"Obamacare" - The USA Hard Right vs. the NHS

ZoZo wrote:

Fitchsticks wrote:

Out of interest, how does the transplant system work in the US? I mean do you get the new heart according to how much you need it or how much you pay for it? Or is there a kind of waiting list like the NHS?

I think that private organ donations are currently legal, but it's going to be banned soon.

Why? If you have an article to link, I'd love to read it.

They are banning private donations to the UK but nothing more. And the UK is banning all private donations.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] <---US banning international private donations to the UK

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] <---UK banning Private Donations

Clarification based on the article - they are banning private donations from dead donors. Cadaver organs will follow the protocols for their transplant list.

Living donor private donation is still permitted without regard to a person's place on the transplant list.

This is part of the problem - there seems to be distortion between what the "slug" is and what the article actually says.

As usual, Americans confuse Socialism with Communism. Note to idiots - just because it ends in 'ism' doesn't make it the same thing.

For the life of me, I'm sure most of these protestors don't even know what they're complaining about. They're calling a free health care system a Nazi-ism or something. How is health care for all Nazi-ish?

Watching part of a debate, a woman asked a protester on his podium a question, and he just stood there and insulted her intelligence, telling her he'd have more of a conversation with a dining room table. And people APPLAUDED this response, as if he'd really pwned her or something.

Harley Quinn hyenaholic wrote:

Watching part of a debate, a woman asked a protester on his podium a question, and he just stood there and insulted her intelligence, telling her he'd have more of a conversation with a dining room table. And people APPLAUDED this response, as if he'd really pwned her or something.

Shit was so awesome.

Yeah, that man.

While in theory I agree with him, he does not make his points look good by insulting a woman from his podium. Also, he talks like he's got his mouth full of cotton wool.

Harley Quinn hyenaholic wrote:

Yeah, that man.

While in theory I agree with him, he does not make his points look good by insulting a woman from his podium. Also, he talks like he's got his mouth full of cotton wool.

It's about time someone told these people how genuinely stupid they are and sound. Everyone on both sides is fed up with each other but the woman's side lacks intellect and the man's side lacks tact.

Also: THIS
Long but you'll facepalm so hard.

Harley Quinn hyenaholic wrote:

As usual, Americans confuse Socialism with Communism. Note to idiots - just because it ends in 'ism' doesn't make it the same thing.

Not only that, the people yelling about "socialism" usually can't even get that right. Socialized services for citizens =/= socialism. The fucking GDR was a socialist country, which I happened to grow up right next to (less than 50 miles from the border). Having some good friends who grew up under that particular socialist regime, I can say with some authority that those idiots wouldn't be able to define socialism if it shat in their faces.

Harley Quinn hyenaholic wrote:

For the life of me, I'm sure most of these protestors don't even know what they're complaining about. They're calling a free health care system a Nazi-ism or something. How is health care for all Nazi-ish?

About the bolded part: Well, DUH. For the rest: I don't think Hitler was renowned for health care, considering that Bismarck is usually credited with the socialized services Germany has, IIRC, and he was around when 'Stach-Boy was still crapping his diapers. So, the whole Nazi angle must have to do with something else, but I can't for the life of me tell you what, so I'm blaming the Kool-Aid those people seem to be ingesting in large quantities.

Harley Quinn hyenaholic wrote:

Watching part of a debate, a woman asked a protester on his podium a question, and he just stood there and insulted her intelligence, telling her he'd have more of a conversation with a dining room table. And people APPLAUDED this response, as if he'd really pwned her or something.

That is because lately, a lot of politicians have been assaulted with a lot of really, REALLY stupid questions that could have been avoided if people stopped listening to their demagogue of choice and picked up a fucking newspaper once in a while. It was high-time someone told one of them how fucking stupid their question was. Thus the applause.

Mafiosa wrote:

Harley Quinn hyenaholic wrote:

Yeah, that man.

While in theory I agree with him, he does not make his points look good by insulting a woman from his podium. Also, he talks like he's got his mouth full of cotton wool.

It's about time someone told these people how genuinely stupid they are and sound. Everyone on both sides is fed up with each other but the woman's side lacks intellect and the man's side lacks tact.

Also: THIS
Long but you'll facepalm so hard.

Holy shit, I love it when journalists let the retards ramble on. Talk about enough rope to hang themselves. And he knew it too; he was smirking near the end.

Mafiosa wrote:

the woman's side lacks intellect and the man's side lacks tact.

Actually, her side also lacks tact.

I don't blame Barney Frank a bit--the man is Jewish, and he's being accused of supporting a "Nazi" agenda. I'd have called the woman a "dumb whore" under those circumstances.

I just don't see their point of view no matter how hard I try. It seems to work like this.

Tyranny: a 3% raise in the tax rates to the richest of the rich; providing universal health care. Having a black President.

Not Tyranny: The President and Vice President claiming the unitary right to throw people in a gulag and torture them without any judicial or congressional oversight; secret death squads; wiretapping your phone without a warrant.

That just doesn't compute to me.

Lysander wrote:

Mafiosa wrote:

the woman's side lacks intellect and the man's side lacks tact.

Actually, her side also lacks tact.

Democrats win on the basis of having functional brains.

Harley Quinn hyenaholic wrote:

Yeah, that man.

While in theory I agree with him, he does not make his points look good by insulting a woman from his podium. Also, he talks like he's got his mouth full of cotton wool.

1. The woman accused a gay, Jewish congressman and a mixed-race President of being Nazis because they support improving access to medical care for Americans who are having trouble getting it. She's manifestly an idiot, and it's no more than the truth to call her such.2. He has a speech impediment, and I'd still prefer to listen to him than to people who talk like their skulls are full of cotton wool.3. He totally pwned that stupid cow.

She still wasn't as bad as the woman in Las Vegas who gave the fascist salute and shouted "Heil Hitler!" at an Israeli who was being interviewed about that nation's health care system.

Quote :

During his remarks, a woman yelled out, “Heil Hitler!” The man stopped, became visibly upset, and exclaimed, “Did you hear this? She say to a Jew, ‘Heil Hitler’! Hear? I’m a Jew! You’re telling me, ‘Heil Hitler’? Shame of you!” After he angrily confronts her, the woman mocks him by making a crying sound to imply he is a whining baby.

You can't have a debate with these people. Debate implies that the other side is actually trying to argue with you using facts and logic.

What the fuck is wrong with Americans? We're dumb as hell. No, seriously. Comparing Obama to Hitler? WAT.

This does not compute. I"m going to live in Canada. See y'all later.

Spotts1701 wrote:

You can't have a debate with these people.

They lack souls.

Maximilia wrote:

What the fuck is wrong with Americans? We're dumb as hell. No, seriously. Comparing Obama to Hitler? WAT.

This does not compute. I"m going to live in Canada. See y'all later.

You're acting like that's something new. People have been doing that since before he even got elected.

DarthDarthington wrote:

You're acting like that's something new. People have been doing that since before he even got elected.

Copypasted from the Washington Post:

Quote :

In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition

Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage

By Rick Perlstein
Sunday, August 16, 2009



In Pennsylvania last week, a citizen, burly, crew-cut and trembling with rage, went nose to nose
with his baffled senator: "One day God's going to stand before you, and
he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the
Hill. And then you will get your just deserts." He was accusing Arlen
Specter of being too kind to President Obama's proposals to make it
easier for people to get health insurance.

In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed that "under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man would be given no care whatsoever." He pressed his case further on Fox News.

In New Hampshire, outside a building where Obama spoke, cameras trained on the pistol strapped to the leg of libertarian William Kostric. He then explained on CNN why the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots."

It was interesting to hear a BBC reporter on the radio trying to
make sense of it all. He quoted a spokesman for the conservative
Americans for Tax Reform: "Either this is a genuine grass-roots
response, or there's some secret evil conspirator living in a mountain
somewhere orchestrating all this that I've never met." The spokesman
was arguing, of course, that it was spontaneous, yet he also proudly
owned up to how his group has helped the orchestration, through sample
letters to the editor and "a little bit of an ability to put one-pagers
together."

The BBC also quoted liberal Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin's explanation:
"They want to get a little clip on YouTube of an effort to disrupt a
town meeting and to send the congressman running for his car. This is
an organized effort . . . you can trace it back to the health insurance
industry."

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers
-- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators
staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing
the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president
-- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies
on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are
both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political
change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the
crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where
elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of
Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and
accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately
surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants
published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly
rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for
the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of
Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new
Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a blueprint
for socializing America."

When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to
anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles
-- instead of long-range bombers -- and form closer ties with Eastern
Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young
president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of
delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in
Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned
to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the
audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants
to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm for
hanging him!"

Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were
right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s
proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been
hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act
was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would
"enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame,
paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy
theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and
'50s.

The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the
commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to
internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the
persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an
argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental
health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new
facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio
programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of
Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents,
just like in the Soviet Union.

So, crazier then, or crazier now? Actually, the similarities across
decades are uncanny. When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United
Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the
hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the
television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a
grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson
was baffled. "What's the matter, madam?" he asked. "What can I do for
you?" The woman responded with self-righteous fury: "Well, if you don't
know I can't help you."

The various elements -- the liberal earnestly confused when rational
dialogue won't hold sway; the anti-liberal rage at a world
self-evidently out of joint; and, most of all, their mutual
incomprehension -- sound as fresh as yesterday's news. (Internment
camps for conservatives? That's the latest theory of tea party favorite
Michael Savage.)

The orchestration of incivility happens, too, and it is evil.
Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in
a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular
susceptibility to existential terror -- powerful elites -- find reason
to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically
fair-minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism:
something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing
different values down their throats.

That provides an opening for vultures such as Richard Nixon, who,
the Watergate investigation discovered, had his aides make sure that
seed blossomed for his own purposes. "To the Editor . . . Who in the
hell elected these people to stand up and read off their insults to the
President of the United States?" read one proposed "grass-roots" letter
manufactured by the White House. "When will you people realize that he
was elected President and he is entitled to the respect of that office
no matter what you people think of him?" went another.

Liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage, and
particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that
outrage's entry into the political debate. For the tactic represented
by those fake Nixon letters was a long-term success. Conservatives have
become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads
of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe
they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of
the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death
panels" as just another justiciable political claim. If 1963 were 2009,
the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable
news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our
present moment uniquely disturbing.

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite
taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed
mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for
right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who
made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media
didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a
set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against
liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled
the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out
of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only
now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and
taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild
provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want
living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the "death panel" canard
-- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of "complaints over the provision."

Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never
have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the
provisions in it that would enslave whites.

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It has nothing to do with Obama or health care. Every attempt by liberals to expand the rights of Americans has been fought tooth-and-claw by paranoid right-wingers. These people are frothing lunatics, and dignifying their bullshit with anything but utter sneering contempt does nothing but empower them. What we need are more Barney Franks.

It's not that I'm against Health Insurance reform, I just believe that a group of lobotomized monkeys could do a better job at it than the current Congressional administration.

You people go on and on about how good the NHS is, but you also have another thing going for you: a leadership with actual morals that correspond fairly well with those of the populus.

President Obama promised an open and clear debate, but what came out of it? a 1000+ page document that would make more sense if translated into Klingon, then transcribed into Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

unskilled78 wrote:

It's not that I'm against Health Insurance reform, I just believe that a group of lobotomized monkeys could do a better job at it than the current Congressional administration.

"Let's wait until Congress only has 'smart' people in it. What's another 75 or so years?"

Quote :

You people go on and on about how good the NHS is, but you also have another thing going for you: a leadership with actual morals that correspond fairly well with those of the populus (sic).

"Every other country on the planet that has a working government-run healthcare system, has honest and honorable officials to oversee those systems" (Even Cuba?) "But Americans suck and can't do anything right. This is why we can't have nice things."

Quote :

President Obama promised an open and clear debate, but what came out of it? a 1000+ page document that would make more sense if translated into Klingon, then transcribed into Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

"A link to the proposed bill was posted earlier in this very thread, but I lack the reading skills to understand English. Also, I'm too lazy to try. Did I mention that Americans suck?"

DarthDarthington wrote:

Maximilia wrote:

What the fuck is wrong with Americans? We're dumb as hell. No, seriously. Comparing Obama to Hitler? WAT.

This does not compute. I"m going to live in Canada. See y'all later.

You're acting like that's something new. People have been doing that since before he even got elected.

I guess I've never heard such utter... I don't even know how to describe it. Insanity? Stupidity? Paranoia?

I think it's because of the inherent contradiction a lot of these people have built into their minds over the last 8 years.

I would bet good money that the people who are shouting these epithets at President Obama are the same ones who wanted anyone who uttered a cross word about President Bush arrested for treason or expelled from the country.

They have a very rigid and inflexible view now that "whatever the President does is right". However, this crashes headlong into the fact that they don't like Barack Obama.

So they create a justification: he's not legitimate (tying in the birther movement). He's like Hitler by lulling us into a false sense of security before taking everything over.

Armed with this justification, they feel they can do whatever they want because to them the President is a usurper.

Agreed, Spotts. I've just never seen this sort of rabid behavior demonstrated to me that's nationwide. It's like some sort of stupid plague. There's always been protestors for whatever reason here and there, but nothing like this. Perhaps it's just more shocking to me that my own flesh and blood--most of whom I consider at least reasonably intelligent--are in the crazy bunch this time around.

unskilled78 wrote:

It's not that I'm against Health Insurance reform, I just believe that a group of lobotomized monkeys could do a better job at it than the current Congressional administration.

The Republican party is. Democrats want to help people, and Republicans have decided that, if nobody is helped, then they "win."

I also disagree that the bill doesn't make any sense; in the last few days I've seen a number of people with actual copies of the proposed bill, quoting specific sections in response to questions, etc. For example, Barney Frank quoted a specific passage that said no part of the bill would apply to illegal immigrants. It's long and covers a lot of things, and a number of people who really should know what's in the bill apparently don't, but it's not like it's in hieroglyphics.

And again -- not all Americans are raving lunatic idiots, but it's always the crazies who are the loudest, and with the circus that is our news media, they're the ones getting all the air time. Watch some C-SPAN -- at least there the insanity makes up a smaller percentage.