yeah I thought the name seemed familiar and w/ the post count/join date it was likely you had been around here before. well welcome back again, and judging from your recent posts you in for a world of hurt, I hope you enjoy it and stick around.

LOL I'm not a "fan" of either "side" anymore. See my edit

Edit edit: Telecom immunity, gitmo, iraq, etc etc etc. They're so ****ing afraid something will come back and bite them in election year they piss away their only chance to actually do anything.

Edit: RP vid on this subject http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrSFi...layer_embedded

I hope you have a very loose definition of almost, because otherwise I refuse you were actually serious when you wrote that.

No, I think that even opponents of the current push for health care reform recognize that allowing health care, which is already responsible for 1/6 of our economy, to continue to grow at it's current rate is unsustainable. The problem lies in the fact that some democrats wrongly think, and republicans know, that defeating health care reform is their best chance for electoral success in 2010.

I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say here.

Anything in particular you're trying to imply about people who choose to homeschool their kids?

Read the sign a little closer.

He says everyone knows we need health care reform, but some Dems wrongly believe it is against their interest in getting the job done, while Repubs correctly know it's in their own interest to defeat everything.

Sorry. Cliff's notes:

Total health care spending has doubled in the past ten years. Pretty much everyone agrees that that needs to be changed, and that a major overhaul is necessary to accomplish that.

Some democrats think that their best chance for reelection in 2010 is to oppose the reform, when in reality, achieving legislative wins for the party will help them dramatically. Freshman house members are particularly susceptible to this (I don't want to name names, but I know for a fact that some of them, despite overwhelming support in their districts for reform, did not vote for the house bill because the August town halls scared them).

Republicans know that if they can obstruct obama's entire legislative agenda, they have a better chance of winning seats in 2010 than if they support reform, regardless of what's in it. I believe that even if the leadership let republicans write the bill, they would still oppose it.

I hope that clears up my point a bit.

If it doesn't, you'll have to wait until tomorrow for my response because i'm out with friends and they're all pissed that i'm on my phone rather than being social.

This. When Palin was first announced as McCain's VP, the explosion of hysteria/vitriol directed toward her from the Left was unprecedented in magnitude. Since this happened before she was even proven to be a blathering idiot (see the drooling "Trig is really Bristol's" crap), I maintained some semblance of sympathy towards her. Now I pretty much cringe everytime she opens her mouth. I mean, it's cool for her to go out and make a buck, but she is utterly unserious as a political figure (stipulating a priori what a ridiculously low standard "serious political figure" constitutes that is which she is incapable of meeting)

FYP.

Reading fail

Probably the same as an Obama supporter. What does IQ have to do with much anyway? I don't know what Obama's IQ is, but even if it's the highest IQ in the land, he still is a very, very poor President.

If you honestly believe that everyone agrees that it needs to be changed, I couldnt disagree more. And even if it were true, the type of reform that Republicans might that think health care needs is substantively different than what Dems envision. To lump them all together as if they were some sort of thing that everyone agrees on is fairly disingenuous.

He won like a million dollars with that Nobel prize, yo.

If it weren't true, why would republicans even put forward their own ideas for reform? The fact that total health care spending has doubled in the past decade is true (I would link to it, but i'm on my phone, friends are still pissed). I never said that all sides agreed on the kind of reform that was necessary, just that something needed to be done.

its called reform so its gotta be good amirite?

Well, my personal conviction, and I think that research supports me, is that a single payer system is the best way to ensure the highest level of care for the greatest number of people at the lowest cost. However, I recognize that for various reasons, that isn't a politicaly viable option, and that the bills coming out of congress are likely the best options we have.

Or as Obama would say, the press corpse.

A +

Yeah, half a day later I really shouldn't have bothered trying to get that one in.

Is someone says slow pony after someone else says it or something equivalent, do they get the picture too? Well, let's just do it anyway.

Also, I will concede that there is a certain segment of the population who will believe whatever they want to believe despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Who, despite the fact that we spend more on health care than any other country, have a shorter life expectancy, higher infant morality and higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and obesity than the rest of the developed world, will continue to believe that our system is best (hint: it's not). However, I think that that segment is very, very small.

Sorry, I probably should have been more clear. I wasn't referring just to raw intelligence, I was talking more about the fear, hatred, paranoia, anti-intellectualism, racism and tendency towards violence which I see as a constant current running through the movement.

I think that the paranoia is pretty evident (no need to look any further than the birthers).

The fear and racism, I think, can be kind of lumped together. When I hear Glenn Beck say that President Obama is a racist with a deep-seeded hatred of white people, or Rush Limbaugh says that when black kids get into a fight with a white kid, that's just what happens in "Obama's America," I hear echos of some of the same arguments against the abolition of slavery. When the founding fathers were drawing up the Constitution, there was a lot of pressure in the North for them to abolish slavery, and there were even a number of delegates from the South who conceded that yes, slavery was evil, but it wasn't their fault, it was just a peculiar institution they had inherited from the British. More to the point there was a real fear that if slaves were freed, it would result in immediate and violent reprisals against their former masters. I believe that this fear, that once African Americans found themselves in a position of equal power with whites they would use it as a way to take revenge for centuries of oppression, causes many people to believe that African Americans need to continue to be oppressed. For those people, an African American President in the ultimate position of power is very frightening, and Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh's words strike a very real chord.

As for the anti-intellectualism and hatred, look at Palin's comments about "real America," the universal hatred in the movement against any University or institute of higher learning. Among these people it's like, if you're not from the country, they hate you. If you went to college, they hate you. For them, the "urban, educated, liberal elite" is the ultimate bogeyman.

Finally, the tendency towards violence stuff is mostly anecdotal, although I think that the adoption of the phrase "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," leads me to believe that for some of them, their talk about revolution is very real. Otherwise, I can just talk to you about getting pushed around and threatened when I counter-protested the 4/15 rallly last year, and how a friend of mine got clocked in the jaw at an August town hall.