Mao on a pogo stick, sometimes I’m thinking the current crop of right wingnut Republicans are secret Red Chinese Communist moles that want to implement the China model in the US of A.
Oy! This is the second time that someone in the Dope is making me defend a worm like Beck!
[continues reading]…
And Anne Coulter too! Ugh!
Glen Beck and Ann Coulter are on the record of calling the birthers nuts and cranks.
The real swines are guys like Rush, Hannity and Savage that still go around “just asking” birther questions.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/07/ann-coulter-calls-birthers-cranks.php
Conservatives are people who dislike Change. They seek comfort in Tradition, in things being The Same As They Always Have Been, even when that ‘Same’ is an unrealized mythology (such as the idea that the USA is a ‘Christian Nation’). Their beliefs tend to be grounded in the bedrock of such traditions, which to them are The Truth.
Change indicates a move away from such known truthes, thus a challenge and denial of their core beliefs. This is why they react with anger and fear to wholesale change, especially where such change challenges what they consider underlying truthes, such as morality and religion. (Even when their personal acting morality is in blatant conflict with their publicly proclaimed morality.)
Conservatives are not alone in wanting an ‘echo chamber’ of similar beliefs. Lefties like the same thing. Neither is really any different upon achieving power - both sides seek to silence opposition by violent repression of any hint of dissent or differing opinion. The Party Line is how all ‘good’ people are required to think on all sides of the spectrum.
Balderdash, sir! Toimmyrot! We on the left don’t have a “Party Line”, we can’t agree on what to have for lunch! We got a rough consensus about direction, that is, progressive. Dissent? Yeah, we got some. Oodles.
Tell that to the Cubans, to the former Soviets, to the Chinese, to the North Koreans, etcetera, etcetera.
What tradition do they like? Our founding fathers dislikes company power. They had a tea bagger incident to show their displeasure. They set up corporate charters that were easy to revoke for such things as acting against public interests . That would be nice to return to those days. We have morphed away from a country dedicated to the interests of all the people to one that the people are subservient to big money and corporate power.
Yep, lets go back to the good old days.
Yep it’s just the Right that participates in an echo chamber. Christ I just finished reading this Goddamn thread and as usual the masturbatory angst against the Right is overwrought, indignant, and exaggerated.
Why don’t all of you on the Left here just fellate each other and call it a day.
I would love to see those of you to show some humility from time to time and maybe admit that the Right could possibly have a good argument in regards to certain policies and beliefs.
I’ll just mention two that I would like to see happen here but probably won’t:
The Teachers Union is a joke and should be disbanded. I pretty much feel the same about all public unions in the 21st century but I’ll settle for a bone thrown our way just for that union.
The Health Care Act: As written, it is broken into so many breaks for special interest and mind numbingly complex regulations that it would be better to start over.
I would like for some on the Left to maybe, just maybe admit that the uncertainty of this program has contributed (possibly significantly) to the continued high unemployment rate.
Companies are afraid to hire new employees full time without knowing the full cost of this program.
Oh and if this program ends up saving money for the federal government according to the CBO I’ll forever stop watching porn.
I’m sure this will turn out as expected but what the hell.
As mentioned before, when I see science being disparaged by conservative leaders I don’t think that we are exaggerating at all.
As a slight majority of teachers are conservative I think this is not a good subject for your point.
I guess you did not pay attention to most of the threads discussing that. Many on the left said that it was not a good act, but the fact is that not doing anything to control the rising health care costs (the de facto Republican plan) is an unsustainable plan, and in the previous discussions I pointed at research that showed that the current health care situation is the one that is actually costing jobs.
As the CBO is bi-partisan I could say you lost the bet already, but feel free to continue watching porn.
I see echoes of this in the talk conservatives indulge in when liberals propose anything too principle-based. The phrase the real world is slung around like a club at anyone proposing to address issues that affect anything beyond people’s tax bills. Some even accuse libs of believing in the perfectability of humanity - something you’d think the Holy Joe wing of the GOP was focused on for a lot of years.
Basically, what modern conservatism is focused on is winning at all costs - moral, social, financial or otherwise. A good conservative learns that winning is the real morality, and far above any principle.
WTF is wrong with you, conservative America?!? There are a slew of good arguments in regards to certain policies and beliefs–but the face and voice of modern conservatism has become dominated by the likes of Beck, Coulter, Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, and a host of others who push those rationale arguments to the back in favor of gross over-generalizations, malformed logic, and intentionally deceptive practices.
It is unfortunate that there are those that cannot distinguish between a pitting of the tortured logic and malfeasance of the voice of the conservative viewpoint and a pitting of conservative ideals in general.
Sorry, I’m still too busy laughing my ass off at the idea that conservatives crave an echo chamber more than liberals.
No wonder when you have FOX. 
I know that conservatives like to say that the corporate press is liberal, but really, the reality is that they depend on advertisers that pressure them on what to focus, that means that the liberals have very few outlets to present and **repeat **constantly their points of view.
The few conservatives that have weighed in so far in this thread have made my OP point for me.
The problem is that my side is right and the other side is completely wrong. We have free thinkers and people that constructively disagree. The other side is made up of sheeple, all thinking the same thing, only what their talking heads say. And their fringe elements are just dangerous! They should be outlawed, the proposals they make. At least our fringe elements are few in number and only advocate a few things that are outside of what society really needs. If only my side had power for a few years, we could show everyone that we know how to really fix America, make it right. Plus their talking heads are boring, ours are funny and insightful.
This is one of the biggest straw men I’ve seen in a while.
I don’t think you know what that phrase really means.
That is OK, I don’t think you don’t know also how wrong the side that disparages science is.
Your point in the OP seemed to be something about it being sad that there are birthers and that some people haven’t paid as close attention as you to the statements made by that blonde chick who writes political books, while most of us have chimed to say that the usual smug masturbatory self-congratulatory posts on this board are laughable counter-evidence to the theory that conservatives are more likely to only want to hear people express the same opinions that they hold (I mean Jesus, people, there are 50x more threads here started by liberals who want confirmation that [insert issue] is terrible than conservatives doing likewise - no, no desire for an echo chamber at all there). Seems to me that we’ve helped derail the points you were trying to make, not proved them.
As for your OP, of course Obama is an American. And I’ve never read a word Ann fucking Coulter has written, so how the hell am I supposed to know what she says about Muslims?
Not at all, Kid C has offered us a sternly sarcastic admonition to beware of the dangers of self-righteous stubborness, and reminds us of humility and modesty in our opinions. Virtues I can heartily endorse and recommend without the slightest intent to emulate.
You know, you’ve had it explained to you over and over again that the CBO does nothing but calculate numbers based on the assumptions baked into the questions it is asked. The Democrats cooked the books on the health care bill, and you know it. They set up the question to the CBO such that the answer would be pre-ordained. Then once they got the CBO imprimatur, they trumpeted it like it’s the last word that ever needs to be said about the financing of the health care bill.
But since you’re willing to accept the CBO as the oracle of health care wisdom, how about we dig a bit into the letter the CBO just sent to the congress?
Text of the letter here.
This is a useful letter because it breaks down the health care bill’s costs and revenues, and therefore sheds light on exactly why the CBO scored it as reducing the deficit.
The first and most important thing to note is that it’s NOT reducing the cost of health care, which was one of its main selling points originally. The only reason it reduces the deficit on paper is because the Democrats baked in a whole bunch of assumptions about the extra revenue it would raise and promised a bunch of savings by capturing planned cuts in other agencies and attributed them to this bill.
For example, the CBO credits the bill with raising $27 billion dollars from penalties paid by uninsured citizens. The CBO has to do that, because the Congress said they’re going to collect it. Except that they took out any means of actually enforcing that collection. So just who is going to pay? How much of that $27 billion are they really going to collect?
The bill raises 148 billion dollars by raising taxes on medical device manufacturers. But what it doesn’t do is assume that this will push up the cost of medical devices at all. Since it’s the government that will be paying for those medical devices through the health exchanges, that seems… problematic.
The bill raises 248 billion dollars through a new hospital insurance tax. Again, the implicit assumption is that this will have no effect on the cost of health care services - which the government or insurance companies will have to pay.
The bill raises $111 billion dollars through special taxes on ‘gold plated’ employer insurance plans. Except that the administration has already exempted the largest companies from that under pressure from labor unions. The Obama administration has so far issued 733 waivers to allow various special interests to avoid penalties and fees associated with the health care bill, including a blanket exemption to the SEUI, one of the largest unions in the country. That will have a big effect on the ‘gold plated’ tax collection and the 82 billion dollars that the bill was supposed to collect from non-compliant companies. But the waivers are not scored by the CBO because they’re not part of the bill.
The CBO letter actually takes care to note the limitations of its estimates:
Those changes are already happening, and every single one of them is a change that has a negative impact on the deficit.
The bill cuts costs by $379 billion by reducing the fees paid to doctors’ FFS payment rates. Except that no one believes that this will actually happen, and Obama has already punted on this year’s reductions. In any event, those fees were scheduled to be reduced whether bill had passed or not, and really had nothing to do with this legislation. The Democrats just included it to make the numbers look better. The CBO had no choice but to score it, because that’s the way the bill was written.
I could go on. The bottom line is that covering an additional 33 million people costs a lot of money. This bill doesn’t save money at all - it creates a new entitlement that will add about a trillion dollars to the cost of government, and only comes in as deficit neutral because it contains big tax hikes and captures savings that would have happened anyway.
Or look at it this way - you could keep the tax hikes, eliminate the other stuff, and reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars over the next ten years.
Finally, the CBO only looks at the bill itself - not the effect of the bill on the economy or other government outlays and revenues. For example, if the uncertainty around the health care bill is affecting unemployment, then the government is already paying for it through increased UI premiums and reduced tax revenue. If the additional $813 billion dollars in new taxes in the bill cut economic growth, that will also have an affect on revenues and the deficit.
So the CBO scores that the health care bill will, overall, reduce the deficit by $210 billion dollars because the tax increases and promised spending cuts in the bill are larger than the proposed costs. This should be considered the absolute best-case scenario - and a highly unlikely one. In the real world, almost every deviation from the rosy estimates of the bill will drive costs up and revenue down.