Healthcare - I'm on Public Option slow boil
POSTED BY: pizmobeach
UPDATED: Thursday, October 8, 2009 02:16
VIEWED: 8381
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"Funny how all the anti-Govt folks here are silent all of a sudden. I guess it's only hip & cool to be an anarchist or libertarian when there's a Republican Adminstration in power."
Hello,
I think you possibly haven't been paying enough attention.
If you examine the posts in this very thread, you will find that there is a fear amongst libertarians and anarchists that is even greater than their fear of a government monopoly on your life.
And that fear is a fear of government-enabled corporate monopoly on your life.
Which is exactly what this thread is crying out in opposition to. This is not a thread debating the merits of health care reform. It is a thread lamenting the catastrophe of mandatory health care in the absence of a public option alternative.
My own posts on the subject should be quite instructive as to why this is a bad idea.
--Anthony
"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner
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Just wanted to comment on "A list of broken promises is (always) fair." (Is it "necro-posting" if I bring up an issue from 80 posts upthread? 
)
First of all, I'm not a big fan of "fair," of course. It's a childish ethic, based on shifting perceptual "equalities" that dumbs down the whole discussion to the level of binary, he said/she said irrelevance.
A conservative complaining about Obama's broken promises is at best ingenuous and at worst undemocratic. Liberals breaking campaign promises mean a win for the conservatives--they should be happy. As an anti-conservative, what I wouldn't give for Bush to have broken some of his campaign promises!
It's about on the level of liberals complaining about some right-wing senator's sex life. Liberals don't care about that crap, so they really shouldn't pretend they do just to gain some political points. "Oooh, let's do everything we can to spin every situation to make the other guy look bad!" To any adults in attendance, this kind of crap just makes you look bad.
And speaking of adults, this sanctification of "campaign promises" has gotta go! Repeat after me: POTUS ≠ Santa Claus. Pretending that all Obama's gotta do is get elected and all the promises will become law the next day is asinine. And acting as if his not doing so is some grand betrayal of us all is just as dunderheaded. I'm far, far more interested in the reasons for not immediately implementing a campaign promise--the who/what/where/why of it--than the mere fact that circumstances have motivated him to change his mind or postpone his actions. He's a g.d. human being whom the country has hired to do a job for which no one is qualified before entering office. Blaming him for the fact that his best laid plans have gone astray is simply naïve. If he's shown to have out-and-out lied, pretended to believe a thing that he actually opposes, well then, that's something. But to expect the President to have absolute control over the political process, well, that simply betrays one's own authoritarian leanings, now don'it?
Obama has made it clear enough to me that he's committed to actual healthcare reform, that he's aware of the stakes for us Americans. I think he's fully aware that if healthcare "reform" becomes nothing but a big giveaway to the insurance lobbies that his "political capital" would be voided and he would be out of a job in just over 3 years. I fully expect that he would veto a bill that would turn the entire Country into Massachusetts. I don't think my confidence is any less credible than any of the cynicism I've seen in this thread. Time will tell. I see we're living out the Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times! 
HKCavalier
Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
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It's more complicated than him lying, it's the deal-making and compromises I know he's had to make frustrates me. This mandatory insurance is an obvious one. Another obvious one is the actions in Pakistan only six days into his term: that was actually a campaign promise, one I didn't like because it's motivated by other interests.
There's a lot of things that are creeping into the books that aren't things I like. Obama as a target of blame is pointless, the people who are real trouble are the people behind him who he's making these deals with so he can succeed with what he wants to accomplish. There's no other way to do it, the corporate interests (and a number of other interests as well) have the money that Obama needs.
But these same interests have some scary, scary ideas, and they're ALWAYS working towards them. Obama is a pawn.
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HK
I kinda gotta agree with the Byte. I think Obama would pick public option, but "health care reform" if it means "you must buy this product" that's not an improvement in anybodies book.
Also, anti-conservative? Is that a position? You are against conserving?
As for democrat sex scandals, that's spin. The right attacks the left for something real, and some GOP tools and media tools come in and help make it all about sex. Check out Ron Paul's speech on Clinton's impeachment. There are some other good one's too. This was about killing lots and lots of people. It makes me sick to see clintons anywhere near the white house, just as it would to Bushes.
Billary bouncing around town pulling strings is just as bad as having elected JEB. If that ain't clear as day, then there's undoubtedly a little reading that you gotta catch up on.
The scariest thing is people who *have* done the research, and still support Clinton. I had one member of the actual Clintonistas say to me "Sometimes Genocide is a viable solution." Here point: Killing one million Iraqi civilians would be worth it to remove Saddam Hussein (screw the fact that it didn't work for the moment...) She was openly admitting that she knew her prez had intentionally killed a million civilians, and thought that it was "the right thing to do." This is like the "we had to nuke hiroshima" crowd.
So, yeah, criticism is always fair, and welcome. I would hate to live in a country where people had to fall in line and just hope for the best. That's disasterocracy. Or is it disastocracy?
Spellcheck doesn't like either one.
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Quote:
Also, anti-conservative? Is that a position? You are against conserving?
You know how you say that the word "socialist" has particular connotations far beyond what was originally intended? Same with "conservative". Nowadays, for a good half the population, it means "backwards, hidebound, refusing to move forward or adapt". Or, more simply, "the party of old white men."
So yeah, you CAN be an "anti-conservative". I got what it meant. Of course, I've never understood those who use "liberal" as if it were a four-letter word, or refer to "progressives" with venom in their voices. Are they against progress?
Mike
The percentage you're paying is too high-priced
While you're living beyond all your means;
And the man in the suit has just bought a new car
From the profit he's made on your dreams
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"This is like the "we had to nuke hiroshima" crowd."
Hello,
I've heard a lot of condemnation of this just recently, and it's interesting to me.
I assume we are all aware of what the alternative would have looked like?
Or the devastation and death caused by what preceded it?
I never seem to hear much condemnation or horror directed in that direction. It seems to have become popular to decry the terrible use of nuclear arms on Japan whilst simultaneously forgetting the much more terrible use of conventional weapons on Japan.
I don't favor an un-balanced view of the situation. It bothers me when people focus on the image of incinerated, crisped bodies of women and children, civilians of all stripes...
and forget the image of incinerated, crisped bodies of women and children, civilians of all stripes.
--Anthony
"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner
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I think all of them were bad, nuclear weapons AND the firebombing. Neither of those should have happened, because that's a WAR that shouldn't have happened.
And I mean SHOULDN'T. On the Europe front, we shouldn't have tried so hard to punish and ruin Germany with the Treaty of Versailles, though I guess no one could have expected the Great Depression in America or the effect that had on the global economy, or that the Germans would be so quick to rebound. But if Europe hadn't been so distracted, Japan might not have taken advantage of the opportunity.
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Mike,
I disagree. I think that "Republican" has, sure, but "Socialist" was discredited by socialists internationally, and any new form of collectivism that doesn't have a top down central power structure orchestrating everything though direct control over social engineering should get a new name.
Conservatism has not done this yet. The British Conservative party has not gone off the deep end, in fact, it's fairly well rooted in the ideas of the root word, "conservative" as is true in many other, probably most countries. In the US, there are a large number of conservatives who are not loons. We have has "neocons" and "Bush." No one, not even his stalwart conservative supporters called Bush a "conservative" because there is no measure by rights (individual, community or state), resources (natural, mineral), economics(budget, fiscal policy) environmental conservation, even foreign policy, there was nothing conservative in this administration, except maybe a casual nod to the family values crowd, but then, no force behind it. There wasn't even support for business, small or big, unless you were a govt-sponsored corporation. No, conservatives clung to Bush not because they had any illusion that he was conservative, but because he pushed their fear buttons, not just on terrorism, but on what democratic liberalism would be like. He had the advantage of succeeding Clinton in that regard.
But at the same time, you had clearly a lot more support for ron paul, by any measure of rallies, contributions, etc., only computerized voting disagreed, but when it did, it went for John McCain, Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee, all of whom are objectively conservative. The neocons on the ballot like Rudy and Fred (who?) Thompson, with all of their media support, couldn't even poll as high as Steven Colbert.
So, I disagree. Conservative would have to do a lot more than this.
Consider for a moment what the US liberal Democratic party has done without destroying the names "Liberal" or "Democrat":
1. First act: Indian Removal Act
2. Slavery as national policy
3. Several more indian wars
4. Secession, (republicans made a disasterous war out of it, and a disasterous reconstruction)
5. The federal reserve
6. Federal Income Tax
7. World War I
8. The New Deal, and all the spending programs, taxes, which largely just took your money and gave you pennies on the dollar back, but created:
9: The National Debt, which was made worse by:
10: World War II, which ended in:
11: Dropping two nuclear bombs on civilian populations of a long term US ally.
12: Complicit support of disasterous take over of Europe, and China.
13: Another war in Korea
14: A war in Vietnam
15: Deregulation, monopolies, the mark to market train wreck economy, merger mania monopolies, and everything Clinton, Waco, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq, and a seldom talked about war in afghanistan, secret torture prisons, domestic wiretapping, halliburton takeover of the military industrial complex, rampant deforestation at home and abroad, the whole sell off of US assets, etc. etc. etc..
Okay, and someone can still run on a ticket with the name Democrat? In retrospect I'm astonished that the party wasn't removed from the ballot in 1832.
So, no, conservative, which has been around for centuries, will survive this. "Neoconservative," will probably not.
Quote:
"This is like the "we had to nuke hiroshima" crowd."
Hello,
I've heard a lot of condemnation of this just recently, and it's interesting to me.
I assume we are all aware of what the alternative would have looked like?
Or the devastation and death caused by what preceded it?
I never seem to hear much condemnation or horror directed in that direction. It seems to have become popular to decry the terrible use of nuclear arms on Japan whilst simultaneously forgetting the much more terrible use of conventional weapons on Japan.
I don't favor an un-balanced view of the situation. It bothers me when people focus on the image of incinerated, crisped bodies of women and children, civiliaNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Hello Dream,
I'm unfortunately unable to distill from your response exactly what you meant to say in refutation of my statements.
Unless you meant to say that we should have concluded the war with Japan without defeating them?
--Anthony
"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner
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Speaking of the false dichotomy between right/left-dem/rep, Anthony Gregory has a nice piece regarding that which is well worth reading.
I think he picked the wrong title for it, but the subject material is sound.
http://ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle539-20091004-02.html
-F
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Tony
Yes, well, we lost the war, by any measure.
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