Congratulations to President Obama!

It's a ridiculously large law. If the professional liars on the Hill are going to pass something, each of them should be forced to at least read and comprehend it.

it's always been the pork barrel when it came to laws, even way back when.

That is why Regan wanted the byline veto. That scared the hell out of everyone in Washington. :D
 
What's funny, the Dems want to take better care of the warrior, provide more care, insurance, education, but the Reps, they're all about the war.
It might seem strange, but I agree with that philosophy, even though I don't agree with the war. Every Soldier knows this: always put the mission first.

Once the US is out of Iraq, there will be money.
Another sheeple? 2012 expenditures in Iraq are 'only' $10 billion. The government had to borrow and print money to pay for the wars. There are no "left-overs". It doesn't even have enough revenue to pay for all of the programs that it has, let alone force projection.
 
Diplomacy is trying to head off trouble, to try to reason and to try to get out of situation without making it ugly.

That's diplomacy.

Standing there and getting bitch slapped over and over and over and over again is not diplomacy, its not having the spine to do the job he is in place to do.

In the early 80's Gadafi fucked with us, shot down a plane. Reagan bombed his fucking palace. The good old colonel was pretty irrelevant at least where we were concerned for a long long time after that.

Now we have a dead ambassador and "sorry, its our fault" Oh, and by the way even though this country is predicated on freedom of speech, we're really sorry a citizen used that right and made a movie that hurt your feelings, go ahead and hurt us, we deserve it.

Really TX you fought for this country, how the hell do you condone this?

As for my opinion as him being a socialist? Has nothing to do with Fox, I'm capable of making my own decisions which is becoming a dying art these days.

Yeah, I've fought in a war and I've been in several embassies as security. I understand how they work and what the hell can happen in and around them. You're blowing this whole embassy thing out of proportions because you don't understand how they work and what the risks are.

What are you basing the statement that he is a socialist on? If it is on Nation heath care, then you don't understand the difference between social and socialist.
 
Social policy: I want everyone to have health insurance.

Socialist policy: I want everyone to have health insurance and I want a minority of the population, whether or not they need health insurance, to pay for all of it.
 
Yeah, I've fought in a war and I've been in several embassies as security. I understand how they work and what the hell can happen in and around them. You're blowing this whole embassy thing out of proportions because you don't understand how they work and what the risks are.

Thank you, Tex. Both for your service and for your input here.
 
Of course the rest of the world likes him, he kisses their asses and is a push over.

If you had to play one game of whatever it is your good at against someone for all the marbles, who do you want to play, a tough opponent or a pushover?

And spare me any egotistical "I want to play the best" I'm talking life at stake type situation.

Obama is the world's doormat. It was all I really had against him in 2008, lack of experience, and he wouldn't be taken seriously by our enemies. I think after 4 years my feelings proved right and in the meantime he's added an entire new dimension to why I don't like him.

Because personally I'm not into socialists.

You can tell he's the world's doormat by the way he sent troops into the world's most dangerously volatile nation without anyone's permission to shoot a terrorist in the face. And by the way he started lobbing missiles and airstrikes into Lybia while we were already engaged in wars on two other fronts.

I've got a lot of criticisms of Obama. I very nearly voted for Jill Stein. The man's got a lot of flaws, but "doormat" and "pushover" are absolute fantasies.
 
As respect to insurance
Hmm? As I pointed out, the rigid standards set will require that individuals buy insurance or be penalized via a "tax". If you have a low-cost policy (read, "low-profit for the insurance company"), you will have to buy a more expensive policy or pay an excise tax. If you have a high-value policy (read, "more benefits than the standard permits"), you will have to buy a lower-value policy or pay an excise tax. If you are an employer and can only afford to provide low-cost insurance, you will be forced to provide a more expensive policy or pay a per-employee fine. If you are an employer that provides or sponsors (pays for a large percentage) of the cost of high-value policies to your employees (e.g. executives, senior managers, teachers, police officers, fire fighters, aeronautical production line employee, etc.), you will have to provide a lower-value plan or pay your portion of the 40% excise tax. There is also 3.8% tax on "Gross income from interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents unless such income is derived in the ordinary course of any trade or business (excluding a passive activity or financial instruments/commodities trading); other gross income from any passive trade or business; and net gain included in computing taxable income that is attributable to the disposition of property other than property held in any trade or business that is not a passive trade or business." As of 2013, you will only be able to deduct the medical expenses that exceed 10% of your annual income, unless you're 65+, in which cases the floor is 7.5%. This is not including the increase in Medicare payroll tax.

Of course, if you're on the dole, the government pays for your federally-approved insurance policy and you don't care if taxpaying employees and employers have to foot the bill. Still, an increase in the cost of living (including insurance) means that labor costs will go up without any real corresponding increase in GDP. This means that your energy, food, utilities, and transportation costs go up while your limited income does not. City property taxes and fees will have to go up as well, which means rents will go up. Some people (taxpayers) pay more than others, but TANSTAAFL.
 
What you leave out, Proxy, as Romney and everyone else on the right generally does, is the reason to make sure everyone has insurance in the first place. The idea by having people have insurance is that you have a broad pool of people in the insurance pools, so you don't have a situation where the pools are only full of people who are unhealthy and need insurance. There is a reason that group plans are so much cheaper then individual plans, and that is because the relatively healthy people subsidize those are need care, and brings down the cost.

More importantly, your claim about people with good health insurance plans pay for everyone else is already happening, it is part of the problem with the current system where 47 million people don't have health insurance. When those people get sick, they often end up in emergency rooms, which are ridiculously expensive when dealing with non emergency care. More importantly, when people who don't have insurance are treated, they end up as charity cases which theoretically the state will pay for, but don't. So want to know what happens? Someone with a sore throat goes to an emergency room, is found to have strep throat and is given penicillin. To do this in an emergency room costs about 5 times what it does going to a clinic or doctor's office. And guess what happens? You got it, you go to the hospital with a broken foot and you start seeing things like a 20 buck aspirin and fees that are like WTF...it is called cost shifting and it is routine, estimates are a typical patient with private insurance is paying 20% more then they should because of cost shifting (so much for Romney saying no one is ever denied care, they should just go to the emergency room). The reason they require people to have insurance is to stop this, the young 20 something who thinks he doesn't need insurance and doesn't want to pay for it, then gets hit riding his bike in hipster land, ends up costing the system a lot of money, much more then if he had insurance.

It is also the problem with medicare, to make medicare more cost efficient the government since the Reagan administration onwards has cut what they will pay for procedures. Doctors and other providers don't want to turn down Medicare patients, so they do the same thing, they cost shift (yeah, we hear how efficient medicare is, how they have reigned in costs, but in the end, everyone else is already paying for it).

What I also love is the fear mongering about how Obama care is going to cause the price of health insurance to go up, and I see these tea party clucks saying 'see, they passed Obama care and premiums went up 10%......' Guess what, morons, the price of health insurance premiums has been going up by double digit amounts for the past 15 years or so, long before Obama care even was a thought in someone's head...

I don't think the obamacare plan is perfect, I think it is going to need adjustments, but what I do think is the current system stinks on ice, and the whole myth about 'free market forces' bringing down the cost is exactly that, a myth, unless you are going to do something like bring in foreign doctors on H1 visas at cur rate prices, and ration treatment, it won't work, health insurance is expensive because the cost of treating people is expensive. We spend aboiut 70% of our health insurance costs maintaining the last month of life, yet try to tell the family of grandpa joe who has stage IV prostate cancer not to resuscitate him if his heart goes into shutdown. We have hard choices to make, but competition in health insurance plans isn't going to do it, because unless you are talking a fly by night plan that covers little, there is no way to shave costs that much, there is no economies of scale like with tv sets.
 
I expect for ObamaCare to be means tested like food stamps is, if you got no job but got a car theyll make you sell the car before you get any help paying the insurance.
 
602258_511597008851282_1232046176_n.jpg
 
I talked to a woman in the course of work today and she made an interesting observation. It's obvious the Democrats got 90% of the Black vote and 70% of the Latin vote but the most interesting thing to her was the split in the white vote with women vastly more inclined to vote against Romney than their husbands and boyfriends.

She argued that sensible Republicans should try to bury abortion and anti female rhetoric as an issue in future, but that Democrats now have a vested interest in re-stoking the controversy from time to time. She felt that what she called the Akin/Murdoch effect, could cement a permanent majority of females voting Democrat.

She reckoned, and she is an Actuary, that if a difference of voting intentions between men and women could be maintained at 5% to 7% it would be desperately difficult for a Republican ever to win. It was hard to fault her mathematics particularly when she pointed out that women are by some way the largest voter faction, considerably larger than men because they live longer.
 
Stella's list is good except the one on Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. He DID have them. We (the United States) sold them to him, so we knew he had them. (As far as I know, the United States is still the largest arms dealer on the planet and there's been no "peacenik" administration that's cut down on that.) If anyone in the Bush (the Lesser) administration had bothered to ask those keeping track of such things, though, they would have known that he resold some of them, used some of the rest on the Kurds, and then let the rest deteriorate in the desert to the point of not being usable--and, apparently, not even recognizable (or--and I've always wondered about this--they might have found that the ones they picked up still had their U.S. marking on them, and thus couldn't be trotted out for propaganda purposes).

Where the Bush administration bumbled around on that issue and didn't keep up with the world as it is today is in not just salting some away there when we invaded to be "found" later. Hint: the Obama administration hasn't been that dumb about such things--which, yes, puts a "hey what?" to the claim that Obama is soft in defense. Both he and Hillary Clinton are rocket rattlers--they just do it cleverly enough that blind wingnuts like some posting to this thread don't see it. People tend to forget that beefing up in Afghanistan--not retreating from there--was in Obama's platform the last time he ran.
 
Last edited:
I talked to a woman in the course of work today and she made an interesting observation. It's obvious the Democrats got 90% of the Black vote and 70% of the Latin vote but the most interesting thing to her was the split in the white vote with women vastly more inclined to vote against Romney than their husbands and boyfriends.

That woman knows what she's talking about. If I believed in a god, i would thank him for Akins, Mourdoch, Walsh and all the rest of them, and their big, ignorant, entitled mouths. I would never have imagined so many women leave the Republican party so suddenly!

And I don't think the Democratic party, per se, will need to assume responsibility for keeping the controversy alive. I think there will be foot-shooting from GOP politicians for a while to come. And guess what-- women talk to each other.

Despite the billions of dollars the superPACs spent on television radio and other old-people one-way media, this election was largely decided on facebook, peer-to-peer.
 
Last edited:
If you didn't live in the Northeast, you could thank Him (Her or It) for Sandy too. (Just saw on CNN an interview with a woman who had gotten Thanksgiving as the estimate of when her power would be restored. Brrrr.)
 
If you didn't live in the Northeast, you could thank Him (Her or It) for Sandy too. (Just saw on CNN an interview with a woman who had gotten Thanksgiving as the estimate of when her power would be restored. Brrrr.)

The states hit hardest, NY, NJ, and CT, were going to vote for Obama as it was.
 
The states hit hardest, NY, NJ, and CT, were going to vote for Obama as it was.
yep, a lot of blue states. But Sandy doesn't explain the battleground states so much. Although I think that, every stupid comment made by a GOP pundit about how Obama deployed FEMA early to get election votes, sent a few thousand more people to the democrats. :rolleyes:

here's a really lovely graphic, enjoy;
552381_4419138669951_955262954_n.jpg
 
yep, a lot of blue states. But Sandy doesn't explain the battleground states so much. Although I think that, every stupid comment made by a GOP pundit about how Obama deployed FEMA early to get election votes, sent a few thousand more people to the democrats. :rolleyes:

here's a really lovely graphic, enjoy;
552381_4419138669951_955262954_n.jpg

That's it in a nutshell. If the pundits kept their mouths shut, perhaps it might have made a difference in Iowa, Colorado, and maybe in Florida. Ohio, not much because of Romney's own stupidity and lies.
 
The states hit hardest, NY, NJ, and CT, were going to vote for Obama as it was.

Not really the point. It highlighted that the Republican campaign's approach to disaster relief just didn't match the reality of what disaster relief needs (it's point specific, not spread all across the United States proportionally). It also showed a president "doing it right" (although that might mostly have been because of the opportunity it gave re the elections), and it showed a Republican presidential contender governor embracing the president and effectively flipping the bird at the Republican presidential candidate just days before the election. The effect of this was spread across the United States, I'm sure. Sandy was a gift of God to the Democrats (and, I'm happy to say to any Evangelical Republican I encounter, a clear God vote for Obama).
 
Not really the point. It highlighted that the Republican campaign's approach to disaster relief just didn't match the reality of what disaster relief needs (it's point specific, not spread all across the United States proportionally). It also showed a president "doing it right" (although that might mostly have been because of the opportunity it gave re the elections), and it showed a Republican presidential contender governor embracing the president and effectively flipping the bird at the Republican presidential candidate just days before the election. The effect of this was spread across the United States, I'm sure. Sandy was a gift of God to the Democrats (and, I'm happy to say to any Evangelical Republican I encounter, a clear God vote for Obama).

The crass statement to the Evangelicals would have been, "Sandy was God's will for Obama."
 
That's it in a nutshell. If the pundits kept their mouths shut, perhaps it might have made a difference in Iowa, Colorado, and maybe in Florida. Ohio, not much because of Romney's own stupidity and lies.
And the abortion issue. The human race has more women then men, and a hella lotta those women want to control their own vaginas and lives, even if they personally oppose abortion. i would say that even women who would have voted Republican for the financial issues (if they could not be persuaded that those were lies) voted for their own cvil rights, and that a lot of women got so angry about the rape comments that they decided the finance promises were lies.

'cause you know, women are emotional that way. ;)

It's the damndest thing how many men seem to not ever have noticed this issue this year-- this forum of course being a prime exception. or continue to discount it. IMO, women really-truly decided the election.
 
And the abortion issue. The human race has more women then men, and a hella lotta those women want to control their own vaginas and lives, even if they personally oppose abortion. i would say that even women who would have voted Republican for the financial issues (if they could not be persuaded that those were lies) voted for their own cvil rights, and that a lot of women got so angry about the rape comments that they decided the finance promises were lies.

'cause you know, women are emotional that way. ;)

It's the damndest thing how many men seem to not ever have noticed this issue this year-- this forum of course being a prime exception. or continue to discount it. IMO, women really-truly decided the election.

My wife, when she first heard "Legitimate" rape yelled at the tv. When she heard the "A woman's body has ways to shut down during a rape," she decided then and there she could not vote for anyone, ANYONE, in the same party. Yes, it was an emotional way to vote, but...Too bad, so sad for the old white guys.
 
My wife, when she first heard "Legitimate" rape yelled at the tv. When she heard the "A woman's body has ways to shut down during a rape," she decided then and there she could not vote for anyone, ANYONE, in the same party. Yes, it was an emotional way to vote, but...Too bad, so sad for the old white guys.

Which indicates some of the candidates should have been more politically savvy in their pronouncements than even the pundants.

I wonder if any of the professional Republican strategists have any hair left to pull.
 
The mess we are in has more to do with the Reagan Years and Geo. W's mismanagement, than anything the current President did. I think Obama was a brave man to take on the problems that Bush left behind and try to correct them. He is not perfect, by any means, but so much better than what we had for 8 long and destructive years, I can actually feel some hope in the air.

That is, provided the world does not end on 12-21-2012. LOL
 
Back
Top