Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine What Will Conservatives Do?

Aside from their own statements, you mean?

I do scratch my head over the tanning bed tax... are they implying that tanning beds are health risks? Seems like they should implement a sugar tax since diabetes is heavily on the rise...

I rarely go to the tanning bed, but when I do go it is during the winter when my skin is acting up. It is cheaper than a dermatologist visit by far-- at least, it used to be.

rick, I'll make a deal with you: I'll pick up this whole thing with you again at a time when:

A) You bother to set up the quotes-within-quotes bit in a way that doesn't give me a headache and

B) You can wrap your mind around the idea that those without money are punished brutally for our "shortcomings," as you so wittily refer to them. And our punishments are way out of proportion to whatever the supposed original "crime" was. Whereas those with money are generally not punished to the same degree for the same manner of supposed moral failings-- if indeed they are punished at all.

Until then, how about we just stick to talking about comics and cheeseball music videos and such? Honestly, real life doesn't leave me much energy these days for banging my head repeatedly against the wall in a place that I prefer using to get away from that kind of thing.

Thanks.

At one point during the debate there was a proposal to include a tax on soda and sweet juices. It didn't make it into the final bill.

Sure thing Cle, long as you realize that I'm one of those poor as well and always have been.

Dude, that's completely besides the point, but... whatever.

:rolleyes:

I just don't need you or anyone else wagging their finger at me. A person saying that their life is not all roses and creampuffs is not, contrary to popular belief, an invitation for either friends or strangers to start moralizing at them-- making veiled slams about "shortcomings." It's got nothing to do with being poor or conservative. Some of the worst specimens in this regard reside right here in the supposed "progressive stronghold" where I live. They may use different catchphrases than conservatives, but it's still the same old crap, to me.

Seriously. When I want advice or lectures about my personal problems, I ask. That's not what I dove into this thread for.

Rick and Cleome,

Your exchange inadvertently gets us right to the heart of the matter. Central to modern conservative philosophies is this concept of "personal responsibility", which many liberals view as "blaming the victim". The gap between these two points of view has brought us to one of the ugliest most polarized election cycles in modern history.

It's certainly a huge factor in the health care debate. Probably the most controversial piece of the health care reform legislation is the requirement that uninsured individuals buy insurance by 2014 or pay fines (about $700 a year). The fine is to be enforced by the IRS. An insurance exchange is being created to help people find "affordable" insurance, and low income to medium low income families will be eligible for government assistance to purchase insurance. It is certainly convoluted and confusing.

A number of Republican governors and state attorney generals are taking legal action to prevent implementation of this component. They argue that it is unconstitutional to force anyone to buy a private product.

This is ironic because it was a Republican idea to begin with. The Republicans proposed it as an alternative to "Hillary Care" in the 1990s. It was proposed as an alternative that embraced the idea of "personal responsibility" instead of a government takeover of health care.

So conservatives all over the country are running on a pledge to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. Liberals are asking, "replace it with what?"

Conservatives oppose:

1) Single payer government run healthcare (socialism, rationing).
2) Requiring employers to provide healthcare (bad for business, hurts small business, kills jobs);
3) Individual mandates (unconstitutional).

Pelosi's bill was a huge compromise that incorporated pieces of each approach. So, it made everyone mad.

Will what conservatives plan to replace it with make us any less mad?

I know this political season has been so ugly that most of us just want to turn it all off. It's an important election, though. The decisions made by the next congress will impact us for the rest of our lives. We deserve some specifics in the debate.

Jerry, I recommend Corrente for some illuminating stuff about healthcare "reform," as well as the link I left in my response to Ken earlier.

To be honest, I don't think this election is any more important than all the other "most important elections EVER!!" Really, it's only the knowledge that there are ballot measures to keep the libraries and such affloat that motivate me to spend the time filling the damn thing out. The personalities don't interest me, since they're all getting their money from the same sort of interests.

What the Democrats and Republicans both agree about at the upper echelon is that healthcare is to remain a private, for-profit enterprise for the overwhelming majority of Americans. It's a luxury good, not something that people NEED TO PRESERVE THEIR LIVES. To argue that for-profit should be the default is no better than arguing that for-profit water and air should be the default.

All else is quibbling, so far as I'm concerned. Until that tenet gets removed, who cares? My fond hope would be that both camps beat one another unconscious, metaphorically of course. Then maybe the rest of us could have some peace and quiet.

Cle, first, I wasn't being personal with anyone but me. I wasn't finger wagging at you. Just as I wasn't saying I agree with everything on the repub/conservative side. Most times I simply point out the view from the mostly underrepresented conservative side when it threatens to get pushed into the stereotyped "hater/phony/mean" camp.

You sound like you've got a sharp mind. Perhaps you fall into the categories I was mentioning, I DON'T KNOW BECAUSE I DON'T KNOW YOU THAT WELL! If you read above, I certainly didn't exclude myself from any of the problems above.

But, in this day of "don't judge me" and "its someone else's fault my life hasn't turned out the way I want" then yes, it does create tension and possibly some hard feelings when people feel that they fall in that category and feel targeted.

Lets see... I could have breezed through college with an A* average in english and gone to law school. Instead, I wanted to know about the hows and uses of money. I majored in finance and squeeked by to get my degree mainly because I couldn't make heads or tails of accounting. My error.

I am exceptionally loyal and thus stuck out a bad situation far longer than I ever should have, not once, but four times. It cost me professionally. Who's feet do I lay that at? Mine.

I got royally screwed over by not only family, but a friggin state senator, OSHA, the legal system, and several manufacturers that worked in unison (which was supposed to be illegal) when my leg was crushed at 20 years old. Who do I lay the blame for that on? Me. Because I certainly had the brains to turn the "settlement hearing"'s opposition lawyer on his head, but didn't have enough experience to do more with it.

At the age of thirty, I allowed myself to settle into stagnation both mentally and physically.

These are all my faults. Because I allowed others to act on or against me and not use my own natural talents and abilities to fight back for myself.

Part of getting older is looking back on the regrets and missed opportunities of your own life. All I was saying is that its easy to fall into the trap of blaming others and ignoring your own role in your own life. And that was the plural, not the singular directed at you.

If you feel it was, I apologize for that. I've said plenty of times, tact is not something I'm known for. And even when I try, it tends to blow up in my face.

so, from now on, I think I will stick to the funny. I'd rather do that than cause hard feelings with people who don't want to hear the other side.

Friends?

So here's the thing: we need a new roof. We bought this house last year, and there were a few shingles curling up here and there. It's noticeably more pronounced now, but it's not a crisis. I give it until next year until it becomes worrisome. I've been up in the attic and things are fine as far as I can tell. The smart money would be to put funds back until we have enough to cover the cost of the roof. But what are we doing in 3 days?

We're going to Vegas. It is West's birthday and our 2'nd anniversary. We are going to take in a Cirque show. We are going to see Cher. (Yes, Michael Lash, CHER!) We are taking $2000 with us to play the slots and other table games. We are going to paint the town red, not necessarily in a several hundred K Michael Jordan or Kevin Federline way, but in a nice little 5k middle-to-upper-middle-class way. It's our money that we've saved over the past several months, and we want to have a great time that we will remember.

And it's incredibly wasteful and frankly quite disturbing if you look at it with a keen eye, given the unemployment rate, the economy, the fact that there are so many out of work and that there are so many more forced into menial jobs they don't want and a life they hate just so they can get by. We're so lucky. We've kept our good jobs. We've made it through and even carved out a better life for ourselves the past several years. And we're GOING TO VEGAS, BABY!!! We hope to make memories that will last a LIFETIME this week.

There is a point here. The government will do nothing. The Republicans will do nothing. The Democrats will do nothing. This country is in desperate need of much more than a new roof. This country has worshipped at the altar of supply-side economics and laissez-faire economics since way before the Berlin Wall fell. It worked out well until technology checkmated capitalism sometime in, oh I don't know, 2002. About the time gross stochastic models and bubble maths began to lump hedge funds into monoliths of imperturbable complexity, coupled with the blazing speed of millions of trades per second in this wonderful new techno-capitalistic utopia we created for ourselves. We all know how that is continuing to turn out.

The government will do nothing because they are being elected to do nothing. And they know this. The problem is not that we need to cut the military, or that we need to raise taxes, or that we need to raise the military, or that we need to cut taxes. The problem is that IT. DOES. NOT. MATTER.

The fundamental rule of gambling is that one cannot beat the house. Not in the long term. The math behind every game is such that the casino is guaranteed to win over time. The math behind modern economics is that Wall Street is guaranteed to win over time. And modern America is as much a thrall to Wall Street (and by Wall Street, I mean your 401k, and the guy over in China who owns 78% of Geico, and possibly Osama Bin Laden's secret investment accounts, but mainly the guy on Wall Street who is going to make 100 million dollars this quarter off of your 401k's meager .4% appreciation but never lose a dime off your investment depreciation) as Lucy was to Dracula. Adam Smith never anticipated any of this. Wall Street stared down America in 2008 when AIG was teetering on the brink. Democrats and Republicans stood together and agreed that the status quo was preferable to the abyss. They were probably right, in the short term. In the long term, the house always wins.

The manifestation of this American governmental lust for corporate sponsorship in each person is the American citizen's consumer lust. Austerity is not part of our makeup. It's not a makeup that is based on the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. It's an individual American makeup built on hundreds of discarded Happy Meal toys, 7 birthday parties at Showbiz, 4 pairs of $200 Diesel jeans, 5 iPods, 41 Atari cartridges, a $500 Banana Republic gift card, and a Kenny Rogers greatest hits CD bought in the gift shop of Cracker Barrel.

In a way, I almost applaud the Tea Partiers, because they at their grass-roots base are actually based on an idea that America is something more. Of course at the higher levels, this gets perverted into a News Corporation auxilary which is designed to cut a daily billion-dollar paycheck to Rupert Murdoch, but it's nice to think that our elders are still keyed in to something. As for the rest of us? We have Microsoft. Or if you're a tree-hugging liberal, Apple. And I'm GOING TO F*#%ING VEGAS.

THAT was one HELL of a post. Loved it.

DO IT UP IN VEGAS BABY!

Tell Cher I said hi!

Jerry,

one thing I'd add on the conservatives' "personal responsibility" argument: they tend to (not all) employ it mostly against those who have the least amount of control over their circumstances - and give carte blanche to those of greater power and wealth.

If it's good for us plebes, it should be at least as good for the elite whose irresponsibilities tend to impact the rest of us.

Also, there is such a thing as collective responsibilities, too - but not at the expense of the personal.

For some reason I can't quite fathom, I'm suddenly seized with the urge to write in Cher for Governor of Oregon.



I hope she likes rain and fog...

Synchronicity - The experience of two or more unrelated events that are apparently casually unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner.

1. Rick having regrets about past decisions.

2. Kid Prime going to Vegas

3. Cleome voting for Governor.

The only possible conclusion:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEszTzdUMcY

Ahhh, Cher doing fleet week. There are soooo many bad, misogynistic jokes I could do here, but... I'm not gonna.

Only partially apropos of nothing:

I just caught up with the brouhaha in CA regarding candidate Whitman. Yup. I called it several pages ago. Those who shout the loudest about the sanctity of U.S. citizenship are inevitably the ones who get caught knowingly employing undocumented workers.



Seriously, with real life providing such rich bounty, who needs satire?

<span style="font-size: 11px;">And no, if I lived in CA I still wouldn't vote for that twerp Brown, either. Like I said, the ideal scenario would be both yahoos in a ring, beating the stuffing out of each other until they both fell over unconscious, preferably live on CSPAN.</span>

My favorite post-election wrap-up comes courtesy of Dave Lindorff, at the blog appropriately titled, This Can\'t Be Happening.

[warning: post contains ire, gloating and naughty words]

<span class="spoiler_containter"><span class="spoiler_wording">Click Here For A Spoiler</span><span class="spoiler_text">... I went to the polling station in the church one block from my house to cast a vote, and found myself in conversation with an ardent local Democrat who was handing out local Democratic sample ballots, and an equally ardent Tea Party guy advocating for a right-wing candidate running for the local congressional seat. I found myself agreeing much more with the Tea Partier.

The Tea Partier said that the government had “lost touch” with ordinary people. I couldn’t agree more. He said that the health bill was a costly and overly bureaucratic disaster. Again, I couldn’t agree more. The Democratic activist countered that Obama and the Democrats in Congress weren’t getting credit for any of the good things they had done in the past two years. I just don’t see it. Judges? Obama named two very mediocre, middle-of-the-road jurists who may even side against liberal positions, like the death penalty, or presidential executive power. The wars? We still have 50,000 troops and an enormous army of mercenaries in Iraq, and a ballooning quagmire in Afghanistan that is looking more like Vietnam every day. That’s change? And education? Show me the money. All we’re hearing is charter schools, and the studies show them to be costly failures that simply suck the life out of the rest of the schools in a district. Jobs? Right. Regulating the banks? There’s a laugh! They are bigger, more concentrated, and more powerful than ever, and engaged in the same crooked behavior that caused the economic crisis.

The good news is that the voters have told Obama, the Democrats, and their oh-so-smart political advisers, “F*ck you!”

One would hope that we won’t be hearing any more dissing of progressives from the White House or Congressional Democrats after this election, but then again, the Democratic Party long ago lost any pretense of being the party of the common person, so who knows?...

-- "Democratic Base To Party Leaders: Take That, You Smug B*st*rds!," 11/3/10</span></span>

I actually thought the Dems would get pounded much harder.

but that said, I still predict new new reformers will settle into the same old, same old soon enough. The reform we need ain't gonna come from either of the big two parties.

Your sig line is eerily appropriate, KHPE.

While I'm sympathetic with the disappointment by progressives with the Dems, I don't understand what Lindorf bases the claim that health care reform weakened Medicaid on.

Much of that is speculation, refers to things that would have happened without reform, and it totally ignores the major expansions in Medicare and Medicaid services.

It is true that the new law lacks proven cost control methods. There are no proven cost control methods. The inflation rate for medical expenses has been out of control for almost three decades now. This trend definitely would have continued without reform. There are provisions designed with the intent of helping control costs. These include financial incentives for preventative care, reforms in billing practices, demonstration grants for tort reform, more oversight for fraudulent billing, expanding the insurance pool, and taxes on cadillac plans.

There would have been attempts to decrease deficit spending regardless of whether this law passed or not. The law does nothing to increase the chances of that occurring. It actually increases funding to these programs, which will hopefully buffer some areas should deficit reducing actions target them.

The purpose of the Centers Of Medicaid and Medicare Services is to increase efficiencies and outcomes in payment and delivery methods. Anyone who works with Medicaid and Medicare billing knows that it is full of inefficiencies. It would have been irresponsible to pass a health care law that didn't include this function.

The new law impacts Medicare and Medicaid in the following ways:

1. Expands Medicare drug coverage.
2. Extends Medicare payments to small rural hospitals that were not previously eligible.
3. Expands Medicaid coverage to 133% of the federal poverty level - making more people eligible for Medicaid.
4. For the first time, extends Medicaid coverage to adults without dependent children who fall under 133% of the poverty level. This is huge. Speaking as someone who has had to deny Medicaid applications for hundreds of chronically ill adults without dependent children, I can tell you it is one of most heartbreaking experiences imaginable. If the new Republican Congress is successful in removing funding for this provision of the law it will be a great tragedy.

And regarding Lindorff's claim that the automobile company bailouts hurt UAW members... I suppose the Democrats should have just let General Motors and Chrysler go belly up. Tens of thousands of UAW members would have lost their jobs and all of their benefits. I'm sure Mr. Lindorff would have been more successful in convincing UAW members to support "principled" Democrats under that scenario.

Good luck with the Republicans, sir. I believe they actually tried to blame the financial problems of the automobile industry on the UAW - just as they blame the problems of the educational system on teacher's unions.

Hmm. I know I said I'd stay away, but...

Jerry, there is some truth, not all, but some, in putting part of the problem with education on the teachers union. When schools with low scores cannot get rid of bad teachers with low scores and hire better ones due to the union, its a problem. Now, honestly, I put most of the blame on parents and students. All most teachers in overcrowded rooms and no supplies can do is put the information there, but there are cases of bad teachers as well. And if you are only willing to focus on one aspect of the problem and not all of them, you are not solving the problem.

Unions, in all industries, represent their members during disciplinary proceedings. Yes, it can make it more difficult to get rid of poor performers. It can be particularly irritating when the work of the poor performer falls to other employees. Ultimately, though, it is only a small part of what unions do. Much more effort goes to advocating for better pay, better benefits, better working conditions, professional support and training. Politicians have found it's particularly effective to demagog against teacher's unions for some reason. The problems with our educational system run much deeper than a few a poor performing teachers being protected by unions. Teachers' unions have much more to complain about when it comes to Democrats not standing up for them than the UAW. Many Dems joined the Republicans in voting for No Child Left Behind and its over reliance on standardized test scores.

My reaction to Lindorff's rant on his blog is mainly due to what I perceive as some inaccurate arguments. I certainly support any progressive's right to vote against Democrats for not fighting strongly enough on some issues - or to just not vote at all. This election cycle was very ugly. There were a lot of attacks, distortions, and outright lies from all sides.

The Democrats took a lot of criticism from the right for the auto industry loans. It is certainly legitimate to argue that the government has no role in bailing out any industry. It was done, however, to save the jobs of UAW members - and was largely successful.

Likewise, I get that progressives who favored single payor health care or a public option are disappointed. The leadership of the newly elected Republican Congress has already signaled that blocking implementation of health care reform will be one of their top priorities. Throughout the healthcare debate and campaign, conservatives misrepresented what is in the law and have failed to advance alternative solutions. This is a law that eliminates pre-existing conditions clauses from insurance coverage and expands Medicaid benefits to many individuals that never received them before. These are things that some Democrats have spent our entire adult lifetimes fighting for. We will fight to prevent them from being taken away. Progressives may not want to join us in this battle, but we have as much responsibility to correct their misrepresentations about what's in the law, as we do the misrepresentations from the right.