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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Nader is delusional, which is a shame.
In that piece, he feels that the people who had polled for him, but who voted for Obama, sold out. "A vote for Nader or Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney in 2008 was an act of defiance."
No, it was a vote vote for McCain.
As we have a debate about intelligence, this guy still doesn't have the courage or integrity to admit that he lost elections to republicans, to wit, Gore. (setting aside the Supreme Court business, which wouldn't have mattered)
And if having Bush as President instead of Gore didn't change the course of this country (Nader claims that it would have made no difference), then there is no talking.
Nader represents that same wacko fringe on the left, that is as wacko as the fringe on the right. He and Perot, the're a pair.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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where's the follow up JE
I have a paying job, and am at work this morning, so I post on breaks. The article you posted is so full of baloney [you can choose stronger language if you wish, but I find its overuse adalpates the brain] that I haven't the time to refute its insanity.
Corporate slavery? Back to a feudalist system? That requires a response for rational people? C'mon. . .
John
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Effective this year with the bill, all health insurance companies MUST spend at least 85% of their income on their customers healthcare.
Prior to this, each State had their own regulations and some some states had none.
That means that in the past they could kept as much as fifty percent of monthly premiums as profits paid out to their top office executives.
No more of that crap.
But the bill should be REPEALED because it is, wait for it.........SOCIALISM....somehow
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Ken, it is hard not to use the argument that a vote for Nadar in FL was a vote for Bush.
A while ago, I decided to vote my true feelings rather than on the lesser of two evils. I honestly believe what Nadar had said--both the Repubs and the Dems have the same sponsors. Just take a look at who gives to their campaigns.
In the piece that Dr. F. posted above, Nadar shows how the MSM has taken the Left out of circulation, how they do not cover demonstrations and such. And I have seen this. "The Peace Riots" come to mind.
Perhaps you don't like Nadar, that's fine. But his message is clear and true.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Ken M,
Anyone may attend as a guest, I will be a "guest" this year, I did not seek appointment as a voting member this year.
I may have to ski to Sacramento to attend!
To show you what a bizarre person I am, several years back, I was leading a volunteer trail crew in the remote sierra, and one of the guys was a member of the Riverside(?) GOP Central Committee. We had some great debates around the campfire (others were horrified). However, at the end of the week, we shook hands in respect. At one point, I made a suggestion: I suggested that their group invite the chair of the democratic committee come speak to their group, and vice versa....that the reality is, that both sides have far more in common in furtherance of the good of America.
He smiled, shook his head, and said that I was delusional if I thought that could ever happen.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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"The article you posted is so full of baloney ..."
Complete dodge. But expected.
Somebody close the window...it's drafty in here.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Effective this year with the bill, all health insurance companies MUST spend at least 85% of their income on their customers healthcare.
There is a little trick involved, that is never discussed.
What is stated above is not QUITE true. Health insurance co's don't provice healthcare......they CONTRACT for it. That is what the 85% goes for. The rest goes for marketing, profit, overhead, etc.
However, when that 85% is used to contract, lets say, with Sutter Medical Group (for example), THEY also have their own overhead, marketing, profit, and for such groups, that can range from about 20-30%. (smaller, less efficient).
So, assuming the best case of 20% for the group,
68 % of the premium dollar winds up being spent for medical care.
32 % of the premium dollar winds up being spent for overhead.
Now, I predict that what will happen, as there is no restriction on the overhead on the downstream Medical Group overhead percentage, that the Insurance Company will seek to push some of it's overhead expenses in the form of marketing down to the Medical group, in the form of the contractual obligation, or other things that the Insurance is otherwise currently providing under the contract.
Compare this with Medicare, in which the overhead is arguably 3-5% of the dollar paid in.
Insurance companies are evil.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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"insurance companies need to be carefully watched and regulated, they can be abusive"
and you think barry is the man for the job?
http://americaswatchtower.com/2010/11/15/the-obama-administration-issues-111-healthcare-waivers/
if insurance companies are so evil, why is barry letting so many of them off the hook? and does that make him evil, too? and if obamacare is so wonderful and will reduce health care costs, then why do so many insurance companies need waivers and why is barry so willing to grant them? and why are so many unions (including seiu) now denying/reducing coverage? and if the government can make us buy health care, then what can't it make us buy?
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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I would never vote for Nadar
But I respect his opinions, and want to hear what he has to say
Unlike the right, that would hang him if they could, and quickly dismiss him as a loon
I vote only one way "Anti-Republican"
any one that has a chance to beat the Republican candidate, Thats who I vote for
Comrade F, can't say I go that far, although I don't think I've voted for a Repub since I can remember.
I do think that "rank and file" repub supporters do so, often, because they have legitimate grievances. They are often outraged by things that outrage us. I just think our approach to solutions are different. But I think we dismiss them as wrongly as they dismiss Nader.
I don't negate the legitimacy of some of his positions. However, his rhetoric is so extreme, and his characterizations are so bizarre and twisted, I find him embarrassing. He marginalizes himself.
Comrade Ken
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Anybody who blames their health care premium increases on "Obamacare" is a moron.
It's, uh, RomneyCare.
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Captain...or Skully
climber
leading the away team, but not in a red shirt!
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We're ALL gonna die, anyway.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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what parts?
I like a little fire now and again
"rise up in multiple acts of physical defiance"
I don't like the sound of that.
See, I think the left abandoned President Obama, requiring him to move to the center to govern. The result was the midterm spanking, and the Rich tax extension.
However, the left abandoned Gore. The result was John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who's effect will be in place for perhaps 30 additional years. Way, way, way, beyond any effect that GW Bush himself will have had.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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"However, the left abandoned Gore. The result was John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who's effect will be in place for perhaps 30 additional years. Way, way, way, beyond any effect that GW Bush himself will have had."
What, is there something about Citizens v United that you don't particularly like?
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Rox, Abbie Hoffman was NOT murdered as you claim.
From wiki
Hoffman was 52 at the time of his death on April 12, 1989, which was caused by swallowing 150 Phenobarbital tablets. He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1980;[28] while he recently changed treatment medications, he claimed in public to have been upset about his elderly mother, Florence's, cancer diagnosis (Jezer, 1993). Hoffman's body was found in his apartment in a converted turkey coop on Sugan Road in Solebury Township, near New Hope, Pennsylvania. At the time of his death, he was surrounded by about 200 pages of his own handwritten notes, many about his own moods.
His death was officially ruled a suicide.[29] As reported by The New York Times, "Among the more vocal doubters at the service today was Mr. Dellinger, who said, 'I don't believe for one moment the suicide thing.' He said he had been in fairly frequent touch with Mr. Hoffman, who had 'numerous plans for the future.'" Yet the same New York Times article reported that the coroner found the residue of about 150 pills and quoted the coroner in a telephone interview saying 'There is no way to take that amount of phenobarbital without intent. It was intentional and self-inflicted.' [29]
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shut up and pull
climber
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Victor Davis Hansen, Stanford Hoover Fellow and Central Valley farmer, just nails this one:
RAGING AGAINST "THEM"
It’s All Greek to Us
In very un-Icelandic fashion, last week protestors in Athens tried to blow up a downtown courthouse. Over a year after the Hellenic meltdown, the Greek newspapers still reflect the popular fury—protests, strikes, senseless violence—at the mandatory cutbacks, the public sector layoffs, and the high-interest needed to attract investors to shaky Greek bonds. And yet amid the furor, 60% of the public still polls in favor of the European Union. How are we to diagnose the drowning non-swimmer who eagerly grasps—and yet hates—the life preserver?
A bit of story-telling: When I lived in Greece in the 1970s, it was a relatively poor country. The road system was deplorable; the airport at Athens was little more than an insulated warehouse. I usually stayed in hotels with bathrooms down the hall. A bus trip of about 200 miles translated into about a six hour marathon. The buses were often of eastern European make and spewed black smoke into the Athenian air whose toxic bite could devour marble. Rail travel was nightmarish (biking was quicker). There was no bridge across the Gulf of Corinth. The Athens “subway” was little more than a 19th century electric carriage.
Greeks’ second homes were one bedroom village affairs. It was rare to see a Mercedes in Athens. I knew one Greek who had a swimming pool. Getting off an island ferry boat usually meant meeting a swarm of older ladies trying to hawk you their extra bedroom for rent.
You get the picture:1970s Greece reflected a small southern Balkan population wedded to a siesta lifestyle, on a rocky peninsula in which there was little wealth other than tourism, a poorly developed agriculture, some shipping, and remittances from Greek expatriates in the United States and Germany.
Fast forward to the post-Olympics Greece: five star hotels, 20,000 plus private swimming pools (most of them unreported for tax purposes), half the work force ensconced in cushy government or government-related jobs, Attica dotted with Riviera-like second homes, BMWs more common than Mercedeses, billions of euros worth of new highways, and a new airport and subway system.
In other words, somehow a country without a manufacturing base and with poor productivity, a small population, an inefficient statist economy, and bloated public sector suddenly went from near third world status to a standard of living not that much different from a Munich or Amsterdam. How? Did Greek socialism produce all that wealth?
Well, we know the answer: northern European cash—borrowed, given, or swindled. The radical new affluence in part was justified by the fact that Germans and Scandinavians wanted good infrastructure and facilities when they went on their annual summer Greek vacations—along with pan-EU pipe dreams and fraudulent Greek book keeping that disguised massive debt.
Now? Oz is over with and the Greeks are furious at “them.” Furious in the sense that everyone must be blamed except themselves. So they protest and demonstrate that they do not wish to stop borrowing money to sustain a lifestyle that they have not earned—but do not wish to cut ties either with their EU beneficiaries and go it alone as in the 1970s. So they rage against reality.
California Got What It Wanted
The same is true of California. Our elites liked the idea of stopping new gas and oil extraction, shutting down the nuclear power industry, freezing state east-west freeways, strangling the mining and timber industries, cutting off water to agriculture in the Central Valley, diverting revenues from fixing roads and bridges to redistributive entitlements, and praising the new multicultural state that would welcome in half the nation’s 11-15 million illegal aliens. Better yet, the red-state-minded “they” (the nasty upper one-percent who stole from the rest of us due to their grasping but superfluous businesses) began to leave at the rate of 3,000 a week, ensuring the state a Senator Barbara Boxer into her nineties.
Yes, we are proud that we have changed the attitude, lifestyle, and demography of the state, made it “green,”and have the highest paid public employees and the most generous welfare system—and do not have to soil our hands with nasty things like farming, oil production, or nuclear power. And now we are broke. Our infrastructure is crumbling and an embarrassment. My environs is known as “Zimbabwe” or “Appalachia” for its new third-world look that followed from about the highest unemployment and lowest per capita income in the nation. Again, thanks to the deep South, our schools are not quite last in reading and math. So of course, like the Greeks, we are mad at somebody other than ourselves. Californians are desperate for a “them” fix. But who is them? “Them” either left, is leaving, or has been shut down.
Consumers are furious at spiking gas and food prices, and the collapse of state revenues. The illegal alien cadre is furious that there are cutbacks in their entitlements. The Latino community says that it cannot support anyone who wants to close the border and opposes amnesty. The public employees are furious in Greek-like fashion at the thought of cuts to pensions and lay-offs. The professors and UC administrators are either suing the state or turning on each other. Where are a few hundred Bill Gates and Warren Buffetts who would gladly pay more in taxes for the rest of us from their ill-gotten gains?
The Statist Religion
What strikes me is not that leftism does not work, but that when it is indulged and doesn’t work, its beneficiaries scream at the unfairness of it all—in the fashion that a theorist who claimed 2 plus 2 equals 5 blames the construct of mathematics because his equation is not true. Why don’t Germans just give Greeks the hundreds of billions of euros that they “owe” them?
The green lobby got all it wanted—subsidies, insider dealers, fame, money, influence. And then came Climategate, the multimillionaire Al Gore’s personal and professional meltdown, the coldest, iciest, and snowiest winters in memory, all the false warnings about record hurricanes and tsunamis becoming the new norm, the Orwellian metamorphosizing nomenclature (global warming begat climate change that is now begetting “climate chaos”).
Gorism is becoming a permanent fixture of late night comedians. When the New York Times keeps publishing op-eds about how record cold proves record global warming, the world wonders: what would record heat prove?
But whom to blame? The bad earth that is not boiling this winter? Right-wing zealots who cannot comprehend that very cold proves very hot. Red-state yahoos that don’t understand the brilliance of cap and trade? Broke governments that did not subsidize enough green power, green farming, and green energy?
The New Liberal Age
By January 2009, I was reading brilliant new books promising an end to conservatism, a new 50-year-old liberal ascendancy, the final triumph of John Maynard Keynes, and of course the apotheosis of the omnipresent “god” Barack Obama. By May 2009 we were lectured that the nascent tea party was an Astroturf fake movement, then a racist dangerous movement with Nazi undertones, and then a splinter nihilist know-nothing movement without political consequences.
By November 2010, all the above vanished in a blink. Furor followed from the Left that Obama was not a Great Stone Face savior, that the tea party was all too real, that the conservatives were back, and that liberalism had suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1938. How can all this be? Whom to blame?
Inconvenient Truths
Yet why not carry on with the progressive agenda? Would not the Greeks be happier if the Germans said, “Sorry, we won’t loan you anything at any interest rate, so please by all means riot all you wish”?
Would Californians be happier if we let in, say, 10 million more illegal aliens, and shut down east-side San Joaquin Valley water deliveries as well to save far more fishlets than just the smelt? Are not we still discriminating against transsexual and transgendered in the military? Why is there not diversity/affirmative action redress for underrepresented gay officers? Why are not these legitimate questions?
Cannot liberals press on with their dream and insist on amnesty, go for single-payer health care, lobby for a 50% income tax rate on higher incomes? If spring is delayed by frost and snow this year into June or July, would that even more so prove the case for global warming? Will Al Gore make another film, A Really Really Inconvenient Truth?
In short, there is no “them” who wrecked Greece, ruined California, subverted the climate change movement, sidetracked a half century of liberalism to come, or discredited mega-deficit spending.
“Them” you see is simply a shorthand for “I got what I wanted, and I am mad at someone or something for not allowing the world to become what I think it should have been.”
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shut up and pull
climber
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A simple syllogism:
(1) Liberals/socialists want government to provide wealth and benefits to folks who have not earned it, out of "fairness", or as Obama said, "to spread the wealth around";
(2) In order to accomplish this wealth transfer, liberals do two things: 1) they demonize wealth producers (i.e., business), and 2) they convince as many people as possible that they are victims and deserve the producers' wealth;
(3) Liberals also gain political power by enlarging the numbers of public employees who help implement and enforce the wealth transfer; the public employees in return pay union dues that go in large portion back to the liberal pols to keep them in power;
(4) Liberals push "green" policies that force, via government diktat and subsidies, what products and services will be provided to the consumer, regardless of what the consumer wants;
(5) All of this, as any simple-minded dolt can figure out, kills private incentive to take risk, hire workers, or expand production. Why? Because when the private economy is being "run" (i.e., broken) by know-nothing pols who put political dreams over basic economic principles, the private economy retracts, and businesses merely look for ways to ingratiate themselves with the pols and their priorities, not risk their asses in a "market" that is at the whim of idiots.
(6) Meanwhile, tax revenues go down because businesses aren't making profits, or are leaving states (e.g., California) that have liberal idiots at the helm (and the businesses, surprise!, move to the states where saner minds control -- e.g., Texas).
To summarize -- Liberalism is fantasy based upon the desires of so-called "educated" folks to realize their dreams for the lives of others, regardless of what the real world requires.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Ok Rox
Someone crammed 150 pills down Abbie's throat.
The coroner was an unqualified liar.
I wish I could be as emphatically certain of myself as you always are.
My self esteem would sure go up, like yours.
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shut up and pull
climber
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A GREAT POST FROM POWERLINE TODAY:
Europe's Doomed Generation:
The New York Times reports on the straitened prospects of Europe's young, especially those of Southern Europe. The paper cites demographic trends, political roadblocks and sclerotic economies as reasons for sky-high unemployment and marginal futures for young people: "Europe's Young Grow Agitated Over Future Prospects."
NYT: Francesca Esposito, 29 and exquisitely educated, helped win millions of euros in false disability and other lawsuits for her employer, a major Italian state agency. But one day last fall she quit, fed up with how surreal and ultimately sad it is to be young in Italy today.
It galled her that even with her competence and fluency in five languages, it was nearly impossible to land a paying job. Working as an unpaid trainee lawyer was bad enough, she thought, but doing it at Italy's social security administration seemed too much. She not only worked for free on behalf of the nation's elderly, who have generally crowded out the young for jobs, but her efforts there did not even apply to her own pension. ...
The daughter of a fireman and a high school teacher, Ms. Esposito was the first in her family to graduate from college and the first to study foreign languages. She has an Italian law degree and a master's from Germany and was an intern at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. It has not helped.
"I have every possible certificate," Ms. Esposito said dryly.
It seems to me that the Times conflates several rather distinct issues in chronicling the malaise of Europe's young. It is not obvious that accumulating "certificates" is the optimum path to gainful employment. Europe has long tended to prize credentials over actual productivity, but that is probably a secondary issue in the current crisis.
NYT: Even before the economic crisis hit, Southern Europe was not an easy place to forge a career. Low growth and a corrosive lack of meritocracy have long posed challenges to finding a job in Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal. Today, with the added sting of austerity, more people are left fighting over fewer opportunities. It is a zero-sum game that inevitably pits younger workers struggling to enter the labor market against older ones already occupying precious slots.
As a result, a deep malaise has set in among young people. Some take to the streets in protest; others emigrate to Northern Europe or beyond in an epic brain drain of college graduates. But many more suffer in silence, living in their childhood bedrooms well into adulthood because they cannot afford to move out.
But what causes that "low growth?" That is the key issue, but not the principal focus of the Times article.
NYT: [E]xperts warn of a looming demographic disaster in Southern Europe, which has among the lowest birth rates in the Western world. With pensioners living longer and young people entering the work force later -- and paying less in taxes because their salaries are so low -- it is only a matter of time before state coffers run dry.
"What we have is a Ponzi scheme," said Lawrence Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University and an expert in fiscal policy.
He said that pay-as-you-go social security and health care were a looming fiscal disaster in Southern Europe and beyond. "If these fertility rates continue through time, you won't have Italians, Spanish, Greeks, Portuguese or Russians," he said. "I imagine the Chinese will just move into Southern Europe."
That's true, and it is a very serious problem--Italy, Spain and other European countries are in the process of going out of business. (Does the Times's endorsement mean we can take Mark Steyn off the list of dangerous extremists liable to prosecution in Canada?) But isn't that a separate problem? Other things being equal, shouldn't a low birthrate and consequent shortage of young people make it easier for those relative few to get jobs?
NYT: The problem goes far beyond youth unemployment, which is at 40 percent in Spain and 28 percent in Italy. It is also about underemployment. Today, young people in Southern Europe are effectively exploited by the very mechanisms created a decade ago to help make the labor market more flexible, like temporary contracts.
Because payroll taxes and firing costs are still so high, businesses across Southern Europe are loath to hire new workers on a full-time basis, so young people increasingly are offered unpaid or low-paying internships, traineeships or temporary contracts that do not offer the same benefits or protections.
Now we're starting to get to the heart of the matter. Governments have interfered with the labor market to such an extent that, for an entire generation, the market barely functions at all. More NYT:
[M]any young people in Southern Europe see labor union leaders like Mr. Fernández, and the left-wing parties with which they have been historically close, as part of the problem. They are seen as exacerbating a two-tier labor market by protecting a caste of tenured older workers rather than helping younger workers enter the market.
For Dr. Kotlikoff, the solution is simple: "We have to change the labor laws. Not gradually, but quickly."
Yet in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, any change in national contracts involves complex negotiations among governments, labor unions and businesses -- a delicate dance in which each faction fights furiously for its interests.
Because older workers tend to be voters, labor reform remains a third rail to most politicians.
That is what happens when government inserts itself into every employment decision and when labor unions are given quasi-official powers and status. The result is economic disaster, a disaster first suffered by the young. What has happened in Europe, especially Southern Europe, is a flashing red alert, warning the United States not to follow the same path of government interventionism and union empowerment. Yet that is exactly the direction in which the Obama administration is trying to take us. It is deeply ironic that Obama came to office in part because of support from young voters who are too ill-informed to see the effects that his policies, if implemented, would have on them.
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