American Politics during the Obama Presidency

[QUOTE=Esten]Using the word "takeover" to describe the reform is pure hyperbole.

There will be no federal funding of abortion, this has been very clear.

Destroy our quality of care? Take our economy to the very brink of destruction?

How can you believe this bullshit you are posting![/QUOTE]It's not necessary to delve into the details. In fact, you don't even need to see the legislation until an hour before we vote on it. Don't read the bill. Just vote "YES" and vote quickly! Chop chop!

As Sidney would say: "CHANGE"

This does bring up a point that everyone on the Democrat side should really, really ask themselves, no matter what they believe, no matter if they think the Democrats are above reproach, even if they think Obama is da bomb.

Why are they in such a hurry to present such far-reaching changes with such potentially huge results in such a short time? Even if what they are doing is a good thing to them, with a significant portion of the country at best uncertain about what's happening, and a significant portion outright opposing it - why rush this through so fast that no one has a chance to really discuss and propose alternate possibilities (with a hope of being listened to) and make sure that the huge amount of money and theh huge growth of the government that is being proposed will actually do what is hoped?

Why? Because the people who are behind this are at least as bad, and I think many times WORSE, than anything that came out of 9-11, Afghanistan and Iraq put together as far as trying to control the government and the American people and put an effective dictatorship over us all. They have close to effective control of two branches of the US government, the parts responsible for actually making and enacting the laws, and have significant power in the third which is responsible for reviewing those laws made.

Even if these guys have no "dark designs" on the US, the speed of such a huge change is at best irresponsible. I think it's downright criminal, personally.

[QUOTE=Sidney]You cannot be convinced. You are ''brainwashed''! [/QUOTE]Translation: I can't formulate an intelligent argument to support my views (or can't be bothered to).

They were trying to get most of the work done by the summer, which to me would have been rushed. But the summer "deadline" was more an effort to prod focus and progress. From September through December was a period of fine tuning. There has been plenty of time for review and discussion. There were efforts to make the reform bipartisan, to engage affected industries in the discussion, and CBO review. By the time the House and Senate bills are merged it will be close to 1 year they have spent on this. If 1 year is rushed, how many years would you have them working on it?

This "rush don't read" criticism is simply another disingenious attempt by the right to discredit the administration for political purposes.

The "Government" is about to require everyone to purchase health insurance or be fined or worse. The purpose of this grand plan is to reduce the number of "uninsured" persons in America. The Democrat's made a very valid comparison when they likened this new national requirement for healthcare insurance to that of states requirements for liability auto insurance.

Point 1

Here in Texas a report was just released regarding the number of still uninsured motorists in the state since the requirement that all vehicle owners purchase liability coverage (you have to have proof of coverage to register your vehicle each year and to have it inspected. Guess what? We went from 28% uninsured drivers before the law went into effect several years ago to 22% today, and yes you get fined and can go to jail if you are found to be without coverage – just like the federal plan. From what I have seen published in other states this is pretty much the norm regarding the reduction in uninsured drivers.

DO YOU REALLY THINK YOU WILL HAVE BETTER RESUTLS WITH NATIONALLY MANDATED HEALTHCARE INSURANCE? This translates to yes you will get some of the uninsured coverage but the total number of uninsured will not decrease dramatically any more than it did with auto liability. So why create a new huge government bureaucracy that in the end fails to accomplish its intended purpose?

Point 2

Why would you want to create a new government bureaucracy when the creation of government jobs does nothing for the economy? Government jobs do not produce a product or contribute to the GDP and grow the economy; they just drain more money from productive activities which do contribute to the GDP and do grow the economy in the form of more taxes to pay their salaries and benefits.

Point 3

How are you going to "catch" those uninsured scoundrels and fine them? I am sure you are familiar with a little governmental outfit called the Internal Revenue Service. How many tax cheats do they catch out of the number out there? Not many and they have multiple reporting requirements. You really think the government is going to do any better "catching" the uninsured?

Point 4

Now since we can be relatively certain the majority of uninsured will not be "caught" and under this program no insurance company can deny coverage due to preexisting conditions or charge more for same, the uninsured will simply wait until they are ill, sign up, get treated, then drop the insurance which means more tax increases on the rest of us to cover the short fall. In the meantime the government gets to control 20% more of the economy.

Now since most of the folks in Congress can't tie their shoes without help or a kickback from someone or pork barrel spending for their districts – do you really want to trust them with this? Much less that they did not even read the damn thing in the first place.

The point of this entire exercise is to grow government, increase its control over our daily lives and place another 20% of the economy under the greedy paws of the political hacks in Washington.

[QUOTE=Esten]They were trying to get most of the work done by the summer, which to me would have been rushed. But the summer "deadline" was more an effort to prod focus and progress. From September through December was a period of fine tuning. There has been plenty of time for review and discussion. There were efforts to make the reform bipartisan, to engage affected industries in the discussion, and CBO review. By the time the House and Senate bills are merged it will be close to 1 year they have spent on this. If 1 year is rushed, how many years would you have them working on it?

This "rush don't read" criticism is simply another disingenious attempt by the right to discredit the administration for political purposes.[/QUOTE]"Only" a year to grow the federal government significantly without really knowing what we're getting into, with basically a single plan that has been pushed from the beginning with an illusion of all of our senators and congressmen working together to come up with a plan that everyone worked on? What ever happened to tort reform, one of the big issues of healthcare, that wasn't even TOUCHED! Why a time limit on something so important anyway? And I would much rather two years than a year to make sure we got it right.

There were NO efforts to make the reform bipartisan. As soon as anyone had anything critical to say, they were being "partisan." The Democrats took a lesson from the Republicans as far as being patriotic and telling people who criticized the war that they were siding with terrorists! Can't you see the Democrats are doing the same thing while blithely saying that the Republicans are doing nothing but try to stop them and that that's the WRONG thing to do? They SHOULD be trying to stop them, to rein them in on this lunacy.

Every proposal that the Republicans made was shot down in committee without hearing and the media didn't even report what was proposed by many legislators. Intead everyone talks about how the Republicans had no ideas and were just cutting down what the Democrats want to do.

Give me a break - this is a prime example of the left taking advantage of a temporary strong majority to push something that the United States as a whole would never have gone for. It was rushed to ensure that very thing because the longer this goes on and the more scrutiny it is given, the fewer people in the country like it - and rightly so.

Watch what happens in the midterm elections and think about what would have happened if the Congress would have opened up the issue for discussion, would have examined it in open congressional sessions and really tried to come up with what was best for THE MOST PEOPLE. It would never have had a chance.

And BTW - I am NOT for the "right." The Republicans lied to us (in my opinion - I know many don't agree with me) to get us into a war, but at least they bothered to line up support before they did it. But the Republicans have been leading us into bigger government almost as fast (if not AS fast) as the Democrats.

I'm a Libertarian who is fucking sick and tired of the new ruling class taking money from mostly ignorant people who completely naively think that government is a good thing and will cure all ills. Esten, I'm not calling you ignorant, please don't take it that way - I'm talking about the masses who really have NO CLUE.

Elected officials are THE NEW RULING CLASS, the replacement of royalty and nobility, a bunch of crooks with no sense of noblese oblige (with a very small percentage of exceptions) and ANYTHING they do as a whole will NOT make the US a better country. It will only bring it down the road of ruin.

[QUOTE=El Queso]"Only" a year to grow the federal government significantly without really knowing what we're getting into, with basically a single plan that has been pushed from the beginning with an illusion of all of our senators and congressmen working together to come up with a plan that everyone worked on? What ever happened to tort reform, one of the big issues of healthcare, that wasn't even TOUCHED! Why a time limit on something so important anyway? And I would much rather two years than a year to make sure we got it right.

There were NO efforts to make the reform bipartisan. As soon as anyone had anything critical to say, they were being "partisan." The Democrats took a lesson from the Republicans as far as being patriotic and telling people who criticized the war that they were siding with terrorists! Can't you see the Democrats are doing the same thing while blithely saying that the Republicans are doing nothing but try to stop them and that that's the WRONG thing to do? They SHOULD be trying to stop them, to rein them in on this lunacy.

Every proposal that the Republicans made was shot down in committee without hearing and the media didn't even report what was proposed by many legislators. Intead everyone talks about how the Republicans had no ideas and were just cutting down what the Democrats want to do.

Give me a break - this is a prime example of the left taking advantage of a temporary strong majority to push something that the United States as a whole would never have gone for. It was rushed to ensure that very thing because the longer this goes on and the more scrutiny it is given, the fewer people in the country like it - and rightly so.

Watch what happens in the midterm elections and think about what would have happened if the Congress would have opened up the issue for discussion, would have examined it in open congressional sessions and really tried to come up with what was best for THE MOST PEOPLE. It would never have had a chance.

And BTW - I am NOT for the "right." The Republicans lied to us (in my opinion - I know many don't agree with me) to get us into a war, but at least they bothered to line up support before they did it. But the Republicans have been leading us into bigger government almost as fast (if not AS fast) as the Democrats.

I'm a Libertarian who is fucking sick and tired of the new ruling class taking money from mostly ignorant people who completely naively think that government is a good thing and will cure all ills. Esten, I'm not calling you ignorant, please don't take it that way - I'm talking about the masses who really have NO CLUE.

Elected officials are THE NEW RULING CLASS, the replacement of royalty and nobility, a bunch of crooks with no sense of noblese oblige (with a very small percentage of exceptions) and ANYTHING they do as a whole will NOT make the US a better country. It will only bring it down the road of ruin.[/ QUOTE]What do we do and where do we go?

BlackShirt - I don't have all the answers. I do have common sense and I also live in a country where people feel the need for the government to make all solutions for them and it doesn't work well at all (I live here in Argentina in case you didn't know)

The GOP offered a solution in May that has been sitting in committee and was never discussed.

It has elements that the Democrats refuse to discuss, including reform on frivolous and overly-large award lawsuits, which are a significant component of the horrible cost in health care. As I saw one conservative commentator write in a column, he sees liberals as a group of people armed with lawyers waiting for someone to slip on a rich person's sidewalk so they can redistribute his or her money.

It also deals with one of the great problems in health insurance, allowing for state based health care exchanges and federal incentives for multiple states to band together, crossing state lines, to offer more choices. And the state based exchanges would be responsible for providing group rates to people across a multitude of circumstances to reduce rates. Competition and a relaxing of restrictions.

It also includes providing help for those who cannot afford health insurance. But the Democrats don't want this because 1) it's not providing a government-run function which grows the government and helps to control lives even further, a clear goal of most liberals and 2) it provides many fiscally proper functions to ensure that people who apply for the assistance really need it.

Does anyone care about small businesses on the liberal side? Do they not see that the requirements that they are going to put on ALL businesses, big and small, are going to really harm the small businesses - like mine, for example.

What possible incentive do I have to hire someone if I HAVE to pay for their insurance on top of all the other freaking taxes and insurances and such that I have to pay when employing someone? Not just the direct money but the time and effort involved in keeping up with this crap is horrendous ALREADY! Jesus Christ on a Crutch why can no one on that side see that saddling businesses with making sure that everyone is happy who works for them is going so far past what unions, for example, were originally intended to serve.

I keep saying this: Argentina is such a prime example of where the Democratic party is leading the US. You have to live here for a period of time and try to do business here to really get it, but it's scary to think about.

Do you realize that almost all small businesses here are completely family run and operated? They can't stay open all the time, they can't work on weekends and holidays. Why? Because they can't hire employees outside their family so they are restricted in what they can do. If they do, they are forced to pay for their insurance, they are forced to pay severance (a full month per year worked, starting the first year after three months of employment) no matter how poorly an employee performs (even thought here are laws, the court system almost ALWAYS sides with the "worker") they are forced to pay them a full month of salary as a bonus every year no matter what. They are forced to pay HUGE taxes on salaries to pay for the all of the "social programs" this wonderful government provides for its people. They can't hire temporary or part time help because of the huge RISK. They have no ability to leverage credit and have any kind of large inventory and therefore are usually woefully understocked on certain items in large part because the government tries to control so many things that it fucks them all up.

The US is starting on this path. Argentina is like this because the powers that be have convinced the public, who they keep as ignorant as possible and buy their votes with outrageous promises that cannot be fullfilled by the government, that the government is their friend and is trying hard to provide for everyone.

The same thing is happening in the States because Bush fallback is so strong that a predominantly powerful Democratic party is able to push for powers for the government that dwarf what Bush did, and is doing it in the name of helping the people who can't help themselves.

Bullshit. The only people that can't help themselves are those who don't try, with a very few small set of exceptions. I worked three fucking jobs (AT ONCE! To put myself through college and continued to work my ass off all my life so that I could succeed. Opportunity used to exist, but the politicians are ruining that, election by election, as an ignorant American public think that government is there to make things all better. Instead, they are allowing it to slowly enslave them.

I have never said I have all the answers. I have never said Republicans have all the answers. I have never even said Libertarians have all the answers (though I think they're closer than most) What I have said is that the Democrats alone are going to ruin us, just like the Republicans alone would ruin us. They have too much power and this crap that they are trying to pass that supposedly will help is a HUGE step in fucking things up good.

So why are we in such a hurry? Really? Tell me why two years is too long, but 9-12 months is not too short for one fo the most important decisions the American people have ever made? Are we so pathetic that we can't take our time to really work together to figure out the best way?

Or is the Democratic Party interested in pulling more money out of the money-engine (the rich) of the country in order to pursue power, pure and simple, no matter whether the money-pump starts to cough and spit because it no longer has enough to pump.

Like Argentina.

[QUOTE=El Queso]There were NO efforts to make the reform bipartisan.[/QUOTE]Untrue. If you had said they did not try hard enough it might be more credible. But to flat out say there were no bipartisan efforts at all is untrue.

Obama would have loved to have broad bipartisan support, for obvious reasons. This effort continued up until late summer when it became clear the divisions were too strong and it just wasn't going to happen. Gallup has some interesting charts on public polling on this topic. The last chart shows how perception of sincere bipartisan effort fell for both parties, but moreso for Republicans.

[url]www.gallup.com/poll/123032/americans-credit-obama-bipartisan-efforts.aspx[/url]

After the effort for broad bipartisan support was abandoned, Democrats still continued to work with individual Republicans to obtain their support. Republicans are just as much responsible for the lack of broad bipartisan agreement as Democrats. Have a look at some of the quotes here:

majorityleader.gov/docUploads/HCGOPBipartisan091509.pdf

I like the one from Republican Senator Jim DeMint:

"If we're able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

[QUOTE=Esten] But to flat out say there were no bipartisan efforts at all is untrue.

Obama would have loved to have broad bipartisan support[/QUOTE]You have been drinking purple kool-aid, Esten. Obama would have had no problem passing a health care reform bill through Congress if he had gone to the other party and invited them to write one-third of the bill. Probably would have had to accept malpractice lawsuit limits and inter-state portability of insurance plans and not much more.

Instead, The One's idea of bipartisanship is "You do what I say and you'll like it."

I contrast his approach with that of Bill Clinton in the 90s, who was able to achieve true bipartisan legislative achievements such as the crime bill, the welfare reform bill, and an immigration bill.

Obama is a one-term President, his hard-left Chicago "fuck them if they don't want what I want" politics have already alienated a majority of the population. He will be dealing with a Republican Congress come November, which is an astonishing result - squandering his presidency within 10 months of taking office.

The good news is, most of the "health reform bill" which might pass Congress consists only of taxes that will be relatively easy to repeal. The "benefit" program is not scheduled to take place until 2014, long after President Petraeus takes office along with a GOP Congress.

The only thing "bipartisan" about this health bill is the opposition, which consists of members of both the Republican and Democratic parties. Obama is on his own with the left wing of his party on this, and they will suffer the consequences alone.

Couldn't agree more Hunt. I believe that time will show that you're prediction of this year and the upcoming years is spot on! Couldn't have said it better myself. The repealing of this health care socialist scam will be easily accomplished once we get this idiot out of the oval office. Once again, america has to elect a crazy liberal for all the wrong reasons to return to an appreciation of Republican leadership. This cycle has been going on for decades, however, the sad legacy of this idoit Obama is that he is truely creating damage to America that will take a couple of decades to repair. Without question, he will go down as the worst president in history. Novemeber just can't come soon enough. You really have to question his agenda regarding America. From my chair he seems hell-bent on creating as much damage to America and American values as possible. Maybe all the muslim agenda propaganda about Obama has some validity? He certainly is ensuring that his stay in power will be a short one indeed. Kinda confusing really. I used to think that the first priority of a first term president was GETTING A SECOND TERM in office. Go figure. Ten months and counting.

Happy Mongering All. Toymann

El Queso,

You make some valid points from the entrepreuner's viewpoint, I sympathize with you. But the bickering on this board is akin to what is going on in DC. The Republicans are not going to let the bill go by without watering it down and making Obama look bad, and the Democrats are anxious enough the pass whatever bill, just to claim some success. End result, stalemate and a bill that sucks! I am not a liberal, but Obama did promised changes but even the Messiah could not undo DC Politically, nothing has change, so this is very disappointing.

[QUOTE=Toymann]Couldn't agree more Hunt. I believe that time will show that you're prediction of this year and the upcoming years is spot on! Couldn't have said it better myself. The repealing of this health care socialist scam will be easily accomplished once we get this idiot out of the oval office. Once again, america has to elect a crazy liberal for all the wrong reasons to return to an appreciation of republican leadership. This cycle has been going on for decades, however, the sad legacy of this idoit Obama is that he is truely creating damage to America that will take a couple of decades to repair. Without question, he will go down as the worst president in history. Novemeber just can't come soon enough. You really have to question his agenda regarding America. From my chair he seems hell-bent on creating as much damage to america and american values as possible. Maybe all the muslim agenda propaganda about Obama has some validity? He certainly is ensuring that his stay in power will be a short one indeed. Kinda confusing really. I used to think that the first priority of a first term president was GETTING A SECOND TERM in office. Go figure. Ten months and counting. Happy Mongering All. Toymann[/QUOTE]I quote from the Internal Herald Tribune, Dec. 31, 2009. "The world's superpower (US) is focused on security. It's fastest-rising competitor (China) concentrates on commerce".

Nothing wrong being patriotic, but how did we get to where we are now. If not for the fact that we can keep printing the dollar, I would probably be sleeping under some bushes right now.