Ronald Reagan famously said "it's not that the Liberals don't know a lot of things, it that so much of what they know is wrong." I know this to be true. When I was a Liberal I thought I knew everything and, as it turns out, I was almost always wrong.
So many things that were just "true" because, well, that's what I'd been told and no one I ever met disagreed, have, in my enlightenment proved 180 degrees from reality.
The Vietnam War was not an "evil, illegal and immoral" war waged by evil and horrible Americans who saw money to be made in the "military-industrial boom" but an absolutely moral and just war fought to stop the spread of an evil empire that was already oppressing half of the people of Europe and spreading into another continent in Southeast Asia.
One of the "truisms" of America was that "money wins elections." This was simply a given not because I'd ever thought about it but because it's something repeated so often by those who denigrate America at every turn.
Yet, here we are and Mike Huckabee, who had no money, has been given a full and fair hearing. McCain, who was penniless not that long ago, is now the front-runner, Mitt Romney has all the money he needs, and yet he came in second to Huckabee in Iowa and McCain in New Hampshire and beneath both of them in South Carolina.
Meanwhile, on the leftist front, I don't think there are many people who believe that if the leftists pick Ms. Rodham-Clinton or Barack H. Obama, it's going to be because one or the other wasn't heard or seen enough.
Every time one of you complains about the system -- and there are things that can be made better about the system -- remember that this one slander (that in America money buys elections) has been proved wrong yet again.
468 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 400 of 468 Newer› Newest»simes wants an "unlimitted" health care benefit for every American. No experimental procedure would cost too much or be off the table.
How much would that cost, simes? 20% of GDP? 50% of GDP? 100% of GDP? And what happens at that point? Oooops... there's that nasty "limit" again and someone deciding who lives and who dies.
You want some politician or health care bureaucrat to decide. I want to reserve that decision for myself. When I'm out of money, credit, and human charity... I'll accept that it's my time to kick the bucket.
Police protection is not a freedom. It is a service provided by local and state governments. It is not the role of the federal government to fund those services. Besides, law enforcement is a necessity in any government that has laws. You can't compare that to health care.
So just to be clear, you don't have a right to the police to come to your location when you call 911? A simple yes or no will do.
If a State wanted to do as Mass has done and socialize healthcare, fine. But that doesn't make healthcare a right. It is a centralized service that the citizens of Mass have agreed to pay for. If it's a good service, other states may adopt it.
You do realize that what Mass. has adopted is not any centralized provision of healthcare, just a way to make it easier for people to buy subsidized private insurance, don't you?
If not, people and businesses will leave and the laws will change. Once you do something at the national level, it is practically irreversible.
Like the National Recovery Administration, Welfare and welfare reform, and slavery.
Why do I bother...
And what if mom doens't have any? What if you don't have any? Too bad? Go into debt. Buy beg borrow or steal.
When people go into tremendous debt and go into bankruptcy, do you think there is no harm to society? That person can now never buy a home, and will have problems for the rest of their lives.
...but even that beats the alternative... a box 6' under.
But what about those bills they couldnt' pay? Those companies they owed for goods and services? They're not paid, you know. They just write that stuff off, for the most part. Hospitals and doctors make less money that way, and to compensate for that, what do they do? You guessed it, raise fees for everyone!
That's economics, ain't it? But what's the alternative. Health care rationing and politcians deciding who gets to live, and who has to die.
No, I'm not for a totally unlimited system...more of your silly black and white. You're the monkeys who wanted to keep Schiavo and those like her alive forever. There are realistic limits which must constantly be revised as tech changes. Also a big emphasis on preventive care.
You want some politician or health care bureaucrat to decide. I want to reserve that decision for myself. When I'm out of money, credit, and human charity... I'll accept that it's my time to kick the bucket.
You'll accept that you'll die because you have no money.
what a pointless way to die, really.
I'll accept that it's my time to kick the bucket.
Teddibly big of you...some people are ALREADY out of money...and some of those people may be a hell of a lot better human being than you are. I would suspect that most of them are.
simes,
You probably believe that non-profits are much more efficient and humane organizations than for-profits, don't you? And because governments don't take profits, governments are the most efficient and effective systems in the world!
That's just how big of an idiot you are!
Why do I bother...
Debate is in the blood. Probably why you want to be a lawyer.
I think the best part is that these shmoes are ready to kick sick people out on the street and don't want the gubmit telling them what to do, but I bet they're all anti-abortion.
Teddibly big of you...some people are ALREADY out of money...
Name one. Then I'll bet there's also some charity helping the poor slob out as we speak. Because we have one of the most robust and humane health care delivery systems in the world.
Like the National Recovery Administration, Welfare and welfare reform, and slavery.
Don't mix slavery in there. Freedom is obviously a basic human right, not an entitlement! Welfare is a service, as well as the NRA. Welfare and the NRA should not be at the federal level. I am consistent in my views. States keep each other balanced. It gives us the freedom to try crazy socialist programs at the state level without risking our nation as a whole. Ever read this? The founding fathers were wise in this regard.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people"
baby steps.
You probably believe that non-profits are much more efficient and humane organizations than for-profits, don't you? And because governments don't take profits, governments are the most efficient and effective systems in the world!
Unfortunately for free market parrots like you, that is sometimes the case. You have to look at each thing separately. The market is often the very worst place to get the best value...especially the unregulated market. You've heard the inane, unchallenged nonsense about the magics of the free interprise system so long in your accepting, little sheeps mind that you just bleat in unison and follow the head sheep whenever you hear it.
think the best part is that these shmoes are ready to kick sick people out on the street and don't want the gubmit telling them what to do, but I bet they're all anti-abortion.
Not a single American gets kicked into the street with the existing system. Not one. Yet we just HAVE to change to hillarycare. Talk about non sequitors.
Name one. Then I'll bet there's also some charity helping the poor slob out as we speak. Because we have one of the most robust and humane health care delivery systems in the world.
Well, I'm sure there's at least one named Bob. As for the rest...awk awrk awrk gimme a cracker
Also, the best part is that we will actually save money this way.
CIA Factbook, highest life expectancy
First big country: Japan, 82.02 years
OECD % of GDP spent on Healthcare (PDF)
Japan: 8%
Next big country: Sweden, 80 years old, GDP % spent on healthcare: 9.1%
And on and on and on in the same manner.
US, life expectancy 78.0 years old (ranked 45th by the CIA), GDP% spent on healthcare) 15.3%, higher than any other OECD country.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people"
10th Amendment, eh?
States' rights is dead, let me tell you. Sad but true. Unless you think it's constitutional to have laws against miscegenation.
Socialists are so anti-market that if the local Citgo station closed down, they'd all choose to park their Mercedes and walk to work till it either reopened or Hugo brought them a can of free gas... whichever came first.
I think the best part is that these shmoes are ready to kick sick people out on the street and don't want the gubmit telling them what to do, but I bet they're all anti-abortion.
Yes, interesting phenomenon. They get very judgmental once people are actually people. The fetus thing is really a religious deal...it makes them feel like they're god's special, little animal when they can talk about the "sanctity" of (fetal) life.
Not a single American gets kicked into the street with the existing system. Not one. Yet we just HAVE to change to hillarycare. Talk about non sequitors.
Another phony who ignores the facts on the horrible record of the US on PREVENTABLE deaths.
hillarysolutions2nonproblems said...
think the best part is that these shmoes are ready to kick sick people out on the street and don't want the gubmit telling them what to do, but I bet they're all anti-abortion.
Not a single American gets kicked into the street with the existing system. Not one.
Really?
Authorities are launching a criminal investigation after police officers in Los Angeles say they videotaped five hospital patients being dumped on Skid Row over the weekend. The incident is being cited as the latest in an ongoing problem of indigent hospital patients being dumped on the streets with no one to care for them. [NPR]
Yes, interesting phenomenon. They get very judgmental once people are actually people. The fetus thing is really a religious deal...it makes them feel like they're god's special, little animal when they can talk about the "sanctity" of (fetal) life.
Oh, but that's not even the best part!
If life begins at conception, then the pill and the IUD cause abortions, because one of the ways in which they work is by PREVENTING A FERTILIZED EGG FROM IMPLANTING IN THE UTERINE WALL. But these guys would never mention it, cuz then their wives/girlfriends would have to stop being pumped full of hormones so they can have consequence-free sex!
Socialists are so anti-market that if the local Citgo station closed down, they'd all choose to park their Mercedes and walk to work till it either reopened or Hugo brought them a can of free gas... whichever came first.
And another miseducated, little kid who doesn't know the difference between a liberal and a socialist.
Sweden and Japan...two of the least racially diverse nations on the planet. But do they live long by nature or nurture?
American life expectancies...
America 1
Average life expectancy: nearly 85 years.
Residents: about 10 million Asians.
That's not quite all the Asians in the U.S.
Those in "America 1" live in counties where Pacific Islanders make up less than 40% of Asians. All other Asians living in the U.S. are in "America 3."
America 2
Average life expectancy: 79 years.
Residents: 3.6 million low-income rural whites living in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska with income and education below the national average.
America 3
Average life expectancy: nearly 78 years.
Residents: 214 million people -- mainly whites, with small numbers of Asians and Native Americans -- with average income and education slightly above the national average.
America 4
Average life expectancy: 75 years.
Residents: more than 16 million low-income whites living in Appalachia and the Mississippi Valley; 30% of them haven't finished high school.
America 5
Average-life expectancy: almost 73 years.
Residents: 1 million Native Americans living in the western mountains and plains areas, excluding the West Coast.
Most live on reservations in the "Four Corners" area -- where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet -- or in the Dakotas.
America 6
Average life expectancy: nearly 73 years.
Residents: more than 23 million blacks who aren't low-income blacks living in the South or high-risk urban blacks.
America 7
Average life expectancy: about 71 years.
Residents: nearly 6 million low-income blacks in the Mississippi Valley and the South.
America 8
Average life expectancy: around 71 years.
Residents: 7.5 million high-risk urban blacks. They were blacks (aged 15 to 74 years) living in urban counties with high homicide rates.
Putting It in Perspective
Murray's team compared the eight Americas to real countries.
"Ten million Americans with the best health have achieved one of the highest levels of life expectancy on record, three years better than Japan," the researchers write.
"At the same time," they continue, "tens of millions of Americans are experiencing levels of health that are more typical of middle-income or low-income developing countries."
PREVENTING A FERTILIZED EGG FROM IMPLANTING IN THE UTERINE WALL.
Yes, that egg is already fertilized and therefore it is a little human soul which they are interfering with, yea, even unto death. And just so they can screw their wives...man that is cold of the horny little bastards.
LOL!
Authorities are launching a criminal investigation after police officers in Los Angeles say they videotaped five hospital patients being dumped on Skid Row over the weekend. The incident is being cited as the latest in an ongoing problem of indigent hospital patients being dumped on the streets with no one to care for them. [NPR]
PREVENTING A FERTILIZED EGG FROM IMPLANTING IN THE UTERINE WALL.
As opposed to jabbing a scissor into the back of the neck of a 4/5th's delivered full-term infant because mom's new boyfriend hates kids.
So, does that mean these little abortionists will be joining in hell? Goddammit, I was hoping we could finaly get away from them down there.
Another phony who ignores the facts on the horrible record of the US on PREVENTABLE deaths.
Maybe I should sew you up in your mother's womb so that you never have to face the possibility of falling and scraping your knee...
It's not a matter of whether it's illegal or not...the point is that the cost of the current system drives these assholes to dump people. Of course, a lot of homeless die on the street every day without the remarkable benefit of being dumped there.
So, does that mean these little abortionists will be joining in hell? You don't know what "conception" means, do you? I didn't think so.
The pill/IUD prevents conception. Preventing conception is not the same thing as "conceiving" and then flushing. THAT is abortion.
It's not a matter of whether it's illegal or not...the point is that the cost of the current system drives these assholes to dump people.
You think that doesn't happen in Canada or the UK?
Herb Woodend, the longtime curator of the Pattern Room of the British Ministry of Defense (one of the premier small arms collections of the world before it was recently shut down) was diagnosed with colon cancer shortly after he retired. The surgery was botched and did not remove all the tumor.
Even though Mr. Woodend was a holder of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his decades of outstanding service, the British socialized medicine bureaucrats refused to do anything more.
Mr. Woodend sold most of his possessions and came to a free country (the USA) in hopes of saving his life. The Cancer Center at the University of Texas did a medical evalation and determined that he has a fighting
chance.
The British socialized medicine system won't help; they just want him to die. Of course, he doesn't have US health insurance.
Consequently, Mr. Woodend will pay the $100,000+ cost of treatment
himself.
Only in the UK, it's NOT ILLEGAL TO DUMP PATIENTS!
10th Amendment, eh?
States' rights is dead, let me tell you. Sad but true. Unless you think it's constitutional to have laws against miscegenation.
First, miscegenation is not an entitlement, it's a freedom. You keep confusing the two. It is correct to define those freedoms at the federal level through the courts. The only place I can think of where there is vagueness is on abortion, because some argue that it takes away the right to life of the child - another freedom. I am not going to argue that here, because opinions on the subject rarely change. (except if you're Mitt Romney) :^)
As far as your view on States Rights is concerned, that shows where you stand. That is where most socialists stand. I don't understand why you won't just let the States do it on their own. Once the federal government gets too much control, we are doomed.
Contrary to secular belief, conception has nothing to do with an egg joining a sperm.
Conception is the moment a woman thinks to herself... I'm pregnant!
When doctors in the UK dump patients (decline further treatment)... the police launch no investigations. The doctors have decided... it ain't worth it!
And that's what dora and simes want for the US. Someone to decide for them whether or not they get to try again... or whether THEY AREN"T WORTH IT!
How does the USA compare for some of the more common cancer treatments...
For breast cancer in the United States, the cancer-mortality ratio, or death rate divided by the incidence of disease, is 25 percent. In Canada and Australia, it is 28 percent; in Germany, 31 percent; in France, 35 percent; and in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, 46 percent.
For prostate cancer, the U.S. mortality ratio is 19 percent; in Canada, 25 percent; in New Zealand, 30 percent; in Australia, 35 percent; in Germany, 44 percent; in France, 49 percent; and in the United Kingdom, it is 57 percent.
Yes, let's be more like the UK... NOT!
manslaughterversuscoldbloodedkilling said...
PREVENTING A FERTILIZED EGG FROM IMPLANTING IN THE UTERINE WALL.
As opposed to jabbing a scissor into the back of the neck of a 4/5th's delivered full-term infant because mom's new boyfriend hates kids.
Actually, that never happens. Seriously, never. Abortions after 24 weeks, those that you call partial-birth, are done for health reasons only, or because the fetus has some serious defects.
But, even if it did happen, it wouldn't change the fact that the pill and the IUD cause tiny little abortions, and you guys don't care. What happened to "life begins at conception," yall?
Dora said...
Yes, interesting phenomenon. They get very judgmental once people are actually people. The fetus thing is really a religious deal...it makes them feel like they're god's special, little animal when they can talk about the "sanctity" of (fetal) life.
Oh, but that's not even the best part! If life begins at conception, then the pill and the IUD cause abortions, because one of the ways in which they work is by PREVENTING A FERTILIZED EGG FROM IMPLANTING IN THE UTERINE WALL. But these guys would never mention it, cuz then their wives/girlfriends would have to stop being pumped full of hormones so they can have consequence-free sex!
Well, guys, then, shouldn't be allowed to masturbate or use a condom--and you already know these religious nuts are against free condoms--because, hell, those acts prevent conception, too. Make every goddambody so anal that their asses suck up all of the furniture in the room.
If the egg is ferilized, I'm afraid it's too late for you to dodge responsibility for your little child, son...but if splitting hairs makes murder alright for you, that's your problem.
The UK has one of the more mediocre systems...so argue against the better ones or don't bother. As I said before, you can design the system any way you want to. If apes like you don't get in the way, we can do it right.
libs2stupid4words said...
So, does that mean these little abortionists will be joining in hell? You don't know what "conception" means, do you? I didn't think so.
The pill/IUD prevents conception. Preventing conception is not the same thing as "conceiving" and then flushing. THAT is abortion.
Nope, wrong. That's just ONE of the ways in which it works. If it doesn't manage to prevent fertilization, it prevents the fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall.
Here, for example, is the text from Ortho Tri-Cyclen insert:
Combination oral contraceptives act by suppression of gonadotropins. Although the primary mechanism of
this action is inhibition of ovulation, other alterations include changes in the cervical mucus (which increase the
difficulty of sperm entry into the uterus) and the endometrium (which reduce the likelihood of implantation). [PDF]
First, miscegenation is not an entitlement, it's a freedom. You keep confusing the two.
No, i'm not confusing anything. The right to marry whoever you choose of whatever race is definitely not in the bill of rights, yet the supreme court said it was an unconstitutional restriction to have anti-miscegination laws in Loving v. Virginia. Give that a big think.
Once the federal government gets too much control, we are doomed.
Calm down, chicken little. That's what you people were saying during the new deal.
Anyway, you never answered my simple question about the police: So just to be clear, you don't have a right to the police to come to your location when you call 911? A simple yes or no will do.
But, even if it did happen, it wouldn't change the fact that the pill and the IUD cause tiny little abortions, and you guys don't care. What happened to "life begins at conception," yall?
Even if we outlawed abortion, abortion pills would be easily available for anyone that wanted them. If my retarded 14 year old buddy in high school could get cocaine, girls will be able to get abortion pills.
Also, as Dora said, it is hard to argue against abortion without arguing against certain types of birth control pills. These birth control pills do their business after the fact. To be a purist, and I've met quite a few, you must be against both.
That said, I believe abortion is a horrible and inhumane practice - and the number of abortions that happen every day speak volumes about the integrity and morality of our nation. It is very sad.
Also, please inform us when you will be moving to birth control methods that do not cause abortions.
Abortive methods: any hormonal method, including the pill, the hormonal IUD, the patch, the ring, the shot, etc. And Depo. The copper coil IUD (non-hormonal) works exclusively by preventing implantation.
Non-abortive methods: any barrier method, including the condom, the diaphragm, and the sponge. Spermicides are also good. And of course, vasectomies and tube-tying.
Lil Johnnie: Once the federal government gets too much control, we are doomed.
Now that's a good one. Which president has increase the power of the government more than any other president?
Even if we outlawed abortion, abortion pills would be easily available for anyone that wanted them. If my retarded 14 year old buddy in high school could get cocaine, girls will be able to get abortion pills.
Well, now, don't get confused. There is: - the Pill, which one takes every day, which works by preventing ovulation, and failing that, preventing sperm from entering the cervix, and failing that, preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterine wall.
- the morning-after pill, which is just 3 doses of the regular Pill, and it works in the exact same way
- and RU-486, the abortion "pill" which causes an abortion, and is not really a pill at all, but more like a shot and a drinkable drug.
Also, as Dora said, it is hard to argue against abortion without arguing against certain types of birth control pills. These birth control pills do their business after the fact. To be a purist, and I've met quite a few, you must be against both.
Don't get confused -- all birth control pills work in those 3 ways described above.
Even if you outlawed abortion, people would still have abortions, just in much less safe conditions.
Anti-abortionists know that they can't come out against the pill and the IUD like they should because they would lose all their support, cuz most people aren't that crazy! So, they mostly keep quiet about this inconvenient truth, putting their desire to be influential ahead of consistency in principles.
Perhaps you guys have heard of this movement in Colorado to amend their constitution to protect every fertilized egg? What would happen to the pill/IUD in that state? What would happen to Aspen/Vail/Telluride and all the tourists and their contraceptives?
When confronted with the truth about the Pill/IUD, most rightwingers just run away and pretend they didn't hear. Pathetic.
Sweden and Japan...two of the least racially diverse nations on the planet. But do they live long by nature or nurture?
Also, I don't know what that has to do with anything.
As you can see from the CIA, the EU, Israel, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, Jordan and Bosnia and Herzogovina all have longer life expectancies than the Us, and those are some pretty diverse places.
That Colorado thing is the high water mark of the great, slimy right wing flood that has been inundating much of the nation...it won't make it and the polluted waters will be receding fairly quickly in the near future.
So just to be clear, you don't have a right to the police to come to your location when you call 911? A simple yes or no will do.
You're going completely off track. Apples and Oranges. Human rights (freedoms) guaranteed by the constitution vs services paid for by state and local funds.
And yes, miscegenation is a right/freedom that should be defined at the federal level. A entitlement and a right are two totally different things (as we've already discussed). You are trying to justify the federal government taking over an entire industry vs the freedom to marry outside your race. Two TOTALLY different things. There are basic human rights that states cannot infringe upon, of course. Our system accounts for these cases, and we've fixed slavery and anti-miscegenation laws. Right? Don't mix entitlements in with rights. That is the whole point of this discussion.
So just to be clear, you don't have a right to the police to come to your location when you call 911? A simple yes or no will do.
You're going completely off track. Apples and Oranges. Human rights (freedoms) guaranteed by the constitution vs services paid for by state and local funds.
Ok, let me rephrase: Does one have an entitlement to have the police come to your location when you call 911? A simple yes or no will do.
And yes, miscegenation is a right/freedom that should be defined at the federal level. A entitlement and a right are two totally different things (as we've already discussed). You are trying to justify the federal government taking over an entire industry vs the freedom to marry outside your race. Two TOTALLY different things. There are basic human rights that states cannot infringe upon, of course. Our system accounts for these cases, and we've fixed slavery and anti-miscegenation laws. Right? Don't mix entitlements in with rights. That is the whole point of this discussion.
My only point here is that it's not anywhere in the constitution that you have a right to marry. It's not anywhere in the amendments that segregation is unconstitutional. Brown v. Board of Educ. was actually a very strange case -- the decision is based in some sketchy sociological data, not any hard constitutional principles. The assertion "separate is by definition not equal" does not have a firm constitutional footing.
And yet, and yet, these things are declared unconstitutional, the court finds new rights out of thin air, some would say.
PS To me, the right to life -> the right to healthcare.
When confronted with the truth about the Pill/IUD, most rightwingers just run away and pretend they didn't hear. Pathetic.
That's not true. Some do, some do not. Many are purists that don't use any of those birth control methods. The real problem is that we have a nation of irresponsible, self centered people. I don't believe that we could ever get enough votes to ban abortion and birth control. The real solution is not found in law. We need to teach personal responsibility to our children. It's a moral question, and I now how pointless it is to discuss morals with liberals. Move onto the next subject...
That's not true. Some do, some do not. Many are purists that don't use any of those birth control methods. The real problem is that we have a nation of irresponsible, self centered people. I don't believe that we could ever get enough votes to ban abortion and birth control. The real solution is not found in law. We need to teach personal responsibility to our children. It's a moral question, and I now how pointless it is to discuss morals with liberals. Move onto the next subject...
Well, what would you do, if you were in charge? Would you outlaw the pill & IUD if you could? In your ideal world, would people even use contraceptives? Have premarital sex?
Well, what would you do, if you were in charge? Would you outlaw the pill & IUD if you could? In your ideal world, would people even use contraceptives? Have premarital sex?
I'm honestly not sure what I would do. I'm sort of a cross between a libertarian and a conservative moralist. The libertarian side of me wants to give people as much freedom as possible. The moralist side of me wants to discourage premarital sex and abortion. I don't think sending people to jail for those things is an effective solution. I do believe those things should be discouraged, but is that the role of the state? I'm not sure. It's a very tough issue.
PS To me, the right to life -> the right to healthcare.
We do have the right to healthcare. There is no law preventing us from purchasing it.
Does one have an entitlement to have the police come to your location when you call 911? A simple yes or no will do.
Yes, the local and state police are paid to enforce the law, and we are entitled to their services. I would actually be ok with a single state creating it's own socialized insurance program. I think it's a dumb idea, but at least it allows the nation to stay in balance. If the program sucks too much tax money, then people and businesses can move to another state. If it's a good program, it will attract people and business - and other states will follow the lead. What is the problem with that model?
Well, what would you do, if you were in charge? Would you outlaw the pill & IUD if you could? In your ideal world, would people even use contraceptives? Have premarital sex?
There is a lot of money for the pharmaceutical companies in the pill. It aint goin away--the pill. They prescibe it for irregular menstual cycles. They prescribe for fibroid tumors. They prescribe for peri-menstual women. It aint goin away.
Yes, the local and state police are paid to enforce the law, and we are entitled to their services.
Even if you don't pay for them, right? Even if you're someone who doesn't pay taxes?
I'm honestly not sure what I would do. I'm sort of a cross between a libertarian and a conservative moralist. The libertarian side of me wants to give people as much freedom as possible. The moralist side of me wants to discourage premarital sex and abortion. I don't think sending people to jail for those things is an effective solution. I do believe those things should be discouraged, but is that the role of the state? I'm not sure. It's a very tough issue.
Well, I'm a libertarian on this, but i'm glad we agree on this to some extent.
Even if you don't pay for them, right? Even if you're someone who doesn't pay taxes?
What, like a child? I don't know where you're going with this. Anybody that spends money, owns property, or has a job is paying local & state taxes.
Well, I'm a libertarian on this, but i'm glad we agree on this to some extent.
We do agree there to some extent. If I were to be consistent, I would say that abortion law should be left to the states. Even then, it's a tough call - I still don't know what I would do.
Even though i have libertarian tendencies, I still believe that drugs like cocaine and heroin should be illegal. On the other hand, I see alcohol and marijuana as two drugs with equivalent societal impact. Both kill brain cells and impair judgment. Both can produce dead beats - I've seen it first hand. I don't know how people can fairly say that alcohol should be legal for adults but marijuana can not. I think that the food/air Nazis that ban trans fats and outlaw/overtax cigarrettes are completely out of line. That is the nanny state, and I want nothing to do with that. Pure libertarianism is a little hard to swallow. Many of my heroes are libertarians, like Walter E Williams and Milton Friedman. I just disagree with them on some moral issues. There is a place for moral law in governance.
Even if you don't pay for them, right? Even if you're someone who doesn't pay taxes?
What, like a child? I don't know where you're going with this. Anybody that spends money, owns property, or has a job is paying local & state taxes.
A child is a good example. Or a poor person who has no property, no job, and pays no taxes. People are entitled to police response no matter what. Even if they are foreigners visiting the US who have no job here. It's an entitlement that we are ALL entitled to. And there are others, also. And I view healthcare as the same kind of entitlement -- we are ALL entitled to it, no matter what our job/property/financial situation.
Even though i have libertarian tendencies, I still believe that drugs like cocaine and heroin should be illegal. On the other hand, I see alcohol and marijuana as two drugs with equivalent societal impact. Both kill brain cells and impair judgment. Both can produce dead beats - I've seen it first hand. I don't know how people can fairly say that alcohol should be legal for adults but marijuana can not.
I completely agree.
I think that the food/air Nazis that ban trans fats and outlaw/overtax cigarrettes are completely out of line. That is the nanny state, and I want nothing to do with that.
See, i'm all about trusting people to make the best choices for themselves. But to make the best choices, people have to be well-informed. So I support labeling of trans fat cigarette risks (i used to be a smoker). The thing with trans fats is that there is ABSOLUTELY NO HEALTH BENEFIT to transfat. To me, people who are saying "banning trans fat is nanny-statish" seem to be the same as those who say "banning strychnine in foods is nanny-statish." We shouldn't have arsenic in food, ever, and no amount of proper labeling is a better solution than an outright ban, in my view. I think we should have an FDA that says that some foods and some drugs are not safe for consumption.
Just like with the SEC - the whole premise of the SEC is that investors will make the best decisions for themselves as long as they are properly informed, like the security having a label that adequately describes what's "in it." But some kinds of securities are just BANNED, they are never good for investors. That's how I view trans fats.
I disagree about trans-fats of course. However, I do believe that a state or locality should be able to make these laws as long as they are constitutional. That's where the 10th amendment comes in. If people are pissed enough about it, they will vote in new leadership or leave the state. That includes many laws I agree with and disagree with. For example, incest and prostitution laws (I have seen that in many discussions here). They should, and are I think, laws that are made at the state level. I support those laws, but I also acknowledge the rights of states to overturn those laws. Am I wrong there? Marriage laws are the same way. You can get married in some states at a very early age, but the marriage may not be recognized in other states. I think that's all good. That's the way it's supposed to work. I think the system will survive as long as we keep to the design the founding fathers gave us.
Ok, so how do you feel about the FDA approving and disapproving of foods, drugs and consmetics for national consumption?
Don't you think that items for ingestion are particularly important to regulate?
This putting out fires of the idiotic arguments against socialized medicine needs to end. It is a damned clear-cut case. And, those who refuse to see it, are just plain stupid and will never be convinced. There needs to be a closing argument, not all of this responding to stupid-assed idiots.
Check out the World Health Organization stats. The US is at the bottom of the totem pole on infant mortality, longevity....numerous other things.
It spends more per capita than any of the other industrial nations--double and almost triple in some cases. Plus, we have a huge number of people who are not covered.
AND, we already have socialized medicine right here in the good old U.S.A. in the form of the V.A. hospitals. And, not so fast there with the Walter Reed deal (that was a fiasco kos of this godddam war of attack which the V.A. was not prepared for) or the disaster it was before the mid-90's--there were numerous problems back then. Before 2005, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a study that compared veterans' health facilities with commercial managed-care systems in their treatment of diabetes patients. In 7 out of 7 measures of quality, the V.A. hospitals provided better care. The National Committee for Quality Assurance ranked (as of 2005) health-care plans on seventeeen different performance measures. Those items included how well the plans managed high blood preesure or how they adhered to standard protocols of evidenced-based medicine like prescribing beta blockers for patients recovering from a hear attack. Winning the National Committee for Quality Assurance's seal of approval is considered the "Gold Standard" of the health industry care. The VHA outperformed the Mahyo Clinic, John Hopkins, Massachusetts General. Of course, the Bush administration's decision to deny previously promised health-care benefits who do not have service-related illnesses or who could not pass a strict means test cause a huge uproar. This was an access problem, not a quality problem. It was, at the time, the government bureaucracy that was setting the satndard for maintaining best practices while reducing costs. The private sector was lagging. Because the VHA is a big, government-run system that has nearly a lifetime relationship with its patients, it has incentives for investing in quality and keeping its patients well. These are incentives that are lacking in for-profit medicine. At one time, the veterans health-care system was in a crisis...for various reasons. Many Republicans wanted to do away with it completely. But, the veterans have a powerful lobby and they were able to squelch this movement. Three weeks before the 1996 presidential election, in part to Bob Dole's promises to the veterans (and kudos to him for that), President (kudos to him, too) signed a bill that planned to "furnish comprehensive medical services to all veterans," regardless of their income or whether they had service-related disabilities. Under the guidananc of Kennieth Kizer (1994 VHA's undersecretary for health), began to look at ways in which the system might be repaired. He not only downsized and reengineered the system, he systematically improved uality and safety that is even today lacking in the for-profit health-care industry.
I paraphrased the above from article below--and the link is at the bottom. Here's the rest of it, and I am editing to shorten it when possible:
To understand the larger lessons of the VHA's turnaround, it's necessary to pause for a moment to think about what comprises quality health care. The first criterion likely to come to mind is the presence of doctors who are highly trained, committed professionals. They should know a lot about biochemistry, anatomy, cellular and molecular immunology, and other details about how the human body works--and have the academic credentials to prove it. As it happens, the VHA has long had many doctors who answer to that description. Indeed, most VHA doctors have faculty appointments with academic hospitals.
But when you get seriously sick, it's not just one doctor who will be involved in your care. These days, chances are you'll see many doctors, including different specialists. Therefore, how well these doctors communicate with one another and work as a team matters a lot. "Forgetfulness is such a constant problem in the system," says Berwick of the Institute for Health Care Improvement. "It doesn't remember you. Doesn't remember that you were here and here and then there. It doesn't remember your story."
Are all your doctors working from the same medical record and making entries that are clearly legible? Do they have a reliable system to ensure that no doctor will prescribe drugs that will interact harmfully with medications prescribed by another doctor? Is any one of them going to take responsibility for coordinating your care so that, for example, you don't leave the hospital without the right follow-up medication or knowing how and when to take it? Just about anyone who's had a serious illness, or tried to be an advocate for a sick loved one, knows that all too often the answer is no.
Doctors aren't the only ones who define the quality of your health care. There are also many other people involved--nurses, pharmacists, lab technicians, orderlies, even custodians. Any one of these people could kill you if they were to do their jobs wrong. Even a job as lowly as changing a bedpan, if not done right, can spread a deadly infection throughout a hospital. Each of these people is part of an overall system of care, and if the system lacks cohesion and quality control, many people will be injured and many will die.
Just how many? In 1999, the Institute of Medicine issued a groundbreaking study, titled To Err is Human, that still haunts health care professionals. It found that up to 98,000 people die of medical errors in American hospitals each year. This means that as many as 4 percent of all deaths in the United States are caused by such lapses as improperly filled or administered prescription drugs--a death toll that exceeds that of AIDS, breast cancer, or even motor vehicle accidents.
Since then, a cavalcade of studies have documented how a lack of systematic attention not only to medical errors but to appropriate treatment has made putting yourself into a doctor's or hospital's care extraordinarily risky. The practice of medicine in the United States, it turns out, is only loosely based on any scientifically driven standards. The most recent and persuasive evidence came from study by Dartmouth Medical School published last October in Health Affairs. It found that even among the "best hospitals," as rated by U.S. News & World Report, Medicare patients with the same conditions receive strikingly different patterns and intensities of care from one another, with no measurable difference in their wellbeing.
For example, among patients facing their last six months of life, those who are checked into New York's renowned Mount Sinai Medical Center will receive an average of 53.9 visits from physicians, while those who are checked into Duke University Medical Center will receive only 20.9. Yet all those extra doctors' visits at Mount Sinai bring no gain in life expectancy, just more medical bills. By that measure of quality, many of the country's most highly rated hospitals are actually its shoddiest.
Worse, even when strong scientific consensus emerges about appropriate protocols and treatments, the health-care industry is extremely slow to implement them. For example, there is little controversy over the best way to treat diabetes; it starts with keeping close track of a patient's blood sugar levels. Yet if you have diabetes, your chances are only one-out-four that your health care system will actually monitor your blood sugar levels or teach you how to do it. According to a recent RAND Corp. study, this oversight causes an estimated 2,600 diabetics to go blind every year, and anther 29,000to experience kidney failure.
All told, according to the same RAND study, Americans receive appropriate care from their doctors only about half of the time. The results are deadly. On top of the 98,000 killed by medical errors, another 126,000 die from their doctor's failure to observe evidence-based protocols for just four common conditions: hypertension, heart attacks, pneumonia, and colorectal cancer.
Now, you might ask, what's so hard about preventing these kinds of fatal lapses in health care? The airline industry, after all, also requires lots of complicated teamwork and potentially dangerous technology, but it doesn't wind up killing hundreds of thousands of its customers each year. Indeed, airlines, even when in bankruptcy, continuously improve their safety records. By contrast, the death toll from medical errors alone is equivalent to a fully loaded jumbo-jet crashing each day.
Laptop medicine
Why doesn't this change? Well, much of it has changed in the veterans health-care system, where advanced information technology today serves not only to deeply reduce medical errors, but also to improve diagnoses and implement coordinated, evidence-based care. Or at least so I kept reading in the professional literature on health-care quality in the United States. I arranged to visit the VA Medical Center in Washington, D.C. to see what all these experts were so excited about.
The complex's main building is a sprawling, imposing structure located three miles north of the Capitol building. When it was built in 1972, it was in the heart of Washington's ghetto, a neighborhood dangerous enough though one nurse I spoke with remembered having to lock her car doors and drive as fast as she could down Irving Street when she went home at night.
Today, the surrounding area is rapidly gentrifying. And the medical center has evolved, too. Certain sights, to be sure, remind you of how alive the past still is here. In its nursing home facility, there are still a few veterans of World War I. Standing outside of the hospital's main entrance, I was moved by the sight of two elderly gentlemen, both standing at near attention, and sporting neatly pressed Veterans of Foreign Wars dress caps with MIA/POW insignias. One turned out to be a survivor of the Bataan Death March.
But while history is everywhere in this hospital, it is also among the most advanced, modern health-care facilities in the globe--a place that hosts an average of four visiting foreign delegations a week. The hospital has a spacious generic lobby with a food court, ATM machines, and a gift shop. But once you are in the wards, you notice something very different: doctors and nurses wheeling bed tables with wireless laptops attached down the corridors. How does this change the practice of medicine? Opening up his laptop, Dr. Ross Fletcher, an avuncular, white-haired cardiologist who led the hospital's adoption of information technology, begins a demonstration.
With a key stroke, Dr. Fletcher pulls up the medical records for one of his current patients--an 87-year-old veteran living in Montgomery County, Md. Normally, sharing such records with a reporter or anyone else would, of course, be highly unethical and illegal, but the patient, Dr. Fletcher explains, has given him permission.
Soon it becomes obvious why this patient feels that getting the word out about the VHA's information technology is important. Up pops a chart showing a daily record of his weight as it has fluctuated over a several-month period. The data for this chart, Dr. Fletcher explains, flows automatically from a special scale the patient uses in his home that sends a wireless signal to a modem.
Why is the chart important? Because it played a key role, Fletcher explains, in helping him to make a difficult diagnosis. While recovering from Lyme Disease and a hip fracture, the patient began periodically complaining of shortness of breath. Chest X-rays were ambiguous and confusing. They showed something amiss in one lung, but not the other, suggesting possible lung cancer. But Dr. Fletcher says he avoided having to chase down that possibility when he noticed a pattern jumping out of the graph generated from the patient's scale at home.
The chart clearly showed that the patient gained weight around the time he experienced shortness of breath. This pattern, along with the record of the hip fracture, helped Dr. Fletcher to form a hypothesis that turned out to be accurate. A buildup of fluid in the patient's lung was causing him to gain weight. The fluid gathered only in one lung because the patient was consistently sleeping on one side to cope with the pain from his hip fracture. The fluid in the lung indicated that the patient was in immediate need of treatment for congestive heart failure, and, fortunately, he received it in time.
The same software program, known as VistA, also plays a key role in preventing medical errors. Kay J. Craddock, who spent most of her 28 years with the VHA as a nurse, and who today coordinates the use of the information systems at the VA Medical Center, explains how. In the old days, pharmacists did their best to decipher doctors' handwritten prescription orders, while nurses, she says, did their best to keep track of which patients should receive which medicines by shuffling 3-by-5cards.
Today, by contrast, doctors enter their orders into their laptops. The computer system immediately checks any order against the patient's records. If the doctors working with a patient have prescribed an inappropriate combination of medicines or overlooked the patient's previous allergic reaction to a drug, the computer sends up a red flag. Later, when hospital pharmacists fill those prescriptions, the computer system generates a bar code that goes on the bottle or intravenous bag and registers what the medicine is, who it is for, when it should be administered, in what dose, and by whom.
Each patient also has an ID bracelet with its own bar code, and so does each nurse. Before administering any drug, a nurse must first scan the patient's ID bracelet, then her own, and then the barcode on the medicine. If she has the wrong patient or the wrong medicine, the computer will tell her. The computer will also create a report if she's late in administering a dose, "and saying you were just too busy is not an excuse," says Craddock.
Craddock cracks a smile when she recalls how nurses reacted when they first were ordered to use the system. "One nurse tried to get the computer to accept her giving an IV, and when it wouldn't let her, she said, 'you see, I told you this thing is never going to work.' Then she looked down at the bag." She had mixed it up with another, and the computer had saved her from a career-ending mistake. Today, says Craddock, some nurses still insist on getting paper printouts of their orders, but nearly all applaud the computer system and its protocols. "It keeps them from having to run back and forth to the nursing station to get the information they need, and, by keeping them from making mistakes, it helps them to protect their license." The VHA has now virtually eliminated dispensing errors.
In speaking with several of the young residents at the VA Medical Center, I realized that the computer system is also a great aid to efficiency. At the university hospitals where they had also trained, said the residents, they constantly had to run around trying to retrieve records--first upstairs to get X-rays from the radiology department, then downstairs to pick up lab results. By contrast, when making their rounds at the VA Medical Center, they just flip open their laptops when they enter a patient's room. In an instant, they can see not only all of the patient's latest data, but also a complete medical record going back as far as the mid-1980s, including records of care performed in any other VHA hospital or clinic.
Along with the obvious benefits this brings in making diagnoses, it also means that residents don't face impossibly long hours dealing with paperwork. "It lets these twentysomethings go home in time to do the things twentysomethings like to do," says Craddock. One neurologist practicing at both Georgetown University Hospital and the VA Medical Center reports that he can see as many patients in a few hours at the veterans hospital as he can all day at Georgetown.
By this summer, anyone enrolled in the VHA will be able to access his or her own complete medical records from a home computer, or give permission for others to do so. "Think what this means," says Dr. Robert M. Kolodner, acting chief health informatics officer for the VHA. "Say you're living on the West Coast, and you call up your aging dad back East. You ask him to tell you what his doctor said during his last visit and he mumbles something about taking a blue pill and white one. Starting this summer, you'll be able to monitor his medical record, and know exactly what pills he is supposed to be taking."
The same system reminds doctors to prescribe appropriate care for patients when they leave the hospital, such as beta blockers for heart attack victims, or eye exams for diabetics. It also keeps track of which vets are due for a flu shot, a breast cancer screen, or other follow-up care--a task virtually impossible to pull off using paper records. Another benefit of electronic records became apparent last September when the drug-maker Merck announced a recall of its popular arthritis medication, Vioxx. The VHA was able to identify which of its patients were on the drug within minutes, and to switch them to less dangerous substitutes within days.
Similarly, in the midst of a nationwide shortage of flu vaccine, the system has also allowed the VHA to identify, almost instantly, those veterans who are in greatest need of a flu shot and to make sure those patients have priority. One aging relative of mine--a man who has had cancer and had been in and out of nursing homes--wryly reports that he beat out 5,000 other veterans in the New London, Conn., area for a flu shot. He's happy that his local veterans hospital called him up to tell him he qualified, but somewhat alarmed by what this implies about his health.
The VistA system also helps to put more science into the practice of medicine. For example, electronic medical records collectively form a powerful database that enables researchers to look back and see which procedures work best without having to assemble and rifle through innumerable paper records. This database also makes it possible to discover emerging disease vectors quickly and effectively. For example, when a veterans hospital in Kansas City noticed an outbreak of a rare form of pneumonia among its patients, its computer system quickly spotted the problem: All the patients had been treated with what turned out to be the same bad batch of nasal spray.
Developed at taxpayer expense, the VistA program is available for free to anyone who cares to download it off the Internet. The link is to a demo, but the complete software is nonetheless available. You can try it out yourself by going to http://www1.va.gov/CPRSdemo/. Not surprisingly, it is currently being used by public health care systems in Finland, Germany, and Nigeria. There is even an Arabic language version up and running in Egypt. Yet VHA officials say they are unaware of any private health care system in the United States that uses the software. Instead, most systems are still drowning in paper, or else just starting to experiment with far more primitive information technologies.
Worse, some are even tearing out their electronic information systems. That's what happened at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, which in 2003 turned off its brand-new, computerized physician order entry system after doctors objected that it was too cumbersome. At least six other hospitals have done the same in recent years. Another example of the resistance to information technology among private practice doctors comes from the Hawaii Independent Physicians Association, which recently cancelled a program that offered its members $3,000 if they would adopt electronic medical records. In nine months, there were only two takers out of its 728 member doctors.
In July, Connecting for Health--a public-private cooperative of hospitals, health plans, employers and government agencies--found that persuading doctors in small- to medium-sized practices to adopt electronic medical records required offering bonuses of up to 10 percent of the doctors' annual income. This may partly be due to simple techno-phobia or resistance to change. But the broader reason, as we shall see, is that most individual doctors and managed care providers in the private sector often lack a financial incentive to invest for investing in electronic medical records and other improvements to the quality of the care they offer.
This is true even when it comes to implementing low-tech, easy-to-implement safety procedures. For example, you've probably heard about surgeons who operate on the wrong organ or limb. So-called "wrong site" surgery happens in about one out of 15,000 operations, with those performing foot and hand surgeries particularly likely to make the mistake. Most hospitals try to minimize this risk by having someone use a magic marker to show the surgeon where to cut. But about a third of time, the VHA has found, the root problem isn't that someone mixed up left with right; it's that the surgeon is not operating on the patient he thinks he is. How do you prevent that?
Obviously, in the VHA system, scanning the patient's ID bracelet and the surgical orders helps, but even that isn't foolproof. Drawing on his previous experience as a NASA astronaut and accident investigator, the VHA's safety director, Dr. James Bagian, has developed a five-step process that VHA surgical teams now use to verify both the identity of the patient and where they are supposed to operate. Though it's similar to the check lists astronauts go through before blast off, it is hardly rocket science. The most effective part of the drill, says Bagian, is simply to ask the patient, in language he can understand, who he is and what he's in for. Yet the efficacy of this and other simple quality-control measures adopted by the VHA makes one wonder all the more why the rest of the health-care system is so slow to follow.
Why care about quality?
Here's one big reason. As Lawrence P. Casalino, a professor of public health at the University of Chicago, puts it, "The U.S. medical market as presently constituted simply does not provide a strong business case for quality."
Casalino writes from his own experience as a solo practitioner, and on the basis of over 800 interviews he has since conducted with health-care leaders and corporate health care purchasers. While practicing medicine on his own in Half Moon Bay, Calif, Casalino had an idealistic commitment to following emerging best practices in medicine. That meant spending lots of time teaching patients about their diseases, arranging for careful monitoring and follow-up care, and trying to keep track of what prescriptions and procedures various specialists might be ordering.
Yet Casalino quickly found out that he couldn't sustain this commitment to quality, given the rules under which he was operating. Nobody paid him for the extra time he spent with his patients. He might have eased his burden by hiring a nurse to help with all the routine patient education and follow-up care that was keeping him at the office too late. Or he might have teamed up with other providers in the area to invest in computer technology that would allow them to offer the same coordinated care available in veterans hospitals and clinics today. Either step would have improved patient safety and added to the quality of care he was providing. But even had he managed to pull them off, he stood virtually no chance of seeing any financial return on his investment. As a private practice physician, he got paid for treating patients, not for keeping them well or helping them recover faster.
The same problem exists across all health-care markets, and its one main reason in explaining why the VHA has a quality performance record that exceeds that of private-sector providers. Suppose a private managed-care plan follows the VHA example and invests in a computer program to identify diabetics and keep track of whether they are getting appropriate follow-up care. The costs are all upfront, but the benefits may take 20 years to materialize. And by then, unlike in the VHA system, the patient will likely have moved on to some new health-care plan. As the chief financial officer of one health plan told Casalino: "Why should I spend our money to save money for our competitors?"
Or suppose an HMO decides to invest in improving the quality of its diabetic care anyway. Then not only will it risk seeing the return on that investment go to a competitor, but it will also face another danger as well. What happens if word gets out that this HMO is the best place to go if you have diabetes? Then more and more costly diabetic patients will enroll there, requiring more premium increases, while its competitors enjoy a comparatively large supply of low-cost, healthier patients. That's why, Casalino says, you never see a billboard with an HMO advertising how good it is at treating one disease or another. Instead, HMO advertisements generally show only healthy families.
In many realms of health care, no investment in quality goes unpunished. A telling example comes from semi-rural Whatcom County, Wash. There, idealistic health-care providers banded together and worked to bring down rates of heart disease and diabetes in the country. Following best practices from around the country, they organized multi-disciplinary care teams to provide patients with counseling, education, and navigation through the health-care system. The providers developed disease protocols derived from evidence-based medicine. They used information technology to allow specialists to share medical records and to support disease management.
But a problem has emerged. Who will pay for the initiative? It is already greatly improving public health and promises to bring much more business to local pharmacies, as more people are prescribed medications to manage their chronic conditions and will also save Medicare lots of money. But projections show that, between 2001 and 2008, the initiative will cost the local hospital $7.7 million in lost revenue, and reduce the income of the county's medical specialists by $1.6 million. An idealistic commitment to best practices in medicine doesn't pay the bills. Today, the initiative survives only by attracting philanthropic support, and, more recently, a $500,000 grant from Congress.
For health-care providers outside the VHA system, improving quality rarely makes financial sense. Yes, a hospital may have a business case for purchasing the latest, most expensive imaging devices. The machines will help attract lots of highly-credentialed doctors to the hospital who will bring lots of patients with them. The machines will also induce lots of new demand for hospital services by picking up all sorts of so-called "pseudo-diseases." These are obscure, symptomless conditions, like tiny, slow-growing cancers, that patients would never have otherwise become aware of because they would have long since died of something else. If you're a fee-for-service health-care provider, investing in technology that leads to more treatment of pseudo-disease is a financial no-brainer.
But investing in any technology that ultimately serves to reduce hospital admissions, like an electronic medical record system that enables more effective disease management and reduces medical errors, is likely to take money straight from the bottom line. "The business case for safety…remains inadequate…[for] the task," concludes Robert Wachter, M.D., in a recent study for Health Affairs in which he surveyed quality control efforts across the U.S. health-care system.
If health care was like a more pure market, in which customers know the value of what they are buying, a business case for quality might exist more often. But purchasers of health care usually don't know, and often don't care about its quality, and so private health-care providers can't increase their incomes by offering it. To begin with, most people don't buy their own health care; their employers do. Consortiums of large employers may have the staff and the market power necessary to evaluate the quality of health-care plans and to bargain for greater commitments to patient safety and evidence-based medicine. And a few actually do so. But most employers are not equipped for this. Moreover, in these days of rapid turnover and vanishing post-retirement health-care benefits, few employers have any significant financial interest in their workers' long-term health.
That's why you don't see many employers buying insurance that covers smoking cessation programs or the various expensive drugs that can help people to quit the habit. If they did, they'd be being buying more years of healthy life per dollar than just about any other way they could use their money. But most of the savings resulting from reduced lung cancer, stroke, and heart attacks would go to future employers of their workers, and so such a move makes little financial sense.
Meanwhile, what employees value most in health care is maximum choice at minimal cost. They don't want the boss man telling them they must use this hospital or that one because it has the best demonstrated quality of care. They'll be their own judge of quality, thank-you, and they'll usually base their choice on criteria like: "My best friend recommended this hospital," or "This doctor agrees with my diagnosis and refills the prescriptions I want," or "I like this doctor's bedside manner." If more people knew how dangerous it can be to work with even a good doctor in a poorly run hospital or uncoordinated provider network, the premium on doctor choice would be much less decisive, but for now it still is.
And so we get results like what happened in Cleveland during the 1990s. There, a well-publicized initiative sponsored by local businesses, hospitals and physicians identified several hospitals as having significantly higher than expected mortality rates, longer than expected hospital stays, and worse patient satisfaction. Yet, not one of these hospitals ever lost a contract because of their poor performance. To the employers buying health care in the community, and presumably their employees as well, cost and choice counted for more than quality. Developing more and better quality measures in health care is a noble cause, but it's not clear that putting more information into health-care markets will change these hard truths.
Health for service
So what's left? Consider why, ultimately, the veterans health system is such an outlier in its commitment to quality. Partly it's because of timely, charismatic leadership. A quasi-military culture may also facilitate acceptance of new technologies and protocols. But there are also other important, underlying factors.
First, unlike virtually all other health-care systems in the United States, VHA has a near lifetime relationship with its patients. Its customers don't jump from one health plan to the next every few years. They start a relationship with the VHA as early as their teens, and it endures. That means that the VHA actually has an incentive to invest in prevention and more effective disease management. When it does so, it isn't just saving money for somebody else. It's maximizing its own resources.
The system's doctors are salaried, which also makes a difference. Most could make more money doing something else, so their commitment to their profession most often derives from a higher-than-usual dose of idealism. Moreover, because they are not profit maximizers, they have no need to be fearful of new technologies or new protocols that keep people well. Nor do they have an incentive to clamor for high-tech devices that don't improve the system's quality or effectiveness of care.
And, because it is a well-defined system, the VHA can act like one. It can systematically attack patient safety issues. It can systematically manage information using standard platforms and interfaces. It can systematically develop and implement evidence-based standards of care. It can systematically discover where its care needs improvement and take corrective measures. In short, it can do what the rest of the health-care sector can't seem to, which is to pursue quality systematically without threatening its own financial viability.
Hmm. That gives me an idea. No one knows how we're ever going to provide health care for all these aging baby boomers. Meanwhile, in the absence of any near-term major wars, the population of veterans in the United States will fall dramatically in the next decade. Instead of shuttering under-utilized VHA facilities, maybe we should build more. What if we expanded the veterans health-care system and allowed anyone who is either already a vet or who agrees to perform two years of community service a chance to buy in? Indeed, what if we said to young and middle-aged people, if you serve your community and your country, you can make your parents or other loved ones eligible for care in an expanded VHA system?
The system runs circles around Medicare in both cost and quality. Unlike Medicare, it's allowed by law to negotiate for deep drug discounts, and does. Unlike Medicare, it provides long-term nursing home care. And it demonstrably delivers some of the best, if not the best, quality health care in the United States with amazing efficiency. Between 1999 and 2003, the number of patients enrolled in the VHA system increased by 70 percent, yet funding (not adjusted for inflation) increased by only 41 percent. So the VHA has not only become the health care industry's best quality performer, it has done so while spending less and less on each patient. Decreasing cost and improving quality go hand and hand in industries like autos and computers--but in health care, such a relationship virtually unheard of. The more people we can get into the VHA, the more efficient and effective the American health-care system will be.
We could start with demonstration projects using VHA facilities that are currently under-utilized or slated to close. Last May, the VHA announced it was closing hospitals in Pittsburgh; Gulfport, Miss.; and Brecksville, Ohio. Even after the closures, the VHA will still have more than 4 million square feet of vacant or obsolete real estate. Beyond this, there are empty facilities available from bankrupt HMOs and public hospitals, such as the defunct D.C. General. Let the VHA take over these facilities, and apply its state-of-the-art information systems, safety systems, and protocols of evidence-based medicine.
Once fully implemented, the plan would allow Americans to avoid skipping from one health-care plan to the next over their lifetimes, with all the discontinuities in care and record keeping and disincentives to preventative care that this entails. No matter where you moved in the country, or how often you changed jobs, or where you might happen to come down with an illness, there would be a VHA facility nearby where your complete medical records would be available and the same evidence-based protocols of medicine would be practiced.
You might decide that such a plan is not for you. But, as with mass transit, an expanded VHA would offer you a benefit even if you didn't choose to use it. Just as more people riding commuter trains means fewer cars in your way, more people using the VHA would mean less crowding in your own, private doctor's waiting room, as well as more pressure on your private health-care network to match the VHA's performance on cost and quality.
Why make public service a requirement for receiving VHA care? Because it's in the spirit of what the veterans health-care system is all about. It's not an entitlement; it's recognition for those who serve. America may not need as many soldiers as in the past,[we hope] but it has more need than ever for people who will volunteer to better their communities.
Would such a system stand in danger of becoming woefully under-funded, just as the current VHA system is today? Veterans comprise a declining share of the population, and the number of Americans who have personal contact with military life continues to shrink. It is therefore not surprising that veterans health-care issues barely register on the national agenda, even in times of war. But, as with any government benefit, the broader the eligibility, the more political support it is likely to receive. Many veterans will object to the idea of sharing their health care system with non-vets; indeed, many already have issues with the VHA treating vets who do not have combat-related disabilities. But in the long run, extending eligibility to non-vets may be the only way to ensure that more veterans get the care they were promised and deserve.
Does this plan seem too radical? Well, perhaps it does for now. We'll have to let the ranks of the uninsured further swell, let health-care costs consume larger and larger portions of payrolls and household budgets, let more and more Americans die from medical errors and mismanaged care, before any true reform of the health-care system becomes possible. But it is time that our debates over health care took the example of the veterans health-care system into account and tried to learn some lessons from it.
Today, the Bush administration is pushing hard, and so far without much success, to get health-care providers to adopt information technology. Bush's National Coordinator for Health Care Information Technology, Dr. David Brailer, estimates that if the U.S. health-care system as a whole would adopt electronic medical records and computerized prescription orders, it would save as much as 2 percent of GDP and also dramatically improve quality of care. Yet the VHA's extraordinary ability to outperform the private sector on both cost and quality suggests that the rest of the Bush administration's agenda on health care is in conflict with this goal.
The administration wants to move American health care from the current employer-based model, where companies chose health-care plans for their workers, to an "ownership" model, where individuals use much more of their own money to purchase their own health care. But shifting more costs on to patients, and encouraging them to bargain and haggle for the "best deal" will result in even more jumping from provider to provider. This, in turn, will give private sector providers even fewer incentives to invest in quality measures that pay off only over time. The Bush administration is right to question all the tax subsidies going to prop up employer-provided health insurance. But it is wrong to suppose that more choice and more competition will solve the quality problem in American health care.
VHA's success shows that Americans clearly could have higher-quality health care at lower cost. But if we presume--and it is safe to do so--that Americans are not going to accept the idea of government-run health care any time soon, it's still worth thinking about how the private health-care industry might be restructured to allow it to do what the VHA has done. For any private health-care plan to have enough incentive to match the VHA's performance on quality, it would have to be nearly as big as the VHA. It would have to have facilities and significant market share in nearly every market so that it could, like the VHA, stand a good chance of holding on to customers no matter where they moved.
It would also have to be big enough to achieve the VHA's economies of scale in information management and to create the volumes of patients needed to keep specialists current in performing specific operations and procedures. Not surprisingly, the next best performers on quality after the VHA are big national or near-national networks like Kaiser Permanente. Perhaps if every American had to join one such plan and had to pay a financial penalty for switching plans (as, in effect, do most customers of the VHA), then a business case for quality might exist more often in the private health-care market. Simply mandating that all health-care providers adopt electronic medical records and other quality protocols pioneered by the VHA might seem like a good idea. But in the absence of any other changes, it would likely lead to more hospital closings and bankrupt health-care plans.
As the health-care crisis worsens, and as more become aware of how dangerous and unscientific most of the U.S. health-care system is, maybe we will find a way to get our minds around these strange truths. Many Americans still believe that the U.S. health-care system is the best in the world, and that its only major problems are that it costs too much and leaves too many people uninsured. But the fact remains that Americans live shorter lives, with more disabilities, than people in countries that spend barely half as much per person on health care. Pouring more money into the current system won't change that. Nor will making the current system even more fragmented and driven by short-term profit motives. But learning from the lesson offered by the veterans health system could point the way to an all-American solution.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html
Incidentally, Johh Edwards and, later, Hillary Clinton both pointed to the VHA as examples of how socialized health care could work.
Independent Study Finds Bush “Unequivocally” Lied U.S. into War with Iraq
Impeachment | Iraq | Media Criticism | Terrorism
by Frank J Ranelli | January 23, 2008 - 3:06am
article tools: email | print | read more Frank J Ranelli
In perhaps the most complete and damning evidence yet that President Bush deceived a nation into a baseless war, a nonprofit collaboration of two independent organizations has concluded that President Bush used at least 532 misleading and deceptively false statements to justify military action against Iraq.
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A nonprofit collaboration of two independent, non-governmental organizations has concluded that President Bush used at least 532 misleading and deceptively false statements to justify military action against Iraq. In all, the Bush administration as a whole used a mind-numbing 935 false statements to goad America into war with Iraq. Calling their findings “an orchestrated deception on the path to war,” the partnership report may very well be the first fully comprehensive investigation that incontrovertibly proves the Bush administration lied this nation into an unfounded war.
The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism determined, through a collective study and breakdown of Bush administration speeches, press briefings and interviews, that Bush and other top officials “led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information.”
According to the report, Bush alone lied more than 259 times, including 232 false statements “about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq” and “28 about Iraq's links to al-Qaida.” Quoting Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism, “It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida.” Furthermore, the shared study noted, “the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”
Among the seven top officials cited, Colin Powell was the most egregious in the dispersal of dissembling and mendacious language regarding the requisite call for war against Iraq. Powell is attributed to having made 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in a two-year period beginning on September 11, 2001 and through the commencement of military action in Iraq on March 18, 2003.
As a microcosm example of at least 935 lies cataloged by the exhaustive study, Vice President Dick Cheney declared on August 26, 2002 that “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” Bush’s patently false proclamation, made on May 29, 2003, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction,” has now been completed discredited. Of course, no weapons of mass destruction were ever found and George Bush, on NBC’s Meet the Press in 2004 conceded, “No weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq.”
In a never-ending stream of fuzzy rationales to justify war, beginning as early as November of 2001, the Bush administration began making disingenuous statements attempting to tie Saddam to the attackers of 9/11. Quoting Bush, “They're both risks, they're both dangerous. The difference, of course, is that Al Qaeda likes to hijack governments. Saddam Hussein is a dictator of a government. Al Qaeda hides, Saddam doesn't, but the danger is, is that they work in concert.” However, in stark contrast, the 9/11 Commission Report was unable to establish any “evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with Al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”
The comprehensive study also touches on and illuminates the vast failures of the mainstream media; mainly their failure to offer critical scrutiny, while chiefly operating as Bush’s surrogate and disseminator in the misleading rhetoric of the dire need to take the country to war. During that critical, seminal juncture in the run up to the war, the media “creating an almost impenetrable din” that forced out nearly all dissenting views, the report revealed.
In what may be the first true, categorical “War Report Card” that separates fact from fiction, fine tunes mass distortion into utter clarity, the Center for Public Integrity makes a compelling case that “Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.”
Now I wish I hadn't checked in. I'm going to be up all night worrying that Little Johnny is going to be denied his rights to a glop of trans fat every day. Where does it stop...won't they ever learn?
The thing with trans fats is that there is ABSOLUTELY NO HEALTH BENEFIT to transfat. To me, people who are saying "banning trans fat is nanny-statish" seem to be the same as those who say "banning strychnine in foods is nanny-statish."
...
Don't you think that items for ingestion are particularly important to regulate?
Let me put it this way. There is ABSOLUTELY NO HEALTH BENEFIT to Everclear, yet I want to have the right to buy it and make Jello Shots. What is worse, a bottle of poison or trans-fat? Maybe you don't agree that there is a connection? Fine, how about this. Some days I like to stop by Dunkin Donuts in the morning, drink 5 cups of coffee, eat a pan pizza for lunch, and then finish it all of with a case of White Castles for dinner. Hell, I may go out with my buddies in the evening, have an Irish Car Bomb and maybe smoke a menthol. (I hate smoking, but I may indulge a few times a year while drinking) There - I spent the entire day knowingly eating foods with ABSOLUTELY NO HEALTH BENEFIT. In fact, I probably took a few years off of my life - but I wouldn't trade it for anything.
I do believe that foods and drugs should be labeled, and they are. I have a severe peanut allergy, so I am frustrated when I go to a restaurant and cannot get a list of ingredients for each item on the menu. Believe it or not, I lost my lunch in a Chinese restaurant because they used peanut butter in the egg rolls! If a state law were to pass that required ingredients to be available to all that care, I would support that in my state - but to ban foods just because they are unhealthy? That is the nanny state, and I despise it.
So what.. are you going to make MSG illegal next? I don't know about you with your rich parentage, but I lived off of Ramen noodles in college. In fact, Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant noodles, is one of my food heroes. He famously said, "Peace will come to the world when the people have enough to eat." I figure you liberals would love him. But yet, like transfats, there is a war against MSG.
Mountain Dew and other sodas have Brominated vegetable oil in them. As you may know, Bromine is a deadly poison. In one case, a man who drank eight liters of Ruby Red Squirt daily had a reaction that caused his skin color to turn red and produced lesions diagnosed as bromoderma. Good luck outlawing Mountain Dew!
OMG now I'm SOOO hungry! I'm going to have a bowl of ramen, a bottle of dew, and finish it off with a few hostess twinkies. That way I have MSG, transfats, and brominated vegetable oil all in the same meal!
his putting out fires of the idiotic arguments against socialized medicine needs to end. It is a damned clear-cut case. And, those who refuse to see it, are just plain stupid and will never be convinced. There needs to be a closing argument, not all of this responding to stupid-assed idiots.
First off, everyone on both sides agrees that there are problems with the US healthcare system. The difference is the solution. You want to nationally socialize healthcare, which is foolish and unconstitutional. There are plenty of other things that can be done to repair it.
Here is something you probably didn't know about social security:
"Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was immensely popular with the public and he dominated the lopsidedly Democratic Congress. Only one thing thwarted Roosevelt: the Supreme Court.
Four Justices, George Sutherland, Willis Van Devanter, Pierce Butler, and James McReynolds, believed that the Constitution should be interpreted conservatively, according to the intent of the Framers. In their view, the federal government could not intervene in economic or local matters, and the Tenth Amendment – "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people" – narrowly confined its legitimate activities. So the New Deal was invalid. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Owen Roberts often concurred. The liberal Justices, Harlan Fiske Stone, Louis Brandeis, and Benjamin Cardozo, believed that the Constitution had to be interpreted flexibly, to meet changing circumstances. A clause in Article I, Section 8, empowering Congress to impose and collect taxes "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States," they believed, authorized New Deal laws.
The Roosevelt Administration feared that the Court would rule that the Constitution did not permit federal tax-financed old-age insurance. While the Social Security bill was in Congress, the Court invalidated the Railroad Retirement Act, which resembled Social Security. So the Administration’s allies on the House Ways and Means Committee weeded the insurance language out of the bill and physically separated the tax and benefits titles in the text so they wouldn’t look like an insurance program.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court hammered the New Deal. On May 27, 1935, in a crushing defeat for Roosevelt, it voided the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act. It struck down the Agricultural Adjustment Act on January 6, 1936, the Guffey Coal Act on May 18, and the Municipal Bankruptcy Act and a New York state law setting minimum wages for women on May 25.
Enraged, Roosevelt decided to subdue the Court. His megalomania inflated by his 1936 landslide, on February 5, 1937 he abruptly asked Congress to enact a bill empowering him to appoint one additional Justice for every one who turned 70 and did not retire, for a maximum of six, thus enlarging the Supreme Court from nine Justices to up to fifteen.
A firestorm ensued. Critics rightly called Roosevelt’s proposal a plan to pack the Court. Even liberals who deplored the Court’s decisions, including many congressional Democrats, opposed it.
Its arm cruelly twisted by Roosevelt’s threat to its independence, the Supreme Court began surrendering in self-preservation. On March 29, the Court upheld a revised Frazier-Lemke Act; the National Firearms Act; the Railway Labor Act, which promoted collective bargaining; and a Washington state law providing for minimum wages for women."
What if GW Bush did that today? You guys would shit a brick, no doubt! FDR was a scoundrel, and the New Deal is unconstitutional. Why don't you fight for Socialized Medicine in your state - that is the flexibility the constitution gives us. After all, each state is the size of a small European country. If you can make it work there, other states will follow. Good luck!
As opposed to jabbing a scissor into the back of the neck of a 4/5th's delivered full-term infant because mom's new boyfriend hates kids.
Actually, that never happens. Seriously, never. Abortions after 24 weeks, those that you call partial-birth, are done for health reasons only, or because the fetus has some serious defects.
Never say never. You should read your wiki-facts better. Shame on you for lying!
There is also controversy about why this procedure is used. Although prominent defenders of the method asserted during 1995 and 1996 that it was used only or mostly in acute medical circumstances, Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers (a trade association of abortion providers), told the New York Times (Feb. 26, 1997): "In the vast majority of cases, the procedure is performed on a healthy mother with a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks or more along."[35] Some prominent self-described pro-choice advocates quickly defended the accuracy of Fitzsimmons' statements.[36]
Nope, wrong. That's just ONE of the ways in which it works. If it doesn't manage to prevent fertilization, it prevents the fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall.
Nope wrong. Fertilization and Conception may be used interchangeably by modern secular peoples (aka - the ignorant), but religious and thinking people require just a bit more essence of substance
Nope wrong. Fertilization and Conception may be used interchangeably by modern secular peoples (aka - the ignorant), but religious and thinking people require just a bit more essence of substance
I completely agree with that, but what do you think about birth control that kills a fertilized egg? Also, what punishment would you inflict on women that self-abort thier babies through the day-after pill (or another method) once its made illegal?
On partial birth abortion and other late term abortions, it's a horrible practice and should definitely be outlawed. I just think that, if you truly believe that a fertilized egg has a soul, then we should be consistant. Right?
When confronted with the truth about the Pill/IUD, most rightwingers just run away and pretend they didn't hear. Pathetic.
And when Left wingers are confronted with the nature of the soul, they simply stare into the distance and pretend it doesn't exist. Religious people jes be ignorint and not smart like us they say, and then wink at each other.
I completely agree with that, but what do you think about birth control that kills a fertilized egg?
The same thing I feel about a fertilized egg that fails to naturally implant in a uterous. I don't know if it has a soul or not. And since I don't know, I don't go out of may way to deliberately destroy it. Because "souls" have everything to do with thoughts, intentions and deliberation and little to do with physical substances.
After all, each state is the size of a small European country. If you can make it work there, other states will follow. Good luck!
I can answer that littlejohnny. Democrats know that socializing medicine at the federal level forces everyone into it. If they want to live in the US, they must pay the tax. At the state level, people can leave and go to another state with lower taxes and get thier own insurance. I know some people that choose to go without insurance because they never get sick. I think that's foolish, but that's their right. Remember, liberals want to force these programs on EVERYONE. They will never give into your argument.
When to implant a soul is for G_d to decide... not man. That's why the Catholic Church is against ALL forms of contraception.
It's His decision, not ours. And I don't like to think that I'm smarter than Him. And I wouldn't want to piss Him off!
Because "souls" have everything to do with thoughts, intentions and deliberation and little to do with physical substances.
By taking Birth Control pills, you are intentionally killing fertilized eggs. That is why it's called "Birth Control". The process it exacts on your body is well documented. Using your logic, taking the "day after abortion pill" without taking a pregnancy test first is ok.
I really want to agree with you, beleive me.
I was supposed to be tom wright's father, but a dog beat me over the fence.
That's why the Catholic Church is against ALL forms of contraception.
I can respect that because it's consistent. Good luck changing the laws though. People enjoy their promiscuity and childless adulthood too much! We will just have to raise our children to be responsible, compassionate, life loving adults. At least we have the freedom to do that still.
littlejohnny,
Any attempt to substitute your will for G_d's Will is a sin in His book. So you can parse birth control methods into two categories, manslaughter and 1st degree murder.
And every advance of technology and knowledge is an attempt to do that. We can't help ourselves. It's in our nature. All we can do is sin and ask Forgiveness and for His Grace.
Good luck changing the laws though.
That's Caesar's job. And if Caesar chooses to delegate that responsibility to me, that's his problem.
LewRockwell.com, itty, bitty johnson? Oh my! Social Security is unconstitutional? Now, that is a revelation. So, howcum we have Social Security? You've been consuming waaaaaaaaay too much msg. Is it in that kool-aide you've been suckin up, eh, cockalorum?
That's Caesar's job. And if Caesar chooses to delegate that responsibility to me, that's his problem.
Jesus rarely talked about politics and governance. However, he did say in regards to taxes, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s.". I'm not sure how that applies here, but I guess I see your point. Does that mean we should not participate in the political process? No - but it is very interesting.
Sweden and Japan...two of the least racially diverse nations on the planet. But do they live long by nature or nurture?
Also, I don't know what that has to do with anything.
Are you saying there is NO genetic component to lifetime health or life expectancy? My, what a liberal view of science YOU must have... no genetic diseases like sickle-cell anemia or hereditary disease...everyone's the same and there are no correlations within groups.
DeNile is a river in Egypt.
So, howcum we have Social Security? You've been consuming waaaaaaaaay too much msg. Is it in that kool-aide you've been suckin up, eh, cockalorum?
Yes, I believe it was/is unconstitutional - as did the majority of the supreme court before FDR's shenanigans, but I respect the ruling of the court all the same. That doesn't mean it couldn't be repealed. It also doesn't mean we need to bloat the federal government any more than it already is.
Does that mean we should not participate in the political process?
In the year of the Athenian democracy when Socrates tribe was responsible for administering the laws, Socrates refused to collect the votes on the day it was his turn to do so, for it would have been an "injustice" for a few men to impose their will on so many others.
I think we should participate in politics and voting, but then go to church on Sunday and ask forgiveness for whatever "trespasses" we may have committed, and forgive those who trespass against us. It's "unavoidable".
Us substituting our own will for His started w/Eve in the Garden of Eden. And every time we do it, we must take on another of His chores as our own as we wander in the wilderness... another self-imposed rock in the backpack of handicaps for us, and future generations of our descendents, to carry.
The thing with trans fats is that there is ABSOLUTELY NO HEALTH BENEFIT to transfat. To me, people who are saying "banning trans fat is nanny-statish" seem to be the same as those who say "banning strychnine in foods is nanny-statish."
okay, but Everclear has other benefits -- making you drunk. I love drinking, some might even say I have a drinking problem (but then, by lawyers' standards, i'm a teetolater), so I think that's a benefit.
But I don't see ANY benefit, health or otherwise, to transfat.
Do you think that any food or food additive should be outright banned, or should everything just be really well labeled and we let the consumers decide?
Here is something you probably didn't know about social security [long discourse on the 10th amendment, new deal, and stacking the court]:
Remember how i said states' rights are dead? The NEw Deal killed 'em, and there's no going back. You guys have to get over it, you've had like 60 years to do so.
^^^^^speaking of rocks and handicaps^^^^
Never say never. You should read your wiki-facts better. Shame on you for lying!
There is also controversy about why this procedure is used. Although prominent defenders of the method asserted during 1995 and 1996 that it was used only or mostly in acute medical circumstances, Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers (a trade association of abortion providers), told the New York Times (Feb. 26, 1997): "In the vast majority of cases, the procedure is performed on a healthy mother with a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks or more along."[35] Some prominent self-described pro-choice advocates quickly defended the accuracy of Fitzsimmons' statements.[36]
That's just one guy. All other signs, like ancedotes of women who have these procedures, show that no one does it just for fun. You know, i could have had my abortion in the last 5-6-7-8 months, but decided to wait until now, just for the fuck of it.
Do you think that any food or food additive should be outright banned, or should everything just be really well labeled and we let the consumers decide?
Yes, of course. But if we banned everything that was unhealthy, in the way trans-fats are, we'd have to get rid of many sugar substitutes, emulsifiers, preservatives, etc etc etc etc. Sure, any food that has poison in it should not be classified as food. I do believe that we should be allowed to buy poisons though (and we are). Let people eat how they please, and mind your own business. That's what you say when it comes to many other issues, right?
Remember how i said states' rights are dead? The NEw Deal killed 'em, and there's no going back. You guys have to get over it, you've had like 60 years to do so.
I don't give up hope. I believe in the tenth amendment - it is central to the future stability of our government. The founding fathers and I stand together on this issue. Let the states manage these kinds of programs, keep the federal government out of it.
The same thing I feel about a fertilized egg that fails to naturally implant in a uterous. I don't know if it has a soul or not. And since I don't know, I don't go out of may way to deliberately destroy it. Because "souls" have everything to do with thoughts, intentions and deliberation and little to do with physical substances.
"I don't go out of may way to deliberately destroy it."
Um, yeah, that's what hormonal birth control and IUDs do. Your wife makes a choice to take the pill/put in the IUD to deliberately control her reproduction in ways that include not allowing the gg to implant in the wall. Sorry.
Fertilization and Conception may be used interchangeably by modern secular peoples (aka - the ignorant), but religious and thinking people require just a bit more essence of substance
soulman said...
When to implant a soul is for G_d to decide... not man. That's why the Catholic Church is against ALL forms of contraception.
It's His decision, not ours. And I don't like to think that I'm smarter than Him. And I wouldn't want to piss Him off!
So, then we shouldn't have any contraceptives?
By taking Birth Control pills, you are intentionally killing fertilized eggs. That is why it's called "Birth Control". The process it exacts on your body is well documented.
Yeah.
Using your logic, taking the "day after abortion pill" without taking a pregnancy test first is ok.
You're getting your science confused again. The morning-after pill is the exact same thing as the regular birth control pill. You can fashion a morning after pill out of 3-5 regular birth control pills in a pinch. It works in the exact same way -- a last-ditch attempt to prevent ovulation (because sperm live in the uterus for up to 4 days, so when you had sex, you may not have had ovulated, but you might get pregnant 2 days later), and an attempt to prevent implantation of an already-fertilized egg.
Plus, a pregnancy test works at least 10 days after you become pregnant, it wouldn't show you're pregnant within 24 hours of fertilization.
Also, I don't use "fertilization" and "conception" interchangeably, because i know the former is a technical medical term, and the latter is a religious term with no fixed meaning. But religious folk tend to equate conception with fertilization more often than with any other moment in reproduction.
I like how soul man turns to Aristotle for science on reproduction/biology and to the Catholic church for contraceptives guidance. It's breath-taking.
And yes, people do enjoy not having 10 babies and controlling reproduction. Is there a problem with that? Do you think people should only have sex when they intend to have children?
The right to abort a baby is not in the constitution, so it really should be a state law issue. (10th amendment once again) That is one of the reasons why there are so many people that would like to overturn Roe vs Wade, including pro-abortion people like Guliani who think it's an State issue. That doesn't mean that abortion would be illegal anywhere, it just leaves the decision to the states. I agree with that from a constitutional perspective. It is much more likely that Roe vs Wade will be overturned than Social Security, but even that is unlikely. Still, as conservatives, we will fight against the growth of government and the usurpation of the courts to dictate law.
"Do you think that any food or food additive should be outright banned, or should everything just be really well labeled and we let the consumers decide?"
Yes, of course. But if we banned everything that was unhealthy, in the way trans-fats are, we'd have to get rid of many sugar substitutes, emulsifiers, preservatives, etc etc etc etc. Sure, any food that has poison in it should not be classified as food.
Well, then I guess everything turns on what you consider poison. I personally consider trans fat and aspertame poison, because they have no benefit at all, and only cause health problems. Aspertame was rejected by the FDA repeatedly. Transfat was invented by Crisco to save money, not for any dietary benefit, and has been shown to be worse for you than pure lard. There are no "good fats" in trans fat, like there are in natural animal and vegetable fats. There is absolutely no upside except cost, and even then, it's not such a big difference.
I do believe that we should be allowed to buy poisons though (and we are). Let people eat how they please, and mind your own business. That's what you say when it comes to many other issues, right?
Yes, but for example, I would not hesitate to ban contraceptives that are bad for you. Or alcohols that cause you to go blind.
Remember how i said states' rights are dead? The NEw Deal killed 'em, and there's no going back. You guys have to get over it, you've had like 60 years to do so.
I don't give up hope. I believe in the tenth amendment - it is central to the future stability of our government. The founding fathers and I stand together on this issue. Let the states manage these kinds of programs, keep the federal government out of it.
I don't think you'll be able to roll back the New Deal and the 4th branch of government (the administrative branch). It's just not possible in a modern state. There is no federal government that operates the way you imagine.
Also, how do you feel about the 9th amendment?
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Doesn't that pose a problem for Scalia, etc. who say "if it's not in the constitution, it's not our problem"? The ninth amendment has a very interesting history that originalists should know about. It was what made the bill of rights happened. Many people were opposed to the bill of rights because they thought that enumerating 10 rights would automatically disparage other rights not enumerated. They thought thebill of rights would limit the rights protected. The 9th amendment was inserted to appease those people.
And then Judge Robert Bork said in his confirmation hearing that it has no meaning and is like an ink blot on the bill of rights, with no discernible application. Interesting, no?
A concurring opinion by Justice Goldberg in Griswold v. Connectivut, which is the case that established a constitutional right to privacy (the case was about contraceptives), was based on an argument through the 9th amendment. Goldberg argued that this is exactly the kind of right the founders intended to protect by specifically stating that there are other rights protected by the constitution that the federal government (and later, the states too) cannot infringe upon.
And yes, people do enjoy not having 10 babies and controlling reproduction. Is there a problem with that? Do you think people should only have sex when they intend to have children?
There are ways of being responsible without having to kill a baby. But as I said before, the best thing for pro-life believers to do is to just mind their own and teach their children to be responsible, compassionate, life loving adults. Even if RvW is repealed, chances are abortion and birth control would still be legal in most states.
littlejohnny said...
The right to abort a baby is not in the constitution, so it really should be a state law issue. (10th amendment once again) That is one of the reasons why there are so many people that would like to overturn Roe vs Wade, including pro-abortion people like Guliani who think it's an State issue. That doesn't mean that abortion would be illegal anywhere, it just leaves the decision to the states.
I think that maybe that's what you believe, but I think most pro-lifers are just saying "it's a states' rights thing" now to get Roe overturned, and then will switch to arguing for a federal ban on abortion.
If Roe is a states' rights issue, isn't partial-birth abortion also? Do you then oppose federal regulation of partial-birth abortion as it currently stands?
And what about this pesky 9th amendment, which says if it's not in the constitution, it's still a right retained by the people that the government cannot infringe upon. What are some of those rights? Could the right to control your reproduction be one of those rights?
You know, the flipside of Roe is that no state or fed can make laws restricting a person's reproduction either. Roe stands for the principle that you are in charge of your reproduction, and even if you're destitute or mentally retarded, no one can tell you how many babies to have or not to have. Otherwise, what if a state said, 2 babies for everyone, max? Woudl that be unconstitutional under your model, or, "if it's not in the constitution, it's not the Supreme Court's problem"?
Otherwise, what if a state said, 2 babies for everyone, max? Woudl that be unconstitutional under your model, or, "if it's not in the constitution, it's not the Supreme Court's problem"?
I support the ruling of the court, but the court can repeal RvW legally as well. The definition of reproductive rights could exclude the disposal of unwanted children. Still, I stick with my previous statement. Pro-life believers need to just mind their own and teach their children to be responsible, compassionate, life loving adults. If for some crazy reason RvW was repealed, great. But that is highly unlikely.
when I said, "I support the ruling of the court", I meant "I respect and acknowledge the ruling of the court". Doesn't mean I agree.
Littlejohnny, you didn't address most of my questions:
(1) What about the 9th amendment? Couldn't it protect various rights that are "not in the constitution"?
(2) What about federally controlling partial-birth abortion? Isn't that anti-states'-rights?
(3) Do you think my fears that this states-rights argument is just for show are unfounded?
(4) What if a state said, 2 babies for everyone, max? Would that be unconstitutional under your model, or, "if it's not in the constitution, it's not the Supreme Court's problem"?
(5) Do you think access to birth control is a right? In other words, do you think a state could constitutionally ban all birth control, if it's a states' rights issue?
(6) Is segregation a states' rights issue?
when I said, "I support the ruling of the court", I meant "I respect and acknowledge the ruling of the court". Doesn't mean I agree.
Which ruling are you referring to, Roe? That's a copout answer, I think, with respect to my hypothetical "max 2 kids law". Suppose a state passed such a law, do you think it's an unconstitutional law? in other words, if you were on the supreme court, would you say it's an unconstitutional law, or not?
Which ruling are you referring to, Roe? That's a copout answer, I think, with respect to my hypothetical "max 2 kids law". Suppose a state passed such a law, do you think it's an unconstitutional law? in other words, if you were on the supreme court, would you say it's an unconstitutional law, or not?
I said I respect the ruling of the supreme court, because they have the right to clarify and interpret the constitution. However, the interpretation of those rights may change over time. For example, reproductive rights, in my mind, don't include the disposal of unwanted children. If a silly "2 child" law like you propose were to come up, that would violate reproductive rights as anyone would interpret them.
I said I respect the ruling of the supreme court, because they have the right to clarify and interpret the constitution.
And you're saying you have no opinion on the subject? You just follow what the court says? I thought you said that you think abortion is a states' rights issue, therefore your opinion conflicts with Supreme Court jurisprudence.
However, the interpretation of those rights may change over time. For example, reproductive rights, in my mind, don't include the disposal of unwanted children. If a silly "2 child" law like you propose were to come up, that would violate reproductive rights as anyone would interpret them.
But do you think that reproductive rights are protected by the constitution at all, or is it all a states' rights issue? Scalia would probably say that since it's not in the constitution, it's none of his business, and if he were in charge, he would say the Supreme Court has no business ruling on a state's "max 2 children" law.
I was mistaken there. If the constitution doesn't address an issue like that, an amendment is needed. That is not the role of the court. The court interprets the law, the congress makes law. Scalia would be correct in leaving this issue to the legislature to amendment the constitution. How silly of me! Otherwise, the supreme court justices become kings.
oops - I meant
*amend the constitution
I was mistaken there. If the constitution doesn't address an issue like that, an amendment is needed. That is not the role of the court. The court interprets the law, the congress makes law. Scalia would be correct in leaving this issue to the legislature to amendment the constitution. How silly of me! Otherwise, the supreme court justices become kings.
Well, that's a very established but minority point of view, and I respect that.
The problem with this view is, where in the constitution does it say "separate is not equal"? The next thing to go is segregation and Brown v. Board of Education. Scalia has been dogged by this question his whole career, and he refuses to answer it.
Do you think that segregation is also a states' rights issue, because it's not in the constitution?
Also, both Scalia and Thomas were in the majority on the partial birth abortion ban, even though it seems that if abortion is a states' rights issue, then so is partial birth abortion. What do you think?
And, what about that 9th amendment, and the original intent behind it? Scalia and Thomas are very committed to originalism, yet they ignore this amendment.
I'm not trying to push you into defending either Scalia or Thomas. I personally think these are some of the most interesting questions, and although I have my own views, I don't think that all other views are completely wrong. These questions don't have established answers. I'm interested in your point of view.
Also, both Scalia and Thomas were in the majority on the partial birth abortion ban, even though it seems that if abortion is a states' rights issue, then so is partial birth abortion. What do you think?
Did the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act go through the legislature? Yes! The constitutionality of the law was challenged immediately after the signing, and it's constitutionality was upheld. That is not judicial activism.
As far as the 9th is concerned, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. "
I honestly don't see how that protects a womans right to dispose of unwanted children. I have read about how it has been interpreted that way, but I can't agree with that interpretation.
Do you think that segregation is also a states' rights issue, because it's not in the constitution?
Well, why haven't we amended the constitution yet? I agree that in this case, the result if the courts actions had a very positive outcome. This may be a case where the 9th amendment would apply because the United States was built upon the principle that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights". That makes sense to me.
Goodbye, Rudy -- Tuesday?
The St. Petersburg Times headlines its blog item tonight: "Bye-bye Rudy?" The reason -- its new poll shows America's Mayor a distant third in the Florida race, and sinking. It states: "Among Florida voters likely to vote in Tuesday’s primary, 25 percent are backing McCain and 23 percent Romney, a statistical tie, while Giuliani and Mike Huckabee were tied for third place with 15 percent each." The polls was sponsored by the St. Pete Times, The Miami Herald and a local TV outlet. "Giuliani's decision to pull out of the early states is going to go down in history if he finishes out of the money in Florida as one of the worst political decisions,'' said pollster Tom Eldon. Meanwhile, an L.A. Times/Bloomberg national poll finds McCain 22%, Huckabee 18%, Romney 17%, Giuliani 12%.
Did the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act go through the legislature? Yes! The constitutionality of the law was challenged immediately after the signing, and it's constitutionality was upheld. That is not judicial activism.
Ah, but that wasn't their analysis and why it was upheld. it wasn't an argument of (1) did the legislature pass it? yes, and (2) does the constitution say anything about this topic? no --> then it's good.
As far as the 9th is concerned, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. "
I honestly don't see how that protects a womans right to dispose of unwanted children. I have read about how it has been interpreted that way, but I can't agree with that interpretation.
Well, the 9th doesn't specify those rights that are otherwise protected without being enumerated. It also all depends on how you frame the right. As a different example from abortion, in Bowers v. Hardwick, the court ruled that there is no right in the constitution to homosexual sodomy, and thereby the court upheld homosexual sodomy statutes. But in Lawrence v. Texas, the court framed the issue as a right to privacy in the bedroom, and said that in fact the constitution does protect that right and struck down homosexual sodomy statutes.
You're framing the abortion issue as "a right of a woman to dispose of unwanted children." I frame it as "the right of a woman to control her reproduction." Do you think there is a right of a woman to control her reproduction? One that is protected by the constitution?
If you're interested in an originalist interpretation on this question, Roe v. Wade actually has an extensive section on the history of abortion laws in the US, and that history is that basically, until the fetus was "quickening" or "quick", it was not considered a baby. And quick meant that you could feel it moving in the womb. That's the historical analysis, and presumably, it's similar to the opinions of the founding fathers at the time of the writing of the 9th amendment.
Do you think that segregation is also a states' rights issue, because it's not in the constitution?
Well, why haven't we amended the constitution yet? I agree that in this case, the result if the courts actions had a very positive outcome. This may be a case where the 9th amendment would apply because the United States was built upon the principle that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights". That makes sense to me.
Well, that's the difficulty with the 9th amendment -- how do we discover which rights are protected by it? One doctrine often used by the court is "evolving standards of decency" and even Scalia has acknowledged that it has a place in constitutional interpretation.
But even then, at the time of Brown, there was a large minority in this country that sincerely thought that desegregation would be against all decency.
One doctrine often used by the court is "evolving standards of decency" and even Scalia has acknowledged that it has a place in constitutional interpretation.
I agree. It does have a place in constitutional interpretation. I can't see how anyone would call abortion decent though.
You're framing the abortion issue as "a right of a woman to dispose of unwanted children." I frame it as "the right of a woman to control her reproduction." Do you think there is a right of a woman to control her reproduction? One that is protected by the constitution?
That is why abortion is such a difficult issue - because many see it as "a right of a woman to dispose of unwanted children", and then others see it as you do, "The right of a woman to control her reproduction". Most pro-lifers would say, "Women have the right to control their reproduction by not getting pregnant". Then you have people that define life as starting somewhere between fertilization and the "quickening". Some advocate preventative birth control and early abortions, but not later ones. It's a very tough issue, and even on the right there are many different variations. We saw that from soulman and that other person. One was a purist, the other advocated preventative birth control.
That's just one guy.
A guy, Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers (a trade association of abortion providers), who's expert opinion cannot be ignored. You did say partial birth abortions NEVER happened without there being serious complications, after all. btw - Is Downs Syndrome a "serious complication?" (see the nurses testimony in the same Wiki piece).
Um, yeah, that's what hormonal birth control and IUDs do. Your wife makes a choice to take the pill/put in the IUD to deliberately control her reproduction in ways that include not allowing the gg to implant in the wall. Sorry.
My wife doesn't use any birth control. You ASSume.
So, then we shouldn't have any contraceptives?
You shouldn't be having sex outside of marriage. But since your already way past the bottom of that slope already, do whatever the hell you want, tinkerbell. You've already built your Hell. Now go live in it and pull in all your friends with you. Why should you care?
I like how soul man turns to Aristotle for science on reproduction/biology and to the Catholic church for contraceptives guidance. It's breath-taking.
Where do you think the theologians of the Catholic Church got their doctrines on reproduction from, Jesus? How many kids did He have?
With Jesus, there never was a "fertization" of egg/sperm, was there? Immaculate Conception may be a big joke for liberals *guffaw-guffaw*, but not so for the religious.
Millions of aborted babies later, liberals are still acting like conservatives are oppressing them and interfering with their right to indiscriminately kill millions more. And they like to wag their fingers in our faces and call US fascists. The liberal abortion mill is more than a match for Hitler's ovens...
Right Ready to Ruin their Frontrunner:
The Right gears up to kick some Straight Talk ass
All the GOP frontrunners (or onetime frontrunners, in some cases) have weaknesses in the type of voters they can attract, which could spell disaster in the general election. Social conservatives turn their nose at Romney's religion; Huckabee wouldn't be able to attract any non-religious conservatives; Giuliani seemingly can't attract anybody -- even xenophobes! And McCain? He might be the best at courting independents, but the right just plain hates this guy.
It was just over a year ago where McCain was too afraid to show his face at CPAC. The rest of the candidates spoke, but McCain wouldn't dare step foot inside the conference because he knew the backlash against him would generate too much bad press. Here was a Republican who couldn't even communicate with members of his own party at their largest gathering -- how the hell did he think he could win the GOP nomination for president?
Fuel for the liberal pyre.
You shouldn't be having sex outside of marriage. But since your already way past the bottom of that slope already, do whatever the hell you want, tinkerbell. You've already built your Hell. Now go live in it and pull in all your friends with you. Why should you care?
It's not the place of any of us to judge the salvation of another. I have sinned much, including premarital sex. It was wrong, and I suffered the consequences.
There are reasons why it's wrong - it isn't just a way to stifle sexual freedom. People that wait until marriage are able to give the gift of virginity to their spouse, which is a very special gift. I don't think anyone likes the idea of their spouse having that kind of emotional and physical intimacy with anyone else. There are very deep emotions tied with sexual relationships. It's much easier to find the right person for marriage when your judgment is not impaired by those emotions. In other words, you can break off a courtship much easier when there has not been any sexual intimacy. Promiscuity also devalues sex. When a person chooses to have promiscuous premarital sex, they punish themselves.
That's my opinion, but you know what they say about opinions... :)
My wife doesn't use any birth control. You ASSume
You mean this little idiot is reproducing without control? I hope the mailman is beating him to the poor woman. Everyone needs to see IDIOCRACY.
I have sinned much, including premarital sex. It was wrong, and I suffered the consequences.
Bad case of post coital tristesse?
Or did she give you the clap?
I'll tell you a little secret...trans fat is better than KY...if they ever ban that stuff...
You mean this little idiot is reproducing without control? I hope the mailman is beating him to the poor woman. Everyone needs to see IDIOCRACY.
Hey, if you're so worried about the future of the country, maybe you should have a bunch of kids and raise them to be wacko leftists.
I have sinned much, including premarital sex. It was wrong, and I suffered the consequences.
There are reasons why it's wrong - it isn't just a way to stifle sexual freedom. People that wait until marriage are able to give the gift of virginity to their spouse, which is a very special gift.
Oh, it's a special gift all right...sort of like a grab bag....or a box of chocolates. What if, upon being married, you discover that your spouse does not have anywhere near the same sex drive as you do? What if one party is only interested in having sex "missionary style" and the is other far removed from being thus constricted. What if you and your spouse are utterly sexually incompatible with one another? What if one spouse enjoys oral sex and the other finds it repulsive? I have my own view of those who wish to save their virginity. And, from what I have seen, my view has only been reinforced.
And, how does premarital sex "stifle sexual freedom"?
Bad case of post coital tristesse?
Or did she give you the clap?
I'll tell you a little secret...trans fat is better than KY...if they ever ban that stuff...
Very cute. Anyone with any emotional depth would understand what I was talking about.
The St. Petersburg Times headlines its blog item tonight: "Bye-bye Rudy?" The reason -- its new poll shows America's Mayor a distant third in the Florida race, and sinking.
I see in this a great victory for my little tin pot man crush...he will rise like a Phoenix from these ashes as he did from those ashes in NY and be seen as an even greater leader.
Very cute. Anyone with any emotional depth would understand what I was talking about.
I'm personally very shallow, yet very analytical. I think what you mean is anyone with a religiously manufactured pseudo-conscience formed by exposure to ancient Hebrew superstitions and the morbidy of St. Augustine.
What if you and your spouse are utterly sexually incompatible with one another? What if one spouse enjoys oral sex and the other finds it repulsive? I have my own view of those who wish to save their virginity. And, from what I have seen, my view has only been reinforced.
Love does not equal sex. You people are so shallow. What happens if your spouse has a medical issue and cannot perform anymore? You would probably break up your family and divorce him. No wonder there are so many divorces and single parent families. If you love each other and are committed to your marriage, you will work through any sexual issues - along with all the other life issues you run into. You people are unbelievable.
Hey, if you're so worried about the future of the country, maybe you should have a bunch of kids and raise them to be wacko leftists.
I do have many children, however, I have little to say about their rearing...I just hope there's not a priest involved in that. Since then, I've grown up and realized that the herd is in severe need of thinning...regardless of the political persuasions of the individual herd constituents.
I think what you mean is anyone with a religiously manufactured pseudo-conscience formed by exposure to ancient Hebrew superstitions and the morbidy of St. Augustine.
Yepper.
I'm well aware of short-comings in the Republican party's policies. What I like is that Republicans DON'T just mindlessly go along with party. The President nominated Harriet Miers and it was the Republicans/conservatives who didn't just go along. Same with the President's (and the Democrats) immigration policy.
I want to go back to this, because I think it's instructive. This was in Evan's last post, and he was responding to some points I made in the previous post.
What he didn't do, as you can see, is address any of the specific points I brought up. The mismanagement of the war? Not mentioned. Things like the Klamath River disaster (which happened as a direct result of Bush/Cheney environmental policy)? Not mentioned. The unbridled expansion of executive power? Not mentioned. Instead of addressing these three problems (to my mind the biggest failures of the Bush/Cheney presidency, namely the way national defense resources have been squandered through poor planning, environmental policy that is basically written by pro-business interests and the expansion of executive power) he talks about Harriet Miers (who gives a shit about her, really?) and immigration policy, something no one here actually brought up.
He claims that "Republicans don't mindlessly go along with the party", and yet, despite the fact that he has no answers to any of the points I brought up, I don't hear him speaking out about them. Instead he focuses his energies on smearing "Democrats", a group that essentially seems to include anyone who disagrees with him. Evan, his "ideas", and this site are perfect examples of the dumbing-down of American politics, where everyone is placed into a little box and, rather than trying to find common ground so we can move this country forward in the right direction, pissants like him and Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg get on television and scream at us that "they" just "don't get it". Every single day that you shit your poisonous rhetoric out into the blogosphere and into your (theoretical) book about how "Teh libruls r bad" you are hurting this country, making it a more divisive place, a place less open to new ideas and finding common ground. That is why you, Evan, are a boil on the ass of society, and why the only solution to your brand of poisonous rhetoric is to lance the shit out of it.
What if you and your spouse are utterly sexually incompatible with one another. What if one spouse enjoys oral sex and the other finds it repulsive?
Sexual compatibility is really not a problem for virgins because they haven't fooled around yet. Anyway, from what I've heard from other guys, many women stop "putting out" generously once they ensnare their men into marriage. Also, I talked to a woman who's husband stopped having sex with her after she had her first child. So there is no guarantee in the "try before you buy" method. I personally think sex gets better in a healthy marriage. When you are committed to your spouse and trust her commitment to you. My primary point was that you can choose your spouse with more clarity by avoiding premarital sex. An added benefit to that is that you won't get pregnant, and you won't have to make the abortion decision. Anyway, I told you it was just my opinion based on personal experiences. You don't have to agree with me.
eople that wait until marriage are able to give the gift of virginity to their spouse, which is a very special gift.
Oh god.
I don't think anyone likes the idea of their spouse having that kind of emotional and physical intimacy with anyone else.
speak for yourself.
There are very deep emotions tied with sexual relationships. It's much easier to find the right person for marriage when your judgment is not impaired by those emotions.
You're so wrong.
In other words, you can break off a courtship much easier when there has not been any sexual intimacy. Promiscuity also devalues sex. When a person chooses to have promiscuous premarital sex, they punish themselves.
Punish themselves?
To be honest, I am deeply disappointed in you, little johnny. I thought you were a reasonable person.
Love does not equal sex. You people are so shallow.
Yes, if something occurs after you're married that may be true, but it is much more adult, responsible, and like rilly DEEP to find out these little matters beforehand. This little guy constantly confuses earnestness with depth and buys rather too eagerly into the most sentimental, conventional notions of love and romance. There is absolutely nothing inherently GOOD or virtuous about the same two homo sapiens inhabiting the same little pink cottage together for the remainders of their probably very sterile, unfulfilled and desperate lives. And there is certainly nothing deep about it...though if you happen to be monogamous by nature, then it can be a good and deep thing. For others...no.
You mean this little idiot is reproducing without control? I hope the mailman is beating him to the poor woman. Everyone needs to see IDIOCRACY.
In your case, you need only look into a mirror!
To be honest, I am deeply disappointed in you, little johnny. I thought you were a reasonable person.
I believe it's a reasonable view. I know many people that waited until marriage, and they have very happy and healthy marriages. I do as well, but my wife and I had to work though a few years of problems because of our pasts. Like I said, I don't expect most people to agree with me or understand my points - especially people that do not have a healthy marriage. Most of you are probably disillusioned with the whole institution, and that is sad. But I'm not judging you - just sharing my opinion.
To be honest, I am deeply disappointed in you, little johnny. I thought you were a reasonable person.
Li'l Johnny combines in one corpus the mentalities of two of this beleaguered planets most naive organisms...the libertarian and the religous.
You mean this little idiot is reproducing without control? I hope the mailman is beating him to the poor woman. Everyone needs to see IDIOCRACY.
In your case, you need only look into a mirror! The Chinese must love you. Oh! But wait! One kid would be one too many for you! Even the Chinese aren't stupid enough to opt for the "extinction of the species" option!
btw - Have you been neutered/ spayed? HELLO! WHY NOT?
Love does not equal sex. You people are so shallow. What happens if your spouse has a medical issue and cannot perform anymore? You would probably break up your family and divorce him. No wonder there are so many divorces and single parent families.
And yet the divorce rate is lowest in the blue blue perverted premarital sex states.
Weird, eh?
I think you're more likely to have a stable relationship if you've been in a few relationships previously and learned some lessons. It's a simple argument about the benefit of experience -- how can you argue with that?
Johnny, do you think I could meet your wife someday. I bet she's had the hell bored out of her by now.
I know many people that waited until marriage, and they have very happy and healthy marriages. I do as well, but my wife and I had to work though a few years of problems because of our pasts. Like I said, I don't expect most people to agree with me or understand my points - especially people that do not have a healthy marriage. Most of you are probably disillusioned with the whole institution, and that is sad. But I'm not judging you - just sharing my opinion.
Generally, statistics show that the older you are when you get married, the less likely you are to get divorced. And the older you are when you get married, the less likely you are to be a virgin and to have had previous relationships.
Weird, eh?
Oh, it's a special gift all right...sort of like a grab bag....or a box of chocolates. What if, upon being married, you discover that your spouse does not have anywhere near the same sex drive as you do? What if one party is only interested in having sex "missionary style" and the is other far removed from being thus constricted. What if you and your spouse are utterly sexually incompatible with one another? What if one spouse enjoys oral sex and the other finds it repulsive? I have my own view of those who wish to save their virginity. And, from what I have seen, my view has only been reinforced.
"What if" you love your spouse? Then the answers to the questions you posed above are superfluous. And if they aren't, then I don't think you know what a marriage is and should go out and get yourself sterilized IMMEDIATELY!!!!
"What if" you love your spouse? Then the answers to the questions you posed above are superfluous.
Let me ask you, do you think you can have a good relationship if you have bad sex?
I think you're more likely to have a stable relationship if you've been in a few relationships previously and learned some lessons. It's a simple argument about the benefit of experience -- how can you argue with that?
First, the lessons you need to learn are not sexual, so I don't see how that applies. The most important parts of marriage are trust and a commitment to the marriage - to make the marriage work. Of course, if one party decides they want to break their commitment to the marriage, it will fail. When you are choosing a spouse, you must be sure the person is trustworthy and will be committed to you and the marriage. If you are sexually tied to someone already, it's harder to make those distinctions.
As I said, I'm not trying to convert you to my view. I'm just stating my opinion.
Sexual compatibility is really not a problem for virgins because they haven't fooled around yet.
Deep John -- and a good, little flusher as well -- tells us precisely why it IS a problem not to find out first.
First, the lessons you need to learn are not sexual, so I don't see how that applies.
Really? Not at all?
Yeah, Boil, I liked that Miers thing too...one of the very few times the herd actually didn't follow the head idiot. Exception that proves the rule and all that...
Generally, statistics show that the older you are when you get married, the less likely you are to get divorced. And the older you are when you get married, the less likely you are to be a virgin and to have had previous relationships.
Many people also believe that Christian marriages end in divorce just as often as non-Christian, but it turns out that this is not true.
To illustrate, here are the divorce rates among EVER-married respondents in the General Social Survey (GSS, 2000-2004)—one of the best known sources of sociological data. “Frequent” means attending church about once a week or more.
58%, non-frequent Black Protestants
54%, non-frequent Evangelicals
51%, no religion (e.g., atheists & agnostics)
48%, ALL NON-CHRISTIANS
48%, non-frequent, other religions
47%, frequent Black Protestants
42%, non-frequent, mainline Protestants
41%, ALL CHRISTIANS
41%, non-frequent Catholics
39%, Jews
38%, frequent other religions
34%, frequent Evangelicals
32%, ALL FREQUENT CHRISTIANS
32%, frequent mainline Protestants
23%, frequent Catholics
The Heathen Chinee do not love me...nor, alas, even know me...but I do love them...at least in that regard. This moron wants to talk about extinction with six billion self congratulatory stiped ass apes ruining the globe!!? It's that that'll bring about our extinction...not its opposite. The only dufi with a real entitlement mentality are the reichos...god...a little shitheel in our tiny brains tells us its all ours to fuck up as we please...hideous, little gargoyles.
In other words, you can break off a courtship much easier when there has not been any sexual intimacy.
Is that because there is no intimacy other than sexual intimacy in your species?
Promiscuity also devalues sex. When a person chooses to have promiscuous premarital sex, they punish themselves.
Well, I believe that many would disagree with that notion. I noticed that now you tack on "promiscuous" in the hopes of making premarital sex sound like a bad thing.
a little shitheel in our tiny brains tells us its all ours to fuck up as we please...
Ewwwwwwwww. Ann Coulter is in there.
If we've learned anything the last few years it's that the more these malformed creatures spout the family values crap, the more likely they are to take a wide stance in the stall, are in some hookers little black book, or know a sheep farmer.
This moron wants to talk about extinction with six billion self congratulatory stiped ass apes ruining the globe!!?
Then you won't mind if we just off you and remove your useless ass from the face of the planet to make a little room for somebody that's not wasting the air they're breathin'. Hey, save us the trouble... go slit your wrists!
Can you provide a citation for this study?
This doesn't add up. How can it be 48%, ALL NON-CHRISTIANS if 39%, Jews
and 38%, frequent other religions?
Anonymous Yknot? said...This moron wants to talk about extinction with six billion self congratulatory stiped ass apes ruining the globe!!?
Then you won't mind if we just off you and remove your useless ass from the face of the planet to make a little room for somebody that's not wasting the air they're breathin'. Hey, save us the trouble... go slit your wrists!
That's your fucked-up christian way of looking at things. Kill walking , talking people, but drop kids out like you are taking a crap.
The National Institute of Mental Health found that women in cohabiting relationships had much greater rates of depression than women in married relationships (second only to those twice divorced). The numbers fall as follows (annual rate of incident of depression per 100):
Married (never divorced) 1.5
Never married 2.4
Divorced once 4.1
Divorced twice 5.8
Cohabiting 5.1
Lee Robins and Darrel Regier, Psychiatric Disorders in America: The Epidemiologic Catchment Area Study (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. 64.
Ooo, yknot's got his little ying in a knot. I hope that works like a vasectomy.
That's your fucked-up christian way of looking at things. Kill walking , talking people, but drop kids out like you are taking a crap.
LOL! Awwww. Can't we just flush you like some unwanted zygote? YKnot?
If we've learned anything the last few years it's that the more these malformed creatures spout the family values crap, the more likely they are to take a wide stance in the stall, are in some hookers little black book, or know a sheep farmer.
I appreciate the fact that you are taking the time to share your wisdom with us on this issue. If you're happy and secure with your own chosen lifestyle, then good for you. I'm not telling anyone what to do. Just sharing my opinion.
10 Reasons Why the Fight for Reproductive Justice Is Still Essential
By Jill Filipovic, AlterNet
Posted on January 22, 2008, Printed on January 24, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/74633/
Also posted at Feministe and the Huffington Post.
35 years after Roe v. Wade solidified American womens' right to abortion, reproductive rights remain in limbo. And while abortion rights are crucial to women's health and autonomy, they are hardly the end-all be-all to reproductive justice -- even if the constant attacks on those rights (and on the people who provide women with them) have forced the pro-choice movement to remain on the defensive about abortion in particular.
Roe at 35 is in bad shape. But there are plenty of forward-looking, positive steps to be taken. It's worth raising a glass to Roe today -- but even more importantly, it's time to get out and fight. Here are a few reasons why:
10. Abortion is already inaccessible and out of reach for many women.
Eighty-seven percent of U.S. counties do not have an abortion provider. Parental consent laws, 24-hour waiting periods, and other anti-choice roadblocks make abortion difficult or impossible for many women -- young women and low-income women in particular. The Hyde Amendment blocks federal Medicaid money from paying for abortion, meaning that low-income women have their medical care determined by anti-choice bureaucrats instead of doctors. When women have to spend weeks trying to legally bypass parental consent laws, or when they have to take time off work, save up money for the procedure, find someone to take care of their children, figure out transportation, and drive miles and miles to the closest clinic only to be told to "go home and think about it and come back tomorrow," the procedure gets pushed back -- and later-term abortions are more difficult and more expensive. An abortion at 24 weeks (a procedure already impossible to get in most states) can cost as much as $10,000. Groups like the National Abortion Network of Abortion Funds and the Haven Coalition attempt to offset the costs of abortion and the related expenses, but their budgets and abilities are limited, particularly in contrast to the financial and political strength of the anti-choice movement. In the meantime, Roe remains an unfulfilled promise for many American women.
9. If abortion is illegal, then women and doctors will be criminals.
Anti-choicers dislike answering the sticky question of how much time in jail women who have abortions should serve. But as it stands, a lot of anti-abortion legislation is not premised on outlawing abortion, but rather attempts to establish that life begins when an egg is fertilized. Much of that legislation expresses the idea that a zygote and a fetus are people deserving a full range of legal rights. In such a "pro-life" world, women who have abortions are murderers, and doctors contract killers. Women are already going to jail for "murder" because they used drugs while pregnant; it's hardly a stretch to argue that women could face jail time for terminating pregnancies, especially if anti-choicers really believe -- as they claim -- that fetuses are people invested with full rights. As it stands, about one in three American women will have an abortion at some time in her life. Those are a whole lot women to turn into criminals.
8. Anti-choicers care about controlling your sex life, not saving babies.
For all their talk about valuing babies and life, anti-choicers have demonstrated time and again that they could actually care less. They're more interested in punishing women for sex and in maintaining a male-dominated family model. And they're only "pro-life" up until the moment of birth -- then you're on your own. Anti-choice politicians opposed extending health care to low-income kids; they routinely vote against Head Start and early childhood education programs; they abhor welfare programs that give aid to single parents and low-income families; and they are at the forefront of opposition to state childcare aid. It's no surprise that 100% of the worst legislators for children are "pro-life," and many of the most "pro-life" states are the worst for children and for women. While children are hardly their first priority, anti-choicers are extremely concerned about what you do with your private parts. They are the architects of "abstinence-only" sex education that flat-out lies and misleads students in order to promote conservative values of female submission, homophobia and general ignorance. Many of them opposed a vaccine that could save thousands of women from cancer -- because the vaccine prevented cervical cancer and had to be given before the onset of sexual activity, meaning that anti-sex nuts had one less tool in their slut-punishing arsenal.
7. They're going after your birth control, too.
Pro-lifers care about lowering the abortion rate, right? Wrong. They oppose contraception, too -- and though they're quiet about it now, you can bet that it's next on the list of things that have to go in a "pro-life" nation. In fact, none of the major pro-life organizations support contraception access, despite the fact that accessible and affordable contraception is the most effective way to decrease the abortion rate.
6. Illegal abortion kills women.
There are no two ways about this one -- when abortion is illegal, women are killed and maimed. Some 80,000 women die as a result of illegal abortion every year; hundreds of thousands more are injured. Women around the world suffer when pro-life laws rule the land. And "pro-lifers" could care less. Illegal abortion is the cause of 25% of all maternal deaths in Latin America, 12% in Asia, and 13% in sub-Saharan Africa. Women's lives, apparently, aren't covered by that whole "pro-life" thing.
5. Legal abortion is good for women, men and families.
Post-Roe, American women have made phenomenal gains in nearly all areas of life, and American families have benefited. Women go to college at the same rates as men. We can define ourselves as something other than mothers, or as mothers and something else. Poverty has been cut in half since Roe gave women the right to control their own reproduction. Men can be nurturing too, and are expected to take part in raising their children. Families can be planned. Men have greater choices in their occupations since they aren’t required to be the sole bread-winner. More people have access to education. Women have more power to escape abusive relationships or bad jobs. Parents of both sexes spend more time with their kids than ever before. Overall, reproductive rights have been tremendously beneficial to all Americans -- except for those who want women to be second-class citizens.
4. Poor women and women of color are disproportionately impacted by anti-choice policies.
When anti-choicers chip away at abortion rights, they take down the easy targets first -- and since poor women and women of color have relatively little political power, they suffer the brunt of anti-choice ideology. Abortion is made much more expensive by the myriad restrictions placed on it, and low-income women bear the burden of navigating through the costs and impediments of accessing basic health care. Women of color not only face restricted abortion access, but are then blamed for "genocide." And women in the global south face the deadly consequences of the global gag rule, which not only impacts their reproductive health care but silences them as social and political actors.
3. Choice isn't just about not giving birth -- it's about your right to have children.
The anti-choice movement isn't just against abortion and birth control; many anti-choicers also oppose in-vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments. They also draw convenient lines about who is fit for motherhood, bemoaning the lack of white babies up for adoption while supporting organizations and practices that strip women of color of their right to reproduce. Reproductive freedom is about the ability to determine for yourself when and if you have children; the anti-choice movement is about the exact opposite. Anti-choice governments don't just limit abortion rights -- as China's one-child policy aptly demonstrates, they also limit the right to choose to have children.
2. Anti-choicers are also going after the rights of women around the world.
Not content to stick it to American women, anti-choicers have taken their crusade abroad with policies like the global gag rule. The United States’ policy of denying reproductive health funding to any organization that so much as mentions abortion — by petitioning their own government for reproductive rights, performing abortions with their own non-U.S. money, referring women to abortion providers, or even telling women that abortion is an option — contributes to “shockingly high death and disability rates in developing countries.” Reproductive health care clinics usually provide a variety of services, and when the U.S. cuts off funding because of abortion advocacy, they also cut off funding to pre-natal care, HIV/AIDS services, well-baby care, STD prevention, and sexual health education. The majority of births world-wide already take place outside of hospitals, and a third of women receive no pre-natal care. In places like Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia, experts estimate that up to up to 50 percent of maternal mortalities result from unsafe, illegal abortions. In sub-Saharan Africa, 920 women die for every 100,000 live births. The number for Europe, on the other hand, is 24. Contraception access, safe abortion, sexual health education and generalized health care could save many of these women. It is estimated that giving contraception alone to all the women who want it could prevent 22 million abortions, 23 million unplanned births, and 1.4 million infant deaths. Instead of increasing access to health care, anti-choice groups are at the forefront of denying it. And they have lots of blood on their hands in the name of "life."
1. Reproductive justice is about you.
It's about your rights and your family and your body. All of us make reproductive choices -- to have kids or not, to use birth control or not, to have sex or not, to continue a pregnancy or not. Reproductive health care impacts all of our lives. In a pro-choice country, children are wanted and cared for, pregnancy is voluntary and families are healthy. Women and men have a full range of rights, and the liberty to act as individuals instead of squeezing themselves into narrow gender roles. Sex is both a pleasure and a responsibility, not a guilt-ridden exercise intended only for reproduction in the context of a male-headed heterosexual marriage. One's character and morality are squarely centered in their heart and their head, not between their legs. Health care is available for everyone who needs it, without judgment or impediment. And lives are actually valued -- even mine and even yours.
That's what a pro-choice nation looks like. And despite the odds and the opposition, I'm maintaining hope that most Americans do value healthy families, gender equality and human rights -- and that if we keep working towards those goals, it won't take another 35 years to get there.
http://www.alternet.org/story/74633/
Over 50% of first marriages end in divorce
60% of second marriages end in divorce
67% of all recent marriages will end in divorce
84% of African-American marriages end in divorce
Married (never divorced) 1.5
Never married 2.4
Divorced once 4.1
Divorced twice 5.8
Cohabiting 5.1
Lee Robins and Darrel Regier, Psychiatric Disorders in America: The Epidemiologic Catchment Area Study (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. 64.
Ummmmmm 1991? That's 17 years ago, when cohabitating was MUCH less common.
Could you people provide links to the sources you cite?
he National Institute of Mental Health found that women in cohabiting relationships had much greater rates of depression than women in married relationships (second only to those twice divorced).
Haha...the bonehead doesn't ever see the irony or contradiction in this...yeah, I guess those twice divorced women were real happy in those marriages they LEFT. Probably twice as unhappy as the once divorced women, but only two thirds as unhappy as the thrice divorced ones? And, maybe some of that "happiness" is merely docility...not that there aren't happy ones.
Roe Under Attack, Now More Than Ever
By Cara Kulwicki, The Curvature
Posted on January 23, 2008, Printed on January 24, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://thecurvature.com//74645/
This blog was originally published on 1/22/08
Today is the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. And that means it's also Blog For Choice Day.
This year's theme is about politics: why is it important to vote pro-choice? I looked at this question for a while and felt stumped. I vote for candidates who support reproductive health for the same reason that I vote for any issue: because I believe in it. That's clear enough. But more specifically, we need to vote pro-choice because simply being pro-choice is not enough.
Those of us who have been paying attention know perfectly well that Roe is under attack. And 2007 was a particularly interesting year. The Roberts-led Supreme Court upheld the "partial-birth abortion" ban that has no exception for a woman's health, despite its direct conflict with Roe. States have been tripping over themselves to pass "trigger laws" that would outlaw abortion immediately if Roe was overturned. State legislators have also been proposing an endless amount of misogynist bills that would restrict the right to an abortion: all out bans, "informed consent" laws that lie to women, laws requiring forced, medically unnecessary renovations to abortion clinics, laws requiring that women get permission from their fetus' fathers before having an abortion, and laws granting legal rights to fetuses, or even to fertilized eggs.
Not all of the legislation, thank god, has been passed. Too much of it has. And some we're still waiting on.
We've also faced attempts to shut down clinics, direct harassment doctors who perform abortions and outrageous abuse of the legal system. All of these attacks were politically motivated. And our elected officials were either a part of the problem or part of the solution.
We've also got the long-standing battles. There's the Hyde Amendment, which basically rendered the Roe decision irrelevant for millions of low-income women. Internationally, we've got the Global Gag Rule to contend with. And though Congress has recently tried to repeal all or parts of this unjust law that has killed innumerable women overseas, it was a fruitless endeavor. Because we have an anti-choice president.
And it goes beyond abortion. Roe, ultimately, was about more than abortion. Though the specific ruling only handled that one issue, it shifted public consciousness and established other reproductive rights by default. With abortion came the realization that women can choose when and if to become pregnant. Together, with the newfound right of women to not be mothers at all, education and career opportunities were increased. It stopped being acceptable for pregnant teens to be kidnapped by their parents, taken to live in a Catholic-run prison/home and then have their babies snatched from their arms. With the right to choose the number and spacing of children came the implicit right to have children when one chooses. At least, for some women.
In celebrating Roe and "choice," we also have to acknowledge its limitations. And that includes the poor women, primarily women of color, who still regularly have their right to raise their children taken away, for whom abortion is not a "choice" but a financial necessity, and whose fertility is regularly condemned as responsible for a whole slew of social problems. Just like we need to demand that anti-choice Republican candidates explain their stances on contraception, we need to demand that pro-choice Democrats declare their intentions to help women raise the children they have and to stop supporting health, welfare, immigration, war and economic policies that negatively impact and devalue poor mothers and mothers of color.
We're living in frightening times for reproductive health, when we can't even get Congress to clean up their messes and close a loophole that has caused contraception prices to skyrocket at college and community health clinics (though one of our presidential candidates, Barack Obama, has been among those who have fought hardest). We're living in a time when the Democrats can take back Congress, but only by running a bunch of anti-choice candidates, and when Democrats who are pro-choice are terrified to say so. We're living in a time when Rudy Giuliani -- Mr. "I would nominate strict-constructionist (anti-Roe) judges" -- is considered pro-choice and when such pathetic "support" for women's rights and health has probably been instrumental in sinking his campaign. A time when basic expressions of support for comprehensive and honest sex education is used against candidates in ways that implicitly accuse them of perversion and pedophilia.
We need to make abortion a winning issue for more than just Republicans. We need to make women's health more than a "special interest" cause, and to make social programs that help mothers perceived as something other than unsellable socialist insanity. We need to stop talking about women who have abortions and women who have children as two separate groups when they're mostly the same damn women. We also need to stop talking about abortion rights and "morals" as though you can only choose one. Essentially, we need to stop letting the antis run the political conversation.
And we can't do any of that unless we can at least talk about reproductive health issues openly. In a country where rights have been stripped away (or just never granted) by misogynist and racist legislators, electing pro-choice officials is one of the best and most productive things we can do. We need a pro-choice president because even if the Dems pick up seats in Congress this year, we are still unlikely to have a veto-proof majority. We need a pro-choice Congress because the president can't sign anything that doesn't make it to his or her desk. All of the Democrats still in the presidential race have promised to repeal the Global Gag Rule as one of their first orders of business. They've also promised to support comprehensive sex ed and to refuse to sign any anti-choice legislation. It's not enough, but it's a start, and quite frankly it'd be a fucking miracle compared to the last few decades (since most of the good that Clinton might have done given the chance was impossible with a hostile Congress). We need to get them in office, hold them to their promises, thank them and then demand more.
Voting pro-choice is the only way to get more politicians to take a stand, to see reproductive health and reproductive justice as winning issues. It's up to us to use what small power we have as citizens to make them winning issues.
Cara Kulwicki is the founder of The Curvature, where she blogs daily about a wide range of feminist issues.
Sweetness and Light Inside the GOP Campaign...
TAMPA, Fla. — At the end of the Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire this month, when the Democrats joined the candidates on stage, Mitt Romney found himself momentarily alone as his counterparts mingled, looking around a bit stiffly for a companion.
The moment was emblematic of a broader reality that has helped shape the Republican contest and could take center stage again on Thursday at a debate in Florida. Within the small circle of contenders, Mr. Romney has become the most disliked.
With so much attention recently on the sniping between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama on the Democratic side, the almost visceral scorn directed at Mr. Romney by his rivals has been overshadowed.
“Never get into a wrestling match with a pig,” Senator John McCain said in New Hampshire this month after reporters asked him about Mr. Romney. “You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”
Mike Huckabee’s pugilistic campaign chairman, Ed Rollins, appeared to stop just short of threatening Mr. Romney with physical violence at one point.
“What I have to do is make sure that my anger with a guy like Romney, whose teeth I want to knock out, doesn’t get in the way of my thought process,” Mr. Rollins said.
Anonymous yknot? said...
That's your fucked-up christian way of looking at things. Kill walking , talking people, but drop kids out like you are taking a crap.
LOL! Awwww. Can't we just flush you like some unwanted zygote? YKnot?
So, now you're pissed as well as fucked up.
More Good News:
Major shocker, and genuinely terrific news for Democrats: Republican Jim Walsh, who narrowly squeaked by Democratic challenger (and current Blue Majority candidate) Dan Maffei, 51-49, in 2006, will retire according to the Politico's blog, The Crypt:
Republican Rep. Jim Walsh of New York is expected to announce his retirement soon, according to a GOP aide familiar with the decision, giving Democrats another pick-up opportunity following a wave of Republican retirements this cycle.
The veteran appropriator had a tough reelection fight in 2006 and was expected to face another challenge in the fall.
If this does in fact occur, it will make Walsh the 21st Republican representative not to seek reelection in 2008. Worse luck for the GOP
Faced with a Clinton radio spot -- or advertisement -- claiming he endorses Republican ideas, Obama shot back with a denial and a drubbing of her record.
"She championed NAFTA -- even though it has cost South Carolina thousands of jobs. And worst of all, it was Hillary Clinton who voted for George Bush's war in Iraq," an announcer says in the new radio spot.
"She'll say anything, and change nothing. It's time to turn the page," the spot says.
Hillary's Internet strategy pay's off w/earmarks for Gay Mafia bloggers and San Francisco Jim Hormel's Knights of Spam-a-lot...
The funding for the earmarks came through the $555 billion FY 2008 omnibus bill, which included nearly 1,000 earmarks. Clinton's 261 earmarks were more than twice as many as any other member of Congress seeking the presidency, the CAGW analysis showed.
Under ethics reform legislation passed last year, 2008 is the first year that members of Congress have to put their names on earmarks.
In announcing the earmark to the homosexual group last October, Clinton said: "The Gay Men's Health Clinic is providing a critical service in working to halt the devastation that methamphetamine brings to our community. With HIV/AIDS rates among meth users more than twice as high as the general public, these funds are essential in helping the Gay Men's Health Clinic continue the fight against HIV/AIDS through treatment and prevention."
Hillary, queen of the gay earmark.
So, now you're pissed as well as fucked up.
...if I were pissed I wouldn't be laughing!
Hillary, queen of the gay earmark.
Dumb, little wingnut showing his bigotry.
Are y'all watching Clinton Inc. implode. They are tearing the Dem party apart with all this racial campaigning. I love it!
Ain't it grand (sad)!
I wonder how Evan feels about us using his blog as a general bulletin board for political and philosophical discussion. I think there are maybe three total messages pertaining to his "Money Wins" piece. How easily we are sidetracked by the trolls.
So, now you're pissed as well as fucked up.
...if I were pissed I wouldn't be laughing!
fucked up and laughing....now,that's scary.
Mike said...
I wonder how Evan feels about us using his blog as a general bulletin board for political and philosophical discussion. I think there are maybe three total messages pertaining to his "Money Wins"
Well, Mike, he's lucky that he got three commments. It really didn't deserve even one comment. And, actually, "Evan is a boil on the ass of society said...That's because every point of view you have is fucking retarded. The fact that you've created all of your ridiculous straw men based on what you used to believe is just the cherry on top of this sundae of stupid," pretty much sums up everyone's point of view.
Well, Mike, he's lucky that he got three commments. It really didn't deserve even one comment. And, actually, "Evan is a boil on the ass of society said...That's because every point of view you have is fucking retarded. The fact that you've created all of your ridiculous straw men based on what you used to believe is just the cherry on top of this sundae of stupid," pretty much sums up everyone's point of view.
If he really was impotent and pathetic as you claim, there would be absolutely nobody here. We conservatives always know who to root for by looking where the leftist whackjobs unleash their fury. The hatred and anger is there for a reason. Keep up the clever quips - I really like the "cherry on top of this sundae of stupid". I also liked, "This moron seems to think the opposite case is correct and bloviates about it like some wound up fucking cuckoo clock til it runs out his mouth like the product of an insidious, suppurating infection". Yes, very clever. That is the way children talk. You ever listened to an adult conversation? It isn't full of, "You're ideas are all fucking retarded" over and over again. And what is this about straw men? What do you think your arguments consist of? You guys exaggerate and distort EVERYTHING. Sure, you don't want to label anything in simple terms, everything is too complex and nuanced to be labeled - yet, you feel justified in calling conservatives fascists? To you, socialized healthcare is not socialism - even though it is the state redistributing the wealth of the masses. That is socialism by definition. But no, that's a straw man to you. Grow up kids. Go play your video games, hit your bong and get trashed. That's where you belong.
Hillary, queen of the gay earmark.
Dumb, little wingnut showing his bigotry.
Wrong gender there empty nutcase, that dumb wingnut was showing her bigotry.
LOL! Awwww. Can't we just flush you like some unwanted zygote? YKnot?
So, now you're pissed as well as fucked up.
Who's the one that started us down the slippery moral slope of flushing unwanted zygotes that makes offing you and throwing your body on the heap of flushed zygotes a distinction without a difference?
If I'm fucked up, it's thanks ENTIRELY to you! There was once a moral bright line that said, "don't kill innocents" (commit "murder"). By removing it, you gave the jihadi suicide bomber moral cover and moral equivalence. And so there's no moral reason for not offing you and throwing your body onto a heap of 50 million dead zygotes. In fact, there would be a certain justice in doing so.
You would be well advised to learn the moral lesson of Lycaon. But who needs morals when following whatever your dick tells you to do is perceived to be great wisdom.
yknot said...If I'm fucked up, it's thanks ENTIRELY to you!
Ha! I see you are following in lockstep with your chimp in chief, not taking any responsibility for yourself.
Mike says: If he really was impotent and pathetic as you claim, there would be absolutely nobody here.
There is nobody here, except for Evan and those who come to make fun of his idiotic incantations.
There is nobody here, except for Evan and those who come to make fun of his idiotic incantations.
Yes, all of Evan's supporters at this blog are really me posing as an Evan supporter to fool the one troll here that poses as ten trolls.
So it's just you and me asshole.
And what is this about straw men? What do you think your arguments consist of? You guys exaggerate and distort EVERYTHING.
Yeah, what about that? Why does evan write:
"Democrats do not believe in patriotism.
Democrats do not believe in individuality.
This race is really between America and the anti-Americans and I am convinced that the vast majority of Americans -- even those who mindlessly vote Democrat -- love this country and recognize it's greatness and that greatness needs to be defended."
To you, socialized healthcare is not socialism - even though it is the state redistributing the wealth of the masses. That is socialism by definition.
Lots of things are socialism, then. Police and fire protection, military protection, road and bridges -- all redistributing wealth.
And surely because those things are socialism, you oppose them all.
Evan: I was a Liberal. I voted for Gore and Clinton and Dukakis because, when you leave the public schools and universities you have been so brainwashed into believing that "Democrats are good/Republicans are evil."
And, what about this?? Why doesn't everyone leaving public schools and universities, as brainwashed as they are, vote democratic? You must be very weak minded is all I can deduce. Hell, I was in elementary school when I got so fed up with a teacher using racial slurs that, finally, when the teacher threw out the phrase "sneaky as an Indian," I raised my little hand and announced that perhaps some of our parents would want to know that our class time was being spent having the racial prejudices of teachers imposed upon us. Even most children are not mindless robots like you, Evan.
And, what about this?? Why doesn't everyone leaving public schools and universities, as brainwashed as they are, vote democratic?
I asked Evan about this in posts #1 and #5 on this thread, but so far, no response.
Dora said...And, what about this?? Why doesn't everyone leaving public schools and universities, as brainwashed as they are, vote democratic?
I asked Evan about this in posts #1 and #5 on this thread, but so far, no response.
Well, I guess that is an answer of sorts. I take it that he is still a mindless robot, but now he's a mindless republican robot instead of a mindless democrat robot.
I like to think of it as a personality type - the Zealot. Whatever their stance, they are zealously pursuing it.
Dostoyevsky is a Zealot personality type - he was in early life a secular, pro-west activist. Then he was imprisoned and almost executed for subversive activities, and he went completely in the other direction, and because a pro-Russia, kiss-the-earth, religious zealot.
Lots of things are socialism, then. Police and fire protection, military protection, road and bridges -- all redistributing wealth. Some things are fall within the government's charter, and some things belong in churches.
The problem is that the socialists keep trying to reinterpret the Constitution so as to transform strictly "voluntary" social organizations into "mandatory" ones supported with coerced financing (taxes).
There's nothing wrong with socialism dear, until it becomes coerced and mandatory.
ps - Our fire department runs strictly on donations and is all-volunteer.
The problem is that the socialists keep trying to reinterpret the Constitution so as to transform strictly "voluntary" social organizations into "mandatory" ones supported with coerced financing (taxes).
There's nothing wrong with socialism dear, until it becomes coerced and mandatory.
Well, now, wait a second, the income tax was through an amendment to the constitution. Do you have a problem with that? And waht are you talking about, exactly, about these mandatory institutions?
ps - Our fire department runs strictly on donations and is all-volunteer.
Well, that's your fire department. What about your police department? Department of roads/works/infrastructure? Schools?
Government is the one institution to which society grants the exclusive right to use FORCE.
If the task doesn't require FORCE to be used, then the government shouldn't be doing it.
And the use of FORCE is an expedient that a thinking socialist/society should never have to invoke.
But then thinking is too hard for modern day socialsists. It's easier to use the EXPEDIENT of force and coercion. After all, the modern progressive socialist sees government and FORCE as the solution to every problem.
The individual people of a society can't be trusted to do the right thing. They need to be coerced into doing the right thing by government. And of course Leftists are the only ones capable of determining what "the right thing" is.
That way when the socialized hospitals dump their patients and tell them that they can't be treated and have to die, no charges are filed against the "civil servant" doctors who dump their most-costly patients and tell them to die.
What about your police department? Department of roads/works/infrastructure? Schools?
Are you familiar with the concept of "separation of powers"?
Use of force - establish justice is in the Constitution. Interstate commerce is in the Consitution (Defense/Interstate Highways). All others (roads/ courts/ police/ etc.) are covered in state constitutions.
Schools are run by the states. US The Dept. of Education should be eliminated as it is not a chartered responsibility under the Constitution.
Dora said...
I like to think of it as a personality type - the Zealot. Whatever their stance, they are zealously pursuing it.
Dostoyevsky is a Zealot personality type - he was in early life a secular, pro-west activist. Then he was imprisoned and almost executed for subversive activities, and he went completely in the other direction, and because a pro-Russia, kiss-the-earth, religious zealot.
Evan's definitely a zealot. Unfortunately, I only get the gestalt-like perception that Evan's scribbles are a crime and reading them a punishment when Evan and Dostoyevsky are mentioned in the same breath.
yes, we can thank Democrats for Income taxes...
The taxation of incomes is possible because of an amendment to the Federal Constitution effective Feb. 25, 1913, specifically authorizing such a tax, and the Democratic party deserves a large part of the credit for securing the adoption of this amendment. The revenue law of 1894, passed by the Democratic Congress, contained an income tax provision, a flat rate of two per cent, being assessed against all incomes in excess of $4,000.
This law was declared unconstitutional by a divided court - 5 to 4 - one judge changing his decision between the two hearings of the case. In 1896 the Democratic platform declared in favor of an income tax and the demand was repeated in 1900 and 1908. The platform of 1908 demanded an amendment to the Constitution specifically authorizing an income tax. The Republican platforms during those campaigns were silent on the subject and in the campaign of 1908 the Republican candidate announced his opposition to an amendment, giving as his reason that IT WAS NOT NECESSARY. He contended that an income tax, if needed, could be collected by a statute properly drawn. The Republican candidate was elected and then followed a peculiar situation which illustrates the influence of unexpected circumstances. The Democrats in the Senate took the President at his word and prepared an income tax amendment to the Aldrich Bill and secured the support of enough Progressives to insure its adoption. To defeat a STATUTORY income tax, Senator Aldrich prevailed upon President Taft to recommend THE VERY CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT WHICH HE HAD DECLARED UNNECESSARY, and the Democrats, already committed to an amendment, accepted this solution of the situation and the amendment was submitted.
...and expanding the role of the Federal Government into areas WAY BEYOND the government's original charter. Totalitarian bastards!
The Income Tax and the subsequent expansion of government's charter are what made the War in Iraq, and all subsequent wars of American aggression possible.
Physician, heal thyself.
"Democrats do not believe in patriotism.
Democrats do not believe in individuality."
This is a generalization, but as a general rule, it's true. The democrat party does indeed side with our enemies over our elected leadership and their policies. Of course, they only attack our leaders if they are not democrats. Virtually all of the attacks thrown and Bush, Cheney and Rove are either outright lies or twisted exaggerations. That's why none of them have stuck. If the libs had their way, they would kick him and his pals out of office. Ever since the "stolen election", the democrats have been spewing slanderous accusations at our leadership. Halliburton, war for oil, hanging chads, Valerie Plame, unwarranted wiretapping, 9-11 conspiracies, and the list goes on and on. And then, on top of that, they fight to see us defeated in the war they voted us into. The democratic party actually wants us to fail in Iraq! Any semi-objective person could see that.
He is like Anne Coulter in the respect that he calls it like he sees it, and does so bluntly. He's not like one of those TV conservative commentators that are trying to make friends with all the liberals, and many of us appreciate his candor.
You guys wouldn't be here if he didn't strike a nerve. That's why we love Anne, and that's we love Evan.
...and expanding the role of the Federal Government into areas WAY BEYOND the government's original charter. Totalitarian bastards!
Wait, now you're complaining about legitimate, adopted amendments to the constitution? That's not totalitarian, the rules were followed, the constitution was amended according to the procedure described in the same said constitution...
So, now amending the constitution is totalitarian?
Dr. Dora cry now.
"Democrats do not believe in patriotism.
Democrats do not believe in individuality."
This is a generalization, but as a general rule, it's true. The democrat party does indeed side with our enemies over our elected leadership and their policies.
(1) Do you really, honestly believe that?
(2) You didn't address the individuality part of the question.
(3) What about Evan saying that democrats "hate America"? Do you really think Democrats hate America?
Wait, now you're complaining about legitimate, adopted amendments to the constitution?
Nope. Just enjoying the Divine Justice in seeing progressive's squirm at the thought of their utilitarian ideals being used to fund an unlimited number of future wars of aggression and fascist totalitarian state.
So keep on expanding government's charter, I say. Who know's how many other unintended consequences we can squeeze out of a misuse of the income tax code. I mean just look at the trillions of dollars currently going into Homeland Security and now available to monitor domestic communications and the establishment a fascist totalitarian Big-Brother state. Couldn't have done THAT without the income tax!
Nope. Just enjoying the Divine Justice in seeing progressive's squirm at the thought of their utilitarian ideals being used to fund an unlimited number of future wars of aggression and fascist totalitarian state.
I don't get it. Without the income tax, there wouldn't be a war in Afghanistan or Iraq.
You're right! There wouldn't.
But you can't achieve great things without a tool and the means of funding it, can you?
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