idrankwhat

I could go with 8 or 12 but no more.

I'd settle for voting machines with an auditable paper trail. Heck, DZ.com is more verifiable than the machines we use in our district. And I'm looking forward to a new president in seven years. Of course if you're interested in purging all of Congress and holding a publicly funded special election I would be most interested in joining in.

Because my point is that it's an embarrassment to our country that we have this sort of problem at all. There is no excuse for not being able to hold an election, account for all of the votes accurately and be able to do so through a reliable, verifiable system. Trying to turn a nationwide embarrassment into Dem bashing is political gamesmanship. But that, after all, is all this thread is about.

Thanks for reinforcing my point about this all being about political gamesmanship.

Yes, our government let businesses drive themselves into the ground instead of keeping the necessary regulations in place.

Absolutely, being "leaders of the free world" during an information age where people can make $billions through arbitrage but still not being able to accurately count a vote is a fucking embarrassment. There are no real doubts. This is pure politics and the fact that it gets any mention in the mainstream media is just plain sad.

What's the purpose of business? To generate profit. And when profit is the most important consideration you end up with business and financial meltdowns which endanger an entire nation's economy and the financial security of an entire population. Responsible businesses supply their product and reap a fair profit which allows them to grow and prosper. Both parties benefit. Irresponsible businesses reap undue profits by parasitizing their customer base, draining them of their re$ource$ and then discarding them. The route the banking industry has chosen is a good example of the latter.

I probably should have put a in there to modify the automotive reference. The sarcasm didn't transfer well. Sorry.

I don't have any problem with profit in general. It's a good thing. I do have a problem with profit when profit becomes the most important aspect of the operation. What's the purpose of education? To educate. What's the purpose of health care? To heal. When healing and education get in the way of optimal numbers on the next quarterly stockholder's report, then the priorities have gone in the shitter. And car makers will go under when we have to put seatbelts in cars. The drug companies spend about $13 billion a year in advertising. in 2005 there were 1274 pharmaceutical lobbyists in DC. Regardless of what bill passes, the drug companies will profit just fine. They will be the one's with the most influence on the legislation, just like last time. Bribery....err...."access" has it's privileges.

Did you read the link I posted? havent had time yet... sorry Here are some highlights: "In those three critical months, PhRMA and its member companies spent $40 million lobbying Congress. That's more than $3 million each week." "If you want to know what PhRMA is getting this time, Avorn says just look at what's not on the table during the debate: Drug re-importation from Canada? Off the table. Government-negotiated drug prices? Off the table. "A lot of those seem to have been resolved even before the public discussion begins,"" "PhRMA alone has 29 people lobbying for it. In the graphic on this page, you can dig into the reports, and you'll find that PhRMA also hired 45 different Washington, D.C., lobbying firms to represent it in those three months of the second quarter..............There are far more people in Washington representing one party of the debate — the big drug companies — than there are members of Congress working on the health care bill."

Did you read the link I posted?

Which is why I don't want it rushed. Costs are out stripping economic growth. We spend more and get less than any country on the planet and we still don't have everyone covered. The system is broken, but I agree that it does not need a knee jerk fix. But, IMO, a real fix is not possible so long as money flows freely between Washington and special interests and industry is writing the legislation as well as setting the terms for Congressional debate.

Not agreeing, but tell me, who is it that loses if we don't reform health care? Over the full projection period (2008-2018), average annual health spending growth is anticipated outpace average annual growth in the overall economy (4.1 percent) by 2.1 percentage points per year. By 2018, national health spending is expected to reach $4.4 trillion and comprise just over one-fifth (20.3 percent) of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

So there are rules on using taxpayer money to send partisan misinformation to constituents? Cool!

Are you implying that the Dems should all march in lock step with the President? I know we saw a lot of that with the R's over the last decade but look where it got us. This is a difficult issue and I want it to be worked out through constructive debate. The last thing I want is for it to be rammed through on a short, artificial timeline. That's how we end up with things like the medicare drug bill. On the other hand, the longer it takes to build a strong bill the more time PHRMA has to beat/buy down Congress with $3 million a week. I suppose, in all fairness, we should find out how much the uninsured are donating to Congress.

No I don't. Didn't say that either. They both do it and that's why we'd all be better off if we quit listening to them. I provided my personal experience and applied that to the market response. But let me clarify because you seem to be missing part of the message. BOTH RIGHT AND LEFT WING TALK RADIO SUCK. Neither should be used as a model for thoughtful news reporting or respectful dialog. And your opinion is that only one side is rational and uses good sources. As I stated above, BOTH SUCK. But there's only a profitable market base for one. So yes, my opinion is that there are more, maybe I should say "radio listeners" on the right who are willing to embrace lousy information sources. It's a strange phenomena. I have a lucid and rational co-worker who is very thoughtful, sharp and incisive on most every topic except one. "Dems". Bring up politics and he'll foam at the mouth as he recites every pejorative myth out there, and then start making up a few of his own. Fortunately, he also leveled a fair amount of polite criticism towards the other side of the aisle over the last six years or so. I chock it up to some sort of fetish. I'll agree completely with that statement, but not in support of your intended argument. We just got rid of (some of) the neocons who personify your description, and hopefully the moral majority influence that helped them compensate for their lack of numbers. The combination of news and entertainment is what I've termed "ignorance peddling". We get way too much of it from way too many sources. Talk radio (right or left) is probably the worst example with regard to impact. You can not have a thought provoking or fair discussion of a topic when the host uses fallacious, pigeon holed arguments, screams at, interrupts, talks over, and then dumps a guest and then regurgitates a talking point. That exposes the listener to the opinion of the host alone, and by rudely disallowing any rebuttal, gives the listener the illusion that the host holds a more valid position. That sort of discussion style is typically the sign of an extremely weak argument.

Good to see you admitting that you favor political gamesmanship over solutions to the problem. But that's not news Marc But on the serious side, if you really want to see why health care reform will end up being an expensive and ineffective shadow of the necessary reform, read this. Wanna put money on who actually writes the final legislation?

Regarding the thread topic, yea. I'd still vote for him. I already got my votes worth.

When I walk out to the landing area with my camera I always refer to it as my "stupid magnet". Sorry to hear about your gear and best wishes getting rid of the "nonac" tattoo.

They are also the one's who will be most influential on the final draft of any legislation, which is why it will likely fall very short of the original intent. It reminds me of a recent Daily Show segment that summed up our legislative process pretty well.

I listened enough to find out that the lib version was just as invaluable as the con version. But I still do occasionally tune in to right wing yack radio to find out what the talking point of the day is. (It's actually kind of funny to tune in and then cross reference to the new SC thread titles). You can call it "smarter" if that's how you interpret it but that's not what I said. I was simply pointing out that there is a profitable market for one flavor and a dwindling market for the other and gave an opinion as to why based on personal experience. If you have an another idea as to why the right wing noise machine has a market but the left doesn't then I'd be interested in hearing it.

I'm not ignoring the rest of your post but this jumped out at me. I have a friend who, as a grad student, was being insured by what turned out to be sequential six month policies. Apparently she let one lapse by a couple of weeks. She went in to have a procedure done that was diagnosed during the previous six month term. They denied the procedure due to it being a "pre-existing condition", even though she had been with the same company for at least the previous three years. I agree with you about the doctor shopping. That should be easy enough to figure out and it touches upon the other concern about a failure of past records being available to current providers. There's really no excuse these days for there to be any hindrance to information flow between doctors (and by "doctors" I mean "DOCTORS", not insurance employees on risk management duty). And I think Tom pointed out well one of the major problems, that being doctors being pulled away from patients in favor of mindless paper shuffling. I also agree that the insurance companies should be the focus, not the Dr's offices. By your own description it sounds like you spend more time doing work for or working around obstacles put up by insurers. That's not health care IMO.

This makes me think you have never listened to liberal radio. Both liberals and conservatives do the same things. You're absolutely right. I don't, and for the same reason that I dislike "Conservative" talk radio. They do the same things but one target audience embraces it and the other shuns it for the most part and therefore, there's really no market for it. I don't listen to it because I don't want my head filled with misinformation.

I missed the speech (plowing through a stack of Dr. Seuss books) . Where is it that you think he fumbled? I can only speak from the standpoint of a paying health care customer but it seems to me that how medical offices work IS the problem. It seems to me that more time /effort/money is spent on accounting and dealing with ridiculous paperwork than they do on the actual patient care. This is not to belittle the efforts of the office workers but more the system that has been developed to make things as labor intensive and confusing as possible. I'm constantly amazed that I can spend $0.25-$0.30 out of each health care related dollar to a system that sends me three or four pieces of paperwork and tells me what I may owe. Sorry, I'm getting carried away. What in his speech rubbed you the wrong way?

Where I live, Rush comes on at noon and Hannity @ 3:00. Also, "libs" commute to work and listen to the radio just as much as "cons" do so I'm not sure that the correlation with employment related travel has much to do with it. My assumption is that radio and TV conglomerates choose their broadcasting content based on market response. They go with what sells, and if validity of content takes a hit in the process then that's just the cost of doing a profitable business. That's why our "news" programming looks more like a cross between "Entertainment Tonight" and a Springer/Povich political pundit paternity test.