Sorry, the linked article does not support your premise. The only reference in it to anything that dilutes from the basic statement I made is the attempt by Ron Paul to hi-jack the tea party movement to support his foreign policy agenda (the tea party movement does not have a foreign policy position, although many of its members do).
The problem is that too many people are convinced that all they need to do is show up every four years and pick the right guy for President and all of the problems will be solved. That is actually the problem I have with many of the "Occupy" protesters, they do not appear to want to do the many years of hard work it takes to fix problems.
No, because it never was. The tea party movement from the beginning was a protest of government spending. There was a strong discontent with government spending that started with the bailouts passed in late 2008, which became an amorphous protest movement when the stimulus was passed in early 2009 and coalesced around Rick Santelli's rant about the government's proposal to refinance mortgages where he called for a "Chicago Tea Party". It was never about gun rights or anything other than government spending (although some elements extended it to opposing tax increases and supporting tax cuts, that was at least related by also being about government finances).
So tell me, what is the movement about? I have read several articles where they talked to people at the protests and I still don't know what it is about. Your comment seems to imply that it is about people having too much student debt.
The thing is, I do not understand why you had any hope in him in the first place. He had never done anything. At every level up to his Presidential campaign, as soon as he got elected, he started working at moving up to the next level. He never bothered to attempt to make any positive changes at that level. Of course, that is a metaphor for what is wrong in this country, too many people do not want to spend the time and effort to convince the majority of the rest that a:) the problem they see is really a problem or b:) that the solution they propose for the problem is the best one to try. They just want to go to the voting booth and pick the "best" candidate for President and then let that person fix it.
These people are the best chance we've had to turn around a country that's been headed in the wrong direction for at least the past 30 years. We live in a country where Goldman Sachs can commit thousands of acts of felony perjury, and not one person stands trial. They create fraudulent financial instruments, and pay back a small portion of their ill gotten gains as "fines" (bribes). Yet if I were to write a bad check to cover some groceries, I'd be going straight to jail. There's no way to describe this but tyranny.
Barack Obama, the greatest hope in a generation, is either unable or unwilling to do anything about this. If he's unwilling we have a severe political problem. He was elected to bring us change he refuses to deliver, and we have no way to hold him accountable.
On the other hand, if he's unable, we have a much more serious problem. That means democracy is well and truly dead in this country. The corporations have a complete stranglehold on our government. Unfortunately, this is more likely to be the truth.
Barack Obama who received more campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs than any other politician and then hired Goldman Sachs executives into his Administration left and right is your great hope to address problems that you identify as originating with Goldman Sachs?
...you'd know by now they are a VERY diverse group.
And very, very white. The press repeatedly commented on the fact that the tea party protests were largely white, yet doesn't seem to notice that the "Occupy" movement is even more bleached than the tea party was.
This is simply not true. The tea party from its inception was focused on reducing government spending. The only thing "unfocused" about the tea party was that it started out equally angry at both the Republicans and the Democrats. The Republican Party allowed the tea party protests to influence their political agenda and candidate selection (perhaps co-opting the tea party movement in the process) and this transformed the tea party movement into a Republican movement.
The Democrats have been seeking to manufacture a similar movement on their side of issues ever since and may have succeeded with the "Occupy" movement (although to what degree the "Occupy" movement is a product of the Democratic Party and to what degree it is something else that coalesced around and took control of the movement Democratic Party activists were creating is open to question). There is significant question as to whether this movement will have as much impact in the 2012 election as the tea party movement had in the 2010 election and if it does, will that impact be positive for the Democratic Party or negative.
What does your student loan bill have to do with Wall Street? If that is what this is about, they should be occupying the student commons of various universities.
Well, since you seem to believe that giving up freedom for the promise of better health (not actually better health) is a good thing, there is no point for further discussion.
There are several studies that show that cancer survival rates are higher in the U.S. and Canada. I have also seen similar numbers for other serious illnesses.
Considering that at this point most serious illnesses are the result of life style choices that people make, it is really unfair to judge the health care system on the basis of something that it is not under its purview.
No, I mean more effective for everybody. The prognosis for someone diagnosed with most serious illnesses is better if they live the U.S. than if they live elsewhere.
Government is an attempt to stop the robber barons from controlling everything,
Then it is a complete failure, since in today's world it functions to protect them from competition and to transfer wealth from the masses to the elites.
The problem with the Solyndra loan is not that the company went bankrupt after the government loaned them money. The problem is that it went bankrupt when the government experts said it would (with the loan) before the Administration pressured them to loan Solyndra the money in the first place and that when it became undeniable that the company was not viable the government renegotiated the terms of the loan so that the investors (Obama campaign contributors) would get their money before the government got paid back.
Not surprisingly, Hamm considers some of the current administration's loans and subsidies for alternative energy ventures to be misplaced.
That guy is an idiot.
The guy may be wrong about the appropriate government approach to alternative energy. However, he is correct that giving guaranteed loans to companies that have no viable business model is a bad idea. Government analysts has concluded that Solyndra would go bellyup in September of 2011 with the government loans, sooner without them, before the loans were approved.
I never said that America is particularly efficient at health care. To be perfectly honest, I do not consider efficiency a particularly useful metric when it comes to health care. My point was that American health care is, by metrics I consider significant, more effective than other countries.
That is interesting considering that while the life expectancy for Japan is higher than the life expectancy for the U.S., the life expectancy for Japanese Americans is higher than the life expectancy for Japan. So, I wonder if the same thing would hold true for this study? As I said, some time back I saw a review of the expected survival rate for someone diagnosed with a number of severe health issues, in the vast majority the U.S. ranks high. As an example, the survival rate for most cancers is higher in the U.S. than in Canada or Europe. This is a better measure of the health care system than mortality rates, because mortality rates vary by many factors and the U.S. is much less homogeneous in any of those factors than any of the other countries on the list you referenced.
The article failed to list what the benchmarks the study used to compare health care in different countries. However, at least one of its benchmarks was "breast cancer screening, which is significantly effected by sociological factors involving the members of a society and the choices they make as opposed to the actual quality of available medical care. Additionally, most such studies I have seen factor in the degree to which the government pays for health care into their ranking and then say that the fact that the U.S. ranks low indicates that outcomes would be improved by government financing of health care. I am not going to take the time to look it up, however, several months ago I came across an article listing expected survival rates for people diagnosed with about 15-20 serious illnesses. The U.S. ranked in the top 5 in all of them, no other country came close to that.
For your basic corporate conservative, the only things that have value are those things that are owned by somebody. And that's a private owner, not a government.
This guy works for the UN, so while there may be definitions of "conservative" that apply to him, they bear no relationship with the definitions that are typically used in conversations on slashdot.
The relevant ideological perspective on this guy is that he is someone who believes that government is the answer to every problem (even problems that are caused by the government). So, the World Wide Web should have been patented because then someone would have control over it (at least theoretically). That someone could then be controlled by government. With the current model of the Web, it is very difficult for government to get its hands around it to control it. If every website had to license the patent, then government could keep track of who ran each and every website and regulate what they posted.
how else do you explain people that demand to pay more for a private health system with worse outcomes then public health systems?
Perhaps by looking at actual outcomes and discovering that the prognosis for someone diagnosed with a serious illness is significantly better in the US than in countries where the government pays for health-care?
If the Ds are directly responsible for poor black academic performance, then we should expect locally republican areas to have at least somewhat more even performance.
The problem with that is I am not talking about the politicians, I am talking about the actual teachers and school administrators. If you look, you will find that those in the field of education are overwhelmingly Democrats. So, if you could find a school where a majority of the administrators and teachers were Rs, it might be possible to test the question, but I am unaware of any such location.
Ron Paul is considered a nutjob by most Republicans. Other violence based Democratic Party related organizations: New Black Panther Party, Unions (Google the Longshoreman's Union in Longview Washington--and Hoffa's speech introducing Obama, also, Google King Electrical Services owner shot). The Democratic Party has a history of overt racist behavior. The Republican Party has a history of overt anti-racist behavior. Yet today, the Republicans are the one's that are repeatedly asked to defend themselves against charges of racism. The question is, what evidence is there that Democrats are not still racist. Public schools throughout the country are overwhelmingly run by Democrats (teachers, principals, administrators) and we are constantly hearing about the gap in academic performance between blacks and whites. The founder of Planned Parenthood was an avowed racist, one of whose goals was to eliminate blacks. Today Planned Parenthood has over 80% of its clinics in minority neighborhoods. One can go on and see how policies that were started for racist goals are maintained by today's Democrats, who claim that they serve some other purpose.
I use Robert Byrd because he is an example that does not need much explaining. Of course there was also Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, the man who, as governor of South Carolina started flying the Confederate Flag over the statehouse and was a prominent Democrat when the Democrats started demanding that Republican Presidential candidates take a stand on the issue. Then there is Bill Clinton's mentor and political patron, William J. Fulbright.
As for Strom Thurmond, he was 15 years older than Robert Byrd, so there is nothing coincidental about his dying sooner. Second, if he had been a member of the KKK it would have been while he was a member of the Democratic Party. Finally, while Strom Thurmond was a segregationist I do not recall him ever advocating the violence that was the stock in trade of the KKK (resorting to violence seems to be a common theme among many Democratic Party related organizations).
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Sorry, the linked article does not support your premise. The only reference in it to anything that dilutes from the basic statement I made is the attempt by Ron Paul to hi-jack the tea party movement to support his foreign policy agenda (the tea party movement does not have a foreign policy position, although many of its members do).
The problem is that too many people are convinced that all they need to do is show up every four years and pick the right guy for President and all of the problems will be solved. That is actually the problem I have with many of the "Occupy" protesters, they do not appear to want to do the many years of hard work it takes to fix problems.
No, because it never was. The tea party movement from the beginning was a protest of government spending. There was a strong discontent with government spending that started with the bailouts passed in late 2008, which became an amorphous protest movement when the stimulus was passed in early 2009 and coalesced around Rick Santelli's rant about the government's proposal to refinance mortgages where he called for a "Chicago Tea Party". It was never about gun rights or anything other than government spending (although some elements extended it to opposing tax increases and supporting tax cuts, that was at least related by also being about government finances).
So tell me, what is the movement about? I have read several articles where they talked to people at the protests and I still don't know what it is about. Your comment seems to imply that it is about people having too much student debt.
The thing is, I do not understand why you had any hope in him in the first place. He had never done anything. At every level up to his Presidential campaign, as soon as he got elected, he started working at moving up to the next level. He never bothered to attempt to make any positive changes at that level. Of course, that is a metaphor for what is wrong in this country, too many people do not want to spend the time and effort to convince the majority of the rest that a:) the problem they see is really a problem or b:) that the solution they propose for the problem is the best one to try. They just want to go to the voting booth and pick the "best" candidate for President and then let that person fix it.
These people are the best chance we've had to turn around a country that's been headed in the wrong direction for at least the past 30 years. We live in a country where Goldman Sachs can commit thousands of acts of felony perjury, and not one person stands trial. They create fraudulent financial instruments, and pay back a small portion of their ill gotten gains as "fines" (bribes). Yet if I were to write a bad check to cover some groceries, I'd be going straight to jail. There's no way to describe this but tyranny.
Barack Obama, the greatest hope in a generation, is either unable or unwilling to do anything about this. If he's unwilling we have a severe political problem. He was elected to bring us change he refuses to deliver, and we have no way to hold him accountable.
On the other hand, if he's unable, we have a much more serious problem. That means democracy is well and truly dead in this country. The corporations have a complete stranglehold on our government. Unfortunately, this is more likely to be the truth.
Barack Obama who received more campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs than any other politician and then hired Goldman Sachs executives into his Administration left and right is your great hope to address problems that you identify as originating with Goldman Sachs?
...you'd know by now they are a VERY diverse group.
And very, very white. The press repeatedly commented on the fact that the tea party protests were largely white, yet doesn't seem to notice that the "Occupy" movement is even more bleached than the tea party was.
...at least they are angry at the right people.
You mean the people receiving government to corporate handouts rather than the people giving government to corporate handouts?
This is simply not true. The tea party from its inception was focused on reducing government spending. The only thing "unfocused" about the tea party was that it started out equally angry at both the Republicans and the Democrats. The Republican Party allowed the tea party protests to influence their political agenda and candidate selection (perhaps co-opting the tea party movement in the process) and this transformed the tea party movement into a Republican movement.
The Democrats have been seeking to manufacture a similar movement on their side of issues ever since and may have succeeded with the "Occupy" movement (although to what degree the "Occupy" movement is a product of the Democratic Party and to what degree it is something else that coalesced around and took control of the movement Democratic Party activists were creating is open to question). There is significant question as to whether this movement will have as much impact in the 2012 election as the tea party movement had in the 2010 election and if it does, will that impact be positive for the Democratic Party or negative.
What does your student loan bill have to do with Wall Street? If that is what this is about, they should be occupying the student commons of various universities.
Well, since you seem to believe that giving up freedom for the promise of better health (not actually better health) is a good thing, there is no point for further discussion.
There are several studies that show that cancer survival rates are higher in the U.S. and Canada. I have also seen similar numbers for other serious illnesses.
Considering that at this point most serious illnesses are the result of life style choices that people make, it is really unfair to judge the health care system on the basis of something that it is not under its purview.
No, I mean more effective for everybody. The prognosis for someone diagnosed with most serious illnesses is better if they live the U.S. than if they live elsewhere.
Government is an attempt to stop the robber barons from controlling everything,
Then it is a complete failure, since in today's world it functions to protect them from competition and to transfer wealth from the masses to the elites.
The problem with the Solyndra loan is not that the company went bankrupt after the government loaned them money. The problem is that it went bankrupt when the government experts said it would (with the loan) before the Administration pressured them to loan Solyndra the money in the first place and that when it became undeniable that the company was not viable the government renegotiated the terms of the loan so that the investors (Obama campaign contributors) would get their money before the government got paid back.
Not surprisingly, Hamm considers some of the current administration's loans and subsidies for alternative energy ventures to be misplaced. That guy is an idiot.
The guy may be wrong about the appropriate government approach to alternative energy. However, he is correct that giving guaranteed loans to companies that have no viable business model is a bad idea. Government analysts has concluded that Solyndra would go bellyup in September of 2011 with the government loans, sooner without them, before the loans were approved.
I never said that America is particularly efficient at health care. To be perfectly honest, I do not consider efficiency a particularly useful metric when it comes to health care. My point was that American health care is, by metrics I consider significant, more effective than other countries.
That is interesting considering that while the life expectancy for Japan is higher than the life expectancy for the U.S., the life expectancy for Japanese Americans is higher than the life expectancy for Japan. So, I wonder if the same thing would hold true for this study? As I said, some time back I saw a review of the expected survival rate for someone diagnosed with a number of severe health issues, in the vast majority the U.S. ranks high. As an example, the survival rate for most cancers is higher in the U.S. than in Canada or Europe. This is a better measure of the health care system than mortality rates, because mortality rates vary by many factors and the U.S. is much less homogeneous in any of those factors than any of the other countries on the list you referenced.
The article failed to list what the benchmarks the study used to compare health care in different countries. However, at least one of its benchmarks was "breast cancer screening, which is significantly effected by sociological factors involving the members of a society and the choices they make as opposed to the actual quality of available medical care. Additionally, most such studies I have seen factor in the degree to which the government pays for health care into their ranking and then say that the fact that the U.S. ranks low indicates that outcomes would be improved by government financing of health care. I am not going to take the time to look it up, however, several months ago I came across an article listing expected survival rates for people diagnosed with about 15-20 serious illnesses. The U.S. ranked in the top 5 in all of them, no other country came close to that.
For your basic corporate conservative, the only things that have value are those things that are owned by somebody. And that's a private owner, not a government.
This guy works for the UN, so while there may be definitions of "conservative" that apply to him, they bear no relationship with the definitions that are typically used in conversations on slashdot.
The relevant ideological perspective on this guy is that he is someone who believes that government is the answer to every problem (even problems that are caused by the government). So, the World Wide Web should have been patented because then someone would have control over it (at least theoretically). That someone could then be controlled by government. With the current model of the Web, it is very difficult for government to get its hands around it to control it. If every website had to license the patent, then government could keep track of who ran each and every website and regulate what they posted.
how else do you explain people that demand to pay more for a private health system with worse outcomes then public health systems?
Perhaps by looking at actual outcomes and discovering that the prognosis for someone diagnosed with a serious illness is significantly better in the US than in countries where the government pays for health-care?
But, there are a large number of people on slashdot who think that control of the Internet should be given to the UN.
If the Ds are directly responsible for poor black academic performance, then we should expect locally republican areas to have at least somewhat more even performance.
The problem with that is I am not talking about the politicians, I am talking about the actual teachers and school administrators. If you look, you will find that those in the field of education are overwhelmingly Democrats. So, if you could find a school where a majority of the administrators and teachers were Rs, it might be possible to test the question, but I am unaware of any such location.
Ron Paul is considered a nutjob by most Republicans. Other violence based Democratic Party related organizations: New Black Panther Party, Unions (Google the Longshoreman's Union in Longview Washington--and Hoffa's speech introducing Obama, also, Google King Electrical Services owner shot). The Democratic Party has a history of overt racist behavior. The Republican Party has a history of overt anti-racist behavior. Yet today, the Republicans are the one's that are repeatedly asked to defend themselves against charges of racism. The question is, what evidence is there that Democrats are not still racist. Public schools throughout the country are overwhelmingly run by Democrats (teachers, principals, administrators) and we are constantly hearing about the gap in academic performance between blacks and whites. The founder of Planned Parenthood was an avowed racist, one of whose goals was to eliminate blacks. Today Planned Parenthood has over 80% of its clinics in minority neighborhoods. One can go on and see how policies that were started for racist goals are maintained by today's Democrats, who claim that they serve some other purpose.
I use Robert Byrd because he is an example that does not need much explaining. Of course there was also Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, the man who, as governor of South Carolina started flying the Confederate Flag over the statehouse and was a prominent Democrat when the Democrats started demanding that Republican Presidential candidates take a stand on the issue. Then there is Bill Clinton's mentor and political patron, William J. Fulbright.
As for Strom Thurmond, he was 15 years older than Robert Byrd, so there is nothing coincidental about his dying sooner. Second, if he had been a member of the KKK it would have been while he was a member of the Democratic Party. Finally, while Strom Thurmond was a segregationist I do not recall him ever advocating the violence that was the stock in trade of the KKK (resorting to violence seems to be a common theme among many Democratic Party related organizations).