Comments Posted By glasnost
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LEARNING NEW THINGS CAN BE FUN
Rick.
I'd like to believe you're a reasonable guy. You're certainly active in detecting certain hysterical rightist fantasies. However,
I'm still waiting for your intelligent, logical critique of the currently proposed health care plan. If you were so reasonable, you would have one of these.Without congressional hearings, or any input from opponents;
What? Are you kidding? Max Baucus has been locked in a room with Chuck Grassley and Mike Enzi for months, and you're complaining about "no input from opponents"? Who should we be inviting? Sarah Palin? Do you think Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have anything worth hearing about health care reform, Rick? Or the commenters on your board? These people have nothing to add, man. You can see that yourself. They make arguments out of supernatural images and string, and they sure can't be bothered to read any bill themselves.
in secrecy, and using complexity as a beard to hide an agenda that they know full well would be rejected by the overwhelming majority of citizens,
Are you kidding? Have you ***seen*** the polls on a public plan? approval ranges between the mid-50s and the 70s. Now you sound no more informed than the people you mock. What agenda exactly are you talking about? The SuperSpooky Secret Plan to eliminate private health care indirectly? You're crazy. Out of your mind. For pete's sake, go read a liberal website!! We're not rubbing our hands with glee because this system is the back door to single-payer health insurance. A lot of people are disgruntled because such things were IMMEDIATELY OFF THE TABLE. Hell, I wouldn't support any plan that I thought had any realistic change of making private insurance impossible. Who knows, maybe I'll be rich enough someday to actually buy some worth a darn, although that's all but impossible right now.
the Democrats are in full on attack mode. They are not defending what they want to accomplish with reform. They are simply going after those who oppose them, using the most vile and despicable tactics to delegitimize the opposition.
Broad brush much? Wanna look through Barack Obama's speeches? Come back with a word count he spends on describing his plan vs. a word count talking about the crazies.
This is projection and rationalization, Rick. You can see that your conservative bedfellows are crazy, thus to preserve your status as a centrist the "liberals" must also be crazy and mean.
I want to hear your logical, factual, senisible critiques of this bill, Rick. I look forward to a reasonable, logical, evidentiary discussion of why you're wrong. I doubt you have the chops or are willing to put forth the effort required to do this. You're not as crazy as the Palin fans on your comment section, but your opinions are formed from the same lazy rumor mill.
1. Max Baucus holed up in a room with a couple of Republicans who, like me, are in favor of some reform but not the kind being proposed, does not make "input from the opposition" a reality. This is especially true in the get along go along senate where such meetings are for show. The real work, as you well know, is going on between Baucus and the liberals - not between Baucus and the GOP.
2. The public is for a public option largely because its complexity has obscured one of the few slippery slopes that I believe this proposal - as it has been publicly bandied about - represents; that the employer mandate will eventually cause most businesses to opt out of private plans and throw people on the mercy of the public plan. It doesn't have to be spelled out. It is the logical, reasonable outcome to what is being proposed.
3. I actually support some of the proposals; insurance pools for those with pre-existing conditions, a general re-evaluation of Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals; insurance portability; and while I think there is a better answer, more attention paid to preventive care than is now, although as the CBO pointed out on Friday, this won't save much money.
4. As for the rest, a Medicare or "Health Care" Commission would invariably represent exactly what the president is saying he doesn't want; a one size fits all treatment regimen for many diseases. That is the purpose of setting them up in the first place and makes Obama out to be a liar. I have no quarrel with paying doctors to advise patients on living wills and DNR orders. Many are already aware of them but people don't want to think about them. I think the hysteria on this issue comes from people who are claiming it will be a requirement for doctors to get people to sign on the dotted line. That's an overreaction in my opinion and is being pushed by people who have never had a family member in that situation.
I am not a policy wonk and neither are you, but I have read carefully what both sides are saying about the various public proposals. I reach my own conclusions based solely on my judgment and my understanding of what is being negotiated. Of course, much depends on the final language that will be in the bill - something that even lawyers who are familiar with health care issues will have a hard time understanding. And then there's the idea of how the bureaucracy will interpret what Congress has written.
How's that for some "chops," shithead?
ed.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 9.08.2009 @ 11:13
PALIN'S OUTRAGEOUS DEMAGOGUERY: WHY NOT? EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT.
There's no way I'm going to read all of this baloney, but just to shoot down some of the most obvious foolishness and establish some rules for debate:
#1. We're debating a bill (well, three of them: HELP, Finance, and the House Combo) It has words in it. Specific ones. To make specific changes to health insurance regulation. What your psychic powers lead you to see in the minds of Obama and his advisors. Doesn't. Mean. Shit.
Now, to reply to a representative collection of comments:
you have a limited amount of resources…money, drugs, doctors, beds, etc and a huge infux of people demanding all that FREE care…so you have to start limiting access, services, drugs, institute waits etc
“…services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia. A less obvious example is guaranteeing neuropsychological services to ensure children with learning disabilities can read and learn to reason.” Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, January 2009.
There may not be panels actually called “death panels” in the bill, but it is hardly demagoguery to envision a gang of government functionaries meeting to decide who lives and who dies. Indeed, that is the intended purpose of this “reform”
The Dems are vilifying private health insurers in their current ads. Why? Their goal — now almost overtly obvious — is a single payer option which can only be actualized if the private option (ie, private health insurers) disappear.
Goddamn, you fools.
#1. As in my first comments - the only rationing that the government could concievably implement would be among the CARE IT INTENDS TO START PAYING FOR.
You know how much government-subsidized care you get right now? Big fat nothing. So, you're complaining that your increase from nothing will be less than infinity. That's insane. And asinine.#2. If the government ever "rationed" care by denying you coverage for something you thought you needed, GO OUT AND PAY FOR IT YOURSELF!! OR MAKE SURE YOU HAVE PRIVATE INSURANCE COVERAGE FOR IT!!
Nothing in any of these bills eliminates private insurance - which, you may have noticed, sucks. But if you want the suck, it's yours. Have a blast. All this BS about the private market going away is a steaming pile of manipulative propaganda. Private insurance and drug companies are selling that message to right-wing politicians and activist groups, who are pushing that fear message to you - because they're mercenaries. And you're eating it up. Because you're too dumb to know better. Private insurance companies don't want to have to stop fucking you over. They don't want government competition. But they're not going to dissapear as a result anymore than the Postal Service made FedEx "dissapear". They're just going to have to get better.
PS: You can get private health insurance, and private medical care, in Canada. As you can in most systems in Europe. You just don't get it for free. There's your "rationing" - less stuff for "free" - meaning, at the low costs made available by the government.
God, wake up.
Under the single payer health care systems in Canada and UK, health care is rationed. Who loses in such a system? Grandma and Grandpa. “Sorry. We can save your Grandma/pa’s life but it would exceed our budget. My deep regrets in advance”.
See, you don't have anything called "evidence" for this sort of BS. You have only your fevered imagination and the rants of idiots. In order for this to be a legit claim, you need to find... wait for it... something in the actual bills being debated - that would actually empower government bureaucrats... to make decisions about **anything**.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 9.08.2009 @ 08:05
PS: your link re Nancy Pelosi involves her complaining about teabaggers wearing swastikas to rallies because teabaggers were wearing swastikas to rallies.
She's the exact equivalent of you people complaining about whoever it was that came up with "BusHitler".
Perhaps you should have been tipped off by the title of the video "town_hall_protesters_are_carrying_swastikas".
If you can't tell the difference between complaining about conservatives' use of Nazi imagery when they use Nazi imagery, and actually calling someone a Nazi for non-nazi reasons, then I can't help you.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 8.08.2009 @ 16:23
Anon 43:
You live in a world of health-care rationing. When your insurance company hands you a list of treatments it will and will not pay for, that's called "Rationing". When your insurance companies hands you a list of "in-network" doctors which you are allowed to visit, that's called "rationing". When you try and get a treatment that's actually on the "approved" list, and find that the insurance company refuses to pay for it anyway, that's called, "being screwed so an insurance exec can report a slightly lower "losses" to Wall Street".
Under a government plan, we can at least have reasonable hopes of avoiding the last of these. If you don't want to deal with government "rationing", then please feel free to continue going with your private insurance company's form of rationing. But be so kind as to get out of the way of others who would gladly except government "rationing" - meaning a limited amount of something - as better than what they currently get - which is nothing.
Bonus question: why do senior citizens love their Medicare rationing so darn much?
Comment Posted By glasnost On 8.08.2009 @ 16:19
While there are limits to your attempts to understand the world around you, you do at least make an attempt. That's why you're one of my favorite conservative bloggers. You may fall for the fantasism that takes a certain degree of careful study to blow up, but you sometimes catch the obvious ones. I'd love to see just one argument against health insurance reform made using evidence and logic, instead of hysteria, misinformation, and bogus slippery slope arguments. You'd be a good candidate for making it. I'd believe that you could avoid some of the obvious idiocies - analogies to a British system utterly unlike current proposals; fantasies about income tax credits that are hopelessly inadequate to pay for severe care needs that hit five figures in days and six in weeks; yapping about deficits for a bill designed to be deficit-neutral over 10 years (long-term cost of GWB's prescription drug bill: 32 trillion dollars, not a typo); hysteria about government "takeovers" when discussing a public plan that is not in any way subsidized beyond its setup costs (the low income subsidies can be used on any type of insurance, including private insurance) and for which ordinary people on employer insurance won't even be eligible...
But I don't know what you'd have left.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 8.08.2009 @ 16:13
Sarah Palin has magically turned a smart and bipartisan portion of the health care bill - incentivizing doctors to talk to senior citizens about setting up living wills every five years or so - into a panel of government bureaucrats starving her special-needs child.
Until such time as a bill is proposed to outlaw private health insurance and private payment for medical treatment in this country - and I as a partisan liberal don't support either of those ideas, and neither does anyone I know - even if this fictional panel existed, Sarah Palin could pay for her kid's needs out of her own da*n pocket, instead of using taxpayer money.
Conservative arguments against Barack Obama bill are as literally incoherent as the refrain "get your government hands of my Medicare!" They shout about how this bill could introduce rationing of health-care, when in reality such rationing could only possibly include rationing of ***government-paid-for-health-care*** - something which right now hardly exists at all for people under 65.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 8.08.2009 @ 15:57
They're afraid they might someday get less of something for free, and this leads them to fight a bill giving them more of it. These are people who lack the basic skills to understand the difference between truth and lies, logic and incoherency.
GLENN BECK AND THE RADICAL RIGHT
Hey, and... it's great and all that Beck eventually debunked the concentration camp scene. But, it came after days of coverage about a cop killing where the shooter's living friend specifically mentioned how the friend kept repeating that theory. He didn't exactly rush to get to the bottom of this Big Mystery until that happened. I'm genuinely glad that Beck has either seen conscience or basic self-interest and put that one out there to cover his a**. Even that is more than Michelle Bachman is up for. But it was a little late and a lot right after embarassing and lethal blowback. The Big Mystery of whether BO is coming up with a secret plan to confiscate your guns has yet to be debunked.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 8.04.2009 @ 20:54
Just for a tiny example of why Beck is so harmful and useless, despite having, in a holistic, rather-totally-unrelated-to-Obama sort of way, a point is this:
The reason our world is so unlibertarian is that unlibertarianism works. Planet Earth is a constant Darwinian test. Ineffective systems die. The Fourth Amendment is a shell because popular majorities would rather suffer the occasional no-knock raid than the more frequent drive-by. Corporations are accountable enough when causing mass damage to keep Americans reasonably healthy and not in obvious debt enslavement.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 8.04.2009 @ 20:44
If you just get up on a mike and start bellowing about the death of liberty, your hot air will attract a lot of hot air, and you might replace a politician with a different one who will go on to do virtually nothing different. If you want to change the system, you'd better know exactly what you want changed and have a convincing case that your alternative works. Glenn Beck fails overwhelmingly on both counts. That's why he inspires nutbags, rather than pragmatists.
I don't remember to read your site all that often, but you're doing work I respect. I'm a liberal, but my skin really isn't that thin, and I try to put up with empirical criticisms that seem sort of realistic. There are quite a few criticisms about Obama from both the right Jim Manzi, Tom Macguire...um...) and the left (david sirota, krugman, talkleft, etc) that I don't agree with that nevertheless don't fill me with scorn and embarassment, i.e. earn grudging respect.
The saddest part about Glenn Beck is that, to an extent, his philosophy, as I understand it, isn't wrong. The scope of the fourth and first amendments has been shrinking since the 1970's. Politics has become a product of specialists. Institutions get more opaque and unassailable by the year (try suing a large corporation by yourself) But Beck turns the argument into a sick cariacture, and he has no constructive criticism.
More than that, I can't stand to listen to anyone on Fox News bewail the state of civil liberties under the Obama Administration. It makes me mad enough to punch holes in the wall. George Bush shit on the Constitution for eight years, threatened the most fundamental rights we can have, and almost everyone right of Cato defended it to the death - stood up and cheered for government surveillance and ghost prisons, for John Yoo's word-for-word, black-and-white "The Constitution does not apply in wartime". Obama has embarassed me - under blackmail from the Republican Senate (http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-05/are-republicans-blackmailing-obama)
by endorsing some of this monarchic argument in court, but he's committed perhaps a tenth of the civil rights violations as the last guy - but three months in, fascism is shouted from every street corner.For all the chutzpah, if glenn beck, or someone else, was actually pushing for positive, specific changes - leading a movement to bring down the abuse of the state secrets doctrine in court - I would let it go. It's hard to be mad at a force for good. But the cause celebre is Obama's... gaving of money to failing industries, in a manner similar to about 240 of 250 nations on earth and familiar to our last twenty presidents, at a time when it's desperately needed to avoid flushing our economy down the tubes.
Nationalization *can* be an opening to political exploitation (and/or bad management) and should be watched pretty carefully.. when *someone* *actually* *does* it. But in the real world, every step of the way the Obama Treasury has worked to reverse out and wiggle away from Congressional attempts to control the people we're subsidizing. The guy wants to nationalize banks about as much as he wants to contract hernias. But the mediasphere is poised to start a revolution at the drop of a hat to overturn the most minimal state interference possible that avoids the end of financial credit in America.
I'm pissed at Obama for his kid-glove approach to our financial industry, while the right is calling him Hugo Chavez while he pursues a policy as unlike that as he possibly can without having Bank of America eat it. It would be amusing and ironic, if it didn't make me so godda*n mad. The sad part is that Obama thinks that his moderation will get some recognition and credit from some sort of "moderate centrist Right" that, accept in a few nooks and crannies (here?) doesn't seem to be found on the Internet, at least.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 8.04.2009 @ 20:35
WHAT MIDDLE AMERICA THINKS OF THE ELECTION
Pretty smart Post, Rick.
There's another big reason why no one buys all the crap the right-wing have pushed on B.O: no matter how hard you try, he doesn't conform to the stereotypes you push on him of his "associates".
If the guy who once went to a party that W. Ayers was at had been, say, a member of the American Communist party until 2007 - if his Senate record had included any genuine radically lefist ideas - if he hadn't left a trail a mile wide at, for example, the U. Chicago full of outspoken character witnesses, Republicans included, to his moderate temperament, comfort with free-market economics, etc, etc - you'd be having more luck.
The picture you're pushing isn't working because people see so much of the enormous picture that contrasts it. His platform is very small-c conservative. Shifting from Iraq to Afghanistan is nothing like Dennis Kucinich's plan. Repealing Bush cuts for the top 5% has been Dem. consensus since at least 2004. Cap and trade was first proposed by John McCain. Etc. etc.
All you've been able to come up with are, no matter how many times you yell and scream to the contrary, marginal records of barely incidental contacts from 15 years ago. Given how late a start you got on painting your insane picture of him as some kind of Marxist and how much contrasting picture there is, it can't take root. But it could have taken root if we'd nominated Dennis Kucinich. You're just trying to shove a square peg in a round hole, and it only works on people who already hate Democrats; i.e. not the swing voters; i.e. not the people in your examples.
In other words, I agree with you.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 2.11.2008 @ 23:18
