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The Politics Thread - please direct all related posts here..

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Re: The Politics Thread - please direct all related posts here.. 

Post#521 » by duetta » Thu Aug 26, 2010 1:37 am

Former President Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman says he's gay after years of denial

Ken Mehlman, who was President George W. Bush's campaign manager in 2004, has come out as gay - and wants to be an advocate for gay marriage.

Mehlman, also a former Republican National Committee chairman, told the Atlantic magazine "It's taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life."

He said friends, family and colleagues "have been wonderfully supportive."


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... _of_d.html
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Post#522 » by duetta » Sun Aug 29, 2010 3:51 pm

Op-Ed Columnist
The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
By FRANK RICH
Published: August 28, 2010

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Vive la révolution!

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opini ... ch.html?hp
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Re: The Politics Thread - please direct all related posts here.. 

Post#523 » by richardhutnik » Tue Sep 7, 2010 3:17 am

Found this on knowyourmeme:

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/teabonics

Is "teabonics" fake?

It looks like a massive trend in mangled English at tea party protests. Can someone PLEASE show these are all fake?
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - G. Marx
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Post#524 » by duetta » Tue Sep 7, 2010 11:43 am

A separate study in the same issue of Health Affairs illuminates another source of waste in the health care system — medical liability and defensive medicine. The paper by three Harvard professors and a colleague at the University of Melbourne in Australia estimates that the medical-liability system added $55.6 billion to the cost of American medicine in 2008, equal to 2.4 percent of total health spending.

More than 8 of every 10 of those dollars — $45.6 billion — was attributed to defensive medicine by physicians who order unnecessary tests and procedures to protect themselves from malpractice claims. While the dollar amount is “not trivial,” the authors noted that the fraction of total health spending “is less than some imaginative estimates put forward in the health reform debate.”

The authors, led by Michelle M. Mello of Harvard’s School of Public Health, estimated the cost of various components of the medical liability system, including payments to malpractice plaintiffs, defensive medicine, administrative costs like legal fees and lost time by clinicians. Rigorous estimates have been scarce in the past, they wrote, while adding that their own calculations “should be interpreted cautiously.”

The new health law did not make substantial changes to the medical liability system, despite Republican calls for restrictions on malpractice claims. “Reforms that offer the prospect of reducing these costs have modest potential to exert downward pressure on overall health spending,” the study concluded. “Reforms to the health care delivery system, such as alterations to the fee-for-service reimbursement system and the incentives it provides for overuse, probably provide greater opportunities for savings.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/healt ... ealth.html
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Post#525 » by richardhutnik » Tue Sep 7, 2010 5:44 pm

in a system that uses court systems to get people compensation they need to live, rather than a government based welfare system, you are going to have people threatening lawsuits to get people to be competent. What other recourse to people have now, if a botched operation results in the person permanently not able to work for a living? I may need to go for surgery on my back to fix my leg. What happens as a result they botch and I end up paralysed. Should we stuff me in a life termination booth?

Anyhow, I am interested in those who advocate for less government intervention, say there is need for tort reform. Government interferes to limit compensatory damages.

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Post#526 » by duetta » Tue Sep 7, 2010 6:00 pm

richardhutnik wrote:in a system that uses court systems to get people compensation they need to live, rather than a government based welfare system, you are going to have people threatening lawsuits to get people to be competent. What other recourse to people have now, if a botched operation results in the person permanently not able to work for a living? I may need to go for surgery on my back to fix my leg. What happens as a result they botch and I end up paralysed. Should we stuff me in a life termination booth?

Anyhow, I am interested in those who advocate for less government intervention, say there is need for tort reform. Government interferes to limit compensatory damages.

- Rich


I don't disagree. The point of that story to me was how little defensive medicine is contributing to overall health care expenditures.
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Re: The Politics Thread - please direct all related posts here.. 

Post#527 » by HarthorneWingo » Wed Sep 8, 2010 4:18 am

duetta wrote:
richardhutnik wrote:in a system that uses court systems to get people compensation they need to live, rather than a government based welfare system, you are going to have people threatening lawsuits to get people to be competent. What other recourse to people have now, if a botched operation results in the person permanently not able to work for a living? I may need to go for surgery on my back to fix my leg. What happens as a result they botch and I end up paralysed. Should we stuff me in a life termination booth?

Anyhow, I am interested in those who advocate for less government intervention, say there is need for tort reform. Government interferes to limit compensatory damages.

- Rich


I don't disagree. The point of that story to me was how little defensive medicine is contributing to overall health care expenditures.


Yeah, how about that? Medical malpractice lawsuits would go down if the AMA would police (i.e. regulated) its doctors (and don't anybody come at me about how I'm anti-doctor ... my dad is a doctor) and discipline those who are incompetent. But nooooo ... let the free market determine who's in and who's out. And when a victim of this free market experiment sues "Dr. Nick Rivera" because he/she is disabled from ever working again or is scarred for life or is dead

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Re: The Politics Thread - please direct all related posts here.. 

Post#528 » by richardhutnik » Thu Sep 23, 2010 8:52 pm

Here is the case by Student Loan Justice on why the student loan system needs to be reformed, and to put consumer protection back into this type of lending:
http://media.causes.com/ribbon/905871

I figured this is the best place to stick this. The other thread I had on student loan default rate is buried on here.

- Rich
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - G. Marx
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Re: The Politics Thread - please direct all related posts here.. 

Post#529 » by duetta » Fri Sep 24, 2010 4:11 pm

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Post#530 » by mugzi » Sat Sep 25, 2010 7:10 pm

I'm staunchly pro-life, and to me this article sums up how insidious planned parenthood really is.

'Planned Parenthood Aborts African Americans': New Mass Media Campaign
| 9/23/2010 | Patrick B. Craine

A new mass media campaign is hoping to shed light on Planned Parenthood’s racist roots and continued targeting of black communities. The PPAbortsAA campaign (“Planned Parenthood Aborts African Americans”) is aimed at getting the message out to a wide audience through billboards in large cities and TV ads on popular channels.


“When you look at the numbers, it’s absolutely astounding the lie that’s been given to African Americans - that this is really good for them,” said Kimberly Speirs, a spokesperson for PPAbortsAA.org.

African American babies are three times more likely to be aborted than white babies, according to data from the U.S. Center for Disease Control. Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, the black population in the U.S. has been reduced by over 25 percent.

Planned Parenthood is accused of targeting black communities because 62-78% of their facilities are in minority neighbourhoods, depending on how the data is interpreted.

PPAbortsAA.org notes that this targeting of blacks was part of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s plan from the beginning. “Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated,” said the famed eugenicist and leader of the Negro Project, which was designed to curtail the black population.

The campaign organizers have been able to get their ads on BET (Black Entertainment Television), and they are available through their website, but other mainstream media outlets in New York, Chicago, Dallas, and Houston have refused to run them.

“It looks like the mainstream media is more interested in protecting Planned Parenthood than they are in educating African American women about the truth of abortion,” said Speirs.

She said it is clear from Planned Parenthood’s own statistics that they favor abortion over other options. She noted, for example, that in 2007 they aborted 305,310 babies in the U.S., but only made 4,912 adoption referrals.

“Most women who are abortion-minded, they don’t want abortion, they just don’t know what else is out there,” she said. “Once you let them know all the positive, hopeful, beautiful alternatives available for them ... they almost always choose life.”

“It’s so heartbreaking that so many African American lives have been snuffed out because of the deception that they’ve been sold,” said Speirs. “We just think that they want to know the truth about this issue. I think Afircan American women primarily want to know that they and their babies are being targeted.”


Here's a picture of Margaret Sanger, founder of planned parenthood. Funny how the liberal main stream media doesnt broadcast these facts about the roots of this organizations founder or the statistics mentioned in this article.

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Re: The Politics Thread - please direct all related posts here.. 

Post#531 » by duetta » Tue Oct 19, 2010 9:39 pm

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw_0a54S8po&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
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Post#532 » by Knicker23 » Fri Oct 22, 2010 5:20 am

Figured this best fits in here...

What do people think about the Juan Williams firing ordeal?

He was fired from NPR for expressing an opinion, on Fox News.... I watch O'Reilly all the time and Juan is often on and I think NPR was looking for ways to get rid of him bc they're a far left organization and didn't like that he associated himself with Fox....

The guy simply said when he's getting on a plane and sees a muslim dressed in certain attire he gets uneasy - or something to that effect... and now he's getting the boot for expressing some feeling that happened to come out in a conversation.. 'we don't like our journalists expressing personal opinions' - yeah, unless they coincide w their liberal left viewpoint... mind you, NPR is a publicly funded organization...pretty F-ed up if you ask me.
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Post#533 » by duetta » Fri Oct 22, 2010 10:09 am

Thank you for not starting a new thread!

What Williams said is something that a lot of people feel, for better or for worse.

Thing is, as a working journalist, Juan Williams has doubtless traveled a lot since 9/11, and doubtless run into lots of men and women in Muslim garb on airplanes. And the fact that he was on O'Reilly to make those comments tells me that the planes he's traveled on haven't blown up, or been hijacked and then crashed into buildings. So, statistically speaking, Williams fear must be based on a stereotype that has morphed into a prejudice.

As for NPR being left wing, I don't know, since I don't listen to it. But I do watch The Newshour - which is non-partisan, not left wing. And I have observed from hanging out in the Comments section at New York Daily News, a center-right paper run by a known center-right activist named Mort Zuckerman, that some people confuse any perspective that isn't hard right (capitalism as religion, climate change denial, etc.) with being liberal - including most of the mouthpieces and flame-throwers on FOX. So I could understand why an organization that seeks to report the news, not make the news, might be uncomfortable with its journalists appearing on FOX.
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Post#534 » by cgf » Fri Oct 22, 2010 10:26 am

Nah dude, NPR's about two ticks left of CNN. They're not bad because they're pretending to not be biased so it's not just pure ideological demagoguery, but I listen to NPR and my local Chicago Radio and both are clearly predominantly left leaning, and that creates a natural bias. Which isn't as infuriating as the ignorant bias of a Fox news or MSNBC.
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Post#535 » by Reservoirdawgs » Fri Oct 22, 2010 2:04 pm

I turned on CNN yesterday and saw they were reporting that Juan Williams had been fired by NPR for bigoted remarks. I have no opinion of Juan Williams and the CNN report only gave a brief quote, so I figured it must have been pretty bad and went on with my day. It wasn't until later that, out of boredom, I clicked on Williams' reactions on the Drudge Report and saw that his quotes and point was being completely taken out of context (similar to the Breitbart/NAACP fiasco a few months ago). NPR is well-known for being very left-leaning, and I have no doubt that they were looking to get rid of someone associated with Fox News, regardless of his political ideology.

Below are Juan Williams' comments. They are pretty interesting (taken from his perspective, obviously).

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/10/ ... eiss-bush/
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Post#536 » by Reservoirdawgs » Fri Oct 22, 2010 2:06 pm

duetta wrote:So I could understand why an organization that seeks to report the news, not make the news, might be uncomfortable with its journalists appearing on FOX.


With all due respect, NPR has been a pretty far-left organization for a while now. I am a moderate and listen to NPR whenever there isn't anything good on ESPN Radio so their ideology really isn't that big of a deal to me, but they certainly have a political axe to grind and don't really hide it.
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Re: The Politics Thread - please direct all related posts here.. 

Post#537 » by King of Troy » Fri Oct 22, 2010 2:28 pm

Reservoirdawgs wrote:
duetta wrote:So I could understand why an organization that seeks to report the news, not make the news, might be uncomfortable with its journalists appearing on FOX.


With all due respect, NPR has been a pretty far-left organization for a while now. I am a moderate and listen to NPR whenever there isn't anything good on ESPN Radio so their ideology really isn't that big of a deal to me, but they certainly have a political axe to grind and don't really hide it.


Left in American terms. But they aren't really radical in any way.

Leftist media would be calling for collectivism and anarchism over the usual neo-liberalism and authoritarianism. The US political system is all "right".
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Post#538 » by duetta » Fri Oct 22, 2010 2:29 pm

King of Troy wrote:Left in American terms. But they aren't really radical in any way.

Leftist media would be calling for collectivism and anarchism over the usual neo-liberalism and authoritarianism. The US political system is all "right".


Exactly.
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Post#539 » by King of Troy » Fri Oct 22, 2010 2:32 pm

duetta wrote:
King of Troy wrote:Left in American terms. But they aren't really radical in any way.

Leftist media would be calling for collectivism and anarchism over the usual neo-liberalism and authoritarianism. The US political system is all "right".


Exactly.


As a true leftist, this is just one of the things that bothers me in American politics.

A leftist to Americans is actually right of center. Sad days.
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Post#540 » by Reservoirdawgs » Fri Oct 22, 2010 4:23 pm

King of Troy wrote:Left in American terms. But they aren't really radical in any way.

Leftist media would be calling for collectivism and anarchism over the usual neo-liberalism and authoritarianism. The US political system is all "right".


Well, yeah, we're talking about American politics, an American organization, and an American situation.
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