Casey:

As to your second point. I'll tell you as a parent. When I didn't take my son to the doctor, it was because I didn't have health insurance!

As far as your paying your own way in life:
Please answer the following:

1) How much money did you pay and to whom did you pay it, for the road you drive to and from work on?
2) If you have ever had to call the fire department, how much did you pay and to whom did you pay it?
3) If you have ever called the police, how much did you pay and to whom did you pay it?
4) If you use the public library, how much do you pay and to whom do do you pay it?
5) Who do you pay to insure that your employer maintains a safe work environment?
6) How much do you pay and to whom do you pay it to have someone test the medicines you take for safety?
7) How much do you pay and to whom do you pay it to have someone test your food to make sure it is safe.
8) How much do you pay and to whom do you pay it, to ensure that the person in the semi next to you, doing 60 mph is licensed?
9) How much do you pay and to whom do you pay for the air traffic controller who makes sure that the plane you are on doesn't fly into another plane?
10) How much do you pay and to whom do you pay it to make sure that criminals are locked up behind bars where they belong?
11) How much do you pay and to whom do you pay it to have your mail delivered to you daily?

Your statement that you don't take anything from anyone simply isn't true--UNLESS--you live off the grid. But you are here, on the Internet, so that tells me you are not off the grid. You are using satellites that you don't lease time on. You are using microwave transmission towers that you don't lease time on. You make use of hundreds of little services that you pay your taxes for but that you do not pay for directly. Some portion of your taxes goes to pay the NIH and CDC workers who maintain public health but you have never written a check to the NIH or the CDC. Some portion of your taxes go to pay the police but you have never paid an individual cop for showing up. Some portion of your taxes goes to pay for the roads but, toll bridges not-with-standing, chances are you don't pay to drive on the surface streets in town.

As one Supreme Court justice said at the beginning of the last century "taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society". There is an entire infrastructure, supporting your "I'm a self-made-woman" illusions that you utterly take for granted. If you had to pay for all those invisible services that make the wheels of modern life turn, it would be prohibitively expensive.

Now, again, if you live off-the-grid none of that applies to you but you're using a computer, which means you're on the grid, and I know, for a fact, that you aren't paying to rent satellite, microwave and fibre time. Yet, your electrons flow over the same pathways that my electrons flow over because we pay into it *together*.

I'm curious, how much are you willing to cut defense spending? How many years are YOU prepared to spend away from YOUR family and friends fighting in some country that you may not have known existed a year before you got shipped there? Because someone is doing that job, and it most likely isn't you, and you ARE depending upon someone else to do that.

Why is it that we can spend any amount of money you mention on defense but we begrudge even public education!

And our country was *not* founded on 'self-reliance'. You will not find self-reliance in the Constitution nor will you find self-reliance in the Declaration of Independence (yes, I checked). If we were founded on self-reliance may I ask why the Benjamin Franklin said, "we must all hang together, or surely we will all hang separately". Doesn't sound very "I got my liberty, too bad about yours you lazy ass" to me. If we were founded on self-reliance, why did the founders create a postal service or the first public library system? If we were founded on self-reliance why did we create a public education system?

We are not orangutans, Casey. If we were, your philosophy would be perfectly in keeping with the nature of our species. Orangutans have minimal contact with one another and spend most of their time alone. But we aren't orangs. We are a social primate.

Years ago, E.O. Wilson, the great entomologist, was asked what he thought of communism. His response was, "great idea, wrong species". Well, I would say that the same applies to libertarianism, great idea, for orangutans, but not the right system for our species.

You have a right to your opinion. Other people have a right to an opinion *about* their opinion.

If you believe you are right--and you clearly do--then convince us. Show that your position is better thought out, more coherent and has greater internal consistency. People *can* be convinced, but throwing tantrums and crying about your rights to free speech isn't a convincing argument.

Well geez, I think i do pay for most of that, due to the fact I pay taxes and home owner insurance. Pay state taxes and county and city taxes. Pay taxes on everything I have or use. I do not have medcaid or food stamps. I dont sit on my ass and draw money from the government. So I do pay my fair share in life.

key you are an ass hole because my family is republican, My Dad served 34 years in the military so u need to back up and get off your high horse thinking u are always right.

I'm sorry, what in the hell has this got to do with health care? I'm not going to report you for this out burst, I can't say the same for anyone else, but it isn't called for. If you can't debate the issues, perhaps you need to look inward as to why.

Aj........I am always astonished at your ability to break it down............

I think the crux of the question is this:

Is health care a right or a privilege?

I think it is a right, therefore I think a single payor (government financed) system is the only Constitutional way to provide health care.

Each individual pays taxes.........those taxes pay for what we believe are rights............roads, the library, police, fire, infrastructure which used to be sewer, electrical, prison, roads, communication, and shit I can't even imagine (remember the internet was not on my radar 25 years ago).

Medicare has some serious issues..........that's because Republicans don't believe government works or is a good idea and they set up Medicare Part D to fail and to bankrupt Medicare. Republicans have been passing laws that insure the government will fail since Reagan. If you set it up to fail............it will fail............

By the way...........I am one of those single payor beneficiaries ............a recipient of true socialized medicine.......I get my health care from the VA.......

if the VA system is good enough for me and my sister and brother veterans...........then it's good enough for Joe the fucking fake plumber..........

mmmmmmmmmmmm................not sure where I am/was going with this...........so......I'm out for now...........

You seem to be missing the point so I'll try this again.

You claimed, erroneously, that you pay your own way. That doesn't mean that you pay *part* of something and others pay *part* of something. If I'm 'paying my own way' to the movies, I'm not putting in a dollar, and my wife puts in another dollar, and the person who is behind us in line puts in yet another dollar and so on. Rather, it means that whatever gouging I'm about to endure at the box office, I pay every red cent myself.

You pay taxes. I pay taxes and by doing so, we ALL, can afford things like roads, satellite connections, etc. that (and this is the really important bit) would not be able to afford to pay, out of our own pockets, by ourselves. That is not "I pay for everything myself" which is what your original statement was, Casey.

You draw innumerable benefits from the government that you do not actually pay for directly because you cannot afford to do so. You may *think* that you are completely self-contained, dependent upon no one else, but that is an illusion. It is an illusion maintained by the hard work and sweat of thousands upon thousands of ordinary workers, who get up every morning and go to work for the government--local, state and federal. THEY maintain the roads, so you aren't being charged $2.50 a quarter mile to get out of your neighborhood. THEY maintain the air traffic control system so you aren't paying the truly exorbitant amount you would have to pay if you had to contract that on your own. THEY keep the streets safe and show up when your house is on fire, services that would be prohibitively expensive if you had to pay for it yourself. One day you're going to get old and you're going to start collecting Social Security and Medicare. Will you THEN be 'lazy', 'sitting on your ass'? Think carefully before you answer because that's a lot of people's parents you're talking about if you're going to say those retirees are lazy, shiftless and of no account.

You are not 'self-made'. A whole network of support created a society that is not, just to take one obvious example, Somalia. If you lived in that society, you would be too busy trying to just take care of the daily necessities like clean water to do whatever it is you do.

I have to make one last comment on your boasts (and they are boasts) about how hard you work and your complaints about how others are lazy. My day began at 5:15 this morning, I will be off work in about 10 minutes and then I will go to class and be in class until about 8:30. Tomorrow, I have a 'short' day that will mean I leave the house around 6:30 and home about 7:00 and then I'll have a couple of hours of homework to do before Thursday when I'll have another 6:30 to 8:30 kind of day. The next three *years* of my life is going to look like that and then there'll be a year of working part-time (at the same job, my boss wants to hold onto me that badly) while going to school full time for another year and three month practicum in a lab. THEN I get to find another job in a lab someplace.

I bring this up because it seems to me that the people who *most* begrudge those who collect welfare or are on disability or social security or medicaid are those who boast loudest and longest about how hard-working they are. In the meantime, many of us get up and pull insanely long days, have not much in the way of days off because of outside commitments with things like, oh, school and yet, for the most part, we aren't the people I hear shouting about how lazy other people are. I don't begrudge people on welfare or disability or unemployment or medicaid what pittance they get. I don't begrudge that my tax dollars go to pay for people to be on welfare or what-have-you. One, I'm too busy to begrudge them that; two, I am far too aware that I am extraordinarily lucky to live in the comfort that I do; and three I am all too painfully aware that but for a twist of fate, there goes Adrienne Davis.

Now, you'll react however you react. You'll look at those who are less fortunate than you and perhaps you will see them and realize it could just as easily be you there, or you may look at them and see someone who is lazy, shiftless and don't want to work. That's all on you. But I have to say that I find it instructive and interesting that those who yell loudest about how hard working they are are the also the first people to complain about others who don't work as hard. I take PRIDE in being able to push myself longer, faster and harder than almost anyone around me. Maybe I'm just too high on that feeling of being a superwoman to begrudge those who don't have it as good as I do.

I am a flaming ass progressive...who voted for Reagan the first time and was a Republican.......my family on my father's side has bunches of career military........bunches of them for generations.......some of them were warriors who met the Mayflower and some of them were on the Mayflower or with the Conquistadors.............

I would suggest, as a Vietnam Era veteran, that you might need to back up yourself.

And............just to be clear...........you never actually addressed any of dreadgeek's points.......

I, for one, want to know how you think a flawed bill that addresses the payment of health care costs ....and it will benefit you regardless of what you think........is somehow going to cause you harm?

It's a shame that you refuse to access food stamps and other government programs that you actually paid for........you paid ahead for a time you (or someone else) might have a need for assistance.

Thinking you can do everything alone......well.......one day you will find out asking for help and getting it in the form of health care or food or housing or ______ is not a sin or a sign of weakness or a hand-out .........

getting food stamps or any other 'entitlement benefit' is simply a hand-up based on your previous payment of taxes into the system......by not accessing the services you have already paid for makes you a fool and hungry and bitter ...........

by the way........calling folks names to avoid answering questions or responding to thoughtful posts is childish at best..............careful how you show your own ass.......

This is the last i am going to reply. I am tired of people calling people unamerican if we do not feel like you or have the same opinion as you do. The reason why i call Key a bad name is because he said that republicans were unamerican. To me that was uncalled for. No one has the right to call an american citizen unamerican. So if you want to report me that fine with me.

quote the post that called you or anyone else (key) unamerican and I will stand with you and denounce that kind of rhetoric.........otherwise..........you tell lies and think you can get away with it based on some victim stance.

I don't give two shits why you acted like a two year old when you called key names.........you acted like a two year old and that has no place in an articulate discussion.

That ignorant racist law passed in AZ gives the police the right to decide who they think might not be an american............goddess help all my nieces/nephews and great nephews/nieces who are brown and white if they ever cross the border from New Mexico into Arizona....that law gives some redneck AZ lawman the right to decide who they think needs papers to prove they are american...

spit..........and no fucking popcorn

Aside from the name calling here, you have struck yet another nerve for me and the countless members here that I know to have served in the military (I have not). And not just a few of whom had to exit due to DADT.

I get really angry when I hear not only the nonsense about those that work, don't work or don't want to work (tell me, how many of these so called slackers have you interviewed personally?), but also when a person falls back on family history of military service as a shot against liberal or progressive social thinkers as being non-patriotic.

I don't come from a distinguished US military family, but my Dad, brother, 2 Uncles and several cousins served as enlisted women and men (on the front lines) in the military from WWII onward, covering it, Korea, Vietnam, & Desert Storm. Additionally, I have relatives that were relocated to camps here in the Good ‘Ole USA under the Enemy Aliens Acts along with the Japanese and other immigrant groups at the very same time my Uncles were serving in WWII overseas. Thinking maybe it is I that ought to be so pissed at the government!! I have both family and friends with loved ones in Afghanistan & Iraq right now, which are on their 3rd & 4th tour of duty.

Although I question the politics about the various wars we have been and are engaged in, I thank and shake the hand of every single service person I run into in public in a uniform. I do this because I mean it and support them and know that they do not make the war policy. I lost several friends in Vietnam before they reached age 20. I was sickened by how the Vietnam veterans were treated upon their return home- even if I disagreed with that conflict.

I have had times that the people I am with when I walk up to service people and thank them that think its weird due to my political thoughts and social ideology. What I say to them is that I can disagree with the politics and still appreciate the sacrifices these people are making on my behalf. I am no less a patriot than any tea bagging, anti-government nut-cake when it comes to supporting those that serve. I also have expressed appreciation for those that have served the US in many other kinds of ways such as through the Peace Corps, Vista, Habitat for Humanity, etc. All of these people are giving something back.

I can appreciate your beliefs, although, you do appear to have some bigoted views, as your own. But, please do not assume that those of us that have more liberal political and ideological attitudes are somehow not patriotic or do not recognize what our military does and what their entire family goes through when they are serving.

Frankly, this liberal queer has no problem with more of my tax money going to the various programs to benefit service people that need so much support returning from the wars we are in and are not getting. That makes me sick, too! They deserve better.

thank you..............

sometimes the simplest thing says it all..................

You know, I can't help but notice that you focused on the post where you got butthurt and ignored the post where your position was systematically but very respectfully dismantled before your very eyes. I didn't call you un-American. I said that your position that America was "founded on self-reliance" was not even wrong. I said that you appeared to be missing the point but, again, didn't call you names. I didn't mention your family at all but demonstrated that you are not the self-made, monad that is your *self-proclaimed* image of yourself.

I also have to say that I find it the very height of irony that a Republican and conservative would be calling people out on questioning the patriotism of other Americans. You invoked your father's years of service as a rhetorical device. It's a way of saying "my family is more American than thou". Except, as Corkey pointed out, there are *at least* three veterans on this thread that I am aware of (Corkey, Toughy and myself). I have a three-generation tradition of military service in my family--three consecutive generations--and it wouldn't surprise me if one of my grand-children makes it a fourth. In fact, just in my immediate family the *only* people who have not worn the uniform are my granddaughter (who is 2), my mother and my daughter-in-law. My father, my sister, my son and I all wore the uniform of the US Army. My sister made a career out of it and my son aspires to. I would have but I was kicked out (three guesses as to why). So pulling the veteran card here is not going to help much.

Either you have an argument or you don't. If you have an argument, make your argument. I can be convinced, I'm sure that the rest of us can be convinced, so convince us. Convince us that as a matter of social contract, we should be prepared to let, for instance, people whose jobs have been moved overseas by some corporation to starve because there are people who cheat the unemployment system. Convince us that, as a matter of policy, we should let those who are disabled starve for lack of food or die for lack of medical care because they are disabled. Convince us that the newborn baby should starve or not get medical care because her mother is a 17 year old girl who made one mistake, one night and couldn't bring herself to terminate the pregnancy. Convince us that the most well-off, the strongest in society, should have no compunction about trampling on the bodies of the weakest and the poorest and that, as we grind their faces into the mud, we should be telling them that this is no more than what they deserve because they are lazy. If you are right. If your vision of society is the one that is best for society, convince me.

Convince me that America is less free because of the 40-hour work week. Convince me that America needs no public schools or libraries. Convince me that America is less productive because there are laws against child labor, because of unemployment insurance, social security insurance, Medicare. Convince me that there should be no VA because SOME veterans are strung out on drugs or drink or both.

I recognize that there are cheats in the system but I'm not prepared to burn the whole thing to the ground, penalize those who have merely fallen on hard times, to satisfy some sense of righteous indignation. But you can convince me, if you are right and you are very, very good. Go for it. That's a tall mountain to climb, you might want to bring oxygen.

Cheers
aj

at the risk of hijacking the thread
 

How do we get through to people who refuse to debate in facts, or to even defend their opinion with any clarity. F-you is not a rebuttal founded in information. Even if their information is based on dubious sources we at least have a ground from which to discuss the matter. As far as I can see the biggest concern to Casey is that her taxes will go up. Many people have pointed out that her taxes have actually been lowered. If she recently did her taxes, surely she sees her return is larger this year.

Dreadgeek I totally appreciate all the time you took to present your case. I think what we are seeing in reaction is pretty typical for our tea party citizens and other conservatives. They do not operate from facts, only fears. So all the rational debate in the world simply will not compute for these people. I admit that my facts are peppered with emotional appeals. But even this does not seem to get through.

There must be someone among us with the NLP skills that can instruct us on how best to get through to them.

I am not anti-Republican. In my opinion Eisenhower was the last great Republican President we had. He warned us against the Military Industrial Complex, taxes on the rich (equivalent to about 3 million a year in today's dollars) were upwards of 70-90%. Heck I even praise Nixon for giving us the G-Blessed EPA! What happened to "real" conservative values. As in conserving our environment, conserving our blood and treasure, conserving our economy by not allowing any person (corporate or human) to get "too big to fail."

What to do what to do? I can't stand watching poor people defend the rights of the rich. HELP!

Actually, I just thought of something. Maybe the biggest concern to Casey (and others) is that she not be seen as "taking a hand out." There is a lot of pride/shame going on there. I am sure Casey represent many of our citizens in this regard. They don't want to associate themselves with what they perceive as weakness (the "lazy asses"). How do you convince someone with such pride/shame that getting help is not a bad thing? Again someone with NLP language skills might be able to chime in here and give us all a hand. Anyone?

Perhaps first by not talking about them as if they aren't here. Or talking in a language someone w/o your same skill ( vocabulary) set may not understand.

What I, as a reader, just witnessed in your above post was beyond rude. I know you truly mean well. I know you truly wish to be able to assist someone with seeing things through a different lens. As someone who does take an interest ( completely NON partisan, as I think both parties suck), I am watching you fail miserably.

I agree with many many points you and others ( dreadgeek, Kobi, christie, et al ) have expressed. I am also the adult child of someone who refused "to take a handout" when my dad decided to exercise his right to be a fuckhead. I and my siblings along with my mother suffered at the hands of not only his assholishness but because of my mother's pride. So, I get where the not wanting to be dependent upon what has been seen as a "handout" comes from. My mom may not have had to work herself to utter ruin had she accepted help. She may not have become the willful, self determined, non-negotiable woman she did.

The problem is this... You present a case that may perhaps be unknown to someone else. You present what you see as "positive" and a gradual slide forward. You fail to see how she sees things or take into consideration where she is coming from. You do not speak to her. Get it?

There is good AND bad in this piece of now history. Perhaps if we can reasonably see all sides and figure out where it needs to go next we can begin to forge those bridges. If you can't see the other side, you will never breech it.( By you I mean ANY "you", not just you, key.)

The choice to keep banging your head against a wall, as someone else hinted to, I believe the wordage was "talking to a rock" ( lovely, no? ), or you can try to use a different approach. It's always YOUR choice to engage or not. It's always YOUR choice as to a change in strategy or NOT.

For me the question you asked bears another worthy avenue. Do you REALLY wish to engage, or do you just want to make a point? As I see it, those with the most ammunition should be the ones more willing to offer a different road than tossing it.


Sorry for the further derail. My bad.

Many states especially in the South which have large polulations of poor people have been brought up not to be "freeloaders". This goes way back, maybe even to before the Scots Irish (who predominantly settled these areas) came to the US and to the reception they received when they got here.

Casey, I totally get you not wanting a handout and working for what you have, however, for me I think it is a good thing for us to all share the burden of making sure every single US citizen has health insurance. I have also always paid for myself, never taken unemployment etc. I am lucky to have insurance though and even if I have to pay extra taxes, I want us all to. I want YOU to have insurance. :) We all need it.

I know you will agree that when people say Southerner's are lazy and don't want to work, we know that is not true. I think most people given the chance of work they can do well at and make a good living would pick to work. I agree that some people do not have this work ethic. My belief is that some have been so beat down over generations that living off the system seems like a good idea, but for most of us, really, we would rather go to work every day.

Think about what a burden would be lifted if we all shared in making sure every single US citizen had insurance. How many Mothers and Dads would sleep better.

For me, it is worth it to help pay for that. I dream of that day.

We don't have to agree, but I do wish you would think about it. :)

At the risk of going all "meta" on everyone here, I think that there's actually another issue that really comprises the elephant in the room. So I'm going to name it (I will call it George, and I will hug it and squeeze it and call it George! Sorry couldn't help myself). The question isn't about taxes, it's about *merit*. Even more than I heard Casey concerns about her taxes, I heard her concerns about lazy people (undeserving) who don't want to work (not meriting help). That was the theme that I kept reading in different words. And it's a question I think is actually at the heart of our current debates about social programs.

I'm willing to bet that Casey does *not* include wounded veterans in her list of lazy people who don't want to work. (I may be wrong here.) I'm willing to bet that she believes that they ARE deserving of medical care and help going to school. This is a position I don't disagree with. The problem seems to be who 'deserves' help. I (and it seems many others) believe that there are people who fall on hard times and what they need from society is a hand back up to their feet. Some of us may have been born into hard times. Some of us may have fallen on hard times one or more times in our youth or later. My position is that despite the fact that there will be people who game the system, we should be a society that has a safety net and the social contract should be like this: "if you cannot do for yourself because you are disabled, we will do for you. If you can do for yourself, but you have fallen on hard times, we will do what it takes to help you get back on your feet. If you were born into hard times, we will not hold you responsible for the circumstances of your birth and we will help you get into a position so your children won't be born into hard times. For that, we expect you to do your best, obey the laws, maybe do something nice for your neighbors once in a while and generally try to leave the place a little cleaner than you found it when you got here."

Others would disagree with that social contract. I don't know precisely what they would replace it with but, for reasons I'll get into later, I think that the harsher we decide society should be the more short-sighted we are being as a culture.

I want to digress about this whole 'rugged individualism' ethic. While on the surface it's admirable, a couple of people (Jess for one) has pointed to the downside of this. Yes, if one *can* do for oneself one should try their best to do so. However, kids in the mix changes the calculus on that one for me. Think about it this way: Which is more admirable? The mother who has a sick child who *refuses* to take that child to the hospital because "I've never taken a thing from anyone" and she has neither the insurance or the cash to pay or the mother who swallows her pride and goes to the hospital and gets her child medical care even if it means having to ask for charity. I would say that latter. Now, that might be self-serving because that mother was me some 20 years ago. My son was two, I was just out of the Army (not by choice), my marriage had just fallen apart and the only job skills I had were what I'd learned at McDonald's and cryptography. I grew up in privilege, believe that sitting on the doorstep of the county welfare office, my son in my lap, waiting for those doors to open, was the most humbling experience of my life. But I *HAD* to. My parents had cut me off, I had no job skills and my ex-husband had less skills than I did and couldn't hold a job to boot! It was humble myself or watch my kid starve. To this day, I still maintain that watching him starve would've been the easier path at the time, I would have had my pride intact.

Back to the issue of merit. Here's why I think having a truly harsh society is against ALL our interests. As long as I could get welfare, food stamps and medicaid I had no reason to steal or turn to other forms of crime. There was an *option* so I never really had to face my son starving--maybe sometimes there was less food, maybe sometimes I went a couple or three days without eating to make things stretch, but I didn't have to turn to stealing bread from the grocery store so my son could eat. But I can well imagine what I might have been driven to had there been no options. And that is the short-sightedness that mystifies me. One, to me obvious, lesson of history is this: as long as people can feed their children, put a roof over their head, give them some kind of bed to sleep in, some clothes on their backs and some shoes on their feet, they are very, very unlikely to revolt. But when people are watching their children starve or die from malnutrition or disease that *could* be cured but they cannot get the cure, they *will* revolt. It seems to me that social welfare in all its forms, is an insurance policy society pays to keep the wolves of temptation to revolution outside the door. It strikes me as short-sighted to not see a lesson that so obviously litters the fields of history (French revolution end-stage Weimer Germany, Zimbabwe at the end of the last century, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and on and on.)



I have to say I so agree with this. At some point you have to have your human reaction and just holler! One of the problems we have right now, as a society, is that we are in the grips of a meme that makes dialog difficult. That meme is that 'facts' are just a synonym for 'opinion'. It's not. Everyone has a right to their own opinions but no one has a right to their own facts. If someone refuses to acknowledge that there's one set of facts about he world, it really DOES feel like talking to a rock.

"key you are an ass hole"..... ~Casey35

Maybe it's just me, but I prefer to not correspond directly to people who call me an asshole.

And excuse me, but you are assuming that Casey did not understand what I was writing? Darling, I am a high school drop out, my vocabulary is not *that* advanced. Who exactly is being condescending to who?

Casey has been asked very direct very simple questions to which she has refused to answer. Instead she resorts to name calling. There is no point for me to address her directly anymore. But I do not believe that she is the only one with her fears and freak outs (mostly due to conservative media's Misinformation and Propaganda Machine). I would like to learn how to talk to people like her.

So what is your suggestion for when someone calls you an asshole and refuses to answer simple questions about their beliefs and opinions?

This is the Admin:
We don't allow folks to post under other members names.
Please create your own screen name if you wish to participate.

To be honest key, after she said she had left the conversation, I would have dropped it. I try when I can to help people see things from perhaps a different point of view than their own frame of reference. Sometimes I don't execute it very well. At some point I just give up, especially after someone has either made an afront to me or asked me to disengage. I will respect that.

We all have relatives or neighbors or someone we know who we argue with about just about anything political. Sometimes it feels like pulling your hair out trying to get them to hear what you are saying. It hurts and can be exasperating to continue to try to make someone "hear" something other than what is firmly implanted in their head.

I truly do believe you were trying your best to engage. I have seen nothing from you that would suggest otherwise. I don't think the name calling toward you was deserved. That kinda tosses anyones argument out the window in my opinion and at least for me, closes that door of communication.

I get called lovely names for attempting to try to help some folks see something different. It can enrage me. It can hurt. What it cannot do is force my hand or my mind to do anything other than keep trying. I eventually learn that some folks will just never see anything or any point of view other than their own. My best option is to continue trying elsewhere.

The energy you have put into this discussion tells me you do care. My own investment in conversations that are important to me can sometimes feel very sad. I try like hell to see all sides and it is really difficult when engaging with others who can't. I try add helpful items, but ya know, sometimes they are overlooked or dismissed and all that is focused on is the negative counterproductive position of folks stuck in their own frame of reference.

Anyway, don't give up being open minded. I know you are and appreciate it a lot. Sometimes ya just got know when to fold 'em.

As far as this law goes, I have consulted an atty and have found out what legally I need to do to protect my home so I can now join the ranks of those who cannot afford care and use the resources available to get help. I still do not understand why politicians make things so much more difficult than the simple common sense book keeping procedures they should be. But hey, they would all be out of work if they actually made things make sense.

2 words - corporate donations

Obama's health care bill,I don't like it.That is all.

Amen and Amen Again Sister!
 

Do you know about www.youstreet.org ?

For a measly $6 a year from every voting age citizen we could publicly fund every Federal Election. NO corporate donations at all.

Of course we have to hand count every paper ballot (instead of outsourcing our votes to private companies).

But once these two item are in place

(heck throw in instant run off voting - so make it 3, oh yeah and repeal Citizen United - 4 - God these Cons have screwed us but good)

Then

maybe then

We the People will have our country back.

two more words.. very true

I'd like to see every election in this country, right down to dog catcher, publicly funded. The millions of dollars that Meg Whitman is wasting in CA right now is beyond disgusting.

jus' checkin' to see how the thread is going. some constructive opinions and good food for thought i hope.

bye
j

I don't even like Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman's ad was so offensive to me that I would never cast a vote for her. Even for dog catcher. Especially for dog catcher.

Not helpful, nor constructive. Why don't you like it? What does it do that you don't like? Or are you just parroting the party line? More information please.

So what precisely would you like to see? What is it that you don't like? How could the bill be better? If you were writing the bill, how would you have written it?

Your saying you don't like it isn't really, ummm, informative. It would be helpful and would move the discussion forward if you were to say *why*. Otherwise, it seems you're just overturning the pot to see what happens next.

I'm curious. This is your third post on this subject and the only one that wasn't a copy-paste of some article somewhere. We know what you think other people think about this bill, what we still don't know is what *you* think about this bill. Pardon me for quibbling about this but I’m far less interested in what you think of the articles written about the bill (clearly you think they are well-written) than I am in what *you* think about the bill. So if it's not too much of an imposition, would you mind telling us what you think about the bill in your own words and why you think that, in your own words? Thanks in advance.

Cheers
Aj

I really don't either to be honest, I think we should have a single payer system.

The new Health Care Bill falls wayyyyyyyyyyy short of where I think it should be and I am very disappointed.

Yes, I understand that a lot of politic-ing had to happen to get what we got, but I wish somehow more could have been done. Way way more.

Yes, I understand that some people are too proud to accept help from the rest of us.

Bottom line though, I believe it is our right to have health-care and know that health-care is provided for EVERYONE in the USA.

I am fine with paying extra taxes to help this happen.

Hi dreadgeek,

I posted the articles as updated information from the news on the days they were released. I started the thread because there seems to be much concern over the health care overhaul and yet, I didn't see or find any thread on this subject. So I thought I would start this thread so that people could express their opinions. I happened to see the first article that i posted and thought it might be a good way to start the thread.

This thread is for the benefit of members who might want open dialogue or to just express their opinions. This thread is NOT for my benefit. I'm unsubscribed and have no desire to express any opinion. I just happened to notice there was a lot of posting so I thought I would drop and read some of the posts.