Health care reform almost at the finish line... correction: it's finished

Let's stop ignoring this topic. It's about to happen. I'm watching a rerun of the Rachel Maddow show right now. She's outlining everything about the bill.What are your thoughts? I want to hear both sides.Edited by Taz, : No reason given.

Good morning! It's good to have a beautiful day off, for me at least.People nowadays are gullible enough to believe everything Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh have to say. Recently, ESPN news accidently posted misinformation that the Obama Administration wants to ban private fishing. ESPN later apologized for the mistake. Yet, Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck continue to LIE about this on their shows. There has even been a protest in Washington by their sheeps about this.Did you guys hear about the 40 or so thousand nuns that openly defy the church and support the reform?

The US also has some of the most obese people in the world.Donna Simpson: woman who wants to be world's fattest

Did you let him have it? The best way to cure ignorance is to make them understand humiliation. If you let them go easy, yes you will get a better result. But at the same time, they will come right back to you with something nuttier. Buzsaw is living proof of this.

Did you really expect anything better given that republicans have been nothing but obstructionists?

I watch C-SPAN on a regular basis. Never thought I would admit this.But yes, it's a historic moment, comrad.

Damn you for being bringer of bad news. I was gettign ready to celebrate the departure of Brother Limbaugh.

My dear comrade hooah, aren't we so happy that we have succeeded in convincing a large portion of the American population to follow Comrade Stalin's final plan? Soon, American democracy will fall and we communists (aka liberals) will succeed in enslaving the American people in the name of Comrade Stalin.

Hahaha, I'll stop joking around now.If anything, I don't think the health care reform bill went far enough. I was even toying with the idea of signing up for the public option. But now that it's not in the package...Added by edit.And I'm talking as someone that has never ever had any medical condition. At all. I've only been to the emergency room twice. The first time I got ran over by a dumbass semi-drunk driver as a pedestrian. Thank goodness, I only limped a few months after that. The second time a dumbass in the gym dropped a weight on my toe. It hurt like hell and I needed to get it x-rayed to see if anything was broken. Turned out nothing was broken and all I needed was some pain meds.I live by a simple philosophy. We experience this world through our unique vessel (aka our body). Therefore, it is MY JOB to keep MY BODY as healthy as possible to experience this world to the fullest. I hit the gym almost everyday. I watch what I eat. I snack on oranges, grapes, bananas, and other fruits. In fact, fresh fruits and vegetables fill up almost a third of my frige. I don't drink soda pop. I don't smoke. I rarely ever drink, and when I do drink you better see me dance like a fool on the dance floor. And yes, I kinda look down on people who are overweight. It's a part of me that I'm still trying to overcome, damn it.I do consider myself blessed for not having any health problem at all like asthma and diabetes. Heck, I rarely ever get sick. At times when it seems like everyone around me is coughing and sneezing, I'd be perfectly fine. At the same time, I recognize that there are people that get hit by illnesses and diseases of all kinds. And even though I'm considered a low risk customer to the insurance company, I would never trust them, ever. I've heard enough stories of how insurance companies screw people over for profit to know they absolutely don't have my best interest in mind. All they care about are their stock options and how much money they can squeeze out of you.People often talk about how people in the past suffered greatly under supposed communist regimes. What most people tend to ignore is that unregulated capitalism also brought on some of the worst human rights violation in history.And no, I'm not a communist. I just don't trust private corporations. Edited by Taz, : No reason given.

Protesters outside the capitol have been yelling out "nigger" to black congressmen and "faggot" to Barney Frank.

This is a ridiculous statement to make, and you know it. Public schools as a whole don't do as well as private schools because public schools take in EVERYONE, not just the few privileged whose families have enough money to send them to private school. As I stated in another thread, public schools take in the all kids from the brightest to the downright retarded.

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I'm sure you don't work for free Taq...I'm sure you get a paycheck and probably even try to perform above and beyond for a bonus or something...we all do.

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Funny that you mentioned bonus, because that's exactly what this bill does. It gives bonuses to doctors that produce results.As I said in another post, I am one of the lucky ones that have never had any health problem at all. None. The few times I go for check-ups because of my job has produced perfect results. Someone like me can very easily condemn those who go to the emergency room for minor health concerns because they don't have insurance. Who do you think pay for them? Santa Claus?But you see, I have more sense than that. I know that not everyone is as lucky as I am with my health. They go to the emergency room for minor health concerns and not pay because they don't have a choice. They have no insurance and they can't afford the medical costs.The bill says if you can afford it you must get health insurance.This is like the seat belt laws. If your car has seat belt, you need to have it on. Those whose cars do not have seat belt are exempt. I remember when my state first came out with the seat belt law people were screaming up and down that their right was being infringed upon. Just a year after the law got enforced, crash fatality rate took a nose dive.

Sounds like something either Rachel Maddow or Keith Oberman would say.

I now have irrefutable proof that:(1) the tea party is nothing but an excuse for racism to surface in this country(2) most supporters of the tea party movement are white Americans (probably racist, too) and(3) the anti-Obama crowd will wait for Obama's position to be declared on any issue and then take the opposite position even if their new position goes directly against their previously held position.The space program! Tea partiers are crying bloody murder over the cancelation of the constellation program and the $200 million a month check to keep maintain the shuttle fleet. Before Obama said anything about this, these same people were crying bloody murder that the space program was a waste of tax money and all that crap.Now that Obama has begun encouraging the privatization of some of the space program, these same people are crying bloody murder.I am now a believer in the claim that people can be born a hypocrite.

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In the faces of Tea Party shouters, images of hate and history

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By Colbert I. King
Saturday, March 27, 2010

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The angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar. They resemble faces of protesters lining the street at the University of Alabama in 1956 as Autherine Lucy, the school's first black student, bravely tried to walk to class.

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Those same jeering faces could be seen gathered around the Arkansas National Guard troopers who blocked nine black children from entering Little Rock's Central High School in 1957.

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"They moved closer and closer," recalled Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine. "Somebody started yelling, 'Lynch her! Lynch her!' I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd -- someone who maybe could help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me."

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Those were the faces I saw at a David Duke rally in Metairie, La., in 1991: sullen with resentment, wallowing in victimhood, then exploding with yells of excitement as the ex-Klansman and Republican gubernatorial candidate spewed vitriolic white-power rhetoric.

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People like that old woman in Little Rock, the Alabama mob that hounded Autherine Lucy, the embracers of Duke's demagoguery in Louisiana, never go away.

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They were spotted last weekend on Capitol Hill under the Tea Party banner protesting the health-care-reform bill. Some carried a signs that read "If Brown [Scott Brown (R-Mass.)] can't stop it, a Browning [high power weapon] can." Some shouted racial and homophobic epithets at members of Congress. Others assumed the role of rabble, responding to the calls of instigating Republican representatives gathered on a Capitol balcony.

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Tea Party members, as with their forerunners who showed up at the University of Alabama and Central High School, behave as they do because they have been culturally conditioned to believe they are entitled to do whatever they want, and to whomever they want, because they are the "real Americans," while all who don't think or look like them are not.

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And they are consequential. Without folks like them, there would be no Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity or Pat Buchanan. There would never have been a George Corley Wallace, the Alabama governor dubbed by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Diane McWhorter in a 2008 Slate article as "the godfather, avatar of a national uprising against the three G's of government, Godlessness, and gun control."

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Hence, an explanation for the familiarity of faces: today's Tea Party adherents are George Wallace legacies.

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They, like Wallace's followers, smolder with anger. They fear they are being driven from their rightful place in America.

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They see the world through the eyes of the anti-civil rights alumni. "Washington, D.C." now, as then, is regarded as the Great Satan. This is the place that created the civil rights laws that were shoved down their throats. This is the birthplace of their much-feared "Big Government" and the playground of the "elite national news media."

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And they are faithful to the old Wallace playbook.

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McWhorter wrote how Wallace, in a 1963 speech to the political arm of Alabama's Ku Klux Klan, "referred to the recent bombings in Birmingham against prominent black citizens, citing the lack of fatalities as proof that the 'nigras' were throwing the dynamite themselves in order to attract publicity and money."

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Fast-forward to today. Note the pro-Tea Party conservative commentary debunking last weekend's racist and homophobic slurs as a work of fiction and exaggeration strictly for political reasons. Noticeable, too, is the influence of George Wallace, Limbaugh, Beck and their followers on outcomes.

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The angry '50s and '60s crowds threatened and intimidated; some among them even murdered. That notwithstanding, Americans of goodwill gathered in the White House to witness the signing of landmark civil rights laws.

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Schoolhouse doors were blocked, and little children were demeaned. Yet the bigots didn't get the last word. Justice rolled down like a mighty river, sweeping them aside.

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They insulted, abused, lied and vandalized. Still, President Obama fulfilled his promise to sign historic health-care reform into law by the end of his first term.

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Those angry faces won't go away. But neither can they stand in the way of progress.

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The mobs of yesteryear were on the wrong side of history. Tea Party supporters and their right-wing fellow travelers are on the wrong side now. It shows up in their faces.

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Just a reminder for people. After that "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever..." speech made by Wallace, he was still as popular as ever. He was so popular that he probably would have won the presidency if it wasn't for the attempted assination that paralyzed him waist down.Sounds familiar? President Bush when he was governor of Texas openly supported throwing people in jail for homosexuality. I know Faith the morally superior ex-nun gets a kick out of this. Probably how Bush got elected as president twice.The point is despite how far we as a society has evolved, crap like what the tea partiers, George Bush, and George Wallace have said and done still somehow made them more and more popular. Again, probably because of the morally high ground crowd. One would think that those hateful things those people have said and done meant political suicide, not the other way around.I can only hope the tea party is just a temporary flame that will burn itself out before it gets medival.Edited by Taz, : No reason given.