Jodi, more for your list...

Edited by Mike O'Brien on 24 March 2010 at 6:06pm

QUOTE: My logic is that all I know of Gingrich is foul and evil, so until I hear otherwise, I would believe new foul things said about him. {snip}That's where I was going with that. It wouldn't shock me, based on the man's beliefs and policies, that he did hold the positions that he was briefly attributed to.

Say, remember last October when Rush Limbaugh got ahold of that satirical fake Obama master's thesis, and mistakenly thought it was genuine?   He went on the air and started criticizing it for its position that the Constitution does not guarantee "economic freedom" and its advocacy of the direct redistribution of wealth to the poor.  When he found out the document was not really written by Obama, Limbaugh's defense was that even though Obama hadn't written it "we know he thinks it."  Your argument above reminds me of that.


Edited by Jason Czeskleba on 24 March 2010 at 7:27pm

The Insurance companies get their money and the poor stay poor.

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Ah, yes.  Those evil insurance companies.  None of them makes a secret that they are for profit businesses.  And check out the profit margins for health insurers sometime.  They certainly aren't the gluttonous raiders we're led to believe they are.  The blame for the current state of affairs rests more accurately on the medical system as a whole, and the people who drain resources by seeking expensive and often unneeded care. 

Insurer targeted HIV patients to drop coverage

We need to change the end-of-life culture.  Most people are woefully unprepared for the inevitable and many resources are spent in vain.  But not all - there is a place for expensive and unneeded care.  Nearly every treatment used today was outrageously expensive in its genesis.  It gets really bad when doctors say its time to pack it in and families just can't do it.

We've left patients to languish on ventilators for days and days until the clan could be gathered together to be there when grandpa "passes".  Never mind that grandpa passed three days and $9000 ago.  If you had to stay in a $1500 hotel room every night waiting for your brother to drive from Yellowknife to Buenos Aires, wouldn't that seem a ridiculous waste?  And yet that's going on all over the place, all the time.

Well, twice in a row in the same thread, with a cheering section?

Jason: "I don't recollect ever having a significant disagreement with you, though. I usually find myself agreeing with the substance of your political positions, if not always with your stridency or debating style."

Yeah, till today I always thought you were a decent chap too. Shame it has to end this way.

Jason: "I mean seriously, this is the way you discuss things with someone who is on your side politically?"

No, this is how I discuss things with someone who talks down to me. Barack Obama would get the same treatment.

Jason: "Likening me to a defender of OJ Simpson?"

No - you totally missed my point - and forgive me, readers, I'm going to get sloppy here - you missed it because you seemed too interested in smugly dismissing me, rather than reading the content. I can say that because you did it a few times, establishing a pattern, so I don't feel too guilty when my mind fills in the blanks about judging your character on this one.

Here's my point about OJ - everyone thinks he's guilty, but no one knows what happened. (erm... at the time, anyway. That book was the thing that finally made me throw in the towel on the guy) People just call him guilty. Why? Because we've got a nation of Columbos out there who can just TELL if a person is guilty. Someone's acting suspicious? They must be guilty! Is that right? Hell no - but it is human nature - it's our brains filling in the blanks, the way it does when we watch a movie - it's just pictures being shown quickly in sequence, but our brains fill in the flow and make it work.

If a politician has spent his career doing things that cast them in a certain light, then it's not a huge leap to believe something that you hear about.

In fact - look back - how did this come about - you defend Newt saying it wasn't what the NYT says it was. I start with a happy aside about his character - that it woudln't be out of character for him to say that. You call me on it, so I ask for some evidence that he's not some two-bit bigot. Who knows? He might be mind-blowingly liberal on race issues! Nothing I've seen or heard or read about the guy shows that, but I'm open. One guy posts a bit about how Newt wrote a book where he details that he's again' LBJ's social policies - fairly standard conservative position - and again, our brains fill in the blanks - but if that's the case, I feel safe in assuming, till someone sets me straight, that that means that Newt thinks that the blacks in America just need to go out and get a job - pull themselves up! That line of clap-trap, a common conservative position - and if so, I am even more comfortble in judgeing him, in that it displays a lack of empathy or understanding of the situation that certian groups are/were in, and how just telling them to "get a job" isn't the same as yelling it at your lazy hippy son.

In fact, I go one further - I call it a pretty racially insensitive position, and one that further supports my view of Newt.

But I'm still open to suggestion here.

Jason, too busy trying to shame me says: "If you were trying to deliberately illustrate my point about exaggerating and distorting the views of someone you're debating, you couldn't have done a better job." <--- and in turn, supports my disgust with him.

Then Jason smugly notes: "Say, remember last October when Rush Limbaugh got ahold of that satirical fake Obama master's thesis, and mistakenly thought it was genuine?   He went on the air and started criticizing it for its position that the Constitution does not guarantee "economic freedom" and its advocacy of the direct redistribution of wealth to the poor. When he found out the document was not really written by Obama, Limbaugh's defense was that even though Obama hadn't written it "we know he thinks it." Your argument above reminds me of that."

Yeah, because he wasn't acting in an illogical manner. I disagree with what he was saying, but in his twisted drug-addled mind, he really does see that it would be in character for Obama to write that.

Further, in some cases, they were right - but only as far as it applied to them. People lost their shit over Rev. Wright, but seriously? That guy? It's not like what he said wasn't true. It wasn't nice, that's for sure, but if you're an adult you can handle not nice. But Republicans went crazy - how dare anyone say something like that??! Uh... they've never been to one of my diner parties. So, they would be right to assume that that sort of talk was going on, and it would be bad and wrong... TO THEM. Just as Newt's theories on civil rights are wrong TO ME. Not to the guy who mentioned his book - I'm sure he feels about Newt the way I do about Wright's speaches - it's a whole lot of whatever to him and me.

Perspective, Jason, perspective.

This goes back to my OJ thesis - I know you all KNOW in your heart of hearts that OJ killed those people, but were any of you there? Did any of you see any sort of solid evidence? Was there a confession? Or was it a kind of... he's the guilty type, he was acting funny, there were things that if you squint, kind of make him look bad...

I'm not saying he didn't do it - he probably did - but if you're going to call someone out for filling in the blanks based on character and circumstancial evidence, and then in the same breath assure everyone that you just KNOW that OJ was guilty, well...

I will ask this of you, Jason - I expect some sort of sniffy condescending reply, and that's ok, but don't mis-quote me here - don't suggest that I'm saying OJ didn't do it and use that to dismiss my whole point. I didn't say that - I said that we have no solid proof he did it. That is, before he wrote that confession-book.

I've been on debates on the internet before - I get how this works.

Insurer targeted HIV patients to drop coverage

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I can cherry pick horror stories from the internet all day too.  Want one about Walmart?  The Catholic Church?  Citibank?    All evil. 

Again, insurance companies are businesses.  They make less profit than soda makers, retail stores or HOSPITALS.  If they make no profit, then they go away and no one has insurance.  So they, like any other business, have to constantly make decisions regarding their business practices.  Unfortunately, their decisions involve sick people.  So there's always emotion, and hyperbole, involved.  They aren't perfect.  But they are certainly not the bad guys.

They simply cannot pay for 100% of the medical care that we Americans rack up, especially when so many Americans have eaten, smoked and gluttoned their way into disease and ill-health. 

QUOTE: They simply cannot pay for 100% of the medical care that we Americans rack up, especially when so many Americans have eaten, smoked and gluttoned their way into disease and ill-health.

That's not the issue, really. The issue is that insurance companies make a point of trying not to pay their claims.  They have no problem collecting premiums, though.  Perhaps if they spent there resources creating incentives for healthy behaviors and covering preventative care we'd have less trouble with chronic health problems in this country.