Me and your mom have been noticing lately that you've been having a lot of problems, And you've been going off for no reason and we're afraid you're going to hurt somebody, And we're afraid you're going to hurt yourself. So we decided that it would be in you're best interest if we put you somewhere Where you could get the help that you need. And I go: Wait, what are you talking about, WE decided!? MY best interests?! How do you know what MY best interest is? How can you say what MY best interest is? What are you trying to say, I'M crazy? When I went to YOUR schools, I went to YOUR churches, I went to YOUR institutional learning facilities?! So how can you say I'M crazy?
I wouldn't call telling you your opinion doesn't mean crap and I know what is best for you and force you to do something against your beliefs "leadership"
oh please. the wealthy elite in this country has always successfully misdirected blame away from the REAL sources of joe schmoe's problems by stoking racism and various other fear-mongering tactics (death panels! libruls are destroying the american dream! nooooez!). the corporate aristocrats have lower-middle class people groveling at their feet for no clear reason. my thinking is definitely NOT the problem here. i have my opinions, but i'm not desperately pushing them on others for my own financial gain.
From the standpoint of "revitalizing the public option", what I said still stands - Lieberman was the excuse. I still think that there was little intention of ever including the public option in the final version despite initial rhetoric to the contrary - but I confess that is conjecture. Major: No I do not think everything should be published. I was making the point that pgabs' defense was nonsensical. The problem is not the exact details of who met with Obama, but rather what policy changes were made, why, and to whose benefit. This paragraph reeks of bias. Who says these groups were adversaries or "stood to lose"? They also stood to gain too - witness the actual result. Getting support for legislation as you word it above basically means selling off key components (that were popular with the actual voting citizenry) under lobbyist pressure - am I supposed to reward that since it's vaguely better than Cheney excluding undesirable lobbyists completely? No argument. The problem is that they ditched it too easily, and in a deal with lobbyists no less - that's not a compromise in my book, it's a backroom deal or a sellout. From Paul Hogarth
One of the glories of representiative democracy, it SOMETIMES allows us sometimes to ignore the opinions of stupid people who don't know what they are talking about. Though not as much as it should. If you don't like it, I suggest you secede and declare yourself the king of your own sovereigtard nation.
Well see thats where we need to find the balance. I agree with you we all have our opinions and we should not force them or push them onto others. Which this healthcare bill essentially does. It forces something onto others that they might not want. Whether you agree with it or not I think people should have the freedom to choose.
Without this bill I will continue to be forced to pay for uninsured people's healthcare via taxes and higher premiums. No thanks. I'll happily force folks like SpaceGhost to be responsible and cover their own asses.
Well didn't take long for the radical left SamFisher to respond. So you are so much smarter than all the voters that voted against the bill huh? You know what is best for them better than they do for themselves? Now I am not arguing about the healthcare bill. I was only responding to a poster here how he somehow knows what's best for others and you apparently have the same view. I don't know these people in Missouri but apparently they feel very strongly about the healthcare bill. Who am I to tell them their views and opinions mean **** and they are all STUPID? I also suggest you lighten up a bit, go relax, have some fun and take a break from your life on this little insignificant message board (Not for Rocket's stuff ) Maybe it will help with your little attitude problem. It's a message board for people to discuss issues no need to always be so inflammatory in your responses.
Fair enough. Wait - how did they gain? Each of the groups made major concessions. Each time health care looked to be about to fail, their stocks jumped. They are losing less perhaps than they would have under the "ideal" health care proposal, but they are all worse off than they were under the status quo. WellPoint's stock, for example, peaked near 70 the day Scott Brown got elected. It's in the low 50's now. The actual result is that everyone took a haircut. [/quote] No - it's not supposed to be a reward. The reward is health care legislation of any sort passing. We saw what happens when you don't court the stakeholders - you get 1994. So you can continue to argue that Obama should have just gone the naive, idealistic route and push through a bill that would have never passed, but we have evidence of what happens there. They couldn't even get that remotely through the Dem side of Congress in 1994, let alone dealing with filibusters or anything like that. That could very well be so. Or it could be that the Obama knew that a public option was never going to pass the Senate, and so he bargained away something he knew he never had in exchange for concessions from the industry. I have no idea if that's the case, but if so, it would mean he completely played the industry to get more than they could have otherwise. Besides Leiberman, you also had Nelson, Lincoln, and one other (I think) that were staunchly opposed to any sort of public option. They didn't even vote for the reconciliation bill as it was - and at the time, they were planning on needing 60 votes, rather than the fluky 50 they needed thanks to the Scott Brown fiasco.
well I am not going to argue for or against the bill. It's been passed and it is what it is. Like any bill there are pros and cons to it.
I think you answered your own question here. And, as far as I'm concerned, it's not how much they gained that I care about. I really am focusing on what we lost. Actually, I have said repeatedly in previous threads that while I don't like some key parts of this bill, it's still better than nothing and there are many provisions I am extremely pleased with. I've also stated that I have come to some semblance of peace with the fact that America seems stupidly resistant to far more equitable and efficient socialization of major services in lieu of government sponsored corporate systems that vastly inflate the wealth of a select few. It's ****ing stupid, but that's the way it is. Does this mean Obama's off the hook for caving in? No, it does not. Or, at a minimum, he should have at least been honest about it. Heck, being honest about it and blaming those few senators directly may have stoked enough fires to get some better results. We'll never know. Fair point. But then he continued to act like the public option was viable anyhow. That's just plain nasty no matter how you dice it. It's deception and I think it would have been very bad for him had Lieberman not come along and stolen the spotlight.
No, I don't find it hard to believe that I'm smarter (or have a better understanding of health care economics, to be precise) than approximately 667,000 people in Missouri. First off, that's around 10% of the state's population. HUGE! I'm going to venture if you asked those 667,000 people if they'd read Arrow's seminal paper on health care economics they would ask why the Kansas City chiefs are at all relevant to the discussion. So let's say the answer is less than 1000 or so would know what I was talking abut, and of those 1000, probably hundreds would know, deep down, that while Arrow is right, they have other motivations, such as being a partisan dickwad or thier own lucre, so as to cause them to ignore him.
Fair enough - though I do believe blaming the Senators directly may have made future legislation more difficult. My position is that Obama's strategy has been brilliantly effective at getting lots of things done. Has it been perfect? Not at all. But I think he's navigated a minefield to pull off a lot of major positive changes, so he gets a break for having to make compromises here and there to pull it off. I think the only alternative was getting less or nothing done, so I do let him off the hook for those things. Certainly true.
Seeing arguments like Commodore's shows why there can never be an actual society that follows Randian principles.
