so far during  Obamas time in the white house, the dow has climbed up more than 25%.... during the end of the last run of power, the dow went down over 50%... bush's 375  billion dollar stimulus package is not that much different than Obama's... except Obama's was regulated, it worked, and the heads of corporation aren't taking advantage of the government as much as they did under the last administration...

BTW, unemployment has steadied, we have seen the bottom of the economic collapse, and this quarter there has been a seen gain in many important sectors... He has mended the foreign relations that those war mongering republicans completely destroyed...

Should I go on.... and oh yeah - he did that all within the first 6 months of being president...

give me a break, stop sucking on the fat rhetoric that FAUX news sends out and do some damned research before spewing the party line drivel that has no substance... let me guess, health care will not allow you to choose your own doctor, will have amazing waiting lines, and will drive out private insurance industry... and make "the best health care in the world" worse....

reality check - AMERICA is 37th in the world as far as medicine/health care goes, and is close to last among democratic powerhouses, and is almost dead last (excuse the pun) in the entire world as far as happiness with the health system - regardless if your insured or not... Our health care system "as is" puts us in the same positions as emerging third world countries... give me a good ole republican YEE HAW for that one!

Nanky, I respect your rebuttals.

This just in....

Obamacare is back-burnered while Eric Holder launches an investigation of the CIA.

See, when the going gets tough, change the subject.



"Hello America, Eric Holder here to let you know that the Administration has flip-flopped yet again, and despite Obama's pledge not to investigate, he now feels that he has to do something to appease the Bush-haters.  In the meantime, how many of you have invited any blacks to your backyard picnics this summer..."

Some fine questions there fuman.

Yes the Justice Department is supposed to investigate criminal behavior.

However, as Obama himself has noted on a number of occasions, investigating a prior Administration's use of the CIA has a lot of risks - both national security wise and political.

That's why this announcement is so suspect because of its timing, and the fact that Obama has stated in the past that he is not interested in such investigations.

I really have no problem with an investigation to review whether the CIA stepped over the line.
But when you say you won't do it, and then change your mind because your healthcare issue is dying - that is bullshit and is liable to send our intellience community's morale into a complete meltdown.

SHOCK! HORROR! TEABAGGERS EMBRACE MARXIST BOGEYMAN SAUL ALINSKY!


Say it ain't so, Mr Riffhard!

Rush Limbaugh sez:  "They have to lie about what they're actually trying to do, about all of these things because at its core the American people would reject it all.  They are using the tactics of Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals."

But wait...who's Rush talking about? 


Conservatives Find Town Hall Strategy in Leftist Text
Organizers See 'Rules for Radicals' as Blueprint for Taking Down 'Obamacare'
By David Weigel 8/11/09 6:00 AM


Michael Patrick Leahy’s self-published conservative manifesto is coming off the presses this week, and not a moment too soon.

“The timing is crucial,” said Leahy, the Nashville, Tenn., activist who founded the Top Conservatives on Twitter hashtag and played another founding role in the anti-tax “Tea Party” movement. “I’m trying to get these principles out there for conservatives this month, as people attend these town hall meetings with their members of Congress. These are principles that conservatives need to know.”



Those principles are the ones that the late left-wing activist Saul Alinsky outlined in his 1971 book “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.” Leahy’s book, “Rules for Conservative Radicals,” boils them down and scraps Alinsky’s more “amoral” suggestions. “The problem that conservatives have with Alinsky is that, for him, the ends justified the means,” explained Leahy. “I’m suggesting that we take the successful Alinsky rules, we update them and apply them to new social networking technology, and we execute them in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Thirty-eight years since the publication of his handbook and 37 years since he died, Alinsky has found a thriving and surprising fan club in the modern conservative movement. Leahy is one of many “Tea Party” activists who have latched onto “Rules for Radicals” as a blueprint for a counter-revolution, a campaign of robust challenges to President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress that is playing out nearly every day of the August recess in noisy town hall meetings. “Alinsky-cons” have taken the union organizer’s “13 rules for power tactics” and “11 rules to test whether power tactics are ethical” and found a strategy that, they believe, is chipping away at the momentum for national health care reform. When they flummox representatives with chants, or laugh out loud at their attempts to explain their votes, many “Tea Party” activists say they’re cribbing from Alinsky.

The most obvious beneficiary of the surge of interest in Alinsky has been Random House, which publishes the book through its Vintage imprint. According to Nielsen BookScan, “Rules for Radicals” has sold 15,000 copies since the start of this year — it only sold 35,000 copies from 2000 through 2008. Since the start of August, it has sold 1,000 copies. At Amazon.com, “Rules” is safely nestled in the Top 75 on the retailer’s bestseller list, and it’s No. 1 in the “radical thought,” “civics,” and “sociology/history” categories. Most tellingly, the people who snatch up copies of Alinsky’s book at Amazon don’t go on to buy more liberal texts. Instead, according to the online bookseller, they purchase Michelle Malkin’s “Culture of Corruption,” Glenn Beck’s “Common Sense,” and Mark Levin’s “Liberty and Tyranny.”

“I picked up the book after the [November 2008] election,” said John O’Hara, a staffer at the conservative Heartland Institute who helped plan anti-tax “Tea Parties” in February and April. “There really is no equivalent book for conservatives. There’s no ‘Rules for Counter-Radicals.’”



There’s a reason why “Rules for Radicals” became the go-to book for would-be Tea Party and town hall activists. Alinsky-cons can trace their inspiration back to 2008, when it became clear that Obama would win the nomination and Republicans looked deeper into his past for clues about his hidden, not-so-centrist beliefs. Attacking Alinsky was easy; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had been pilloried for writing her senior thesis on the organizer, and in his influential 2008 book “Liberal Fascism,” Jonah Goldberg placed him firmly in the totalitarian tradition: “substitute the word ‘fascist’ for ‘radical’ in many of Alinsky’s statements and it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference.” In the conservative muckraker Jerome Corsi’s “Obama Nation,” published one year ago this week, Alinsky (whom Obama never met) was singled out as a malign influence in the candidate’s education. Alinsky had “extreme socialist objectives,” explained Corsi in an August 2008 Fox News appearance, as “a radical leftist organizer who said that his goal was redistribution of wealth from the haves to the have-nots.”


The attack traveled slowly from Corsi’s bestseller and conservative Websites into Republican talking points. In the final month of the presidential race, when Sen. John McCain’s campaign attacked Obama for befriending reformed Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and receiving campaign help from the community organizing group ACORN, Alinsky became the hidden influence in Obama’s career, in the eyes of many Republicans. In an Oct. 7, 2008 interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani noted, darkly, that the Democratic presidential candidate had been “educated in the Saul Alinsky methods.” In her infamous Oct. 17, 2008 interview on “Hardball,” which generated a backlash that nearly cost her a seat in Congress, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) accused Obama of hobnobbing with “radical leftists” and called Alinsky “one of his teachers, you might say, out of the Chicago area.”

Obama hadn’t exactly covered his tracks. The candidate had written and spoken extensively about his past as a community organizer; Obama’s old allies had spoken about it in a sympathetic profile piece by Ryan Lizza, published in The New Republic. Still, the idea of Alinsky and “Rules for Radicals” as a skeleton key explaining how Obama rose to power, or why Organizing for America was created after the campaign ended, has proven incredibly powerful. On his Fox News show, Glenn Beck has put up charts that connect Alinsky to ACORN and Obama’s allies. When Rush Limbaugh came under fire for hoping the president would “fail,” he told Mark Levin that he was being “Alinskyed.”


Glenn Beck illustrates Alinsky's influence on the left. (Faux News)

The growth of the “Tea Party” movement has seen Alinky morph from a bogeyman to a possible inspiration to conservative activists. In April, Brendan Steinhauser of FreedomWorks, the conservative group that has provided guidance to many “Tea Party” organizers and town hall rowdies, told TWI that the group was “applying Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’” in its approach to anti-tax “Tea Parties.” In June, he told Eric Kleefeld of TPMDC that “Rules” was the first book handed to new employees of the group.

“That first rule, ‘power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have’ — that argument is happening right now,” said Steinhauser, “with both sides arguing about which side represents the majority on health care.” The mockery and laughter at town halls struck Steinhauser as an adoption of the fifth rule, which posits that “Ridicule is a man’s most potent weapon.” The old deference to congressmen, out of respect for the office, has “broken down.”

Other “Tea Party” activists have gotten on board; a memo written by Bob MacGuffie of the conservative group Right Principles told conservatives to adopt some of the “Rules” at town hall meetings and hold their representatives to account. “Use the Alinsky playbook of which the left is so fond,” wrote MacGuffie, quoting from the twelfth of Alinsky’s original rules. “Freeze it, attack it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Some conservative writers have latched onto “Rules for Radicals” to explain the extremist roots of a new Obama policy or explain why a new anti-Obama tactic will work. National Review’s Andrew McCarthy has warned that the Obama administration might “cook the books” on the 2010 Census because it “apportions political count,” and “anyone who has read Alinsky could have predicted that the census would be among Obama’s top priorities.” Joseph Farah, the editor-in-chief of the conservative Website WorldNetDaily, has theorized that the Obama administration mocks “birthers” who push conspiracy theories about the president’s citizenship because it’s following Alinsky’s fifth rule on “ridicule.”

All of this has been quite confusing to Gregory Galluzzo. A veteran community organizer at the Gamaliel Foundation and a disciple of Alinsky (though they never met) who trained the young Obama, Galluzzo has watched with frustration as “over the top and rabid ideologues” on the right stormed town hall meetings, claiming to have flipped Alinsky’s rulebook back onto liberals.

“They polarize,” said Galluzzo. “They’ve got that part down. They do direct action. But that’s not the kind of organizing we do. We end up building relationships with the people we oppose. I’m not going to go up to Mayor [Richard] Daley and say ‘you’re just a Nazi.’ I want to end up working with him.”

But according to Galluzzo, if Alinsky could take a look at the Alinsky-cons, he’d call them “petty protesters” who want to destroy the system without offering solutions. “If you just go around calling people assholes,” Galluzzo said, “you’re not going to get anything done.”


ed note: The one Alinsky tactic Teabaggers are definitely using: "if your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place."

Some Guy wrote on Aug 24^th, 2009 at 7:30am:


Some Post by Some Guy!!!

What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us

Mises Daily by Yuri N. Maltsev
Posted on 8/21/2009 12:00:00 AM


In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal "cradle-to-grave" healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The "right to health" became a "constitutional right" of Soviet citizens.

The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would "reduce costs" and eliminate the "waste" that stemmed from "unnecessary duplication and parallelism" — i.e., competition.

These goals were similar to the ones declared by Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi — attractive and humane goals of universal coverage and low costs. What's not to like?

The system had many decades to work, but widespread apathy and low quality of work paralyzed the healthcare system. In the depths of the socialist experiment, healthcare institutions in Russia were at least a hundred years behind the average US level. Moreover, the filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and frustration that paralyzed the system. According to official Russian estimates, 78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals.

Irresponsibility, expressed by the popular Russian saying "They pretend they are paying us and we pretend we are working," resulted in appalling quality of service, widespread corruption, and extensive loss of life. My friend, a famous neurosurgeon in today's Russia, received a monthly salary of 150 rubles — one third of the average bus driver's salary.

In order to receive minimal attention by doctors and nursing personnel, patients had to pay bribes. I even witnessed a case of a "nonpaying" patient who died trying to reach a lavatory at the end of the long corridor after brain surgery. Anesthesia was usually "not available" for abortions or minor ear, nose, throat, and skin surgeries. This was used as a means of extortion by unscrupulous medical bureaucrats.

To improve the statistics concerning the numbers of people dying within the system, patients were routinely shoved out the door before taking their last breath.

Being a People's Deputy in the Moscow region from 1987 to 1989, I received many complaints about criminal negligence, bribes taken by medical apparatchiks, drunken ambulance crews, and food poisoning in hospitals and child-care facilities. I recall the case of a fourteen-year-old girl from my district who died of acute nephritis in a Moscow hospital. She died because a doctor decided that it was better to save "precious" X-ray film (imported by the Soviets for hard currency) instead of double-checking his diagnosis. These X-rays would have disproven his diagnosis of neuropathic pain.

Instead, the doctor treated the teenager with a heat compress, which killed her almost instantly. There was no legal remedy for the girl's parents and grandparents. By definition, a single-payer system cannot allow any such remedy. The girl's grandparents could not cope with this loss and they both died within six months. The doctor received no official reprimand.

Not surprisingly, government bureaucrats and Communist Party officials, as early as 1921 (three years after Lenin's socialization of medicine), realized that the egalitarian system of healthcare was good only for their personal interest as providers, managers, and rationers — but not as private users of the system.

So, as in all countries with socialized medicine, a two-tier system was created: one for the "gray masses" and the other, with a completely different level of service, for the bureaucrats and their intellectual servants. In the USSR, it was often the case that while workers and peasants were dying in the state hospitals, the medicine and equipment that could save their lives was sitting unused in the nomenklatura system.

At the end of the socialist experiment, the official infant-mortality rate in Russia was more than 2.5 times as high as in the United States and more than five times that of Japan. The rate of 24.5 deaths per 1,000 live births was questioned recently by several deputies to the Russian Parliament, who claim that it is seven times higher than in the United States. This would make the Russian death rate 55 compared to the US rate of 8.1 per 1,000 live births.

Having said that, I should make it clear that the United States has one of the highest rates of the industrialized world only because it counts all dead infants, including premature babies, which is where most of the fatalities occur.

Most countries do not count premature-infant deaths. Some don't count any deaths that occur in the first 72 hours. Some countries don't even count any deaths from the first two weeks of life. In Cuba, which boasts a very low infant-mortality rate, infants are only registered when they are several months old, thereby leaving out of the official statistics all infant deaths that take place within the first several months of life.

In the rural regions of Karakalpakia, Sakha, Chechnya, Kalmykia, and Ingushetia, the infant mortality rate is close to 100 per 1,000 births, putting these regions in the same category as Angola, Chad, and Bangladesh. Tens of thousands of infants fall victim to influenza every year, and the proportion of children dying from pneumonia and tuberculosis is on the increase. Rickets, caused by a lack of vitamin D, and unknown in the rest of the modern world, is killing many young people.

Uterine damage is widespread, thanks to the 7.3 abortions the average Russian woman undergoes during childbearing years. Keeping in mind that many women avoid abortions altogether, the 7.3 average means that many women have a dozen or more abortions in their lifetime.

Even today, according to the State Statistics Committee, the average life expectancy for Russian men is less than 59 years — 58 years and 11 months — while that for Russian women is 72 years. The combined figure is 65 years and three months.[1] By comparison, the average life span for men in the United States is 73 years and for women 79 years. In the United States, life expectancy at birth for the total population has reached an all-time American high of 77.5 years, up from 49.2 years just a century ago. The Russian life expectancy at birth is 12 years lower.[2]

After seventy years of socialism, 57 percent of all Russian hospitals did not have running hot water, and 36 percent of hospitals located in rural areas of Russia did not have water or sewage at all. Isn't it amazing that socialist government, while developing space exploration and sophisticated weapons, would completely ignore the basic human needs of its citizens?

The appalling quality of service is not simply characteristic of "barbarous" Russia and other Eastern European nations: it is a direct result of the government monopoly on healthcare and it can happen in any country. In "civilized" England, for example, the waiting list for surgeries is nearly 800,000 out of a population of 55 million. State-of-the-art equipment is nonexistent in most British hospitals. In England, only 10 percent of the healthcare spending is derived from private sources.

Britain pioneered in developing kidney-dialysis technology, and yet the country has one of the lowest dialysis rates in the world. The Brookings Institution (hardly a supporter of free markets) found that every year 7,000 Britons in need of hip replacements, between 4,000 and 20,000 in need of coronary bypass surgery, and some 10,000 to 15,000 in need of cancer chemotherapy are denied medical attention in Britain.

Age discrimination is particularly apparent in all government-run or heavily regulated systems of healthcare. In Russia, patients over 60 are considered worthless parasites and those over 70 are often denied even elementary forms of healthcare.

In the United Kingdom, in the treatment of chronic kidney failure, those who are 55 years old are refused treatment at 35 percent of dialysis centers. Forty-five percent of 65-year-old patients at the centers are denied treatment, while patients 75 or older rarely receive any medical attention at these centers.

In Canada, the population is divided into three age groups in terms of their access to healthcare: those below 45, those 45–65, and those over 65. Needless to say, the first group, who could be called the "active taxpayers," enjoys priority treatment.

Advocates of socialized medicine in the United States use Soviet propaganda tactics to achieve their goals. Michael Moore is one of the most prominent and effective socialist propagandists in America. In his movie, Sicko, he unfairly and unfavorably compares health care for older patients in the United States with complex and incurable diseases to healthcare in France and Canada for young women having routine babies. Had he done the reverse — i.e., compared healthcare for young women in the United States having babies to older patients with complex and incurable diseases in socialized healthcare systems — the movie would have been the same, except that the US healthcare system would look ideal, and the UK, Canada, and France would look barbaric.

Now we in the United States are being prepared for discrimination in treatment of the elderly when it comes to healthcare. Ezekiel Emanuel is director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the US National Institutes of Health and an architect of Obama's healthcare-reform plan. He is also the brother of Rahm Emanuel, Obama's White House chief of staff. Foster Friess reports that Ezekiel Emanuel has written that health services should not be guaranteed to

individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.[3]
An equally troubling article, coauthored by Emanuel, appeared in the medical journal The Lancet in January 2009. The authors write that

unlike allocation [of healthcare] by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.[4]
Socialized medicine will create massive government bureaucracies — similar to our unified school districts — impose costly job-destroying mandates on employers to provide the coverage, and impose price controls that will inevitably lead to shortages and poor quality of service. It will also lead to nonprice rationing (i.e., rationing based on political considerations, corruption, and nepotism) of healthcare by government bureaucrats.

Real "savings" in a socialized healthcare system could be achieved only by squeezing providers and denying care — there is no other way to save. The same arguments were used to defend the cotton farming in the South prior to the Civil War. Slavery certainly "reduced costs" of labor, "eliminated the waste" of bargaining for wages, and avoided "unnecessary duplication and parallelism."

In supporting the call for socialized medicine, American healthcare professionals are like sheep demanding the wolf: they do not understand that the high cost of medical care in the United States is partially based on the fact that American healthcare professionals have the highest level of remuneration in the world. Another source of the high cost of our healthcare is existing government regulations on the industry, regulations that prevent competition from lowering the cost. Existing rules such as "certificates of need," licensing, and other restrictions on the availability of healthcare services prevent competition and, therefore, result in higher prices and fewer services.

     
$18 $15

Socialized medical systems have not served to raise general health or living standards anywhere. In fact, both analytical reasoning and empirical evidence point to the opposite conclusion. But the dismal failure of socialized medicine to raise people's health and longevity has not affected its appeal for politicians, administrators, and their intellectual servants in search of absolute power and total control.

Most countries enslaved by the Soviet empire moved out of a fully socialized system through privatization and insuring competition in the healthcare system. Others, including many European social democracies, intend to privatize the healthcare system in the long run and decentralize medical control. The private ownership of hospitals and other units is seen as a critical determining factor of the new, more efficient, and humane system.

Yuri N. Maltsev, senior fellow of the Mises Institute, worked as an economist on Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reform team before defecting to the United States. He is the editor of Requiem for Marx. He teaches economics at Carthage College.

I love how the White House always says the same thing. "The recession was much deeper, and considerably worse than we were led to believe, blah, blah, blah,....." Hey Obamadrones here's a nice life lesson for all you gullible sons of bitches. The White House is lying! They are lying now, they have lied in the past, and they are going to lie in the future! The know damned good and well that they are driving the economy off a cliff! That's their plan! Then they can come in and take over everything! Just like the good little Marxists fucks that they are!

The only ones that are stupid enough to fall for their lies are the drones like you! Are any of you starting to see through this lying Marxist bastard yet? Have you not yet figured out the fact that every time the cold hard reality of Barack's economic illiteracy rears it's ugly head the White House has to go into spin mode? Have you begun to pull your heads out of your asses yet? Many of us, intelligent folk, knew well over a year ago that Obama was a disaster. Only the myopic, blinders-on, Bush hating morons are still marching in lock-step with the worst president in the entire history of the United States of America.

Barack Obama is an embarrassment. He has steered this country onto such a far left radical course that even China is telling him to lighten up. Even Hugo Chavez is making jokes about how far left he is. Yet, what do the ignorant Obama supporters say? "It's still Bush's fault! I know this because Barry tells me so!!" Geesh, you Obama supporters are a bunch of gullible SOBs! I can't believe that anyone would still believe anything that came out of this administration! LOL!


Here guys. I'm gonna use a larger font to really make my point, okay? Okay!





I hope that helps to clear up any doubts that you may have had about the utter incompetency of this idiot named Barack!



Riffy

Zack wrote on Aug 25^th, 2009 at 10:30am:




LOL! That's kinda the response I thought I might get! It's a joke son! A joke see?! Though Barry's idiocy is no joke!



Riffy

"the elite wonderland" is not really what you want to be dissing.

You think you're team doesn't go there?
Rush? Reagan? W? Crystal? Perle?


It doesn't make any sense to me.

You mean their murder scenes

nankerphelge wrote on Aug 25^th, 2009 at 2:11pm:

good one..