This reminds me of the Penn & Teller skit about burning a U.S. Flag inside the Bill of rights, and both survive. Then they pulled out a "Chinese Bill of Rights" made of clear acetate.
Kucinich is the most non-establishment candidate. Not only is he not beholden to the corporate interests that fund the Democratic Party like the others are, he's downright hostile towards them.
Such a person simply cannot be allowed to win. The easiest way to prevent a win is to exclude him from the debates. That's what they did to Perot's party in '96.
will of course involve increasing taxes to make the problem go away. We don't know how that will make the problem go away, but such people always seem to think that upping taxes magically solves problems.
A lot of the hunger is because those in power are purposefully starving them, for example if they're part of the tribe not in power and are considered to be a threat to the local dictator. You can send tons of food, and it'll get confiscated to feed his supporters and resold for cash, keeping the dictator in power and maintaining the hunger.
Or in the case of Zimbabwe, you just have a president who instituted various socialist programs and turned what was once the breadbasket of Africa into a nation of starving poor. Getting rid of Mugabe would go more towards solving the hunger problem there than a million tons of grain.
From past information of Bill Gates' management style (remember Alex St. John?), things are not going to be fun over on the IE team. He has no problem ripping even senior management a new one.
When it comes to the commercial insurers, every time you say "efficiency" I hear "denial of coverage".
Easy, not allowed under the contract. By efficiency I meant the elimination of red tape, fraud, employee overhead, etc., all things that exist now, especially in the government-run Medicare.
You say "mergers" for competition, I see an oligopoly and collusion.
You have to start looking at without a "business is evil" approach. With our scattered insurance companies, only a few would be able to handle such a contract, which would mean less competition for it. Consolidated into a dozen or so such companies, they would all be capable of handling such a contract, making more competition for it.
This small group of companies would be under anti-trust scrutiny, as we do today with various markets. And in case you didn't know, collusion in federal contract bidding is already a felony. It's not slap-on-the-wrist fine, it's jail time for the CEO.
I'm not sure you're seeing the distinction between socialized medicine and single-payer.
I'm seeing it. Where we now have hundreds of insurance companies, there will be one. There will be no more competition, allowing the single payer to become bloated and inefficient. The government would also have to track down fraud, which it currently does very poorly at with Medicare (our current experiment in single-payer). Why should the government be careful about fraud? It's not their money, they're not going to go bankrupt. It's also so complicated that many people hire specialists and lawyers to help them through the system. My private health insurance is absurdly simple.
As far as drug prices go single-payer and complete socialization are effectively the same. To cut costs the government will either deny drugs to its people (as in the UK) or force the drug companies to reduce prices. We all know that price controls always lead to a reduction in the availability of the commodity in question. The only reason we get good drugs now is that the price controls in the rest of the world have an outlet in us. What happens when that outlet is eliminated?
The system as it is definitely needs mending though. I would even suggest mergers until we're down to a dozen or so major health insurers (that should be enough competition). For Medicare equivalent and the poor we should have those insurers bid on who gets the contract to provide insurance for those people for the next five years. The insurers will be scrambling to get more efficient and provide better service in order to win each round of contracts. That efficiency will benefit the rest of us who are paying insurance.
It seems apparent to me that if you know basic economics, you'd agree a single-payer system (not government administered, but government paid) would be more efficient overall.
One payer eliminates competition in the area of health insurance. Basic economics: competition is not only good, but necessary. The single payer will get lazy, bloated, inefficient and wasteful without any competition. Look what happened to Microsoft without real competition.
We already pay for the health problems of the sick and poor.
And I agree we need to do that more intelligently. That system is poorly designed and poorly managed. Of course it is -- it's a government-run system and thus allows politics, prejudices and bribes (campaign contributions) to interfere. Do you expect better from single-payer?
I'm not for across-the-board fixed drug prices, but I'm not about to throw the pity party you're demanding for big pharma
I have little pity for big pharma. They're the ones who lobbied to make imports illegal in the first place to protect their profits in the face of socialized medical systems. But I recognize that there does have to be a profit incentive for them to keep developing drugs, and they wouldn't have much of one if the whole world were under socialized medicine (which is always price-fixed).
and I think a single-payer health care system would work better and less expensively than the system we have now.
Have you seen how well it's working in those countries? Hospitals all along our northern border are advertising in Canada for Canadians who can't get the health care they need. The UK's NHS is going bankrupt, even denying revolutionary drugs to patients because they're too expensive. Germany figured out that such a system doesn't work (they have a dual private/public system), so they've had to start cutting back on the benefits of the public system before it goes bankrupt.
And they're not working even though their systems are subsidized by the US population? Did you hear that right? Yep, we subsidize their health care industries. They put price controls on drugs, so to still be able to make a profit the drug companies raise the prices here in the US.
Paul cosponsored a bill that would allow us to import drugs legally to bypass this racket. Had he succeeded we would be paying less for drugs, and the drug companies would have to negotiate true prices with those countries, exposing how untenable their free health care systems really are. Kucinich voted for it too, but strangely he missed the connection and still supports a single-payer system. But then he just probably did it because he wants to screw over corporations as much as possible.
Maybe the answer is just across-the-world price controls on drugs? If you know basic economics, you know that would mean very few new drugs would ever hit the market again.
I'm not sure I want to get into it here, but there are a large number of "freedom froms" that are supported by Kucinich but not Paul.
One of our problems is that what one person sees as a "freedom from" can be restated as a "freedom to." Also, what one person sees as restricting freedom can be seen as a "from" or a "to," depending on the viewpoint.
But Ron Paul is full of "freedoms from," more than Kucinich IMHO. Mostly it's categorized as freedom from government interference, involvement and intrusion in your life. He rightly knows, as the founding fathers did, that government is not the answer to most things -- it is a necessary evil to be kept to a minimum. Government being the answer gives government power. More government power means less freedom.
Kucinich thinks government is the answer, and that's why he will always be for less freedom than Paul.
In general Paul is all about "freedom to" which is why he is lauded by the white supremacists.
Kucinich is all about destroying corporations and eliminating wealth. That is why he is lauded by communists.
But the funny thing is that if you look at the stance of each on many issues, they perfectly line up. Maybe for different reasons, but they agree on the end result. Look at their records on the free trade agreements. They were even both part of the few in Congress who voted no on the use of force in Iraq.
Sentencing guidelines for violent crimes based on intent cannot possibly be thoughtcrime, because a conviction for a violent crime must already have been obtained at the time when sentencing takes place!
This isn't about just sentencing guidelines. The DOJ will help investigate and convict people based on a possible motivation for a crime. It puts the investigation and prosecution of "hate" crimes above others. So if gay Jim got beat up in a bar fight in a rural town, the feds will pour in to help convict his opponent. But Jenny, who just got raped, gets no help for her prosecution.
True, not a hate crime specifically, but the chances of being convicted of one, even if "hate" wasn't a motivation, just went way up. The locals may have just charged the guy with misdemeanor assault and battery and been over with it, but now they can get loads of federal cash and assistance if they call it a felony and go for the hate crime.
Think of it like "freedom from unwarrented search and seizure" and "freedom to attend school even if you cannot afford it."
The first one is a freedom. The second is a hand-out, equivalent to "freedom to steal from your neighbor if you can't afford school."
Kucinich is more concerned with promoting positive rights, and Paul is set against them.
If you define "positive rights" as stealing from the people to pay for your expansion of government power, you're correct. But an expansion of government power always comes with a limitation of rights. Just recently there was a case where the government claimed it could search your house at any time without cause if you're taking welfare money.
If you like your "Freedom Froms" better, I am not sure why you'd prefer Paul over Kucinich.
Notice that's only one "freedom from" Kucinich is for that Paul isn't (sort of, see below), while Paul is way ahead on freedoms in general.
Even on that one, Paul isn't with the right-wing Christians. His proposed constitutional amendment allowing school prayer is framed as a student's right to pray, or not pray, with no administration interference one way or the other (there's your "affirmative right"). He also wants the government "out of our bedrooms."
I don't think they should be regulating any personal behavior if it's non-violent. That means we have to tolerate people who do things that sometimes are dumb and sometimes are irritating, but in a free society you tolerate that.
You see what Paul thinks, now think of Kucinich who wants to ban public smoking.
The argument to ban abortion hinges upon defining fetuses as having human rights, which is not supportable from a scientific perspective
Not everything is science. Fetuses are alive. Fetuses are human. Not fully developed yet, but still human. We still call a fetal pig a pig. Yet somehow the abortion industry doesn't like the term "fetal human," just the more impersonal "fetus" or "tissue."
Anyone who willfully ends such a life, and not in extenuating circumstances (like when the baby is dying and taking the mother with it), is doing wrong.
Think of it as a 'freedom to' rather than the 'freedom from' of a negative liberty.
So with Kucinich you get "freedom to" smoke in public places, "freedom to" succeed without being penalized for it, "freedom to" be considered for college on your merits, "freedom to" burn a flag to petition the government for a redress of grievances, "freedom to" pay for an ad expressing your position on an important election issue, oh I could just go on and on. Kucinich doesn't care about real freedom. He only cares about specific freedoms that scratch his own itch or pander to a constituency.
And I like "freedom from." Freedom from an oppressive government. Freedom from imposed religion. Freedom from warrantless searches. Freedom from secret kangaroo courts. Come to think of it, the Bill of Rights defines a lot of "freedom from."
IOW, this positive and negative freedom is meaningless. We all have natural rights and de facto freedom -- both kinds. It should only be restricted, "from" and "to," where the state and federal constitutions grant those governments the power to restrict it.
nd in the power grabs after 9-11, the democrats have been far more concerned about the civil rights violations
You make it sound like they opposed the power grabs on principle. I propose to you that they only opposed those power grabs because it was not them grabbing the power, but Bush. Had the parties been reversed, the Republicans would have been the ones screaming for the preservation of liberty while the Democrats pushed for more power.
Have you forgotten the Clinton years? Janet Reno? Encryption export controls? Al Gore's Clipper Chip and Key Escrow? Our beloved DMCA? Retroactive copyright term extensions? Waco? Ruby Ridge? The Child Online Protection Act? The Communications Decency Act?
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The Chinese constitution grants rights to the people. What can be granted can easily be taken away.
The US Bill of Rights recognizes pre-existing, inalienable natural rights of the people and states that the government may not infringe on them.
Not that our government has been all that great on resisting the desire to infringe anyway.
This reminds me of the Penn & Teller skit about burning a U.S. Flag inside the Bill of rights, and both survive. Then they pulled out a "Chinese Bill of Rights" made of clear acetate.
How much time as a (relatively) free person does Chen have left?
He'd better hope he's squeaky clean, no Internet posts with anything but praise for the government, no distant relatives in Falun Gong, etc.
That an iMac is the best space-saving, quiet, all-in-one computer ever.
I always built my own because I didn't like OEM systems. Not anymore.
Jealousy is a bummer.
Kucinich is the most non-establishment candidate. Not only is he not beholden to the corporate interests that fund the Democratic Party like the others are, he's downright hostile towards them.
Such a person simply cannot be allowed to win. The easiest way to prevent a win is to exclude him from the debates. That's what they did to Perot's party in '96.
Bush prefers to throw it on the credit card instead of making us pay for it now. :)
will of course involve increasing taxes to make the problem go away. We don't know how that will make the problem go away, but such people always seem to think that upping taxes magically solves problems.
A lot of the hunger is because those in power are purposefully starving them, for example if they're part of the tribe not in power and are considered to be a threat to the local dictator. You can send tons of food, and it'll get confiscated to feed his supporters and resold for cash, keeping the dictator in power and maintaining the hunger.
Or in the case of Zimbabwe, you just have a president who instituted various socialist programs and turned what was once the breadbasket of Africa into a nation of starving poor. Getting rid of Mugabe would go more towards solving the hunger problem there than a million tons of grain.
From past information of Bill Gates' management style (remember Alex St. John?), things are not going to be fun over on the IE team. He has no problem ripping even senior management a new one.
If you don't monitor then you don't have any responsibility to report.
This small group of companies would be under anti-trust scrutiny, as we do today with various markets. And in case you didn't know, collusion in federal contract bidding is already a felony. It's not slap-on-the-wrist fine, it's jail time for the CEO.
I just downloaded Pain for the PS3. I'd love to hear what they have to say about that game.
BTW, it's the funniest game I've played in years, literally gut-busting LOL.
As far as drug prices go single-payer and complete socialization are effectively the same. To cut costs the government will either deny drugs to its people (as in the UK) or force the drug companies to reduce prices. We all know that price controls always lead to a reduction in the availability of the commodity in question. The only reason we get good drugs now is that the price controls in the rest of the world have an outlet in us. What happens when that outlet is eliminated?
The system as it is definitely needs mending though. I would even suggest mergers until we're down to a dozen or so major health insurers (that should be enough competition). For Medicare equivalent and the poor we should have those insurers bid on who gets the contract to provide insurance for those people for the next five years. The insurers will be scrambling to get more efficient and provide better service in order to win each round of contracts. That efficiency will benefit the rest of us who are paying insurance.
And they're not working even though their systems are subsidized by the US population? Did you hear that right? Yep, we subsidize their health care industries. They put price controls on drugs, so to still be able to make a profit the drug companies raise the prices here in the US.
Paul cosponsored a bill that would allow us to import drugs legally to bypass this racket. Had he succeeded we would be paying less for drugs, and the drug companies would have to negotiate true prices with those countries, exposing how untenable their free health care systems really are. Kucinich voted for it too, but strangely he missed the connection and still supports a single-payer system. But then he just probably did it because he wants to screw over corporations as much as possible.
Maybe the answer is just across-the-world price controls on drugs? If you know basic economics, you know that would mean very few new drugs would ever hit the market again.
But Ron Paul is full of "freedoms from," more than Kucinich IMHO. Mostly it's categorized as freedom from government interference, involvement and intrusion in your life. He rightly knows, as the founding fathers did, that government is not the answer to most things -- it is a necessary evil to be kept to a minimum. Government being the answer gives government power. More government power means less freedom.
Kucinich thinks government is the answer, and that's why he will always be for less freedom than Paul.Kucinich is all about destroying corporations and eliminating wealth. That is why he is lauded by communists.
But the funny thing is that if you look at the stance of each on many issues, they perfectly line up. Maybe for different reasons, but they agree on the end result. Look at their records on the free trade agreements. They were even both part of the few in Congress who voted no on the use of force in Iraq.
True, not a hate crime specifically, but the chances of being convicted of one, even if "hate" wasn't a motivation, just went way up. The locals may have just charged the guy with misdemeanor assault and battery and been over with it, but now they can get loads of federal cash and assistance if they call it a felony and go for the hate crime.
Even on that one, Paul isn't with the right-wing Christians. His proposed constitutional amendment allowing school prayer is framed as a student's right to pray, or not pray, with no administration interference one way or the other (there's your "affirmative right"). He also wants the government "out of our bedrooms."You see what Paul thinks, now think of Kucinich who wants to ban public smoking.
Anyone who willfully ends such a life, and not in extenuating circumstances (like when the baby is dying and taking the mother with it), is doing wrong.
And I like "freedom from." Freedom from an oppressive government. Freedom from imposed religion. Freedom from warrantless searches. Freedom from secret kangaroo courts. Come to think of it, the Bill of Rights defines a lot of "freedom from."
IOW, this positive and negative freedom is meaningless. We all have natural rights and de facto freedom -- both kinds. It should only be restricted, "from" and "to," where the state and federal constitutions grant those governments the power to restrict it.
However, the news scares them.
Have you forgotten the Clinton years? Janet Reno? Encryption export controls? Al Gore's Clipper Chip and Key Escrow? Our beloved DMCA? Retroactive copyright term extensions? Waco? Ruby Ridge? The Child Online Protection Act? The Communications Decency Act?