President Obama asks. “How do you want to die?”

1. So the president of Kenya wants to kill off all the old folks. No suprise there.

2. That’s rich, Maher’s got some serious issues himself, beyond the fact that next to no one watches his show.

   He’s simply lying when he claims that Democrats have moved right. The last two Standard bearers have been rated the Most Liberal in the Senate by National Journal. Biden was #3 IIRC. Look at the ratings of the leadership.

   Also, look at what happened to Joe Lieberman since he’s moved to the center, he’s been disowned & trashed by his own party for doing so.

3. As for Health Care, I say let’s solve the problem of those who want insurance, but can’t afford it. We are talking more like 10-12 million people vs. the 40 or 50 million they keep saying. We should not fund health care for illegals, as that will simply exacerbate that problem altogether.

   Here’s a snip I found interesting:

   “The 47 million includes about 10 million illegal immigrants. And all the current legislation being considered in Congress specifically excludes illegal immigrants from government healthcare. The “Big Number” also includes millions of the poor who are eligible for Medicaid but have not yet applied. They could be insured, on the government’s dime, tomorrow. And about a quarter of the uninsured have been offered employer-provided insurance but declined coverage, often because of cost. The solution to this isn’t Uncle Sam, MD, but smarter insurance regulation.

   A new study by University of Minnesota economists Stephen Parente and Roer Feldman shows that Congress could boost by more than 12 million the number of people who have health insurance without spending taxpayer dollars. The change required is to allow people to buy health insurance across state lines, so they can shop for less expensive policies. For example, a typical health-insurance policy in heavily regulated New York costs more than three times as much as in less regulated Iowa ($388 a month versus $98 a month for the same coverage).”

   http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2009/07/20/the-three-urban-myths-of-healthcare-reform/

4. Sy – even if it is true that Obama and Biden are the “most liberal in the Senate” (funny how the most powerful Democrats are always given that title), it has no effect upon the party as a whole.

   If the entire party moved towards a moderate view, you still have those within the party that are “most liberal” and “most conservative”.

   It is all relative. I might be called the “most athletically gifted” if I was standing in a room of 100 year old wheelchair bound Seniors too, but alone it really doesn’t mean anything since it is all about context.

   That being said, I don’t think the Democrats have moved right and in fact I think to some degree they have moved closer towards the middle while Republicans have moved closer towards the middle with a wing of the GOP moving far, far right. The problem is, that wing seems to get all the press, so the perception is that the party as a whole is batshit crazy.

   Talk Radio and Fox News can pretty much accept responsibility for that because ratings are always higher when you go to the extreme viewpoint.

5. I think Bill Maher was right on with that statement. Obama and Biden wouldn’t know liberalism if it hit them like a freight train. Both parties do the bidding of the lobbyists that give them money.

6. If Obama was the lefty everyone on the right claims he is, he’d have proposed a true single-payer government health insurance plan.
   What’s currently being batted around congress is a convoluted turd of a bill with a few shiny kernals sticking out.
   It will get more people covered, but it won’t really reduce costs.

7. Costner:

   “Sy – even if it is true that Obama and Biden are the “most liberal in the Senate” (funny how the most powerful Democrats are always given that title), it has no effect upon the party as a whole.”

   Take a peek at the list:

   http://www.nationaljournal.com/voteratings/sen/lib_cons.htm?o1=con_composite&o2=desc

   Many of the most conservative are not in the leadership positions, whereas many of the most liberal are. If you don’t think the party leadership and their leanings don’t affect the party as a whole then you simply are being dishonest or naive.

   You also have a tactic in play that by painting the most liberal as moderate, it makes anyone to the right look extreme. Maher’s quote above is exhibit A. Paint your opposition as crazy and out of touch. The Tax and Spend policies the Left are advocating haven’t changed since the last time they were defeated, only the packaging has.

8. Guys, unless you have a better anaylsis than Bill Schneider (hardly a right-wing ideolouge) and his methodology of calculating based on votes cast, than you have simply fallen for a talking point.

   Here’s a snip on how NJ arrives at their ratings.

   “A panel of National Journal editors and reporters initially compiled a list of 216 key congressional roll-call votes for 2007 — 107 votes for the Senate and 109 for the House — and classified them as relating to economic, social, or foreign policy.

   Polidata, a nonpartisan political data-analysis firm, downloaded lists from the House and Senate websites of how all the members voted on the key votes. Those lists were then sent to the Brookings Institution, where the Information Technology Services division performed the data processing and statistical analysis. The ratings system was first devised in 1981 under the direction of William Schneider, a political analyst and commentator, and a contributing editor to National Journal.

   The votes in each issue area were subjected to a principal-components analysis, a statistical procedure designed to determine the degree to which each vote resembled other votes in the same category (the same members tending to vote together). Ten of the 216 votes (eight in the Senate and two in the House) were dropped from the analysis because they were statistically unrelated to others in the same issue area. These typically were votes that reflected regional and special-interest concerns, rather than general ideology.”

   http://www.nationaljournal.com/voteratings/methodology.htm

9. Therein lies the issue Sy… what they call “key votes” might differ from what another group calls “key votes”. There is a lot of manipulation on such rankings which is why I never give them much credit, and it seems that National Journal tends to lean right much of the time so I wouldn’t be so quick to claim they are unbiased either.

   If the New York Times came out with their list of the “most liberal” and “most conservative” I would have the same comment, and I do beleive the Washington Post did a similar analysis but their results varied (most likely because their criteria and definition of key votes differed from NJ’s).

   Either way you have to be impressed at the amazing coincidence that Kerry was the most liberal back in 2004, Gore was called the most liberal member of the entire party before that, Hillary was the most liberal during the primaries until Obama because the frontrunner, and all of the Sudden Obama and Biden are number one and two for the “most liberal” label.

   Just amazing how that all works out isn’t it?

   It really just boils down to the same tactic used by the right for decades… try to convince the American public that the term “liberal” is an insult and give it the same connotation as terms like “traitor”, “terrorist”, or “un-American”.

   So how is that working out for them again?

10. Costner said: “It really just boils down to the same tactic used by the right for decades… try to convince the American public that the term “liberal” is an insult and give it the same connotation as terms like “traitor”, “terrorist”, or “un-American”.”

    Bah!If it wasn’t true, we wouldn’t call it that way. Libruls have been working for decades to undermine our government and destroy our economy. That’s as un-american as you can get.
    Not to mention dragging our president through the mud during wartime!

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