It's not my movement. It's a movement that I watch with concern, but it's not one that I've sided with. I'm interested in the claims and facts from both sides.
The problem is that the anti-vaccine folks only have claims, but no evidence or data to back up those claims. To keep sounding this alarm and scaring parents into not having their children vaccinated with absolutely no evidence to base their claims on is just reckless and dangerous for everyone.
He got as many Republican votes as he deserved. None.
He had a super majority of Democrats and still had to bribe them to get their votes.
We do agree on one thing though: he is an absolute failure.
Because democrats span the spectrum from center to looney left. Republicans have maybe one or two members that aren't radical right, so they essentially all stick to the party line and do as they're told. They get brainwashed as part of their initiation apparently. Witness the change in Palin after they picked her for the VP candidate. She could barely get a sentence or two out without putting her foot in her mouth. Then after a few weeks of intensive training, she was spouting the party line with the best of 'em. That Katie Couric interview was an unfortunate incident that occurred before they had finished uploading everything into her brain, so that came out as a bit of a confused attempt to make Republican sounds and try not to say anything of substance. Painful to watch.
"His greatest failure was in trying to be bi-partisan."
That's nonsense. Obama made no effort to be bi-partisan, and the Democratic Congressional leadership did everything they could to avoid including the minority on anything.
Were you paying no attention at all for the past year? Dems made a ton of concessions, beginning with taking single-payer off the table, and later with neutering the public option before essentially removing it completely. Olympia Snow got them to make all kinds of changes in hopes of getting at least some Republicans to support it. There was almost no chance of that anyway, which is why it was a bad idea.
As for getting a Republican to vote for it as cover, that wasn't going to give them cover anyway. The Republicans came right out and said that they were going to do everything in their power to make sure Obama's health care reforms fail. They were going to make it his Waterloo, remember? Chasing their votes was nuts. They had no interest in seeing anything the Dems wanted getting passed.
So I guess what I'm saying is that you're completely wrong. I don't agree with everything that was in the bill, and I sure don't think it was perfect, but what legislation ever is? I found all the talk about "backroom dealing" and such to be hilarious coming from anyone in Congress, as if that doesn't happen with every non-trivial piece of legislation anyway. Those few that were holding things up so that they could get some handouts wouldn't have had that power if there had been some Republican supporters as well.
to continue your analogy, the Republican bills were "let's give the Cancer patient AIDS too".
I guess one hyperbolic analogy deserves another;)
My problem with the Republican plan is that it doesn't really do much of anything to fix the actual problems. It won't bring costs down by much. They claim that tort reform will cut costs, but that term isn't a magic bullet and can do as much harm as good if not done right. I want to see more details on that. I can understand having it in for the lawyers, and I can get behind that, but I want some assurances that this won't be used to screw over patients with legitimate claims. I've heard nothing along those lines from Republicans. While it could be a good start, it still won't do enough to bring costs down anyway.
They also don't do anything for people with pre-existing conditions, and that's more important than ever now that so many people have lost their jobs and their insurance along with it. Doing nothing about that is just a huge gaping hole in their bill and renders it useless for the people who need it most.
Finally their bill won't do much to increase the number of people covered. The CBO puts it at 83% compared to 96% for the Dems plan. So we'll still have a ton of people with no coverage, many of them with problems already, and these folks will continue resorting to emergency care and hospitalization because they have no other choice. This will continue to be a financial drain on the system.
You know, in Toronto teachers strike quite often (almost as often as the rest of the woefully inadequate government workers), but the demands normally have nothing to do with improving education system for the students, it is always a power play between teachers' unions and the public school board officials. It is always about money and perks for the teachers but it is never about improving the system for the students. Teachers want more vacation and more pay, fewer working hours, they want to spend their summers working somewhere else and not improving their skills by attending more professional development classes, etc. It is very difficult to get rid of a useless teacher and many of them are useless, it is also difficult to get good teachers in the first place, I believe this is partially due to the existence of unions in the first place. Unions do not allow real competition, they are about equalizing the outcomes for the members, but not about improving the education for the students.
What's hilarious to me is that the same people who believe that corporations are people and should have the same rights as people (but not the same responsibilities, incentives, liabilities, etc), are the same people who say that workers shouldn't be allowed to bargain collectively. It's beyond hypocritical, and illustrates why unions are needed in the first place. If business didn't have such a long track record of horrible abuses, unions wouldn't be needed.
I don't particularly like a lot of the things that unions do, but then I don't like a lot of the things that businesses do either, so I can just hope that they balance out.
As for firing teachers, sure, I would love to be able to fire bad teachers. The problem is giving them this ability without some objective way of measuring teacher performance and accounting for various factors that are out of the teacher's control. I don't trust school administrators either. I happen to live in Texas where the school boards are packed with idiots, so I sure as hell don't want them having absolute power to fire any teacher for any reason.
Although I agree with the sentiment, the BSA was likely never a strictly secular program. I can't say for sure about the first few months after its creation, as it was a private organization from February 1910 through April 1910, at which point control was taken over by the YMCA, emphasis on the C for Christian. The Scout Oath includes the line "To do my duty to God," and thousands of packs, with hundreds of thousands of members, are organized by churches.
Again, while I disagree with the anti-gay rhetoric of the BSA, it's important to note that this is a case of secular society attempting to "hijack" a semi-religious program.
If they're semi-religious, then why are they getting government funding? If they're private then they can discriminate all they want, but you don't have that right when you're taking taxpayer money.
So, I think we've established that the people whose full-time occupation has been actively interfering with the Nuclear plants ever being built have been successful. Perhaps it's obvious now who the losses should be billable to.
Unfortunately, they don't have many assets to seize. A folding table and a thick stack of leaflets doesn't amount to much. However, it could serve as a valuable educational lesson to make sure the history of their obstruction is known, so that they can be reviled through history. Let the schoolchildren be taught what those people were really about.
If you could bill people for obstruction, we wouldn't have any Congresspeople.
The only supportable "pro-choice" position I see is to defend a woman's right to choose when to have sex. If she does, she has made her choice. Sex organs are not fun organs, they're reproductive organs.
I recognize that this position of "sex is for reproduction" is held by some groups. I find it to be rather shallow and naive. There is more to sex than simply fun and reproduction too. Even if it is done just for fun, I don't see that that is a commitment to bear or raise a child. I think the whole "life begins at conception" line of thinking to be ridiculously oversimplified. Ultimately our bodies are our own and we should have the right to make these decisions for ourselves. I definitely fall on the pro-choice side, but I would be willing to accept some limit on late-term (assuming that it is defined in a way I consider reasonable) abortions as long as exceptions are made for the health of the mother. Whether this would make any real impact, I don't know, but that's as far as I'd be willing to compromise.
And none of them lifted it, and they all made a mistake in not doing so.
That doesn't let Obama off the hook now. He's the one in the Oval Office, it's now his responsibility.
Ever consider that for some of us it's not about partisanship, but about what's best for the US?
Right. The Republican's don't do it even though their base supports it, and even though they had years and years of time with more than sufficient majorities in Congress to do so, yet the President whose base is most opposed to it is somehow supposed to do it? Think you might be underestimating the difficulty of doing this?
Besides, the Democrats in Congress right now can't find their ass with both hands, and have basically crumbled since the Mass. election. I don't expect them to be able to accomplish anything anytime soon. The Republicans move in lockstep save one or two. Maybe they just have to wait and see how the election this year turns out for them. If it goes as well as they seem to expect, then overturn the ban and dare Obama to veto it.
That being said, his bit about loans is only a half measure, if he was really serious he'd rescind Carter's dumbass executive order and get us down the path of recycling to deal with the "nuclear waste" issue.
Minor correction, President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981.
Apparently the ban is part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, so it couldn't have been overturned by an executive order. There's a very interesting discussion of it here. According to this article from 2008, there is still a ban in place.
Your phrasing makes it sound as if it's a foregone conclusion that having a child is always the best option though, and only a deficiency in the parents is responsible for their choice to have an abortion.
You ignore the most frequent cause of abortion: panic. (combined with the inability to take responsibility)
Not sure that's a defensible claim there. Why not say that the most frequent cause is the desire to not have a child because they're not ready or are unable to properly support one, or any of a bunch of other reasons? What evidence is there that panic is the most common cause? You know, aside from made for TV movies on Lifetime...
Given that Obama has a complete lack of understanding of economics and every bill / way to fix the economy he proposes only serves to make it worse, a president with a fully functional brain would go a long way to fixing things. No society has ever been able to tax it's way to prosperity, but that's what Obama is trying to do - and we can all look around us and see how well that's working out.
Yeah, but you can't spend your way there either, which is what GWB seemed to be trying to do. He increased the size of the government more than any president since LBJ, started two wars and passed the Medicare prescription drug benefit, all without any way of paying for them. That's DEFINITELY not the path to prosperity. Factor in the deregulation of the financial industry (although some of that happened before he took office) and we can see exactly how the economy ended up so incredibly fucked. Somebody has to pay for all the spending we've already been doing. Didn't see the Republicans fighting it over the past 8 years though. Where were the Tea Baggers then?
Saying "birds are dinosaurs" (or even "Birds Are Dinosaurs") is rather like saying "French is Latin" or "English is Proto-Indo-European." The lineage is unmistakable, but the one is not synonymous with the other. I am not sure why this conflation seems to be acceptable for birds and dinosaurs, when you never hear, for example, "homo sapiens is homo erectus" or "South America is Gondwanaland" or "Intel is Fairchild Semiconductor."
This video explains the reasoning behind it and why humans ARE apes, among other things. It's designed as a rebuttal against the creationist claim that humans aren't apes. There's a transcript of it as well.
That's the purview of the family. The doctor should be outside of it, because of the potential conflict of interest.
It's the patient's call first and foremost, and that's why they have things like living wills, which should certainly be discussed with your doctor so that you are clear about your options and what they can and cannot do. This allows the patients to make their wishes clear to their doctors. Also, not everyone has blood relatives or spouses that are able to make such decisions for them.
I'm not sure I'd say 'shame' though. The rest of the religion provides a context for the lessons. In a vacuum, the lessons lose a lot of relevance.
We can show plenty of context with real-world examples. Pitching the Christian mythology and all of its baggage as truth is not required and, IMHO, counterproductive because I think being couched in that mythology makes it lose something. I mean Jesus as a role model is fine, but it's also a pretty ridiculously high bar, so it's all too easy to rationalize not being able to meet it and thereby excuse all sorts of things. Putting it in a more modern context with more real-world examples and actual reasoning rather than commandments and assertions would be beneficial I think. This isn't to say that some of the parables of the Bible aren't still useful. Those, along with things like Aesop's fables, can be an entertaining way to introduce topics for discussion.
...and that is why all the species of birds that exist today lie in the same fossil beds of all the dinosaurs that ever existed and that is why modern human fossils exist in the the same fossil beds of all the dinosaurs because everything was created at the same time and just died out at different intervals.
I'm confused on how you take that side of the things but you don't disagree with the age of the fossils. Does it really matter since I'm sure you also think that there is life after death only for humans and not the trillions of other living organisms on the planet.
I tried that argument with another creationist yesterday. His response was "you just haven't found those fossils, keep digging." I fear that our civilization is far too coddling of idiots, which is why we don't see more selection for critical thinking skills.
These are impossible to measure ethically, and yet are valuable concepts.
Valuable concepts certainly, and it always saddens me to see them get all muddied up with religion. That so many religions maintain that in order to have these valuable concepts, we must accept a bunch of rather ridiculous ones along with some version of ancient mythology is a real shame.
They are really only interested in the money anyway.
That's the problem. They want the money, but not the expense and responsibility that comes with it, which is why you see them dropping sick people and denying coverage, something that you don't see nearly as much of with Medicare. Health care is not something that should be left to the market because it is too essential and emotion-driven to be left to a simple profit-incentive. The insurance companies do whatever they can to extract as much money from people as possible while simultaneously trying to ensure that they don't pay out a cent more than they have to. Combine that with the fact that people are generally in a bad position to put up a fight when they most need their coverage and you have a horribly twisted system that hurts people at every opportunity.
Say what you will about the management of Medicare, but it's priorities are not nearly as screwed up as the insurance industry. If we start holding our representatives accountable for the management of it as we should, it could serve as a good replacement that could bring down costs overall, and a big chunk of the deficit along with them. We still have a lot better chance of doing that than we do of getting effective regulations put on an industry that has always found ways around them in the past.
Oh, yes. And with good reason. Profit motive is fairly predictable, and contract law is well settled. Politics are volatile, and while insurance companies are slimeballs, they come out like roses against most everything the government does. This is pretty much beyond debate, as far as I know.
What?! The economy is volatile, and contracts are only as good as your understanding of them, and insurance companies are notorious for dropping people or denying coverage on any of a hundred technicalities when they actually need the care they've been paying for. They never notice these issues when the customer applies or while they're healthy and paying of course. What is the government doing with Medicare or Medicaid that is so much worse than that?
Plus it is relatively trivial to change insurance, compared to changing one's nationality.
That's not true in my experience. I don't know of anyone that has insurance other than what's offered by their employer, aside from some supplemental plans, whose terms can't even be deciphered by most lawyers, let alone their customers (you should see some of the analyses of these contracts).
Only where 'nuts' includes a complete distrust of government. Particularly the blue pill. That can be hard to swallow when you don't trust the dispensary.
I don't trust the government either, regardless of pill color. They're all corrupt, but then so are the insurance companies. Nobody who signs up with an insurance company has any idea what kind of coverage they'll really get or whether they'll get dropped on some technicality if they suddenly need some expensive care. Not you, not me, nobody. But we've got an endless parade of examples of people who've been screwed by that industry because of the twisted incentives involved. The problems I've read about with the care given by the Medicare system (aside from financial mismanagement issues) have been pretty tame in comparison to those by the insurance companies, which are just infuriatingly evil.
If we were limiting ourselves to expanding Medicare/Medicaid. That would be one thing. But we're not. We're going for the whole shooting match with one shot.
Personally I think the single-payer system would have been a better bet. It's much simpler and has comparatively straightforward incentives for everyone. I guess they decided against trying it the insurance industry would've gone apeshit and we'd have been bombarded with and endless stream of disinformation and FUD by the industry.
Here's a humble suggestion - what if we make the government pay all claims over $100,000, and leave the rest to the current system?
Only if everyone is paying into the government system to cover this.
I just really think limited, common sense ideas could work here, and am unsurprised that we have yet to see any from Washington.
There's almost nothing about health care that is common sense. Especially when trying to figure out the current system which has some of the most screwed up incentives imaginable which inflate the costs of health care all around and are a big part of our deficit problem.
Further I humbly submit that religion in general is not bad for children and there's no basis for outrage against it.
That kinda depends on the content and scope of subject matter that's being taught, doesn't it? If I'm, say a scientologist, and I want to teach my kids only those beliefs, but I'm not really qualified to teach them math, history, science, etc., am I not harming them?
This is my point! It can logically be defined that broadly, and the issue at hand is the shift of control from the insurance companies to the government. That is the essence of it, right there. So the 'what' is troubling, but the 'who' becomes crucial.
So they fear a non-profit government employee more than a for-profit insurance company accountant or lawyer? Despite the fact that one of the main reasons we see sick people being dropped or refused treatments by insurance companies is that we don't have anything close to universal coverage, so the incentive for the industry is to drop the sick and retain the healthy? I'm thinking you're arguing that these folks really are nuts.
The only way to effectively provide care for people when they have an accident (by definition this is unpredictable) or get sick (happens to all kinds of people all the time, often without warning) is to require that everyone be covered and contribute so that care can be provided to everyone. Otherwise we have people just showing up in emergency rooms with no insurance and who will never be able to pay their bills, so the rest of us end up paying more in premiums anyway. Screw that. If you're not going to throw the uninsured out into the streets to die, then insuring everyone is the only sensible approach.
That's what I meant about the particulars of the law. It was in the thousands of pages in length, and we don't actually even get to see the final version, so one can only try and peer into the agendas within.
We've already seen both the House and Senate versions, and once reconciled, and voted on again, we get to see the final version (or would have, anyway).
Lack of precise text doesn't obviate human nature and greed. The topic could well have been omitted, or left to the states, or dealt with in any number of ways that are closer to the people impacted.
How is that any different at all than the current situation? It leaves the status quo intact. Conservatives generally support things being left to the states anyway.
Again, back to my original point, there is good reason to fear a bad implementation of this idea. Calling someone a 'whack job' for using the term isn't a good way to get to the heart of their concerns.
The issue is that their concerns are for something that doesn't exist in any incarnation of the bill, unless you define it so broadly that it is essentially a fear of what our current system has been doing forever. So yeah, opposing the bill on those grounds makes you look ignorant.
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It's not my movement. It's a movement that I watch with concern, but it's not one that I've sided with. I'm interested in the claims and facts from both sides.
The problem is that the anti-vaccine folks only have claims, but no evidence or data to back up those claims. To keep sounding this alarm and scaring parents into not having their children vaccinated with absolutely no evidence to base their claims on is just reckless and dangerous for everyone.
He got as many Republican votes as he deserved. None.
He had a super majority of Democrats and still had to bribe them to get their votes.
We do agree on one thing though: he is an absolute failure.
Because democrats span the spectrum from center to looney left. Republicans have maybe one or two members that aren't radical right, so they essentially all stick to the party line and do as they're told. They get brainwashed as part of their initiation apparently. Witness the change in Palin after they picked her for the VP candidate. She could barely get a sentence or two out without putting her foot in her mouth. Then after a few weeks of intensive training, she was spouting the party line with the best of 'em. That Katie Couric interview was an unfortunate incident that occurred before they had finished uploading everything into her brain, so that came out as a bit of a confused attempt to make Republican sounds and try not to say anything of substance. Painful to watch.
"His greatest failure was in trying to be bi-partisan."
That's nonsense. Obama made no effort to be bi-partisan, and the Democratic Congressional leadership did everything they could to avoid including the minority on anything.
Were you paying no attention at all for the past year? Dems made a ton of concessions, beginning with taking single-payer off the table, and later with neutering the public option before essentially removing it completely. Olympia Snow got them to make all kinds of changes in hopes of getting at least some Republicans to support it. There was almost no chance of that anyway, which is why it was a bad idea.
As for getting a Republican to vote for it as cover, that wasn't going to give them cover anyway. The Republicans came right out and said that they were going to do everything in their power to make sure Obama's health care reforms fail. They were going to make it his Waterloo, remember? Chasing their votes was nuts. They had no interest in seeing anything the Dems wanted getting passed.
So I guess what I'm saying is that you're completely wrong. I don't agree with everything that was in the bill, and I sure don't think it was perfect, but what legislation ever is? I found all the talk about "backroom dealing" and such to be hilarious coming from anyone in Congress, as if that doesn't happen with every non-trivial piece of legislation anyway. Those few that were holding things up so that they could get some handouts wouldn't have had that power if there had been some Republican supporters as well.
to continue your analogy, the Republican bills were "let's give the Cancer patient AIDS too".
I guess one hyperbolic analogy deserves another ;)
My problem with the Republican plan is that it doesn't really do much of anything to fix the actual problems. It won't bring costs down by much. They claim that tort reform will cut costs, but that term isn't a magic bullet and can do as much harm as good if not done right. I want to see more details on that. I can understand having it in for the lawyers, and I can get behind that, but I want some assurances that this won't be used to screw over patients with legitimate claims. I've heard nothing along those lines from Republicans. While it could be a good start, it still won't do enough to bring costs down anyway.
They also don't do anything for people with pre-existing conditions, and that's more important than ever now that so many people have lost their jobs and their insurance along with it. Doing nothing about that is just a huge gaping hole in their bill and renders it useless for the people who need it most.
Finally their bill won't do much to increase the number of people covered. The CBO puts it at 83% compared to 96% for the Dems plan. So we'll still have a ton of people with no coverage, many of them with problems already, and these folks will continue resorting to emergency care and hospitalization because they have no other choice. This will continue to be a financial drain on the system.
You know, in Toronto teachers strike quite often (almost as often as the rest of the woefully inadequate government workers), but the demands normally have nothing to do with improving education system for the students, it is always a power play between teachers' unions and the public school board officials. It is always about money and perks for the teachers but it is never about improving the system for the students. Teachers want more vacation and more pay, fewer working hours, they want to spend their summers working somewhere else and not improving their skills by attending more professional development classes, etc. It is very difficult to get rid of a useless teacher and many of them are useless, it is also difficult to get good teachers in the first place, I believe this is partially due to the existence of unions in the first place. Unions do not allow real competition, they are about equalizing the outcomes for the members, but not about improving the education for the students.
What's hilarious to me is that the same people who believe that corporations are people and should have the same rights as people (but not the same responsibilities, incentives, liabilities, etc), are the same people who say that workers shouldn't be allowed to bargain collectively. It's beyond hypocritical, and illustrates why unions are needed in the first place. If business didn't have such a long track record of horrible abuses, unions wouldn't be needed.
I don't particularly like a lot of the things that unions do, but then I don't like a lot of the things that businesses do either, so I can just hope that they balance out.
As for firing teachers, sure, I would love to be able to fire bad teachers. The problem is giving them this ability without some objective way of measuring teacher performance and accounting for various factors that are out of the teacher's control. I don't trust school administrators either. I happen to live in Texas where the school boards are packed with idiots, so I sure as hell don't want them having absolute power to fire any teacher for any reason.
Although I agree with the sentiment, the BSA was likely never a strictly secular program. I can't say for sure about the first few months after its creation, as it was a private organization from February 1910 through April 1910, at which point control was taken over by the YMCA, emphasis on the C for Christian. The Scout Oath includes the line "To do my duty to God," and thousands of packs, with hundreds of thousands of members, are organized by churches.
Again, while I disagree with the anti-gay rhetoric of the BSA, it's important to note that this is a case of secular society attempting to "hijack" a semi-religious program.
If they're semi-religious, then why are they getting government funding? If they're private then they can discriminate all they want, but you don't have that right when you're taking taxpayer money.
So, I think we've established that the people whose full-time occupation has been actively interfering with the Nuclear plants ever being built have been successful. Perhaps it's obvious now who the losses should be billable to.
Unfortunately, they don't have many assets to seize. A folding table and a thick stack of leaflets doesn't amount to much. However, it could serve as a valuable educational lesson to make sure the history of their obstruction is known, so that they can be reviled through history. Let the schoolchildren be taught what those people were really about.
If you could bill people for obstruction, we wouldn't have any Congresspeople.
The only supportable "pro-choice" position I see is to defend a woman's right to choose when to have sex. If she does, she has made her choice. Sex organs are not fun organs, they're reproductive organs.
I recognize that this position of "sex is for reproduction" is held by some groups. I find it to be rather shallow and naive. There is more to sex than simply fun and reproduction too. Even if it is done just for fun, I don't see that that is a commitment to bear or raise a child. I think the whole "life begins at conception" line of thinking to be ridiculously oversimplified. Ultimately our bodies are our own and we should have the right to make these decisions for ourselves. I definitely fall on the pro-choice side, but I would be willing to accept some limit on late-term (assuming that it is defined in a way I consider reasonable) abortions as long as exceptions are made for the health of the mother. Whether this would make any real impact, I don't know, but that's as far as I'd be willing to compromise.
And none of them lifted it, and they all made a mistake in not doing so.
That doesn't let Obama off the hook now. He's the one in the Oval Office, it's now his responsibility.
Ever consider that for some of us it's not about partisanship, but about what's best for the US?
Right. The Republican's don't do it even though their base supports it, and even though they had years and years of time with more than sufficient majorities in Congress to do so, yet the President whose base is most opposed to it is somehow supposed to do it? Think you might be underestimating the difficulty of doing this?
Besides, the Democrats in Congress right now can't find their ass with both hands, and have basically crumbled since the Mass. election. I don't expect them to be able to accomplish anything anytime soon. The Republicans move in lockstep save one or two. Maybe they just have to wait and see how the election this year turns out for them. If it goes as well as they seem to expect, then overturn the ban and dare Obama to veto it.
That being said, his bit about loans is only a half measure, if he was really serious he'd rescind Carter's dumbass executive order and get us down the path of recycling to deal with the "nuclear waste" issue.
Minor correction, President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981.
Apparently the ban is part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, so it couldn't have been overturned by an executive order. There's a very interesting discussion of it here. According to this article from 2008, there is still a ban in place.
Your phrasing makes it sound as if it's a foregone conclusion that having a child is always the best option though, and only a deficiency in the parents is responsible for their choice to have an abortion.
You ignore the most frequent cause of abortion: panic. (combined with the inability to take responsibility)
Not sure that's a defensible claim there. Why not say that the most frequent cause is the desire to not have a child because they're not ready or are unable to properly support one, or any of a bunch of other reasons? What evidence is there that panic is the most common cause? You know, aside from made for TV movies on Lifetime...
Given that Obama has a complete lack of understanding of economics and every bill / way to fix the economy he proposes only serves to make it worse, a president with a fully functional brain would go a long way to fixing things. No society has ever been able to tax it's way to prosperity, but that's what Obama is trying to do - and we can all look around us and see how well that's working out.
Yeah, but you can't spend your way there either, which is what GWB seemed to be trying to do. He increased the size of the government more than any president since LBJ, started two wars and passed the Medicare prescription drug benefit, all without any way of paying for them. That's DEFINITELY not the path to prosperity. Factor in the deregulation of the financial industry (although some of that happened before he took office) and we can see exactly how the economy ended up so incredibly fucked. Somebody has to pay for all the spending we've already been doing. Didn't see the Republicans fighting it over the past 8 years though. Where were the Tea Baggers then?
Saying "birds are dinosaurs" (or even "Birds Are Dinosaurs") is rather like saying "French is Latin" or "English is Proto-Indo-European." The lineage is unmistakable, but the one is not synonymous with the other. I am not sure why this conflation seems to be acceptable for birds and dinosaurs, when you never hear, for example, "homo sapiens is homo erectus" or "South America is Gondwanaland" or "Intel is Fairchild Semiconductor."
This video explains the reasoning behind it and why humans ARE apes, among other things. It's designed as a rebuttal against the creationist claim that humans aren't apes. There's a transcript of it as well.
That's the purview of the family. The doctor should be outside of it, because of the potential conflict of interest.
It's the patient's call first and foremost, and that's why they have things like living wills, which should certainly be discussed with your doctor so that you are clear about your options and what they can and cannot do. This allows the patients to make their wishes clear to their doctors. Also, not everyone has blood relatives or spouses that are able to make such decisions for them.
I'm not sure I'd say 'shame' though. The rest of the religion provides a context for the lessons. In a vacuum, the lessons lose a lot of relevance.
We can show plenty of context with real-world examples. Pitching the Christian mythology and all of its baggage as truth is not required and, IMHO, counterproductive because I think being couched in that mythology makes it lose something. I mean Jesus as a role model is fine, but it's also a pretty ridiculously high bar, so it's all too easy to rationalize not being able to meet it and thereby excuse all sorts of things. Putting it in a more modern context with more real-world examples and actual reasoning rather than commandments and assertions would be beneficial I think. This isn't to say that some of the parables of the Bible aren't still useful. Those, along with things like Aesop's fables, can be an entertaining way to introduce topics for discussion.
...and that is why all the species of birds that exist today lie in the same fossil beds of all the dinosaurs that ever existed and that is why modern human fossils exist in the the same fossil beds of all the dinosaurs because everything was created at the same time and just died out at different intervals.
I'm confused on how you take that side of the things but you don't disagree with the age of the fossils. Does it really matter since I'm sure you also think that there is life after death only for humans and not the trillions of other living organisms on the planet.
I tried that argument with another creationist yesterday. His response was "you just haven't found those fossils, keep digging." I fear that our civilization is far too coddling of idiots, which is why we don't see more selection for critical thinking skills.
These are impossible to measure ethically, and yet are valuable concepts.
Valuable concepts certainly, and it always saddens me to see them get all muddied up with religion. That so many religions maintain that in order to have these valuable concepts, we must accept a bunch of rather ridiculous ones along with some version of ancient mythology is a real shame.
Are you claiming that God doesn’t exist? Or are you claiming that if he did, he couldn’t create the world in 6 24-hour days?
I think the claim is that even if he does exist, and even if he did create the world that way, there's no evidence for it.
They are really only interested in the money anyway.
That's the problem. They want the money, but not the expense and responsibility that comes with it, which is why you see them dropping sick people and denying coverage, something that you don't see nearly as much of with Medicare. Health care is not something that should be left to the market because it is too essential and emotion-driven to be left to a simple profit-incentive. The insurance companies do whatever they can to extract as much money from people as possible while simultaneously trying to ensure that they don't pay out a cent more than they have to. Combine that with the fact that people are generally in a bad position to put up a fight when they most need their coverage and you have a horribly twisted system that hurts people at every opportunity.
Say what you will about the management of Medicare, but it's priorities are not nearly as screwed up as the insurance industry. If we start holding our representatives accountable for the management of it as we should, it could serve as a good replacement that could bring down costs overall, and a big chunk of the deficit along with them. We still have a lot better chance of doing that than we do of getting effective regulations put on an industry that has always found ways around them in the past.
Oh, yes. And with good reason. Profit motive is fairly predictable, and contract law is well settled. Politics are volatile, and while insurance companies are slimeballs, they come out like roses against most everything the government does. This is pretty much beyond debate, as far as I know.
What?! The economy is volatile, and contracts are only as good as your understanding of them, and insurance companies are notorious for dropping people or denying coverage on any of a hundred technicalities when they actually need the care they've been paying for. They never notice these issues when the customer applies or while they're healthy and paying of course. What is the government doing with Medicare or Medicaid that is so much worse than that?
Plus it is relatively trivial to change insurance, compared to changing one's nationality.
That's not true in my experience. I don't know of anyone that has insurance other than what's offered by their employer, aside from some supplemental plans, whose terms can't even be deciphered by most lawyers, let alone their customers (you should see some of the analyses of these contracts).
Only where 'nuts' includes a complete distrust of government. Particularly the blue pill. That can be hard to swallow when you don't trust the dispensary.
I don't trust the government either, regardless of pill color. They're all corrupt, but then so are the insurance companies. Nobody who signs up with an insurance company has any idea what kind of coverage they'll really get or whether they'll get dropped on some technicality if they suddenly need some expensive care. Not you, not me, nobody. But we've got an endless parade of examples of people who've been screwed by that industry because of the twisted incentives involved. The problems I've read about with the care given by the Medicare system (aside from financial mismanagement issues) have been pretty tame in comparison to those by the insurance companies, which are just infuriatingly evil.
If we were limiting ourselves to expanding Medicare/Medicaid. That would be one thing. But we're not. We're going for the whole shooting match with one shot.
Personally I think the single-payer system would have been a better bet. It's much simpler and has comparatively straightforward incentives for everyone. I guess they decided against trying it the insurance industry would've gone apeshit and we'd have been bombarded with and endless stream of disinformation and FUD by the industry.
Here's a humble suggestion - what if we make the government pay all claims over $100,000, and leave the rest to the current system?
Only if everyone is paying into the government system to cover this.
I just really think limited, common sense ideas could work here, and am unsurprised that we have yet to see any from Washington.
There's almost nothing about health care that is common sense. Especially when trying to figure out the current system which has some of the most screwed up incentives imaginable which inflate the costs of health care all around and are a big part of our deficit problem.
That's right!
Last thing the US wants to send is some message about welcoming any huddled masses yearning to breathe free...
Crap... too bad I alrady replied to this story or you'd get a mod point from me...
Further I humbly submit that religion in general is not bad for children and there's no basis for outrage against it.
That kinda depends on the content and scope of subject matter that's being taught, doesn't it? If I'm, say a scientologist, and I want to teach my kids only those beliefs, but I'm not really qualified to teach them math, history, science, etc., am I not harming them?
This is my point! It can logically be defined that broadly, and the issue at hand is the shift of control from the insurance companies to the government. That is the essence of it, right there. So the 'what' is troubling, but the 'who' becomes crucial.
So they fear a non-profit government employee more than a for-profit insurance company accountant or lawyer? Despite the fact that one of the main reasons we see sick people being dropped or refused treatments by insurance companies is that we don't have anything close to universal coverage, so the incentive for the industry is to drop the sick and retain the healthy? I'm thinking you're arguing that these folks really are nuts.
The only way to effectively provide care for people when they have an accident (by definition this is unpredictable) or get sick (happens to all kinds of people all the time, often without warning) is to require that everyone be covered and contribute so that care can be provided to everyone. Otherwise we have people just showing up in emergency rooms with no insurance and who will never be able to pay their bills, so the rest of us end up paying more in premiums anyway. Screw that. If you're not going to throw the uninsured out into the streets to die, then insuring everyone is the only sensible approach.
That's what I meant about the particulars of the law. It was in the thousands of pages in length, and we don't actually even get to see the final version, so one can only try and peer into the agendas within.
We've already seen both the House and Senate versions, and once reconciled, and voted on again, we get to see the final version (or would have, anyway).
Lack of precise text doesn't obviate human nature and greed. The topic could well have been omitted, or left to the states, or dealt with in any number of ways that are closer to the people impacted.
How is that any different at all than the current situation? It leaves the status quo intact. Conservatives generally support things being left to the states anyway.
Again, back to my original point, there is good reason to fear a bad implementation of this idea. Calling someone a 'whack job' for using the term isn't a good way to get to the heart of their concerns.
The issue is that their concerns are for something that doesn't exist in any incarnation of the bill, unless you define it so broadly that it is essentially a fear of what our current system has been doing forever. So yeah, opposing the bill on those grounds makes you look ignorant.