Comments Posted By glasnost
Displaying 11 To 20 Of 37 Comments
IMPRESSIVE TURNOUT IN DC FOR PROTEST
Your time lapse sequence is also fake. The airspace over the national mall is controlled. There are no time-lapse tea party protests. They never happened. These are from someone, or somewhere else. They may quite possibly be identical to the debunked photoset from the polifact article.
Heh - that's pretty good - since the time lapse sequence comes from a traffic cam.
Oh well- back to the drawing board.
ed.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 15.09.2009 @ 17:37
Hey, um, folks? Your pictures are fake.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/sep/14/tea-party-photo-shows-large-crowd-different-event/
It will never be your Dan Rather moment, because most of the conservative blogosphere is not nearly honest enough to admit the plain facts: you got punked by your dishonest acolytes. And the MSM, about whom you constantly complain, generally allows you to lie with impunity.
But Rick Moran is sort of honest, sometimes, so there's at least a chance he'll post a retraction.
If you don't believe me, go check LGF.
No need for a retraction. Read the updates again. I expressed skepticism at both the larger numbers and based my analysis mostly on the marchers moving off from Freedom Plaza in the time lapse sequence. I believe there's a good chance there were more than half a million marchers with many more who were already at the Capitol and tens of thousands more late arrivals.
No other marchers representing another cause were there? I stand by my estimate.
ed.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 15.09.2009 @ 17:34
YES, BUT DON'T CALL THEM UNPATRIOTIC
Rick, no, it's your update that completely misses the point. Were we too subtle in tyig to get across to you that everything you're upset about is a made-up story? A fantasy? In short, a lie? Can you tell the difference between some possibly tacky ceremonies at the World Trade Center and "remaking the meaning of 9/11"?
Comment Posted By glasnost On 25.08.2009 @ 21:33
THE PUBLIC OPTION: NOT A SLIPPERY SLOPE -- JUST PLAIN LIES
Rick,
If the Klu Klux Klan supports strict enforcement of the country's current immigration laws as a first step towards purging the country of all Hispanic culture and populace, does it logically follow that this is also the Republican party's motive for advocating strict enforcement of said laws?
If Tom Tancredo supports it for similar reasons, does *that* allow one to conclude the same?
Does it logically follow that this action would actually have that consequence? Or is it, essentially, red-meat BS?The word "public plan" holds a wide variety of possible concepts, but the one actually in the House and HELP bills subsidizes individuals regardless of whether they choose private or public coverage. Also, it is deficit neutral over ten years. A public plan that offered wildly cheap care compared to private alternatives might conceivably be a "Trojan horse to single payer", but this public plan has no prospect of doing any such thing. Heck, there are explicit promises to keep medical care provider reimbursements near-to-even with current standards!
Don't you pride yourself on knowledge and rational thought? And yet, you've decided the 'public plan' is a "trojan" horse because some radical, somewhere, spoke about it possibly being so. You've stumbled on an example of left-wing red meat BS. Try not to confuse it with reality.
For Pete's sake, man, just read the CBO reports. Or read *coverage* of the CBO reports. 10 million people out of 140 million leaving private insurance is not the end of the private insurance industry. It is, however, a much needed signal that the days of near-infinite knifing your customers in the back needs to change.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 25.08.2009 @ 08:30
HEALTH CARE REFORM TEETERING ON THE EDGE OF FAILURE
Not going to engage your argument here - just thought I'd say that I've skimmed your last two weeks of posting and am vaguely impressed that you're at least interested in being constructive. I'm not particularly impressed with the specifics of your ideas on the alternatives, but it's nice to see someone not offering deliberate nihilism.
Anyone who can see that Sarah Palin has from start to finish been a vapid, hypocritical, sensationalist hack isn't completely unreedemable.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 25.08.2009 @ 08:15
LEARNING NEW THINGS CAN BE FUN
You place entirely too much faith in government to believe that this thing will only cost $100 billion a year
See, once we drill down far enough, you're operating on heuristics and assumptions.
There are **Revenue collection mechanisms** in this bill. "Every single entitlement in history" has NOT had its expenses exceed its revenue mechanisms. In fact, some of them go in the reverse direction. That's why Al Gore was discussing the Social Security "lockbox" in 2000 - because Social Security WAS OPERATING AT A NET PROFIT FOR FORTY YEARS!!!!!!
!!!
!!!Yes, cost estimates are not an exact science. Neither are revenue estimates. It's both bad faith and sloppy heuristics to automatically score the cost of any government program at two or three (or ten!) times the projected and budgeted cost. There's not a program of any kind, anywhere, that looks good when you assume its cost is ten times what it's planned to be. If we'd all pretended that George Bush's 1.5 trillion tax cuts were probably going to end up costing fifteen trillion dollars, we would need... a logical description of WHY that would happen.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 9.08.2009 @ 12:13
Or we'd be blowing smoke.
You're blowing smoke.
You place entirely too much faith in government to believe that this thing will only cost $100 billion a year. Get this: every single entitlement program ever passed by congress - without exception - has ballooned in cost once it has been made law. Every single one. The president says $1 trillion over 10 years. The CBO says $1.5 trillion (and rising) over 10 years with NO WAY TO PAY FOR IT. Some estimates go even higher. Who’s right? You or history?
"No way to pay for it", is not accurate. There are a lot of revenue-raising options being discussed. It's pretty unlikely that they won't be included, because the whole plan, for good or for ill, has been promised to be budget-neutral over 10 years.
Let's pretend for a minute that your reasonable pessimistic case is on the mark. (No, "Every single" government benefit does not rise uncontrollably in cost all the time - track, for example, welfare budgets since the Clinton reforms). Let's say a bill is passed with expenses assumed at $1 trillion with revenue projections at $1 trillion. (That's how the bill is budget-neutral). Let's say the CBO is right and it costs 1.5 times as much as it's supposed to. We get... a net $500 billion in debt over 10 years. $50 billion in deficit a year. In a $12 trillion GDP, that's a rounding error. It's less than $0.5 percent. That would be the best year for deficit since 2000, and excluding the end of Clinton, the best year since about 1970.
The whole thing would be about 1/3 of the net Iraq War debt. And, if all this extra debt really does bring on the phantasmagoric crushing economic burden that conservatives are always waiting to happen... you'll probably be propelled back to power! And you can cut $50 billion out of a $1.5 trillion budget with hardly a care. Right?
Seriously, George Bush's budget deficits did not destroy this country (our citizens' private debts hurt it pretty good, but that ain't the same). Out debt-to-GDP has historically been pretty good, compared to the world. Obama's rather smaller health plan is also not going to be "ruinously expensive".
Thanks for trying.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 9.08.2009 @ 11:59
Correction, post #19, para #2, strike "private" in last line, insert "public".
Comment Posted By glasnost On 9.08.2009 @ 11:50
Ok, I'm obnoxious. But, credit where it's due - your response is a good start at demonstrating that you know something about the bill. There's no way that I could tell that from your original post.
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.
The point of the employer mandate is that if a business doesn't pay for a private plan, it is therefore forced to pay money into the public plan. The problem you're worried about is actually what would come about **without** an employer mandate. Without an employer mandate, the existence of the public plan might cause employers to try to save money by ditching their health insurance coverage, assuming that employees could fall back on the private plan.
With an employer mandate, employers must pay some money into healthcare, period. It can pay for a private plan, or it can pay into a public plan. As long as the private plan prices are in the public plan price ballpark, than there's no reason for employers to prefer one over the other.
In fact, since the existence of republicans means that the public plan is on a rather tight budget - and thus the care provided might not actually be able to pay for all kinds of super-fancy things - employers that... compete for employees.. and that are highly profitable and can afford to do so... should still be going out to buy gold-plated private plans.
This is how it works in Europe. Private insurance is for rich people. That's kind of like how it is here right now, except instead of a public plan, poor people get squat. And middle-class people get BAD private plans that change their minds and deny expensive treatments. With a public plan, private insurance can start focusing on providing **fantastic** coverage to rich people, and the public plan can provide merely good coverage to everyone else.
I'll wait for your reasonable and logical counterargument. Until then, as I have demonstrated, you don't understand how an employer mandate works.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 9.08.2009 @ 11:47
Seriously, Rick. Why are you any better than Sarah Palin?
"Ruinously expensive"? $100 billion a year is "ruinously expensive"? That's less than quite a few Iraq War supplementals, buddy. The average Bush era deficit was $400 billion. The stimulus package was $700 billion. Could you keep a grip?
And that number up there is what you get AFTER pretending that the revenue raisers in the plan **don't exist***. Part of the reason the plan is so "ridiculously complicated" is the debate over how the revenue is going to be raised, so that the whole plan can be...wait for it... BUDGET-NEUTRAL OVER TEN YEARS.
Can I translate that into simple language for you? That means, 10-year addition to deficit = .. $0.
So why the heck do you think you're better than Sarah Palin's rants about a "death panel"? The things you're making up about the bill are less crazy than the things that she's making up, but you still don't know much about the bill and haven't bothered to find out. Your instincts for crazy are a little better, but you apparently can't be bothered to do your homework.
I'm glad that you're **interested** in not being as crazy as Sarah Palin, but in order to tell truth from lies, you need to do some darn homework.
You place entirely too much faith in government to believe that this thing will only cost $100 billion a year. Get this: every single entitlement program ever passed by congress - without exception - has ballooned in cost once it has been made law. Every single one. The president says $1 trillion over 10 years. The CBO says $1.5 trillion (and rising) over 10 years with NO WAY TO PAY FOR IT. Some estimates go even higher. Who's right? You or history?
ed.
Comment Posted By glasnost On 9.08.2009 @ 11:38
