Obama Presidency

[Nick de Cusa]

Ca nous apparait comme du relativisme, mais l'idée selon laquelle Hitler était socialiste est bcp plus répandue aux USA. donc Obama = socialiste = nazi. Et c'est de bonne guerre, après les accusations de nazisme que les conservateurs ont pris dans le coin de la figure.

Sans oublier qu'une des critiques faite à Obamacare est que l'Etat remboursera les avortements… Ce qui n'est pas du goût des prolife, qui hurlent au génocide planifié par l'Etat.

Adapter un peu l'histoire comme tu le fais, c'est digne de Staline. Salaud, tu as des millions de morts sur les bras. C'est bien simple, tu me débectes.

Voilà voilà, de bonne guerre et tout et tout.

[mementopratique]

Bien sur, je ne dis pas le contraire. Je ne cherchais pas à les défendre, mais à décrire.

[john_ross]

Ils sont complètement cons. Ils se déconsidèrent crétinement et insultent les victimes des grands totalitarismes avec lesquels ils associent Obama. Lamentable.

Juste une remarque Obama veut que l'IVG soit pris en charge par l'ObamaCare.

Ce n'est pas parce que les victimes des IVG n'ont pas eu une existence légale qu'elles n'existent pas.

[Glockinette]

Juste une remarque Obama veut que l'IVG soit pris en charge par l'ObamaCare.

Ce n'est pas parce que les victimes des IVG n'ont pas eu une existence légale qu'elles n'existent pas.

Je pense aussi que l'ObamaCare est un véritable danger.

Mais, pourquoi focaliser l'opposition à ce vaste projet sur la question de l'IVG?

[john_ross]

Je pense aussi que l'ObamaCare est un véritable danger.

Mais, pourquoi focaliser l'opposition à ce vaste projet sur la question de l'IVG?

Je ne me focalise pas sur l'IVG mais vouloir que cet acte soit remboursé par l'état en dit long sur son instigateur.

[Nick de Cusa]

"IVG = Nazisme" = gros nase.

[john_ross]

"IVG = Nazisme" = gros nase.

Ce n'est pas ce que j'ai dit, le problème c'est de vouloir faire financer un tel acte par l'impôt.

Et jusqu'à preuve du contraire je n'ai jamais défendu Obama=Nazi.

[E.T. bleu]

Les Nazi etaient des supremacistes ariens, Obama etait un supremaciste noir.

[RLux]

Il y a eu un moment savoureux lors de ces "townhall protests"…

Un mec hurlant- en gros- qu'il ne tolérerait pas l'intrusion du gouvernement dans MEDICARE.

Sinon, Joe Scarborough sur MSNBC (un animateur conservateur…oui oui, ça existe sur msnbc ) estime que les stupides prises de position des Malkin, Coulter, Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, etc….font le jeu des démocrates.

Death panels, nazis, euthanasie pour les viocs, je trouve au contraire ça très responsable en matière de réduction des coûts.

[h16]

Death panels, nazis, euthanasie pour les viocs, je trouve au contraire ça très responsable en matière de réduction des coûts.

Oui, c'est un grand bon en avant !

[Normous]

Medical Mosh Pits

Understanding the clashes at the health care "town halls"

Jesse Walker | August 13, 2009

Clashes keep breaking out at the "town hall" meetings devoted to discussing health care reform. Usually the excitement amounts to some angry questions and heckling, but sometimes there's more. Six people were arrested at a demonstration outside a meeting in St. Louis. Violence erupted at a town hall in Tampa after opponents of ObamaCare were locked out of the building. A North Carolina congressman cancelled a meeting after receiving a death threat; the pro-market group FreedomWorks, which was involved in some of the protests, fielded a death threat of its own. Supporters of the president's health care reforms, who used to tout the support he'd received from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, are now accusing the very same companies of riling up "mob violence" to stop the plan.

As the charges and countercharges fly, here are three maxims to keep in mind:

1. It isn't Astroturf after the grassroots show up. When the San Francisco Chronicle asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi what she thought of the protests, she replied: "I think they're Astroturf." In other words, there isn't real grassroots dissatisfaction with the direction health care reform is taking. There's just a facsimile of discontent, a show ginned up by cynical political operatives.

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations, a London-based body of PR professionals, defines Astroturfing as "the practice of falsely creating the impression of independent, popular support by means of orchestrated and disguised public relations activity"; the examples it offers include "posting comments on others' blogs or on message boards" and "submitting supposedly amateur videos to YouTube." The equivalent action at the "town hall" meetings would be if someone claimed to be something she's not. That has happened: Early in August, a woman asking a pointed question at Wisconsin meeting identified herself as "just a mom from a few blocks away" who was "not affiliated with any political party." She turned out to have a long history of Republican activism.

But there's no evidence that any significant fraction of the protesters are poseurs. Some of them have thrown themselves into health care activism full time—when a friend attended this week's meeting in Philadelphia, he reported that some of the plan's opponents "had been at so many of these meetings, the congressman knew them by their first names"—and some of them haven't. When reporters interview the demonstrators, they don't generally have trouble finding local people with genuine concerns about the proposals presently floating around Washington. ("I went to school in this school," a man at a Maryland meeting told ABC News. "I don't see anyone in this room that isn't from Mardela Springs right now.") You should expect to find opposition to Obama's proposals out there, given how poorly they've been polling lately. His opponents may have a sense of showmanship, but there's far more fakery in the "town hall" meetings themselves, gatherings that draw on the iconography of town-meeting democracy but are designed to sell a program devised in Washington, not to gather input from the sticks.

"Any 'astroturf' campaign on the modern media landscape is going to require actually ginning up some broad-based activism if it's going to be effective," my former colleague Julian Sanchez recently wrote. "And any genuinely spontaneous, bottom-up action that seems even moderately interesting and resonant with national issues is going to find a whole lot of political professionals eager to promote, guide, replicate, or co-opt it. Sure, you can still talk about more or less manufactured movements, but the lines seem a lot blurrier to me. If a few locals decide maybe there should be a rally in the town square, and a high-profile blogger or Twitter user picks it up and promotes it, is that astroturf? What if it's the big-name activist who has the idea, and the locals decide to pick it up and run with it?"

There are links, sometimes loose and sometimes strong, between the protesters and larger political players. It's not entirely clear which of those is leading and which is following, and it's certainly not clear why such ties are any more objectionable than the connections between, say, the netroots and traditional Democratic interest groups. (They orchestrate, we organize.) Now the Dems are calling up the grassroots troops that helped elect Obama, telling them that "special interest attack groups are stirring up partisan mobs with lies about health reform" and asking them to come to the town halls to support the proposed measures. Is that Astroturf? Only if no one but professional Democrats show up.

2. It isn't unprecedented if there are obvious precedents. When someone like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claims that the "mob aspects" at the meetings are "something new and ugly," all he's demonstrating is that he's an economist, not a historian. When it comes to bands of angry citizens being disruptive, it isn't hard to find earlier examples in American history. It isn't even hard to find earlier examples in 21st century American history. Just go to Google and punch in phrases like "guerrilla theater," "antiwar protest," and "Code Pink."

It's entertaining to watch the same people who spent the Bush years smearing the antiwar movement as "on the other side" suddenly rediscovering the virtues of noisy protest. But at least they're moving in the right direction, no matter how haphazardly or hypocritically. What's depressing is to see the people who piously defended the right to dissent suddenly writing off public protest as a subversive conspiracy.

3. It isn't fascism if…actually, you can stop there. IT ISN'T FASCISM, you numbskulls. Nancy Pelosi complained this month that protesters were "carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on health care." The swastikas in question had slashes through them or were inscribed next to slogans like "No to Fascism," but Pelosi's remark made it sound as though the demonstrators were displaying the Nazi iconography approvingly. In the aftermath, as foes of Pelosi's plans reacted angrily, liberal groups like Media Matters argued that Pelosi had merely been innocently describing some of the signs she'd seen. But it's hard to believe she wasn't trying to insinuate that her foes were fascists.

Some people won't stop at insinuation. The liberal writer Sara Robinson has composed a remarkable essay for OurFuture.org called "Fascist America: Are We There Yet?" It begins by recalling "the dark years of the Bush Administration," when "Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history's worst dictators." Many on the left were worried that we were becoming a fascist state, Robinson continues, but she and her colleagues didn't think we were there yet: "though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde….The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess."

Then, scaremongering with a shamelessness that would embarrass even the direct-mail industry, she lets the other shoe drop:

Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas—the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer—being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process—and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."

This is the sign we were waiting for—the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.

It's easy to throw this sort of argument back in Robinson's face. While a few of those "discontended far right thugs" have engaged in low-level violence or intimidation, the same is true of a few of the activists on the other side of the issue, a fact that prompted the conservative blogger Michelle Malkin to give the Service Employees International Union's lavender-clad activists an equally hyperbolic (though admittedly funny) tag, the "Purple Shirts."

But that isn't the deeper problem here. Nor is it the fact that we do not, in fact, "know beyond doubt" that the Tea Parties were "created out of whole cloth" by Astroturfers. It's the fact that Robinson begins her essay with a reference to the real expansions of executive power during the Bush years, but by the end doesn't seem to have any interest in discussing the topic, even though most of those constitutional protections are still missing and the president is still taking on new powers. Instead we're supposed to be afraid of a group whose only sin is sometimes to be unruly or paranoid—as though both unruliness and paranoia haven't been a constant presence in American history from the beginning. At the end, she complains: "Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we're slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return." Set aside the fact that many countries have, in fact, returned from fascism. How did we reach the point where people exercising their First Amendment rights are an existential threat to liberty, while freedom's defenders are those who won't "allow" the noisemakers "to hold up our ability to govern"?

The swastika signs are silly, and I won't defend them. But there's a difference between a little Nazi-baiting invective against the powers that be, and Nazi-baiting invective against a group of citizens whose sin is simply to get in their governors' way. Yes, the protesters sometimes sound like a teenager who can't tell the difference between the petty tyrant in the principal's office and Benito Mussolini. But writers like Robinson resemble Basil Fawlty self-righteously declaring "this is exactly how Nazi Germany started" when his guests complain about the service at his hotel.

Jesse Walker is managing editor of Reason magazine.

[Brock]

ils vont l'avoir leur obamacare; le prochain president republicain gagnera en promettant de la retirer et n'en fera rien.

je predis l'avenir je suis trop fort.

[Nick de Cusa]

J'ai un doute. Les fascistes n'étaient-ils pas favorables à l'étatisation de la santé?

[Brock]

?

comprends pas

[Nick de Cusa]

Pelosi accuse les opposants à l'étatisation de la santé d'être des fascistes. Or, si la réponse à ma question est oui, sur ce point pariculier, c'est bien elle qui serait d'accord avec les fascistes. Sur ce point j'ai bien dit, je ne la soupcçonne pas de purger ses opposants à l'huile de ricin jusqu'à ce que mort s'en suive.

[Normous]

ils vont l'avoir leur obamacare; le prochain president republicain gagnera en promettant de la retirer et n'en fera rien.

je predis l'avenir je suis trop fort.

+1

[Brock]

Pelosi accuse les opposants à l'étatisation de la santé d'être des fascistes. Or, si la réponse à ma question est oui, sur ce point pariculier, c'est bien elle qui serait d'accord avec les fascistes. Sur ce point j'ai bien dit, je ne la soupcçonne pas de purger ses opposants à l'huile de ricin jusqu'à ce que mort s'en suive.

c'est encore plus bete que ca; d'apres ce que j'ai lu les contestataires republicains avaient des signes nazi BARRES dont Pelosi a cite la presence sans preciser qu'ils s'adressaient a elle.

bon d'un autre cote faut bien avouer que partir direct dans le trip Obama=Hitler ne sert pas la cause.

J'ai regarde (pas fou) discuter des amies hier soir qui hallucinaient sur le rapprochement Obama=Hitler; la plupart des democrates de la foule ne connaissent pas l'histoire des totalitarismes et/ou n'en connaissent que les composantes autoritaires.

L'idee securite sociale=>problemes economiques=>etat qui gonfle=>etat autoritaire est un elastique beaucoup trop long pour la plupart des democrates; la plupart des gens d'obedience democratoide etant generalement des taches en economie…

le seul bon argument par comparaison serait la fRance, mais personne ne ressent de l'exterieur la situation pathetique du pays, Sarkozy donne l'impression que c'est l'etat autoritaire qui est le danger, c'est la confusion qui regne, merci les medias: en effet, dans chaque petit article, une simple mention culturelle sur les raison des republicains pour rejeter le obamacare pourrait eclaircir les choses ,mais ooooh non surtout pas.

[Glockinette]

bon d'un autre cote faut bien avouer que partir direct dans le trip Obama=Hitler ne sert pas la cause.

+1

Cela-dit, de nombreux Démocrates sont eux-aussi opposés au projet d'Obama. Alors, j'ai tendance à dire wait and see.

[h16]

L'idee securite sociale=>problemes economiques=>etat qui gonfle=>etat autoritaire est un elastique beaucoup trop long pour la plupart des democrates; la plupart des gens d'obedience democratoide etant generalement des taches en economie…

Je crois qu'on peut dire ça.

Certains vont jusqu'à citer Jorion ou Todd.

Rah ah ah.

Excusez-moi, c'est nerveux.

[Hobbart]

Je comprends que la bataille autour d'ObamaCare fasse rage.

Avec un président qui préconise davantage de coloscopies pour mieux détecter le cancer de la prostate, c'est pas gagné :

Now, when we pass health insurance reform, insurance companies will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime. And we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses, because no one in America should go broke because they get sick. (Applause.)

And finally — this is important — we will require insurance companies to cover routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies — (applause) — because there’s no reason we shouldn’t be catching diseases like breast cancer and prostate cancer on the front end. That makes sense, it saves lives; it also saves money — and we need to save money in this health care system.

Lien.

[RLux]

http://vimeo.com/5752470

08:47 - 09:16

Que des commies…

[Nirvana]

You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.

You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn't get mad when we spent over 600 billion(and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.

You didn't get mad when you saw the Abu Grahib photos.

You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden.

You didn't get mad when wes upports Israel when they attacks it's naighbors without provocation, killing inocent children.

You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn't get mad when we let a major US city drown.

You didn't get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.

You finally got mad when.. when… wait for it… when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all ok with you but helping other Americans… well fuck that. That about right? You know it is.

You people have all lost your fucking minds. You are selfish, greedy, obnoxious, narcissistic, and frankly… stupid. Your pathetic little misspelled protest signs are embarrassing. Maybe you ought to find the smart person in your midst and let them make up all the signs, cause man, you look like a bunch of idiots. Also you're ugly and your mother dresses you funny.

(Anonyme)

Posté aussi dans "les phrases qui vous ont fait hérisser le poil".

[Ash]

C'est bien gentil tout ça mais les démocrates ont voter et approuver la guerre. Et avant l'ère néoconne, ils n'étaient pas en reste pour aller envahir l'étranger.

[José]

Les Démocrates semblent reculer sur le dossier Obamacare : "White House appears ready to drop 'public option'".

[Nirvana]

Roger Ebert, critique de films que je respecte et dont je lis régulièrement les articles, prix Pulitzer, et survivant d'un cancer de la thyroïde, vient de publier une note intéressante sur son site. Ce n'est pas libéral-friendly, mais j'ai trouvé que ça valait la peine de la copier ici :

"Death Panels." A most excellent term.

By Roger Ebert

on August 17, 2009 12:37 PM

"Death panels" is such an excellent term. You know exactly what it means, and therefore you know you're against them. Debate over. This term more than anything else seems to have unified the opposition to the Obama health care proposals. It fuels the anger that has essentially shut down "town hall" meetings intended for the discussion of the issues.

Of course the term is inspired by a lie. There are no conceivable plans to form "death panels" or anything like them. The Obama plan, which has some bipartisan support, doesn't seek or desire to get involved in any decisions about who should live and who should die. But now we hear "death panel" repeated so often that the term has taken on a sort of eerie reality, as if it really referred to anything.

I think we're all in favor of counseling and palliative care being available to the terminally ill. As a man who has been very near death myself in the last few years, I have made it clear to my wife and physicians that I have no desire for my life to be prolonged unreasonably by artificial means. To be kept alive by mechanical methods after any meaningful form of life remains to me is a horrifying thought. It would make a parody of the fullness of my life, to myself and others.

All I desire is that extreme measures simply be discontinued. This does not involve anyone "pulling the plug" on me, or having to feel responsible for my death. It means that my body is being allowed to come to the end of its natural duration, and that I will die. I am content to die. People have been doing it for long time.

It's only in recent decades that the technology has existed to prolong the "signs of life" indefinitely. Doctors for ages have reached a point where they inform families, "there is no more that can be done." In these modern times that is much more that can be done, but to what end? To prolong a life that has been emptied of purpose, activity, accomplishment, joy? To extend the suffering of our loved ones? To receive treatment that is potentially more expensive than everything that has gone before? What is the purpose?

Of course I am in favor of life-saving intervention when it was appropriate. Some days after my first jaw surgery for cancer, it appeared to be a success. The cancerous area had been removed, my jaw had been reconstructed using my fibula bone, the wound had been closed, my appearance was acceptable, my tongue and vocal equipment was still functional, and there was reason to believe I would be able to speak--perhaps not on television any longer, but well enough to be understood by anyone caring to try.

I was actually in the process of being returned home. My body from the neck down was perfectly healthy. Suddenly, catastrophic bleeding began. A carotid artery near the surgery site ruptured. It was sheer good chance that this happened at the hospital and not at home, where I would certainly have died.

It was touch-and-go. The bleeding seemed impossible to stop. The affected tissue had been weakened by radiation. Only within the last year has my wife informed me that at one point it appeared I had died. She sensed I was still alive, and asked the doctors to keep working. I am happy that they did. The bleeding was finally staunched, my breathing was maintained with a tracheotomy, I was in critical care, but I lived and am here today to write this.

Of course I am happy that heroic measures were made to save my life. It was still worth living. I had a sound mind in an (otherwise) sound body. I received excellent medical treatment, which we all have a right to. I had good insurance coverage. I am not willing to say that the millions of Americans who cannot afford insurance would have been left to die, but throughout the course of their lives they would have lacked much medical care they needed. And we've all heard stories of hospital refusing admission to people without coverage. I think it would be difficult to check into many hospitals for cancer surgery if you had no insurance.

The notion of "universal health care" does not mean "socialized medicine." It means just what it seems to mean. America is the only developed nation on earth that does not provide it. Why does it inspire such virulent opposition? Who is behind it? It is opposed mostly from the far right, whose enthusiasm seems to be encouraged by financial support from some (not all) insurance companies. Those companies have priced American insurance out of the reach of millions.

One result has been that our national life expectancy ranks 42nd among all developed nations. We spend more on medical care that any other nation, and get less than 41 of them. These figures are pretty clear.

I don't pretend to know if this information is available to the angry people who have shouted down their representatives at town hall meetings. I think I do know where their anger is fed. The drumbeat of far-right commentators fuels it. Their agenda is not health care, but opposition to the Obama administration. It takes the form of demonizing Obama. It uses the tactic of the Big Lie to defame him him. An example of this is the fiction, "he wants to kill your grandmother." Another is the outrageous statement that he is a racist who hates white people. A person capable of saying that is clearly unhinged and in the grip of unconditional hatred.

This brings us full circle to the term "death panels." As nearly as I can determine, it first gained circulation when it was used by Sarah Palin. She employed it on her Facebook page. It is a term of genius, as demonstrated by how quickly it has entered into common usage.

There's something a little…too perfect…about it. Did it spring into her mind in an instant, while she was typing away on Facebook? It has the feel of having been coined or crafted. She would have been the ideal conduit for it. As a sitting governor, it would have been inappropriate for her to make policy statements on her Facebook page. As a private citizen, she remains as visible as before, and every change on her Facebook page is subjected to minute scrutiny. Now she is reportedly adding Twitter to her means of self-expression.

These are ideal platforms. While a speech must create a context for a political claim, the nature of such net outlets allow her to toss out zingers that seem, but are not, complete ideas. If one were a right-wing strategist, one could think of no better conduit for the term "death panels" than Sarah Palin's Facebook page. There it achieved instant publicity, and it was not what she said about "death panels" but the fact that she said it that achieved notoriety.

I'm not saying she coined the term. For all I know, it appeared for the first time elsewhere. She is responsible for its fame. Whether she coined it or heard it and merely passed it on, it rang a loud bell with her, and fit nicely into her anti-Obama agenda. What did it mean? Why should she ask? It refers in real life to policies that she herself has advocated. But her interest was not in health care. It was in Obama.

"Death panels" is an example of a meme. A meme is a word, phrase, saying, idea or belief that passes from one mind to another. The Domino Effect. Alligators in the sewers. Blondes have more fun. Tax and Spend. The New Frontier. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Swiftboating. Where's the beef? The King of Beers.

A meme succeeds because it survives and reproduces. It works. It has utility. It can define an issue in the desired way. It is almost impossible to refute, because it seems so clearly to open and close the subject simultaneously. Even a single adjective is fatal to it. It admits of no qualifiers: "When the going gets tough, the tough, if they want to live to fight another day, reevaluate the situation." How's that for a lousy meme?

I saw a documentary last year about Lee Atwater, the strategist for the Reagan and George H. W. Bush campaigns, the mentor of Karl Rove and George Bush. The man was a brilliant creator of memes. Among his coinages were "Whitewater," which inspired a $70 million federal investigation into a $28,000 financial loss. He made "Willie Horton" a code term. He got many people to believe "Michael Dukakis opposed the Pledge of Allegiance." He was capable of outrageous invention, as when about the Willie Horton ad he said with a straight face: "I don't think a lot of Southerners even noticed there was a black man in that ad."

Atwater might have been proud of "Death panels." Those two little words have derailed the town hall meetings, by stirring up such unruly dissent that legislators have been shouted down by their own constituents. The town halls were designed to promote rational discussion of health care, a dialogue between lawmakers and their constituents. They have failed. Now those two words threaten to derail the public option provisions of the Obama plan.

Do you know what the "public option" is? It would be the establishment of a federal fund to provide health insurance for those who cannot afford it. I have the feeling that if Jay Leno went Jaywalking among the protesters at a town hall meeting, even those holding signs opposing the public option, he would find few able to define the term.

If you lack insurance coverage, are you opposed to the public option? If your premiums have increased so much that you can't afford them, do you oppose it? If you have a "preexisting condition" that disqualifies you from insurance, do you oppose it? If it would provide you with equivalent insurance at a lower cost, do you oppose it? Most Americans, even those angry people at town hall meetings, now approve of MediCare. The public option would essentially make a system like MediCare available to the general population.

Would it replace private health insurance? Not at all. It would provide an option. Who opposes it? Do the math. The insurance companies do. It would provide price competition for their extremely profitable businesses. Price competition. It's the capitalist way. Besides insurance companies, who else opposes it? The unwavering opponents of all things Obama.

Having arrived at a qualifying age thanks to the love and care of my wife and doctors, I am writing this as the beneficiary of the excellent heath care my insurance plan covered (until my illness exhausted its provisions). I am now covered under MediCare. I continue to get the same treatment as before--and as, for that matter, all members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives do, no matter what their age or political party. You should try it sometime.

Joan of Arc faces the Death Panel

Joan goes to her death

My Great Movie essay on "The Passion of Joan of Arc.".

Headline, August 17, 2009:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/08/de…llent_phra.html

[h16]

Ouais mais tout le problème de cette "option", c'est que même ceux qui n'en veulent pas la payent.

Comme option, c'est fûté. Une option obligatoire, en somme.

[Nirvana]

Man carries assault rifle to Obama protest -- and it's legal

PHOENIX, Arizona (CNN) -- A man toting an assault rifle was among a dozen protesters carrying weapons while demonstrating outside President Barack Obama's speech to veterans on Monday, but no laws were broken. It was the second instance in recent days in which unconcealed weapons have appeared near presidential events.

Article complet ici : http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/17…ifle/index.html

[Glockinette]

Ouais mais tout le problème de cette "option", c'est que même ceux qui n'en veulent pas la payent.

Comme option, c'est fûté. Une option obligatoire, en somme.

Exact. Et les gens ne sont pas fous. Ils n'en veulent pas, de cette "option obligatoire".

[Hobbart]

Quelqu'un connaît ?

http://bureaucrash.com/

Bureaucrash is an international network of activists, called crashers, who share the goal of increasing individual freedom and decreasing the scope of government. Through Bureaucrash Social, crashers connect and collaborate on ways to use guerrilla marketing and new media to introduce others to the ideas of individual liberty, personal responsibility, and free markets. In short, we fight for freedom.

Bureaucrash Manifesto:

We believe that individuals are sovereign and own their own bodies.

We believe that every person has a right to make decisions about his or her own life, as long as those decisions do not directly harm other people.

We believe that no person has a right to use force against another person – to steal what they have earned or threaten their body or property.

We believe that when a government makes a new rule, it threatens to use force against someone (or everyone).

We believe that when bureaucrats and politicians have the power to make arbitrary rules, they steal our choices.

Therefore, we believe that if governments are to exist they should be small and just have the power to protect us from force and fraud.

Because we believe that any other arrangement breeds corruption and gives other people (bureaucrats) power over us.

Any other arrangement makes us all slaves to the bureaucrats.

[Nick de Cusa]

Oui, c'est connu.