I think a “race to the bottom” is a significant risk in eliminating state regs. I think the lib response would be that fed regs would take over and apply everywhere.

Oh, republicans not abiding by their dearly held principles surprises you? R’s are for state’s rights when it is convenient( see marijuana dereg, etc).

“After that episode, I knew I had to follow through with my plans to leave the federal government for the private sector,” Ridge, who resigned soon after the election where Bush defeated Democrat John F. Kerry, writes…

K-LO is the hack's hack. A sort of Uber-water carrier.

Well the individually run state Medicaid programs create all sorts of problems. My GF does some case management for private company Alaska hires to do oversee it’s Medicaid. There are frequent problems with different states having slightly different requirements or deadlines leading to people briefly losing coverage or requiring expensive case management to make the system work. Some states shut down a program for various reasons so a person is then unable to move back to their family while they are seriously ill.

I’ll readily admit the continuing discussion and a lot of what I view as colossal stupidity is driving me crazier then my baseline crazy.

So FWIW, this was ungood. The European Union is not a good analogy because it is made of different countries and we are one country. States do not remotely look like separate countries ( a guy with a blog should know it ins’t 1794) The states are limited in what they can on health based on size (see Alaska, North Dakota,etc) and assorted free rider problems. The public option ( as much as there is one clear plan, which there isn’t) a) could always be modified if all the private insurers decided they wanted to stop making money and b) public plans haven’t drive out all sorts of private competition in this country or other countries. The public plan is being set up to not pull people out of the current employer based system, which has noted on this site to be a problem. As much as people love federalism it isn’t not 1790 and we operate far more as a country then a bunch of individual states. We should health care vary according to state if the states were to set up individual plans. And of course the public plan will have plenty of regulations to bind it just like the private plans.

I’m sorry this is just BDS from those damn liberals.

Obsidian Wings has had a couple of great long posts explaining the legal theory stuff behind this. None of is particularly kind to Scalia, but it gives a good background on the issues. That said, scalia is an ideologue , who is an originalist when it suits him. He said what he said to make a point. He values procedure more then justice or life and he doesn’t care of poor people are killed by the system. I’m sure he absolutely loathes the Innocence Project.

Primer is very good. Very low budget and low tech, but a must see for time travel fans.

We’re past slow to react and difficult to pass big legislation. I realize many of libertarian’s and some conservative’s appear to see gridlock and inability to do anything as a feature not a bug. But that does leave us with a bit of pickle if something needs to be done.

Boy the post has far more then its share of The Stupid. Equating a false, slanderous lie with a hotly debated policy proposal. Brilliant. I may not survive this health care debate.

oh for the love of vishnu. Since there have been modern medicine there have always been people who choose what kind of treatments are available to patients. They are called Doctors and Scientists. They research stuff and say what works. then doctors offer treatments based on their best knowledge. Insurance companies do this, any forking payer of bills will do this.

Of course we should have comparative effectiveness research. Not just because it will cut costs but so we-patients- will have better info to make choices. The repub's got their panties in a bundle so the money to find out what treatments work and don't got cut.

Doctors and patients already make these kind of decisions regarding how much a treatment will help and how it will affect quality of life. What we need is info.

What kind of ethical considerations are there involved in determining what treatments work and what don't? What is the problem with not paying for stuff that doesn't work? Why shouldn't we have Doctors and Scientists going through all the research and letting us know what works? Patients need to know that.

feh it's late and i'm cranky.

No it doesn’t fix entitlements but SS does not need major changes and the Big O has talked a bit about cost containment as part of healthcare reform. We can see how well that has gone over.

Using reconciliation sets up years of conservative freak-outs about a lack of democracy and O forcing his will upon the people, blah, blah blah. On the other hand, conservatives will freak out about O thrusting his evil will upon the country no matter happens. But it is still better to do things in an upright way. There are enough Dem’s to pass it w/o using reconciliation and that is where the focus should be.

I’m sure none of the loss of focus on Iraq has anything to do with the SOFA that was signed by shrub, which , sort of, kind of…started getting us out. While there were some of the anti-war peeps who thought there was some sort of magic 150,000 person bus who could pick up and take all our solders out in day, most knew differently. O is going by the agreement that was signed about leaving. WTF else is supposed to do.

I can’t see how it would ever be possible to know this. The movie and tv industries are notoriously hard to break into and often brutal to work in. if anything social con’s who blame their politics are going to get crap because they can’t accept what a difficult industry it is to work in.

Social con’s seem to want major movies and tv that specifically aim to soothe and please them. Anything that doesn’t the apparently view as eeeviillll liberal brain washing.

One of silliest parts of con whining about the entertainment industry is that it is just about the most rabidly capitalistic industry in the world. Anything that makes money will be copied and produced in a second. If the networks could get away with CSI: The Quad Cities, they would.

Along with that there is some sort of assumption by Con’s that if they don’t like something then it must be liberal. Liberals are the boogie man for Social con’s after all. But where the hell are liberals shouting hazzah’s to how great the entertainment industry is. Liberals types have be pretty rounding criticizing the entertainment industry as much as social cons, albeit for different reasons.

As Jay noted there have been plenty of “conservative” moves, although how you define that is an interesting question. Take the horrible oppressed Clint Eastwood, I think he has made a couple of movies. Con’s seemed to love his movies. Although I’m not sure they liked Unforgiven since it didn’t glamorize violence or that girl fighting movie or the Iwo Jima movie that actually had Japanese characters. I have to add as a card carrying liberal, Dirty Harry is a great movie.

I think the whiners also tended to miss the explosion of violent action and martial arts movies in the 80’s. Then again Chuck Norris and Stallone were hounded out of the movies in the 80’s.

When I have met con’s in person who try the conservatives can’t make it in Hollywood stuff, I usually just starting listing conservatives or republican’s who have been successful. It doesn’t take long before they say “stop” and generally STFU.

It is true that many policy ideas worth discussing are out of the centrist consensus and therefore cannot be discussed. Stopping the drug war and imprisoning a lot less people come to mind. But I still think it is a fair point that right wing crazy is much more acceptable in this country. Pat Buchanan said he thought Jim Crow was better then now because race relations were simpler. The birthers get plenty of mainstream airtime, etc.

Brilliant idea- a mom and pop insurance company. Gee now I just get myself a at least ten’s if not hundreds of millions of dollars in cash. If it was so easy to just start up an insurance company why havn’t all sorts of them sprung up to care for people with pre-existing conditions. ( oh yeah people with medical problems are money losers). Gee I believe I have heard plenty about how insurance companies let people die…….hmmmm…that doesn’t seem to have changed the market.

Hell he probably even associated with guys who said bad things about America

I think this thread was about Mark engaging in looking critically at his own beliefs as an exercise in improving his thinking.

i find the nested comments confusing sometimes myself. So i just assume bad will on the part of everybody else. insert smiley face here

so is it possible to criticize/examine your own beliefs? Is it possible to fairly criticize a movement? I would say yes, but you need to avoid strawmen, attacking the weakest arguments of the other side and ridiculous caricatures.

yes i think there are exactly three political beliefs in this country. and every person ascribes to one of them and believes exacatly what everybody else in their group believes.

Just to be clear. I think it would be nifty if libertarians had a bit more influence on a national level. I also think there are just as big a percentage of shallow, silly thought and cliche in libertarian thought as every other group.

strawman much?

exactly Moff. The excellent point of this post was to look beyond dogma and cliches. No theory is perfect or survives contact with reality. Ideologues present problems as having simple solutions, which always happens to be their beliefs. Many libertarians have that tendency. To a large degree that is because they do not a have strong party with influence on gov or have had to actually run a country, so they can rest comfortably with never having had to fail. Until you can fail and learn from it, you are a neophyte. Until you can see your own short comings, you are a child.

see this link http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2009/04/the-regulatory-origins-of-the-internet.html

if there is anything the gov has been great at is funding and pushing tech innovation. See modern science and also the defense industry.

the issue is not whether gov gets credit for everything it has ever been involved in. These arguments can get pointless real fast since it is easy to point out things gov has done right, done wrong and everything in between. One of the boring variations is to then argue about what actually has worked and what doesn't.

Gov and markets are part of life. I refuse to take anybody seriously who thinks either one or the other is perfect and the only answer. So we have to find the proper mix of ind rights, society, gov and markets. That is our challenge.

hyperbole and strawmen get us nowhere.