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blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
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Oct 13, 2009 - 06:46pm PT
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I admit to not having read every post on this thread.
If Wes's point is simply that the country should provide some minimum level of care to its citizens (and non-citizens?) as a form of charity (although Wes may not characterize it as such), I don't have a problem with that and basically agree.
But many are rightly concerned that the "public option" will become the de facto standard care for all but the elite, such as Obama, his family, his wealthy Hollywood supporters, etc. I'm not part of the gang and never will be.
But I do make a decent living and would prefer to be primarily responsible for deciding how hard I want to work and how much money I want to try to make, and how much money I want to spend on health care. And I'd rather not be taxed up the wazoo to pay for someone else's decision not to work, to go to the doctor every time he has a sniffle or needs a pain Rx refilled, etc.
Having a different view as to the optimal level of government entanglement into people's lives doesn't make someone an idiot or a fool, especially since most of us are just arguing about degrees rather than all or none. But I do start to wonder about the intelligence (or at least the level of intellectual rigor) of someone else who bandies about such accusations against everyone with whom he disagrees.
And thanks to Wes for his "than/then" correction--if I find myself having nothing better to do than proofread Wes's posts, I'll try to return the favor.
Edit: oh and by the way, if you can't see meaningful distinctions between roads and health care, then YOU'RE THE FOOL. Not to say you can't make the analogy, but come on!
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corniss chopper
Mountain climber
san jose, ca
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Oct 13, 2009 - 10:58pm PT
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Don't forget the knife in the back this bill actually is
for already sick folks (in treatment) who's employers pay big
monthly premiums. they will be
assessed a 40% 'tax' for their so-called Cadillac plans.
This will be passed on to the employee by
reducing benefits (real nasty if they cut the treatment you
are using to get well).
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Oct 14, 2009 - 03:28am PT
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Good old Reagan. Excellent at making a funny statement, even if not true.
When he was born in 1911, the average life expectancy of Americans was about 40 years. It is now over 75.
What happened?
Who did what happened?
I'll leave a clue. It was an institution of some sort.
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blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
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Oct 14, 2009 - 10:23am PT
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Ken M wrote:
"What happened?
Who did what happened?
I'll leave a clue. It was an institution of some sort."
OK, I give up. What did happen? I'm really not sure what your answer is, but I doubt that increasing life expectancy has the neat and simple answer your question implies.
From a certain point of view, increasing life expectancy correlates with increasing wealth, which seems to be best generated by a primarily capitalist system. Some of the excess wealth can be used for public health projects (better sewage systems and clean water, vaccinations and medical research, etc.)
To the extent I have a point in this, it's to have a healthy skepticism of whatever the men in power are selling, whether it's a "conservative" (not really) like dubya or a liberal like Obama.
Unlike some on this thread, I'm not knee jerk against government. But it seems to me that the size of government is already huge, and we should think carefully before expanding it further, which seems to be Obama's solution to every problem.
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tom Slater
Trad climber
Central Coast CA
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Oct 14, 2009 - 11:40am PT
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Bluering said it waaaay back...
"He was nominated for it after being in office for 10 days???
Bwahaahahaa, what a joke!!!
He now joins the ranks of Carter, Arafat, and Al Gore...congrats!"
But who knows, now maybe he'll be pressured into actually having to do something. And as far as unity and peace etc... this country has never been more divided, which sucks. I say scrap both political parties and start over. Neither seem to be doing any of us any good. Or we could just vote on a dictator... I vote for Dingus. I like how he is straight forward and he makes me laugh, which is more than I can say for the other crooks.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Oct 15, 2009 - 09:24am PT
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A Decadent Nobel
A prize for soft moralism.
By DANIEL HENNINGER
So Donald Rumsfeld was right about Old Europe.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has taken it in the neck for awarding this year's Peace Prize to a nine-month old American presidency. There's been much mockery of pencil-necked Norwegian academics in faraway Oslo. This is unfair.
The committee said it chose Barack Obama for his "vision of . . . a world without nuclear weapons" and for "meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting." I'd say that completes the argument over old and new Europe. This is a Nobel of decadence.
Let's be clear. This decadence isn't primarily about Roman Polanski or Silvio Berlusconi's playboy club or French culture minister Frederic Mitterrand's adventures in Thailand. Though these are not irrelevant.
This Nobel is about political decadence.
"Decadence," an enduring word, emerged from the Latin "de-cadere," which means "to fall down." Decadence stripped bare means decay.
Daniel Henninger discusses the Norwegian committee's decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama and what it says about Europe.
•Podcast The unanswered question at the center of this odd Nobel is whether Barack Obama admires Old Europe for the same reasons it admires him.
When it was a vibrant garden of ideas, Europe gave the world more good things than one can count. Then it discovered the pleasures of the welfare state.
Old Europe now lives in a world of unpayable public pension obligations, weak job creation for its youngest workers, below-replacement birth rates, fat agricultural subsidies for farms dating to the Middle Ages, high taxes to pay for the public high-life, and history's most crucial proof of decay—the inability to finance one's armies. Only five of the 28 nations in NATO (the U.K., France, Turkey, Greece and Spain) achieve the minimum defense-spending benchmark of 2% of GDP.
The effect of arriving at a state of political decadence, of no longer being able to rise in the world, is that many people increasingly discover that soft moralism is a more congenial pastime than producing answers for the hard questions. As when David Cameron, the Tory leader and likely next British prime minister wonders: "The insatiable consumption and materialism of the past decade; has it made us happier or more fulfilled?"
This isn't to say that soft moralism is about nothing. But when matters such as climate change become life's primary concerns, it means one is going to spend more time preaching, which is easy, than doing, which is hard. One thinks of Nobelist Al Gore's unstoppable sermons.
Among the hardest questions Europe faced after World War II was the placement of anti-Soviet Pershing missiles on Europe's soil in 1983. Led by Helmut Kohl and Maggie Thatcher, Europe did something hard: It overcame its pacifists. A decade later, with the siege of Sarajevo, old Europe came to understand that making the hardest decisions was now beyond its reach.
Current hard questions include Pakistan and Afghanistan. Darfur is a hard question. Where to hold captured terrorists is a hard question.
Americans heard often the past four years how much Europe "hated" us because of that most complex of hard questions, the Iraq war. Unpopular wars cause bad feelings to be sure, but past some point Europe's antipathy toward the U.S. over Iraq began to sound a lot like moralistic decadence. It is a neurotic resentment of a superpower merely because it possesses the resources to do something Europe can no longer do, for good or ill.
View Full Image
Associated Press
Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland
What we are in the process of discovering is just how much President Obama's worldview coincides with that of the continent that claims to have seen itself reflected in him and its Peace Prize.
Mr. Obama is at a crossroads in his presidency. As George W. Bush departed the White House, he said his successor would one day arrive at the need to make a decision that made clear the reality of being the American president. That moment has arrived. It is the pending troop-deployment for Afghanistan, a very hard decision.
After that, Mr. Obama will go to Oslo Dec. 10 to receive the Prize itself. That will occur in the middle of the Dec. 7-18 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen, whose goal is among the explicit reasons why Mr. Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize.
Between Afghanistan and Oslo, we're going to get some clarity about the Obama presidency.
Perhaps the most intriguing onlooker to this education is European Nicolas Sarkozy. On his good days, France's president seems aware of the political and economic decay he has inherited. So it was striking at the United Nations last month when Mr. Sarkozy said that Mr. Obama "dreams of a world without nuclear arms." Then, describing Iran's nuclear threat, he said, "At a certain moment hard facts will force us to make decisions."
By "us" he means that the U.S. must lead. In the West, only the U.S. president can still make decisions based on hard facts rather than recede into soft moralism. The day that is no longer true, the U.S. will finally deserve a decadent Nobel.
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philo
Trad climber
boulder, co.
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Oct 15, 2009 - 10:25am PT
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Good work Radical! Keep it up.
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philo
Trad climber
boulder, co.
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Oct 15, 2009 - 10:47am PT
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Oh and by the way, Congratulations President Obama!
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Dec 10, 2009 - 11:46pm PT
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The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.
So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another -- that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldier's courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause, to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.
The text of Obama's speech fills six webpages, probably equal to ten or more printed 8.5 x 11 pages. Plus analysis and commentary. You can't have read it in six minutes, let alone considered it. Perhaps you should have done so. Obama may not have delivered a flag-waving chest-thumping speech, and it was hardly the place for it. And like most such speeches by all politicians, it may have been hot air. But soldiers and veterans particularly may take more comfort in what Obama said than the words of a vainglorious chickenhawk moron who landed on an aircraft carrier and fatuously proclaimed "mission accomplished".
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Dec 10, 2009 - 11:56pm PT
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I hear ya LEB, just read those pinko military-hating comments he made to his swedish peace-nik hippy friends
When do we vote for impeachment!!??
;-)
Karl
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apogee
climber
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Dec 10, 2009 - 11:58pm PT
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(Cross-posted from earlier today on the 'Repugs are Wrong' thread):
Hey, did you hear Obama's Nobel PP acceptance speech today? He sounded remarkably contrite, acknowledging of it's undeserved nature, and unapologetic for the irony of being a POTUS managing two wars. Some excerpts:
"Compared to some of the giants of history who've received this prize -- Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela -- my accomplishments are slight."
"But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 42 other countries -- including Norway -- in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks."
"And over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war. The concept of a "just war" emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence."
http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2009/12/obamas_nobel_peace_prize_speec.html
If you didn't know better, it would be easy to mistake his comments on the US stance towards the wars as one of Shrub & the neocons.
Come on, Repubs...when it comes to war, Obama has been like Shrub III- what's not to love?
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Dec 11, 2009 - 12:30am PT
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"But he would never do any such thing, however, because deep down inside he does not think much of the troops, the officers or anything remotely related to these folks i.e. the military. He simply knows better than to reveal as much."
I try not to let stuff get to me, but that is just pure bullsh*t.
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dogtown
Trad climber
JackAssVille, Wyoming
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Dec 11, 2009 - 12:51am PT
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Obama Win's Peace prize Joke!!!
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dogtown
Trad climber
JackAssVille, Wyoming
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Dec 11, 2009 - 12:53am PT
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Gorge Bush wins peace prize Joker.
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dogtown
Trad climber
JackAssVille, Wyoming
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Dec 11, 2009 - 12:55am PT
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Super Topo wins peace prize.
Winner!
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Dec 11, 2009 - 01:50am PT
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Leb writes
"Your man is a liar. He is just about as partisan as they come."
He gave a pretty humble speech Lois.
I'm guessing he said mostly, if not all, things you actually agree with. What's not to Love? You should be relieved that he sounds like Bush on the military questions, having a surge like in Iraq, and stuff.
I'm the one who thinks he's probably making a mistake. You just have one of your biased "Feelings" about Obama. He's doing pretty much what you wanted and hasn't raised a dime of your taxes either from what I can tell
Whaaaa!!!
Peace
Karl
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Chaz
Trad climber
greater Boss Angeles area
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Dec 11, 2009 - 02:08am PT
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TV News was interviewing local Euros to see what they thought of Obama's peace prize.
They all pronounced it "piss price".
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apogee
climber
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Dec 11, 2009 - 02:09am PT
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"Obama Win's Peace prize Joke!!!"
Dog, I'd say that even the most starry-eyed Obama-groupie, at the very least, is still scratching their heads about his PP win. As odd as their rationale might have been, the Norwegians gave it to him- the issue now is how he reacts and accepts it.
If you read the text of his speech, esp. in regards to the description of a 'just war', you could close your eyes and easily imagine the neo-con puppet GWB standing before the UN making a case for the Iraq war.
And yet, he will still be crucified by the right.
Politics are not rational.
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Delhi Dog
Trad climber
Good Question...
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Dec 11, 2009 - 02:47am PT
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"But he would never do any such thing, however, because deep down inside he does not think much of the troops, the officers or anything remotely related to these folks i.e. the military. He simply knows better than to reveal as much."
"I try not to let stuff get to me, but that is just pure bullsh*t."
Me too Survival...
Tell me LEB how in the heck do you know what goes on deep down inside anyone let alone Obama?
I can understand if you don't like him, don't agree with him, or whatever, but I got to say your spaying complete BS with that or you actually have the ability to "know" people's inner most thoughts/feelings/ideas/etc.
You just may be what some folks think of as god if that's the case.
Cheers,
DD
scary...
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