Obama!!!

I know "skirting and obfuscation" is a politician's right, but Obama takes it to a different level.

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“The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton

Yeah, the health care bill is undergoing some serious procedural gymnastics that I doubt anyone can really defend, no matter their position on the merits of the bill.

I think a lot of people are just keeping their distance from both the content of the bill and the way it's being forced through Congress, because they support the idea of it, and don't bother to care about the reality of the bill. The whole thing represents all the worst parts of the political process. It's all here: kickbacks, favors for individual members of Congress who happen to be swing votes, procedural gimmicks, broken promises, tax hikes, everything. The bill embodies every cliche about liberalism that conservatives casually toss around. It makes conservative exaggerations true.

But they are defending them, and more-so they are touting them to the heavens and the masses which are not so massy(?).

Look, (to quote a guy), black and white has never been so in our faces since slavery. Slavery was wrong and this is also.

Well, the politicians are. I suppose I mean anyone who doesn't have a huge stake in seeing it proceed. This is the kind of thing I've mentioned again and again in this thread: it's the type of thing people scream at the top of their lungs about when one of the other guys in office, but are deafeningly silent on now that their guy's in there.

Yeah, I get your point, and I agree. I am just not as eloquent about voicing my opinion as you are.

You sound perfectly eloquent to me. We're just making slightly different points, I think.

Yours is quite well taken; this stuff happens from time to time, but combining this many parliamentary maneuvers with a bill this massive and significant is really something. They keep trying to compare it to Social Security or Medicare, apparently oblivious to the fact that both of those passed overwhelmingly with significant bipartisanship.

5 second video sums it all up very neatly:

Single payer healthcare:



Eliminating private sector competition isn't the American way, Superman.

By the by, the vote is apparently Sunday, and it's quite close. If it passes, it'll be by the skin of something-or-other's teeth.

Also, it looks like the bill will actually be finished and available for something like a few days before the vote comes up, meaning a lot of people supporting it won't have read it. Yeah, because we wouldn't want to spend more than a few days going over the most important piece of legislation in a freakin' decade. We're only creating a massive new entitlement program, after all.

He disavows that now, of course, but his original HHS secretary nominee, Tom Daschle, wrote a book in which he supported it, too (Daschle had to step down for other reasons). His Chief of Staff wrote a book called The Plan discussing similar things. Clearly, single-payer is what they want and (presumably) hope to get at some point, and are dancing around this fact with a slightly more realistic approach in the meantime. But it doesn't change the goal.

I think the method the Democrats are using to get the health bill passed without the House of Representatives ever voting directly on the Senate version will be challenged at some point on Constitutional grounds. That method was designed and has been used in Congress previously on small proceedural matters, nothing of this magnitude. I don't see how the House Constitutionally can pass something that imposes new taxes of this magnitude without ever having a direct up or down vote on the bill itself. Those Democrats who go home and try to say, "I just voted on the proceedure, not for the health bill" are going to get their heads handed to them at the polls. Unless the Republicans come up with a complete ninny for candidate (which lord knows they're capable of doing), I think Obama is gonna be a one-term experiment.

Yeah, there's talk of such a challenge already. I think you're correct about people seeing through this smokescreen, too. Obama said as much in an interview just the other day: that this is essentially the up-or-down vote he wanted, and that a YEA vote here is a vote for health care reform. It seems more than a little odd that such a thin level of abstraction would entice any fence-sitters to come down on the other side, though, but apparently they think it will, or else it wouldn't be necessary.

By the by, to anyone skeptical of the idea that the agenda is far more sweeping than even this monumental bill, Harry Reid sent a letter to two Senators today containing this, among other things:

This bill, as big as it is, is still just the foot in the door. It's not a new goal, it's just a more pragamatic, incremental method of achieving the same single-payer policy that many Democrats have been advocating for years.

Sure. I still don't think that non-Americans have any concept of what's going on here, although at the end of the day, I do not see it changing the Constitution and what it stands for. I can understand all the warnings and the bitches and moans, but I still cannot see how it can fundamentally change the country. Anything which gets passed can always get "unpassed". Anyone who gets elected can get unelected. The only thing I will say though is that I do not see any way you can impeach Obama, although if Obama is ever President when the other party has the majority, I believe that may well be the first thing on their minds, especially since all Conservatives love Joe Biden so much. HA!

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

Hilarious . . . and true!

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By setting a further precedent for the government getting involved in things that always have and always should be private sector business.


That's exactly what was said prior to the ratification of the 16th amendment.

I don't think he's committed an impeachable offense, personally. I have a strong dislike for his politics (and his lies) but he's playing his game just like any other president.

Government programs are awfully hard to squash; particularly entitlement programs. Particularly wide-ranging entitlement programs. That's why everyone's flipping out over this: because programs like this almost never go away. They just grow, year after year.

Social Security and Medicare are utterly devouring our budget, but we can't even seem to raise the retirement age for the former, let alone genuinely reform it. Bush tried in 2005 and got nowhere (the Democrats, then the minority, engaged in what they today like to call "obstructionist" tactics to stop it), and he was proposing very modest, optional tweaks to the existing system. Government programs are harder to kill than Rasputin Dracula.

That said, there might be a short opening where this can be repealed, because -- get this -- we have to pay taxes on the system for 4 years before it actually kicks in! This is done, I presume, so that they can keep up the fiction that it's deficit-reducing (or even budget-neutral). We'll have to pay taxes for the next 10 years to get 6 years worth of benefits from it. Once people start getting the benefits, though, good luck ever getting rid of it without a full-blown crisis.

Not discussing any practical matters to the bill, and speaking purely ideologically and politically, I think calling it "socialism" is disingenuous to say the least. If so, then social security, welfare, and medicare are socialist policies. What's more, by that measure we are a Socialist country. The government re-allocates your tax money to individuals who are less fortunate.

Also, again I think it hypocritical that when conservatives don't believe in a policy, like universal healthcare, that they argue that because people who don't want their money going to something they don't support, especially on the abortion issue, that a special case is made, but people who are ideologically opposed to the Iraq war still have their tax money used to fund the war. I never seen any Republican shout about that, though.

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...uh the post is up there...

Sigh, I can tell you that I for one have nothing against "universal healthcare", I just do not want the government running it.

I'm not quite sure how that's possible, I mean who would enforce such a policy, certainly not insurance companies.

Anyway, I was just saying that when it's a policy that conservatives oppose funding, due to practical/ideological reasons, that they over-look the fact that many non-conservatives and liberals frequently fund policies they are opposed to.

Healthcare Reform has passed 219 - 212

This is without a doubt a victory for President Obama and the Democrats.

Yes, we did!