Obama '08?

Eorl, it is the same industrialized nation that is a Constitutional Republic--not a democracy--and secures the liberty of its citizens better than does any other industrialized nation that provides health care to all its citizens..
USA! USA! USA!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100307/ap_on_bi_ge/us_health_care_leap_of_faith
Health care pitch to Democrats: Trust me

By CHARLES BABINGTON, Associated Press Writer Charles Babington, Associated Press Writer " Sun Mar 7, 1:03 pm ET
WASHINGTON " In private pitches to Democrats, President Barack Obama says he will persuade Congress to pass his health care overhaul even if it kills him and even if he has to ask deeply distrustful lawmakers to trust him on a promise the White House doesn't have the power to keep.

That, in a sometimes darkly joking way, is what the president is telling Democratic House members as he begins an all-out push to coax Congress into passing his proposals despite voters' misgivings and Republicans' dire warnings.

"He made the case, 'Listen, we put in a very hard year working on health care reform and the time for action is now,'" said Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., one of several Democrats who met with Obama at the White House on Thursday.

Obama joked that the political battle has contributed to the recent rise in his cholesterol, Kind said, and the president noted how ironic it would be if health care drove him to his grave.

But Obama is anything but sickly these days, making health care pitches Monday in Philadelphia and Wednesday in St. Louis, and instructing aides to address every question or concern Democratic lawmakers possibly can raise.

Some answers, however, rely more on faith than fact. Confronting party unrest on his left and right, Obama is calling for political courage, citing historic opportunities and essentially saying "trust me" in areas inherently murky, uncertain and out of his control. The process for getting health care legislation through Congress is tough enough already, and Republicans are determined to derail it.

Obama told House liberals last week that he understands their frustration in seeing priorities " such as allowing the government to sell insurance in competition with private companies " dropped from the revised legislation. He promised to work with them in the future to improve health care laws, said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., who leads the Congressional Black Caucus.

"He said, "This is the first step, a foundation that we can build upon", she said. "He made a commitment to work with us on all the issues that are outstanding, and there are many."

It's unclear whether Obama can keep such promises, especially with Republicans expecting to gain House and Senate seats this fall.

Obama is asking his party's House moderates to have a different kind of faith. The party's strategy calls for House Democrats, despite many misgivings, to go along with a health care bill the Senate passed in December. Obama would sign it into law, but senators would promise to make numerous changes demanded by House Democrats. Because Senate Democrats no longer have the numbers to stop GOP filibusters, the changes would have to be made under rules that require only simple majority votes.

Republicans are playing on House Democrats' suspicions of their Senate colleagues, saying Senate Democrats may not keep their end of the bargain. The taunts often hit their marks.

"A big issue for the House is putting suspenders with belts on the plan to ensure we don't get left holding the bag with just the Senate bill by itself," said Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn.

"The Senate has given us a lot of reason not to trust them," Rep. Jason Altmire, D-Pa., said on "Fox News Sunday." A top prospect for switching his "no" vote on the initial House bill, he added: "Certainly, that's a key component of the dynamic of getting the votes ... there has to be some certainty that the Senate is going to follow through on their part."

Democratic leaders are considering several ways to reassure nervous House members, who felt burned last year when they voted for climate legislation " a vote many now regret " and the Senate never did its part. Possibilities include a letter pledging compliance, signed by 51 or more Senate Democrats, or a parliamentary move that essentially would suspend the House-passed bill until the follow-up Senate action takes place.

Congressional insiders say the likeliest path involves Obama and others convincing House members that Democrats, who control 59 of the Senate's 100 seats, have more than enough votes for a simple majority, especially when Vice President Joe Biden can break a tie.

Even if the House does its part, Republican senators promise to use every tool they can to kill the Senate's follow-up actions with delaying tactics, such as introducing unending streams of amendments. Democrats say they believe they can grind down efforts over time, leaving Republicans exhausted and perhaps vulnerable to renewed accusations of obstructionism.

A bigger worry for Democrats is that a dispute over abortion restrictions could cause as many as a dozen House Democrats to switch to "no" on health care even though they voted "yes" last year. If that happens, Obama and other party leaders will press some of the 39 House Democrats who voted "no" last year to switch sides. Such a switch can be defended politically, party leaders say, because the revised bill is less costly and excludes the contentious public insurance option.

Republicans are working overtime to thwart such strategies by sowing doubts and fears among Democrats. They say Obama is marching his party toward political suicide in a year when he's not on the ballot.

GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said the president and House Democratic leaders are asking their colleagues to "hold hands, jump off a cliff and hope Harry Reid catches them," a reference to the Senate Democratic leader from Nevada.

Even if the Senate keeps it promise to make changes that the House wants, Alexander said, Republicans will try to repeal the legislation and make it a campaign issue in every race this fall.

White House and Democratic leaders counter with their own warnings to nervous House Democrats who might consider switching from "yes" to "no" on health care. Why would Republicans, they ask, shout warnings if they truly believed Democrats were blundering their way to catastrophe?

They also say Republican challengers will heap even more scorn on a vote-switcher, reviving versions of the flip-flopping taunt used against 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry: "He was for it before he was against it."

It's better, these party leaders say, to pass the health care bill and spend the last few months of the 2010 campaign telling voters about the ways it will help them.

"You've got to go out and sell that product and stop worrying about the process," said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. "And the president is a very powerful salesman for that product."

Whatever health care bill the Democrats are successful in passing will not be the health care Americans will be forced to live with.

You Conservatives are primarily, if anything, old, Ican. You are literally dying off. We will outlast you and prevail in the end - though you won't have to worry about living through it, I suppose.

The revolutionary’s purpose is to undermine the system by taking from the haves and giving it to the have-nots, and then see what happens;
Radicals should be political relativists and should take an agnostic view of means and ends;
The radical is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer;
The most basic principle for radicals is lie to opponents and disarm them by pretending to be moderates and liberals;
The radical organizer does not have a fixed truth"truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing;
The issue is always the revolution;
The stated cause is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is accumulation of power to make the revolution;
The radical is building his own kingdom, a kingdom of heaven on earth.

I think your posts are based on your and other's false opinions and sophistic arguments, and that these false opinions and sophistic arguments appear to be derived from those persons who are desciples of Saul Alinskiy--a person, who based on his writings, suffered severe mental illness for most of his life.

Promoting an opinion that was common 50 years ago and rejected doesn't make you an eccentric ican.

However there is a phrase about repeating the same thing over and over expecting a different result that would probably describe you.

http://www.atlassociety.org/cth-33-2287-Al_Capone_Heath_Care.aspx
Al Capone"Style Health Care
by Edward Hudgins

March 10, 2010 " The Obama administration wants no one to focus on the process involved in the production and passage of its health care takeover"not that it wants us to focus much on the substance, either. After all, politics always involves some trade-offs and even a little bit of arm-twisting. Like making sausage, it’s not nice to watch but the products can be mighty tasty.

But the process in this case is very relevant to the policy because it highlights exactly what sort of regime this administration would inflict on Americans. Consider two aspects of that process.

Naked power

Recently resigned New York House Democrat Eric Massa alleged that Obama chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel helped push him out of office on ethics charges because he, Massa, wouldn’t back Obamacare. Massa said that Emanuel “would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive.”

As evidence, Massa offered: “I was in the congressional gym, and I went down and I worked out and I went into the showers. . . . I'm sitting there showering, naked as a jaybird, and here comes Rahm Emanuel not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me because I wasn't going to vote for the president's budget. Do you know how awkward it is to have a political argument with a naked man?”

Emanuel has a reputation of being a nasty, thuggish, intimidating character. “So what?” you might ask. There are probably nasty, thuggish, intimidating Republicans as well, though perhaps not as deserving of getting punched in the face in the shower room as Rahm.

The Emanuel story comes on top of nearly a year of House Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi using hardball politics and arm-twisting to get her fellow Democrats to vote for Obamacare as well as Obama’s heavy-handed environmental regulations. Again you might ask, “So what?” After all, former Republican House Whip Tom DeLay didn’t get the nickname “The Hammer” for being a laid-back softy.

Purchasing power

But consider the second revealing aspect of the process of passing Obamacare. It was with the “Louisiana purchase,” $300 million in extra Medicaid funding, that the plan’s supporters bought the vote of that state’s Democratic senator Mary Landrieu. It was with the “Cornhusker Kickback,” exempting Nebraskans from paying an extra $100 million for the cost of putting millions of new beneficiaries on Medicaid, that they bought the vote of that state’s Democratic senator Ben Nelson.

Florida ’s Democratic senator Bill Nelson secured for his state’s 800,000 beneficiaries of Medicare Advantage exemptions from cuts in that program. And high-valued labor union health insurance policies were exempted from a new 40 percent tax, allowing senators in the pay of such unions to vote comfortably for the Senate bill while railing against fat-cat businessmen with “Cadillac” insurance plans.

You get the point. Obamacare has brought vote-buying to a new, outrageous level.

Process of decay

Again, you might ask, “Why harp on process? Isn’t it the end product that counts?”

Obamacare’s end product"bringing one-sixth of the American economy under tighter control of the federal government, degrading our medical care, limiting our liberty"is indeed horrible and should be defeated on those grounds. But consider what the process of passing such laws presages.

For better or worse"usually the latter"government entitlement programs are supposed to be administrated in a fair and impartial manner. Individuals who qualify for specific, defined benefits are to receive those benefits regardless of political influence or affiliation.

For course, in the case of the legal bribes used to secure the Senate votes, benefits do depend on whether an individual lives in a state with a politically influential senator. If you want to keep your Medicare Advantage benefits and you live in Arizona rather than Florida, you’re out of luck.

While we can hope that such provisions are declared unconstitutional, the process of producing Obamacare highlights the politicized nature of the regime favored by statists and paternalists. Our system of government is decaying into a new kind of klyptocracy based on raw power. It will make limited government, the rule of law, and individual liberty casualties in a war of all against all.

The paternalist fist

And what about Rahm Emanuel’s Al Capone tactics? Surely they’ll be confined to securing passage of legislation.

To begin with, remember that the current government regulations of health care are enforced with an iron fist. Physicians have suffered fines and even jail for innocently running afoul of incomprehensible Medicare and Medicaid rules. Government agents with guns have taken their money and their freedom. Obamacare would subject both healers and we the patients to an even harsher regime.

Rahm’s rough Chicago gangster ways remind us of the nature of the goals and the souls of statists and paternalists. While posing as our benefactors, they lust for power. They are obsessed with the need to control our lives. And such control is ultimately predicated on the force of government.

Under their regime, bribery and threats rather than free exchange between individuals determine who gets what. The nature of the regime that statists and paternalists are creating was perfectly manifest in the process of producing Obamacare. And this is why the welfare and entitlement state must be challenged not just on the particulars of any given policy, but on a fundamental level, lest America become one big gangland run by the likes of a Rahm Emanuel.
------
Hudgins directs advocacy and is a senior scholar at The Atlas Society, the center for Objectivism in Washington, D.C.

None at all ican?

Then why your obsessive worries about Saul Alinsky?

The revolutionary’s purpose is to undermine the system by taking from the haves and giving it to the have-nots, and then see what happens;
The radical organizer does not have a fixed truth"truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing;
Radicals should be political relativists and should take an agnostic view of means and ends;
The radical is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer;
The most basic principle for radicals is lie to opponents and disarm them by pretending to be moderates and liberals;
The issue is always the revolution;
The stated cause is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is accumulation of power to make the revolution;
The radical is building his own kingdom, a kingdom of heaven on earth.