2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

[Rover]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

You and Kepler have been attending the same "How to be a paranoid liberal" classes I see.

I'm disappointed in you Bob. No, not by this comment, but in your inability to stop illegal immigrants from starting wildfires in Arizona! Sleeping on the job again I see?

 

[geezer]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

Exactly what far left position is getting passed nowadays?

Obamacare is the closest thing you can site and what was passed was a GOP idea.

wait, we're going to try to pin blame for Obamacare on the GOP??? really? Take your medicine.

 

[ScoobyDoo]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

wait, we're going to try to pin blame for Obamacare on the GOP??? really? Take your medicine.

Please cite where I said that. My point was and is that what was passed is nowhere near close to what the far left wanted. What was passed was actually centrist. I can't help it that the nutjobs on the right consider it socialist cause it's nowhere near that. The public option didn't even make it in the bill and even with that it's a far cry from universal coverage.

 

[Kepler]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

Good heavens you are over the top sometimes.

You're angry that I'm defending conservatives as not wanting to go back to a social issues stone age? Interesting.

 

[geezer]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

Please cite where I said that. My point was and is that what was passed is nowhere near close to what the far left wanted. What was passed was actually centrist. I can't help it that the nutjobs on the right consider it socialist cause it's nowhere near that. The public option didn't even make it in the bill and even with that it's a far cry from universal coverage.

I don't doubt it's more centrist than what Obama, Pelosi and Karl Marx would prefer. Still, I don't remember it being "a GOP idea" (your words) to spend another x trillion dollars that we don't have when it's not to kill people far away. If it was, Obama could have vetoed it. Most recent estimate I heard was that Obamacare will cost 9 times more than projected initially, same "misunderestimation" as Medicare ended up being.

 

[ScoobyDoo]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

I don't doubt it's more centrist than what Obama, Pelosi and Karl Marx would prefer. Still, I don't remember it being "a GOP idea" (your words) to spend another x trillion dollars that we don't have when it's not to kill people far away. If it was, Obama could have vetoed it. Most recent estimate I heard was that Obamacare will cost 9 times more than projected initially, same "misunderestimation" as Medicare ended up being.

http://www.slate.com/id/2280867/

Republican attacks on Obamacare's high-risk pools sound a lot like the old joke about the restaurant where the food is terrible—and such small portions! But the contradictory nature of the GOP's complaints doesn't rankle half so much as their fundamental hypocrisy. High-risk pools are, in fact, a terrible solution to the health-care crisis. But they happen to be the terrible solution Republicans most favor (along with tax breaks) whenever they're forced to state their preferred alternative to last year's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. They were the central idea in the health plan proposed by Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., during the 2008 election. They were the central idea in the House leadership's proposed substitute for the Democratic plan in 2009, and they played a major role in the alternative plan set forth that year by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., a medical doctor who became the GOP's lead opponent to Obamacare. They were the central idea in a 2010 repeal bill introduced in May by Rep. Wally Herger, R-Calif., that would have replaced the health reform bill that became law with the 2009 House leadership bill. They're absent from the current leadership repeal bill, introduced Jan. 5 by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., but only because Cantor's bill proposes no substitute at all.

The Heritage Foundation had its Emily Litella moment today. In an op-ed piece in The Washington Post, the conservative think tank acknowledged that it was once a true believer in requiring Americans to purchase health insurance. But now that a Democratic president has embraced the idea, “Never mind.”

I feel sorry for Heritage, and for Mitt Romney and other Republicans who are so furiously denouncing what they once fostered and embraced. The individual mandate has been the core of Republican thinking since the days of Richard Nixon, prized by conservatives as a way to keep the private health insurance industry alive and well, and to ward off Democratic demands for a public system like those in Great Britain or Canada.

In other words, conservatives promoted the concept of a mandate for decades because it wasn't socialism and, in fact, it would prevent socialism.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs...rom-the-individual-mandate-they-once-embraced

In 2009, Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich merrily made the talk show rounds denouncing Obamacare as "rationing." During the health care reform debate he warned Americans of those "death panels."

Yet what about the conservative-maligned individual mandate? Turns out Newt touted it in 1994 as a shiny Republican idea - the gleaming hope of the nation, superior to anything the Clintons could ever come up with.

But now he's against it. Well, kind of against it. This week on "Meet the Press," David Gregory pressed Gingrich on this very issue. The politician said, "Well, I agree that all of us have a responsibility to pay - help pay for health care ... I've said consistently we ought to have some requirement that you either have health insurance or you post a bond ... ."

Gregory then asked, "But that is the individual mandate, is it not?"

Gingrich's answer? "It's a variation on it."

http://onlineathens.com/stories/052111/opi_832694437.shtml

So, have you paid attention at all to the Health Care debate? This is common knowledge.

 

[Bob Gray]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

You're angry that I'm defending conservatives as not wanting to go back to a social issues stone age? Interesting.

You defend them by saying they are Neadrathals for believing what they believe. You get a gold medal for mental gymnastics on that one.

 

[Bob Gray]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

I'm disappointed in you Bob. No, not by this comment, but in your inability to stop illegal immigrants from starting wildfires in Arizona! Sleeping on the job again I see?

I'll try to do better my friend. I have a friend who lives in Hereford who had to evacuate when the Monument fire blew up a couple days ago and who is staying with his family in Phoenix until they hear word on their home, so this hits close to home. Let's hope that the fire season winds down quickly here in the West. Some good rain would be a big help.

 

[ScoobyDoo]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

You defend them by saying they are Neadrathals for believing what they believe. You get a gold medal for mental gymnastics on that one.

They don't go that far back but eventually they will evolve. If they hadn't we'd still have slaves and African-Americans still couldn't marry whites.

 

[Foxton]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

You defend them by saying they are Neadrathals for believing what they believe. You get a gold medal for mental gymnastics on that one.

Neanderthals were too evolved for the average knuckle dragger.

 

[5mn_Major]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

First, Obama = centrist. You take healthcare (which was a push of the Clintons) and maybe the bailouts (conditional based on the crisis) out...and Obama might even be a hair conservative. Economic team = moderately conservative; foriegn policy = more conservative; and the balance of his social policy = pretty limited.

Second, I really like Bachmann touting the Canadian economic system. Its been a full week since some other GOP nominee has called it communist.

Nationally, you just need to recognize the fact that this is a center-right country. That is ultimately why a conservative agenda has a better chance of passing than a liberal one.

Pretty much a fallacy. Its just that conservatives and rural voters (who are conservatives) have high turnouts. Urban and minorities have a lower turn out. Its not a conservative country, its a centrist country. It depends on whether you govern for voters or taxpaying citizens.

And even the extent to which the country votes conservative...is a result of the boomers being seniors and will not last indefinitely.

 

[geezer]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

So, have you paid attention at all to the Health Care debate? This is common knowledge.

So you're combing comments about the insurance industry from Republicans in 1994 to blame for the passage of "Obamacare" in 2010? Now I get it. Yeah, there's nothing the valiant Democrats could have done to stop it from becoming law. I'm sure Obama did everything he could to save us from Obamacare.

 

[ScoobyDoo]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

So you're combing comments about the insurance industry from Republicans in 1994 to blame for the passage of "Obamacare" in 2010? Now I get it. Yeah, there's nothing the valiant Democrats could have done to stop it from becoming law. I'm sure Obama did everything he could to save us from Obamacare.

What the blank are you talking about?

The argument is that Obamacare is a far left idea. It's not. It's a center right idea at best. The individual mandate can be traced back to Nixon and the high-risk pools idea can be traced back to the Republican Congress (the contract with America Congress no less) under Clinton.

Healthcare may have been pushed by the Clinton's but Obamacare isn't Hillarycare. It's not even close. Those are Republican ideas that were suddenly palatable enough to pass despite the killing many new Democrats from '08's election cycle took voting for it.

 

[Handyman]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

So you're combing comments about the insurance industry from Republicans in 1994 to blame for the passage of "Obamacare" in 2010? Now I get it. Yeah, there's nothing the valiant Democrats could have done to stop it from becoming law. I'm sure Obama did everything he could to save us from Obamacare.

Are you trying to be dense...it is pretty obvious what he was saying and I know you are not too dumb to get it. The idea, the whole plan Health Care Reform mandate that happened was almost a carbon copy of the GOP plan that was put forth to try and stop Universal Coverage under Billary. It was a GOP idea before that was just passed now to stop the public option. You can pretend all you want to that it is some liberal idea putting forth socialist agendas but then you are calling Newt, Bob dole, and the rest of the GOP Caucus from the 90's a bunch of Capital S Socialists.

That is what Scooby is saying...this is as much "Obamacare" as it is "GOPcare" because it was their dumb idea in the first place.

 

[Kepler]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

The other shoe drops on Newt.

Newt Gingrich's top fundraisers have quit his presidential campaign, weeks after his top aides and strategists in key states such as Iowa and South Carolina resigned en masse.

Campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond told the Associated Press that fundraising director Jody Thomas and consultant Mary Heitman are the latest staff departures.

 

[Bakunin]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

I love it when people call something a fallacy and then babble about turnout rather than examine actual polling data.
From last summer:
http://people-press.org/2010/07/16/voters-rate-the-parties-ideologies/

"In assessing their own political views, 40% of voters describe their own political views as conservative (either conservative or very conservative), 36% as moderate, and 22% as liberal (including very liberal)."

If that doesn't indicate a center-right electorate, nothing does.

 

[5mn_Major]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

Its just that conservatives and rural voters (who are conservatives) have high turnouts.

"In assessing their own political views, 40% of voters...

I don't know whether you didn't read what I wrote...or you didn't read what you wrote. Either way I said its a voter turnout issue (not that 'this country is conservative')...you made my point just fine.

Minorities voter share was 24% yet their US pop share is 35% (2008, pew). Voting at a rate of 70% for dems vs. 30% for GOP (as in 2004, wiki), that swing of minority voters alone would have in all probability put dems in every white house after the 1980s. And that doesn't even account for...if urban voters or those earning less than $50k/year voted at their true representation in this country.

All that will change anyways, the US will not always over index with senior citizens.

 

[bronconick]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

Arguing that the country isn't center-right because people you'd think would vote liberal choose to eat cheetos and not vote instead is dumb. They've disenfranchised themselves, therefore their opinion on political matters means nothing.

 

[Kepler]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

Arguing that the country isn't center-right because people you'd think would vote liberal choose to eat cheetos and not vote instead is dumb. They've disenfranchised themselves, therefore their opinion on political matters means nothing.

A one word self-ID really isn't really an argument either -- GIGO. Different people mean different things by "liberal" and "conservative." There are different local standards (a Massachusetts conservative is a South Carolina liberal). People greatly overestimate the numbers of people who agree with their opinions -- we mistake the public consensus so we are famously terrible at self-labeling (everyone thinks they are centrist). Much better data would be the distribution of popular preferences on concrete issues mapped against the public rhetoric of the parties.

(Edited as per LynahFan's catch)

 

[Kepler]

Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel

Pretty sure a Mass liberal would be considered liberal in every US state!

(I know you just reversed this, but couldn't pass it up)

Oops. Edited below.