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Saturday, October 31 2009 - 12:08 PM
Obama and the Old Hat People
People thought something small, agile and smart was coming to government, but so far it’s turning out to be just big-box politics.
Daniel Henninger WSJ.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703574604574499693726128138.html
If you’re an elected Democrat anywhere to the right of Barney Frank, and trying to defend a competitive seat next November, you’ve got to be starting to sweat.
You wake up in the morning and just like every other morning as far as the eye can see the only thing in the news is the president’s health-care reform.
It’s starting to look like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are leading the Donner Party, the snowbound emigrants who bogged down in the Sierra Nevada winter in the 1840s and resorted to cannibalism to survive.
In a world defined by nearly 100,000 iPhone apps, a world of seemingly limitless, self-defined choice, the Democrats are pushing the biggest, fattest, one-size-fits all legislation since 1965. And they brag this will complete the dream Franklin D. Roosevelt had in 1939.
The culture still believes the U.S. has a hipster for president. But the Obama health-care bill, and maybe this whole administration, is starting to look totally out of sync with the new zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.
Everything about the health-care exercise is looking very old hat, starting with the old guys working on it. Max Baucus, Patrick Leahy, Pete Stark—all were elected to Congress in the 1970s, and live on as the immortals in Washington’s Forever Land. But it’s more than the fact that Congress looks old. The health-care bill is big, complex, incomprehensible and coercive—all the things people hate nowadays.
It’s easy to make jokes about how insubstantial the millions of people seem to be who are constantly using technologies like Twitter. But these new digital and Web-based technologies, which have decentralized virtually everything, now occupy most of the average person’s waking hours at work or at home. Mass media is struggling to stay massive in a world whose people want to break up into many discrete markets….
There’s an app for that! RH
Randy Hall says...
If we were really living in the world of leading-edge politics that many people thought they were getting with Barack Obama, he would have proposed an iPhone for health care—a flexible system for which all sorts of users could create or choose health-care apps that suited their needs. Over time, with trial and error, a better system would emerge.
No chance of that. Our outdated political software can’t recognize trial and error. What ObamaCare is doing with health care—the “public option”—may be fine with the activist left, but I suspect it’s starting to strike many younger Americans as at odds with their lives, as not somewhere they want to go. Wait until EPA’s ghost busters start enforcing cap-and-trade…
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Sarah4real says...
Social Security and Medicaid are the biggest entitlement programs in America. That, is the real welfare. Lord forbid this government run system makes it through. I’m praying for a miracle.
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Sarah4real says...
Randy, I’m impressed. I thought you still had a pager. Republicans are as tech savvy as those liberals. Why don’t the Democrats try thinking outside the box sometimes. The government can’t do everything.
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Randy Hall says...
Sarah, how many pettycoats do you have? Any whale bone corsets still in your closet?
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Randy Hall says...
Petty coats or Whale bone? Hoop skirt to go with the Pettycoats? ;-)It is Halloween today….
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cherritomato says...
Um- Sarah4real=-why is social security an entitlement program when we pay out of our paychecks every single one-from 1st job until we stop working. it’s our money to begin with and then it’s taxed again whtn you collect it.
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Randy Hall says...
Cherri that is simple, because we give to all reagardless of the ability to pay into it. Such children of those that paid and people here that have worked under that table. Thank Clinton for taxing your SS benefit.
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Randy Hall says...
Another way to look at SS as an entitlement, is those that can’t pay into it we can just make the rich pay for it for them. They are entitled right?
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Cybertariat says...
An excellent post, cuz! Thanks!
*
As an aside:
I was a gangster for capitalism. —General Smedley Darlington Butler former commandant of the United States Marine Corps, and a two-time recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism.
And, given the current and rather dire needs of empire, military personnel are now being used as gansters like never before.
Persevere. Guy
Good evening. :-)
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Bill Parris says...
Sarah and RH, Are you truely saying you are against Social Security and Medicare? Talk about death panels, without these programs millions of people would be dying in droves. What we really need is a single payer system and I wish Obama would stop siding with the conservatives.
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No Spin says...
Wow..MILLIONS will die!!! Where do you come up with this stuff?? SNL reruns?
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Bill Parris says...
Are you kidding, millions only income is SS and only healthcare is medicare.
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Ray Cunneff says...
I paid into Social Security for 48 years. I’ve earned my retirement benefits (and modest pension). Calling them “entitlements” is to cast aside a lifetime’s work.
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Randy Hall says...
For you Ray it was earned. For others a right. I did make draw a difference in my earlier post.
You are welcome Guy, I think.
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Cybertariat says...
Irrespective of the number of people who would perish as a result of the loss of their Social Security benefits, the simple fact of the matter is that, were we workers not robbed – by the mostly idle and thus parasitic capitalist class – of the lion’s share of the economic wealth that we produce throughout the course of our working lives there would exist no need for Social “Security” benefits.
Persevere. Yours in revolution.
Guy R. Marsh
Lancaster, 93536
Member-at-large:
Socialist Labor Party of America (est. 1890)
Good day.
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Randy Hall says...
With almost half who don’t pay in I’d say the parasites are those that take with out earning it.
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Randy Hall says...
Glenn Beck, FOX’s ‘Rodeo Clown’
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/glenn_beck_foxs_rodeo_clown_1.html
It may look like fun and games to the people in the stands, but this is serious business, and not just any clown can do it. (Anonymous comment on rodeo clowns)
Much of what aggravates the Obama administration about FOX News is what Joe Biden would call a three-letter word: B-E-C-K.
Beck calls himself a “rodeo clown.” That fits. A rodeo clown distracts the bull’s attention to defend rodeo riders at risk. Beck believes the nation is at risk and he’s out to distract the raging bulls, or the progressives in power.
Guy can you guess who said this?
“Oh, capitalism shall never again flourish as once it did. Capitalism has been almost taxed out of existence in an effort to meet the coupons and the bonds, in an effort to meet the dole system that is absolutely unnecessary in a country of our wealth.
And democracy? All we who twenty years ago entered a war to fight its battles to make the world safe for democracy, tonight we stand aghast because its last fortification, its last tower of strength, the Supreme Court of America, who has been a protector of the rights of the poor, who has been the protector of the rights of the rich, who has been the protector of the liberties of all, is now assailed and is now the target for those who blame it for our misdemeanors and who blame it for the Depression and the following misery which eventuated from it."
Follow the link to read it all.
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Randy Hall says...
…We define the past 25 years in terms of entrepreneurs and visionaries in places like Silicon Valley who took a small idea and ran with it. Congress does the opposite. It take something already big . . . and make it bigger…
We’ve got Medicare for the elderly, with spending claims out to Mars, so let’s create Medicare for All! One of the least noticed parts of the health-care legislation is its intention to make Medicaid even bigger, when Medicaid’s cost is arguably the main thing destroying California.
There was a time when contributing to the common good meant joining something relatively small like the Peace Corps or Teach for America. Now it means being willing to just fall into line behind some huge piece of legislation…
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