating your utter shit.
Well, you never stated what you thought of it, you just paraphrased it into gibberish.
Jesus merciful fuck. Please tell me you’ve had a recent concussion. Because if word-salad mush like that is what you actually think… well I guess it explains your voting record.
Liberals and libertarians are generally pro drug legalization of some drugs. Although, I don’t think many liberals are for giving out drugs without regulation. Because regulation is what keeps things safe. If you overuse antibiotics, for instance, it will fuckle their usefulness in the future.
That said, no liberal I’m aware of is suggesting that abortions shouldn’t be regulated. If you want to perform one with a rusty fork, that should be illegal.
That’s what you call a regulation. But if an abortion is to be done according to best medical practices, then I’d say most pro-choice liberals would be for allowing that to happen.
Wanting best medical practices to be the norm, isn’t the same thing as racking a shotgun and yelling, “FREE PILLS FO’ EVERONE, Y’ALL!!1”
Big Government, as I use it, means government that is encouraged to always expand its reach and power into areas traditionally handled by state and local governments, or left to individual initiative.
It’s quite intelligent to question whether the government should be doing more things tomorrow than it is today, because the only thing I hear from Democrats is what MORE the government could be doing, how much MORE it could be spending. I don’t hear much about the things it should stop doing. This despite the fact that the government can’t handle the jobs it already has.
We generalize because it’s easy, but I’ve already given examples here. One, should the CDC really be devoting resources and expertise to issues having nothing to do with their core mission of preventing pandemics? And the CDC isn’t the only culprit. Homeland Security is worried about illegal trade in cars and child porn. Guess all the terrorists are dead and our borders are locked down preventing new ones from getting in.
And while we’re talking about how stupid people talk about government policy, can we please dispense with the dumb argument that opposing a big budget increase means that you’re at fault when the agency in question fails to accomplish its mission? Or that a 1% cut will “cripple” said agency? No one knows what the correct budget level is for any particular agency. yet liberals go into paroxysms of outrage whenever a program is to receive a smaller than desired budget increase.
“Best medical practices” tends to include dictating which situations call for a medical procedure and which situations do not. Doctors have been placed under investigation for giving out too many prescriptions for pain pills. Yet a few doctors have performed late term abortions with zero oversight regarding whether it was appropriate. There is a clear difference in government oversight here: if you prescribe pain pills, you’d better be able to justify it to the authorities. If you abort a 26-week old fetus, we’ll just take your word for it that it was necessary.
Do you have any evidence that this “core mission” was ever explicitly stated as the central and only basis for the CDC’s existence, or that the CDC’s current areas of investigation are somehow in violation of a specific mission statement or government directive?
Every pocket history of the CDC that i can find, from Wikipedia to the University of Illinois at Chicago to the CDC itself suggests that the organization began in a rather ad hoc and informal way, and that it has grown by accretion over time, as the particular circumstances required.
It began by focusing on malaria prevention, but no evidence i can find suggests that it was ever told to restrict itself to epidemics or pandemics. In subsequent years and decades, it focused its attention on venereal disease, tuberculosis, polio, influenza, and a whole bunch of other communicable diseases. But it is clear that a key focus of the organization, from the beginning, was both on disease but also on the more general issue of public health. It started with malaria, because at the time malaria was considered a great threat to public health, it branched out to other diseases precisely as those diseases made themselves knows as public health threats, and it moved beyond diseases as other issues became important focuses of public health concern.
The very first name of the organization, in its earliest form, was the Office of National Defense Malaria Control Activities, and even in its early years as the Communicable Disease Center it was focused almost exclusively on malaria. Do you think that it should devote itself only to malaria now, because that’s how it started out and government expansion is a bad thing?
As with any other public agency, there are reasonable questions to be asked about whether or not the CDC needs to do as much as it does. But is the expansion of the CDC really a “stupid liberal idea”?
According to the chart on this page (produced by the libertarian CATO Institute), the largest increase of any period in the last 40 years was during the Bush administration, when the outlays of the CDC rose from $3.448 billion (2000) to $6.328 billion. Of those 8 years under a Republican president, Republicans also controlled the House for 6 years, and the Senate for 4 years.
That’s an 84.5% increase under Bush in 8 years. Under Obama, the CDC outlays have risen from $6.328 billion to $6.783 billion, or 7.2% in 6 years.
So, you were attacking liberals for a position you have no idea if liberals actually hold. Got it.
This will change when a bunch of idiot teenagers kill themselves by crushing and injecting aborted fetuses that they stole from their grandma’s medicine cabinet or bought from a shady abortionist running a fetus mill.
You mean any particular Wednesday at Planned Parenthood?
I just imagine adaher’s rants about liberals and pain pills are being said by Rush Limbaugh and suddenly it makes sense*.
*OK, the wording is still mishmash gibbertoon, but the intent becomes clear.
So, just trying to understand where you are going with this: ‘liberals’, however you define them, are generally in favor of unregulated late-term abortions? 'Cause that’s what it sounds like, and that, of course, would be silly.
So, you guys are trying to apply consistent logic and reasoning to adaher’s arguments. 'Cause that’s what it sounds like, and that, of course, would be silly.
Hey! I’ve got an idea! Let’s all ignore the latest adaher strawman hijack. You’re not going to convince him of anything, and as long as we all dance whenever he holds up his latest and says “dance monkeys,” he’s going to continue to do so.
Remember “plonk” is not just a five letter word.
Yeah, you’re right.
It could be that the stupidest liberal idea in this thread is to argue with adaher as if he were an honest person.
Oh, not really. I’ve found that pointing out one of his mistakes will cause him to disappear for a while. Sometimes it’s for the better part of a day. He may just be waiting for a thread to move on so he can rejoin it without it being so blatant what points he’s ignoring.
Your confusion about the words “mandatory” and “choice”, which are essentially antonyms is, obviously, reason for us to wonder if you’re “playing with a full deck.”
My impression is that you understand that “conservatives” are not a homogeneous grouping. I’ll guess you don’t lump yourself with homophobes, gun nuts, freemen on the land, racists, goldbug scam artists, oldsters whose only concern is keeping teh guvmint away from their Medicare, creationists, or any of several factions which make up the core of the modern Republiopathic Party. Yet somehow you have blinders which lead you to imagine that “liberals”* are* homogeneous.
Do you consider me a “liberal”? Because I would be happy to stand up and so state, and I can point to posts where I’ve complained about similar restrictions.
But I’d consider myself a “liberal” only in the “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, anybody to the left of John Boehner is a liberal” thinking of post-rational America. In saner days, I’d be closer to moderate Republicans than to liberal Democrats in policy preferences.
I’ve discussed policies isolated from partisan politics with “right-wingers” and often found that the right-winger and I were in agreement about much policy, as long as the right-winger could think beyond Pavlovian “teh guvmint is teh evil” gibberish and exercise his mind. I’d guess you and I might see eye-to-eye on some underlying issues, but it seems you can’t divorce your thought from partisanship.
And that sums up why I find today’s Republicans so contemptible. Policies are irrelevant; no lie is too craven; partisanship, partisanship, and partisanship is all that matters to you.