purplewolf:

When it comes to thinner coverages and rising premiums, we are completely on the same page, especially concerning the cushy deal congress has set up for itself. Where we disagree is on the solution. Obamacare was sold as a panacea: Universal coverage, lower premiums and costs and no “death panels”. Needless to say, none of those promises obtain. Ask yourself honestly if you believe US health care (all that that phrase implies) generally, and your health care specifically, is better today than pre-Obamacare.

Since this is a thread dedicated to beating up Glenn Beck, I won’t go into conservative solutions to our medical crisis.

Rico: So the drug czar had denied certain breast cancer medications as too costly, so has the medical insurance industry. Even when the cost is lower and the drug works better that another medication these companies will cover. Rationing of medical care is nothing new. Most of my working life I could not afford medical coverage and I worked mostly in the medical field taking care of countless people through the decades. When I was able to buy into BC/BS through my employer, it was on such a restricted basis and most of the coverage didn’t cover much, but that never let the big corp off the hook up always upping their policy rates.

As a woman, I had to pay more for the same coverage than men and get lesser coverage, higher costs for the same policy and now women have to pay extra on top of what they now have, for maternity coverage if they want that, which does not cover a person that well.

If you don’t like paying for someone elses coverage or a part of that coverage, how do you feel about the lifetime medical coverage that politicians have after just 6 years of bilking the taxpayers instead of doing the jobs they were elected to do?

As for the bullet comment: George Bush Jr. could relate to that better. When he decided to invade Iraq, most of the first soldiers to go into Iraq via Iran had an average of 7 bullets or less per person, as Georgie claimed it would be a cake walk to overtake Iraq so our military didn’t need a lot of bullets for his insane ego trip of revenge. Now I have never been in the military, but I did work as a correction officer in a medium security male prison. We did not carry guns while on duty, but we did have access to them is the situation required them. And the bullets were real. There are times when real bullets are necessary, but sometimes it is overdone.

WriterontheStorm:

How can you know that Carrasco “seems to believe that she can eat all the sugar and salt she wants with no serious consequences to her health”? Why do you assume you know the consequences better than she does? Why do you assume she doesn’t?

All she said was she doesn’t want the government telling her what she can and can’t eat.

And why do you think she will necessarily get fat and sclerotic and become a burden on society just because she wants the government out of her dietary decisions?

That type of thinking is a perfect example of the nanny state mentality adopted by so many progressives: “We know what’s best for you, so leave that part of your life up to us.”

And that encapsulates one of the main messages the Tea Party is trying to convey- “Don’t Tread on Me.” Trite, yes, but powerful.

By the way, you’d make a great FDA Administrator in the progressive utopia.

Rico,

Your question reveals more about how you think than my answer could reveal
about me.

Your own willful (let’s see about bad faith) inability to connect the dots is clear
to all but yourself apparently. But I’ll humor you for the sake of politesse, and
connect a dot or two for you.

Carrasco seems to believe that she can eat all the sugar and salt she wants with
no serious consequences to her health. Wishful thinking, but not
exceptionalism. Not yet.

Clearly, however, Carrasco is convinced that she is not going to become obese.
But if, by some odd chance she bloats up, it certainly won’t push her blood
pressure to dangerous levels. And even if her bp shoots up, her risk of heart
disease and cancer won’t increase geometrically. And even though she can’t
afford private health insurance because Hewlett Packard shipped her husband’s
job to China, she marched against Obama’s health care overhaul, because
getting sick and losing your home and life savings to outrageous medical bills is
something that only happens in socialist countries, apparently. That could
never happen here.

And even if her illness becomes critical, she tells herself that she can always
demand emergency services at her local hospital. That’s free!  Because we live
in the “freest country in the world”.

And so what if thousands, if not millions of others want the same free ride? We
can handle it. After all, America is a land of plenty. Now Carrasco is deep into
that special brand of American Exceptionalism. That right wing/corporate
narrative that says we’re the bravest, the most resourceful, the richest, the
smartest, the strongest,  the toughest, the boot-strappingest, the most just,
the best educated, with the most evolved government, in the history of the
planet.

This narrative purposefully ignores inconvenient facts as well as two thousand
years of history. As Stephen Colbert said in his finest moment, “reality has a
strong left wing bias”.  Peak American hegemony was a result of cheap
resources (especially oil), a growing force of exploitable immigrant labor,
imperialist projects (including those against our own indigenous nations), and
violent persecution of the competition (communism)—none of which was
sustainable in the long run, and most of which is now running on empty.

All the more reason for the narrative to be pom-pommed by the media and
most elected officials, partly because cheerleading always sells, but also
because the narrative is a useful distraction to those in a position to benefit (on
the left as well as the right).

So, how do I go from the salt and the sugar to paranoid-tinged victimhood?
Assuming that Carrasco’s sense of self preservation and capacity for reason are
within normal parameters, it would not be in her interest to advocate personal
greed and conspicuous consumption, unless she bought into the American
Exceptionalism narrative. If one eschews the magical thinking of the tea posse,
if one has a grasp of cause and effect, one quickly deduces that there is, as
Keynes said, no free lunch. Sooner or later the bill is going to come. Some of us
believe that time is now. Others cling to the narrative that was drummed into
them from the first day of grammar school, desperately hoping that the party
isn’t over. For them, the idea that some nazi black Muslim foreigner is plotting
to take their bounty away, is infinitely preferable to the truth—the free lunch,
wasn’t free after all.

**To connect another dot for you, and I hope my generosity will be responded
to in kind,  the end of cheap labor and resources explains why the big money
has turned to inscrutable “financial instruments” such as over the counter CDS’s
and such—it’s actually a better investment than manufacturing is.

purple:

“If you own your body, you should be required to provide certain maintainance expenses that go along with being alive.”

Absolutely true. But I should NOT be required to pay for the maintenence of YOUR body. Nor should I be told what healthcare I can and cannot buy. And Obamacare is telling me all of that. (Doesn’t it bother you that, already, the health czar has proclaimed that a new breast cancer drug will not be available due to its expense. That, to me, is rationing. You can protest that there will be no “death panels”, but that fine distinction might be lost on a woman with cancer.)

I pointed out on another thread that my duty to look after my fellow humans is directly proportional to their nearness to me- family, extended family, clan, tribe, etc. The government has inverted that and makes it more difficult for me to look after my kids by taxing me for the purpose of looking after you, a total stranger.

And, I’m only guessing, but I’m pretty sure that, in your mind, there is NO reason whatsoever for the US military to have bullets.

Rico: True, you don’t have to buy a car or a house. Maybe you are lucky enough for others to drive you everywhere or can afford other modes of transport and you may be able to live within someone elses domicile. But you technically own your body, unless you are a female, then your reproductive system belongs to everyone else but you in deciding your future pregnancy/birth control rights. If you own your body, you should be required to provide certain maintainance expenses that go along with being alive. If you are unable to afford the costs of insurance, as it is very high for many people, there are programs that are available to help many of those who need it.

It finally came out last night that we have been spending 2 billion dollars a day on Iraq, last I heard it was 4 billion a week, but yet the Repub-Tea Partiers want to complain about 10 billion dollars spread out over a 5 year span. Where is the outrage upon the wasted military costs, which are over 59% of every tax dollar spend in America today, but we spend now about 6% on all social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamp programs and other food programs for the poor and elderly and many other programs including the ATF and education, which included colleges, all out of that same 6% that these people are trying to eliminate.

Well, it makes more sense to cut the excessive and wasteful spending in the largest portion of where government spending is being divided among, the military. And why do we still need military bases and soldiers in Germany to this day, didn’t that war supposedly end in the middle 1940’s? It has been over for more 60 years and that is only one example of wasted military money. We have bases all over the world costing billions of dollars and for what? Ask the repubs and the T.P.‘s why not cut them first.

If people want to talk about the death panels(Obamacare) that Sarah Palin kept spouting about, cutting the social safety nets that the working people who paid into all of their working lives that the Tea Party members and Repubs want are the real death panels. We have no further to look than the not so Right Wing and their even depraved indifference attitude of the Tea Partiers subspecies group of radicals. If they attain power after Nov. 2, let’s see if they start to dismantle those safety nets and the outcome there after. How will they be able to run around trying to end these programs while trying to take care and educate their children who are no longer in school and worrying about their elderly parents they now have to take care of too as they destroyed the safety nets in their zeal to destroy this country. The Repubs have already done a good job of that already.

Tea, after it has steeped too long, becomes a bitter brew indeed. No longer good. Best if poured down the drain and disposed of.

purplewolf:

The government isn’t telling me I must have a car or I must buy a house. But now they are telling me I must buy health insurance or else. That’s a big difference, which of course Tea Partiers can easily see, even if you can’t.

Writer:

Please explain something to me. What does it take, intellectually, to conflate someone who “wants to be able to eat sugar and salt and drive an SUV” with someone who has a “monstrous, lurking expectation of entitlement and superiority” who also harbors a “dark, self-righteous, and paranoid tinged sense of victimhood”? Speaking of “connecting the dots”!!

If anybody has a monstrous, lurking sense of entitlement and victimhood, it’s progressives! They think they’re entitled to healthcare, housing, food, an education, a job (well, maybe just unemployment welfare) and are being denied all those freebies by those big bad rich people. That poor woman only wants the government to leave her alone.

Writer:

Re “brown shirts,” have you seen THIS?!:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/nyregion/30border.html?sq=nina bernstein&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=print

Peace.

Andrea Carrasco evidently doesn’t mind the fact that if we drive, we have to have car insurance, which BTW is not just coverage for the car only. And if you have ever read the underwriting on your car insurance policies, they have managed to find almost every conceivable way to get out of paying a legitimate claim turned into them. But these Tea Party people have said nothing about that now have they? Also house insurance when buying or paying off a loan, if you have a house it has to be insured, yet still no protests.

And ask any Indian what the “Black Robes” means to them. Beck obviously has no clue when he used that term on Saturday.

Welcome to the “WRECKENING”.

“... if I want to eat a lot of sugar and salt, and I shouldn’t be forced to buy
medical care.”

American exceptionalism encapsulated. Such simplistic, seemingly humble, and
rather pathetic middlebrow aspirations mask a monstrous, lurking expectation of
entitlement and superiority, coupled with a willful and bad faith refusal to
connect the dots of social contracts to which EVERYONE (and I never use all caps)
is subject. It equally exposes her dark, self-righteous, and paranoid tinged sense
of victimhood, as if a cabal of godless evildoers were sitting in, I don’t know,
some oval office somewhere, plotting to take away her gas guzzler.

These delusions are becoming widespread amongst the increasingly
disenfranchised middle and labor classes. The stage is set for authoritarian
figures to emerge by maxing out their political credit raising socialist bogeymen
from the dead and making sweet hereafter promises of a return to a country that
never was.

The Pied Pipers of the tea posse couldn’t care less about their followers.
Authoritarian leaders have never been concerned with the welfare of their loyal
conscripts. It’s all about appeasement and rabble rousing in the name of self-
aggrandizement. Brown Shirts enter, stage right!

And you thought it couldn’t happen here…

Dr. Lawrence Britt’s 14 Characteristics of Fascism, #8: Religion and Government Are Intertwined.

There’s the bald-faced nub of the problem:
...  “and no reporter wants to write about a church picnic.” Translated into coloquial media-ese—“if it bleeds, it reads” was the way my “journalism” professor at Pitt put it in the good old/new days.
Even at that young age, I had sense enough to drop the class.
  But that’s the mantra, stated or not.  And we fall for it, not only on the news but in TV entertainment and movies.  So it’s partly—probably largely—our fault for simply not saying “No.”
  Currently, the same problem rears its ugly head in the problem of Internet control.  Are we saying “No”
loud enough to these sell-outs of freedom of informatioin.  No, we aren’t.We are talking to each other. 
  We are crabbing a bit about TD ads used to support this site. But are we getting together to talk seriously about alternative methods of funding?
No, we aren’t.
  So . . . . . any suggestions for Mr. Scheer?  And does he want suggestions? 
  By the way, this is a pretty light-weight article, Ms. Marcus, IMO.