Stop Me Before I Vote Again

The Health bill is the perfect representation of the ingeniousness of our current system of democracy. You want to push through a horrifically right-wing corporate give-away, but what of the opposition? Make the opposition to the bill EVEN MORE horrifically right-wing, and there's your debate. 99% of all conversations about this bill this week will be evaluating these two sides.

Obviously, everybody to the left of Richard Nixon should be repulsed by this bill and want it to fail. But how can you justify making common cause with such idiotic tea-baggery. The mere concept takes 10 minutes just to explain. Orwell would marvel.

This, of course, is why the Democrats must be destroyed.

"The more you drive, the less intelligent you are."
Tracey Walter as Miller in Repo Man

I think I'd add "vote" to that maxim as well.

Davidly
Discovers the Heart of our present
dunce ocracy
The great amerikan motor/ voter
axis of weebles

It is fitting that a people who routinely confuse voting for autonomy, work for self-improvement and spectator viewing for enjoyment would have corporate raiding for their health insurance. It is "just" and "deserved," using two words so common to Americanish parlance that they could just about stand in for everything which is wrong with being raised an Americaner.

Blanche's brother has a good point

We pwogs had our path to single payer
Medicare for all of us
That is now
off the table

So lovers of humble humanity like father S
Have to pray for the triumph
Of crude yahoo obstructionism

The cult of frontier freedom

The bear and beaver republic

A spirit of liberty in animal skins
To sweep away the supreme's fear of primeval anarchy
In the double knits of adverse selection

I for one opposed the universal mandate
But hardly on constitutional grounds
Nor fear of adverse selection

The mandate is not about sustainable unconditional mono pooling
It's all about forcing healthy youths to pay into the health sector rent sump

Obviously without single payer
the aggregate social cost
America the diverse
pays
for Her health services
can only going up up up

We Econ cons call health services
a rent sump because supply
is unresponsive to changes in effective demand

Jc the people if they confuse anything confuse voting with sovereignty

We can Leave it to u
simian geniuses of the the solitary soul den
To take every opportunity to urinate on the plebs out there
Commuting for their rations

Spit up piss down ..I love it

There's rarely agreement here
accept on something
we all just happen
for our own very personal beloved
paths of perversity
to hate like hell itself
Even objects of contempt
Face an inevitable and loud dissenting fraction

As usual, the tiresome academic reads "plebs" into policy which helps solidify the votes of the upper and middle classes most of all. The people who live at my level, blessedly, are already anti-voters.

The automobile does bring out the squidbilly
In some of us
I for one honor that streak of sessile cunning in the American character
Allowing the wallow cum duck blind to move on it's own almost anywhere
Fuel dollars permit
Why it produces the best in us shiftless ingrate losers
Serial killers and traveling salesmen

To the contrary inter penetration of opposites rules here

Regimentation rule following
anal sadistic

Nonsense
Give me some open road
And
Just clear out of my way pard

Traffic laws ?
Fuck that
Made to violate like a baby sister

Traffic jams ?

Taylor Made for us smoldering spirits

Why it turns your ride
Into a smoke house of righteous wrath

we common horse apple type Carmen
To a man
woulld
Rather rule behind the wheel then sing tenor in paradise

My apologies: what I meant to write was "...tiresome, well-off, tenured and un-ironically Stalinist academic who hasn't met a top-down imposition on the actual plebs he hasn't yet celebrated with perfidious misplaced glee..."

And perhaps one day, ye littlest of souls, you'll stop confusing "anarchist" with "solitary" complainant. I doubt it, given what you are, but one can hope.

Oh Jack surely u can do better then that

Find a new trope
you sway backed old nag

I'm not playing a game of one-upmanship, clown. When you're not doing your level worst to drive away all dissenters, you're doing your absolute worst to mangle the English language, grammar, syntax and common idiom.

There's no competing with that, or with your snideness, little man.

A board certified post 25 year old
Rank and file bottom tier anarchist
is a failed mom's boy
too lazy to professionalize himself

There are no female anarchists
now bomb throwing cells are passé

Nothing else appealed to women about
Smug mud bathing

Often the captains of anarchy
are too comfortable exploiting
the near and un-dear circled
around them
To ever accomplish a god damn thing

That slice of em I think I can understand from the inside out

Top shelfers ?

That Yale grabber
what's his name guy
By his slippery self staring sanctimony suggests
A useful mountebank
that has found his groove...like you Jack

Nothing is more like a bus line then the thought of a dedicated confirmed anarchist

A poor one off
solitary soul
Some one that really tests the boundary of the human condition
That type appears only in xmas Stories
And gutters

Heh. Let's just leave that one out there to show how ignorant you are, Paine. Nothing like a guy in a protected job complaining about people poorer than he is, who don't see things exactly his way...

One ups manship

Why caliban sees himself at least and irony of ironies
he calls himself Owen

Thanx for the dance Jack
Like a street nut
I needed the human contact

If someone chooses to drive they must buy car insurance. If someone chooses to live they must buy health insurance. Makes sense!

Obamacare will be upheld 6-3 or even 7-2. The "ideology" of the court, the type of thing NPR agonizes over, is overrated. The justices won't want to turn off the spigot of 30 mil customers hand-delivered to insurers.

"Obamacare will be upheld 6-3 or even 7-2. The "ideology" of the court, the type of thing NPR agonizes over, is overrated. The justices won't want to turn off the spigot of 30 mil customers hand-delivered to insurers."

I tend to agree with this point of view. The supremos are nothing if not corporate stooges and this is a gift horse to the insurance companies if ever there was one. Which is why I hate it of course. That said, the supremos will make a appearance of tough questioning and careful consideration of the law before they come to their pre-determined decision. Several of the conservative judges will be allowed to vote the law down just to preserve their conservo-cred. But ultimately it will pass, although I'm thinking by 5-4 myself. Wouldn't be surprised by a 6-3 split I guess. No way Alito, Scalia or Thomas vote for this mess though.

Its a great scam, too, because the minimal insurance people who currently have no coverage will by won't cover didily anyway. I just hope Obama and the Senate didn't sell this legistlation to the insurance cos cheap.

Yep. I agree it's a near-certainty the thing will be upheld.

If the mandate is upheld only one of the fearsome four will cross
That is if Kennedy plays the tilt against corporate interests

The brand bonds won't be broken here beyond
Say chief justice Roberts

The notion of 6 -3 either way
strikes me as beyond the far side of unlikely

5 -4 either way ? Sure

My gut suggests one surprise vote from the fearsome four blunted
by Kennedy the one swinger going
NPR dark side

------
Then again how much liberation from federal regulations can the insurance crowd gain. By a supreme thumbs down ?

My gut Roberts plays the judicial restraint card
Mandate upheld 5 to 4

If they were to turn it down, it would be fun watching them try to justify all the various drug laws. Which is why I don't think they will. I can't see Roberts or Kennedy going down that road.

6-3 for. Book it.

OP, Roberts wontbe the only one playing the "judicial restraint" card, this time in service of big insurance.

It's sufficiently odious that I don't see how the Supremes can say no. They may want to add a provision to make sure people are randomly accused of failing to meet their insurance mandate.

I find it amusing that any supposed commenter here believes he or she knows the bent of any of the Supremes, in subtle fashion and meaningful difference as compared to the remainder of the Brethren/Sistern on the hallowed Bench.

On what ground would any of you supposed commenters think you know why any of the Supremes would not approve Obamacare? And from what background in the law do you make this prognostication?

Inquiring spectral Benchriding phantasms want to know.

Likely they predict that those particular politicians will "vote" a certain way so as to throw a pointless bone to a segment of the population they're responsible for mollifying. The Supremes know how votes will turn out, and how their fellows will vote; they vote "against" a majority when they're trying to make a statement, because they know that the results will be analyzed by wankers 'til kingdom come, much like coverage of the NCAA tourney.

Watching someone cheat at a giant, complicated, one-player game of chess can be fun for some, or at least interesting.

As somebody who....

1. May well be laid off soon.

2. Has no interest in the heroic invasive foolishness of modern high tech medicine anyway (almost 50...no eight months of invasive cancer "treatment" at a million dollar cost for me, no thank you)

I am appalled that a huge chunk of my minimal retirement may be spent on insurance company mandates.

Following up a little bit, Orville, because your original question may have been missed: each Supreme is on there to appeal to a certain demographic, and some people--let's call them minutemen--are genuinely libertarian. In order to make them feel that some part of the "Republican Party" is representing them, they need to see a few token conservatives vote against this proposal. That allows them to believe that someone is fighting for their interests, and to blame this particular rape on the Democrats. It works much the same for them as it does when American liberals believe that the reason they're not getting single-payer is "because of Republicans who just wouldn't let Obama do what he really wanted."

You don't need a degree in "law" to understand that, anymore than you need a degree in "leadership" to understand the game Obama's playing. Actions, they say, speak louder than words (or even diplomas).

(Oh, Brian, you might be interested in this: Cancer. Good flowing to you.)

High Arka: "(Oh, Brian, you might be interested in this: Cancer. Good flowing to you.)"

I just clicked the link and went over to the article. Excellent.

I often see people with shirts or buttons that say "[your disease here] Find A Cure!" (or just "Find A Cure!" – but always the exclamation mark). And each of their pet cancers is used as a hook for fund raising for research into that specific tumor or tumor location. As though none of these things were at all related. Or that a particular cancer was somehow worse, or more unfair, than the others.

Missing in the discussion of "How we gonna pay for this?" and what is the Supremes' favorite Beatles song, is the question of "Why?"

180,000 Medicare "beneficiaries" die every year as result of medical error and adverse drug reactions according to a recent HHS report. That's just Medicare patients, and that's just deaths in hospitals. Extrapolate that number out to the entire populace and the outpatient setting and the US medical system produces an annual body count that would give Westmoreland a woody.

Why would we want to pay anything for this mess, let alone give them a blank government check for "single-payer" "health care?" The American medical system is a money-sucking vortex staffed by the kind of people who can remain silent about such a huge death toll for decades while they cash in on it. If you want to find some brown-shirted careerist motherfuckers, forget about the Supremes or Limbaugh or even Obama, and go read some medical blogs. The medical profession is also one of the most insufficiently disliked institutions in America.

Sean
Of course head and body counts aside
you are right on target

we have a killer of a health system

No one can prevent you from dying unmedicated
Alone in your own bed
But now they want to force you
to pay part of the cost of someone else
Dying in a hospital
after weeks of life saving procedures

High Arka

You got the essence

Individual Brand management and fan cultivation

The best way to keep the political margins in the ballot game
Is to scare them about supreme appointments

So a bench that has at least 3 on your side of the great cultural divide
Is close to necessary
Any new pouts has to be in reasonable striking distance
of switching the balance

Two appointment spreads
Here that means
If the one Janus. Justice Kennedy goes off the corporate reservation
Then one of the fearsome foursome needs to vote against brand

Roberts is the right swivel
In fact my guess once Kennedy is gone
If the odd guy or gal to tip the court has to be from the right it will be Roberts

Knowing the players here isn't all that tough

Roberts would make a nice question mark

-----------
All this assumes the corporates clearly prefer this mandate
To the scramble knocking it down might ignite

I hardly know that to be the case

Interesting film on the medical research industry and its pink ribbon fetish:

http://wrongkindofgreen.org/2012/02/10/hope-the-ultimate-distraction-pink-ribbons-inc-now-playing/

Definitely watch "Burzynski The Movie – Cancer Is Serious Business" about how far the FDA will go to protect pharma profits from the upstarts.

"No one can prevent you from dying unmedicated
Alone in your own bed."

True, but they can force you to die alone in your own bed unmedicated by refusing to treat you, which they do in spite of the enormous price tag of end-of-life "care." Even at the VA, where doctors are on the government payroll, they can refuse to treat you or even see you in anything other than an "emergency" situation.

Most terminal cancer patients will die in agony because doctors refuse to treat pain aggressively with narcotics. Somewhere along the line we foolishly gave a monopoly on pain medication to the vulture class and implemented the drug war to protect it.

"The best way to keep the political margins in the ballot game
Is to scare them about supreme appointments"

It goes back to what Malcolm X said about Johnson vs Goldwater, that no one would run to the fox unless you showed them the wolf, though both want to eat you. That's where guys like Limbaugh come in. He's not just there to induce chest-thumping and fist-pumping among the lower primates, but to scare the shit out of liberals and make them run to the fox. The reality TV show known as the Supreme Court is similarly scripted to make it seem like there's actually some kind of spontaneous struggle going on between left and right in there, when it's as orchestrated as a classical symphony.

That's all the game of political theatrics in America amounts to: herding us cattle into one pen or another according to the brand they've burned into your hide. The cattle prod is only needed for those who try to break out of the pens. Carrots and the threat of their removal are enough to induce the others to comply.

Orville clearly doesn't share my passion for sports radio.

Sean gestures shrewdly toward the studio wrestling essence
of our public politics

Only one addition
The roles are often played for real

In wrestling it's often hard to convince a baby face to " cross" the line
Into heeldom
And of course visa versa

These players are often so into their method it becomes them

Then don't we all..

Of course now i'm wading into overly deep social pysch waters

Man is that riff of yours
On the pain relief oligopoly
the damnable truth
Sean

Interesting comments, all. Including Sean and High Arka.

But...but...but...

One major quibble...the Alternative Medicine Quack Parade is no alternative. funny how that Burzynsky buffoon charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for his quackery.

Anonymous, I agree with this as well. Incidentally, megapwog site Huffington Post also openly pushes that nonsense.

All this assumes the corporates clearly prefer this mandate To the scramble knocking it down might ignite

I hardly know that to be the case

Thus Sean:

The medical profession is also one of the most insufficiently disliked institutions in America.

To be sure, I've known some good eggs in that world -- though how they stayed that way, I can't imagine; they must be people of much better moral character than I am; in their place I would certainly be an even more insufferable asshole than I already am.

Power corrupts, as somebody said.

Most terminal cancer patients will die in agony because doctors refuse to treat pain aggressively with narcotics. Somewhere along the line we foolishly gave a monopoly on pain medication to the vulture class and implemented the drug war to protect it.

In fairness, the DEA poked their long noses into medical decisions and decided to threaten doctors with prosecution who actually had the conscience to prescribe enough narcotics to treat people's pain. In their position, I don't know if I could prescribe the right amount of narcotics and risk being thrown into a rape cage.

Thanks for that one, Jersey. I hadn't realized how much monitoring the docs were subject to. The Drug War truly is the root of many evils.

"In fairness, the DEA poked their long noses into medical decisions and decided to threaten doctors with prosecution who actually had the conscience to prescribe enough narcotics to treat people's pain."

Unfortunately, that's just another in along list of persecuted doctor myths the medical profession uses to rationalize its behavior and to convince the public to help remove what few regulatory constraints to naked profiteering they face.

Pain has been undertreated in America since the days doctors first gained control over narcotics, just as critics at the time predicted it would be. The DEA has only been around for a few decades, and has only started prosecuting doctors for narcotics abuses in the last 10 years. On average, they successfully prosecute around 5 doctors a year, usually for operating pill mills, so the idea there is some kind of "war" against doctors is highly exaggerated.

All this "war on doctors" hysteria is just another attempt to remove what few regulatory protections consumers have when dealing with doctors prescribing pain meds. Doctors want to be able to prescribe mega-doses of narcotics and other drugs without any fear of being sued if someone should happen to die, and they want to be able to bleed desperate patients dry while doing so. Thus we have yet another imaginary "crisis" affecting doctors, the most highly paid and poorly regulated profession in the country. I am not saying that doctors don't genuinely believe there is a war against them. But let's not confuse the Chicken Little hysteria that plagues the medical profession or their endless manufactured "crises" with reality.

There is enormous profit potential for doctors in treating pain patients if they can get regulatory restraints removed. As it is, some doctors charge retainers of as much as $500 per month for writing scripts for pain meds. Multiply that by 1000 patients and you are talking serious money for nothing more than punching out a script once a month on your computer. This is all perfectly legal. Problem is this kind of practice tends to draw scrutiny from the DEA, as this is the MO of most pill mills and how they rake in so much money. Allowing doctors to openly function as drug dealers undermines the drug war, so occasionally they do have to make an example of the more egregious offenders who get greedy and start going outside the law.

Doctors with substance abuse disorders who are caught stealing drugs from hospitals and their patients, forging scripts, selling drugs and even performing surgeries while under the influence are given break after break when they're caught and allowed to continue practicing medicine, even after they've killed people. They rarely prosecute doctors for flat out criminal behavior involving drugs, let alone legitimately prescribing pain medication to cancer patients.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39677-2005Apr9.html

Posted by High Arka | March 28, 2012 10:58 AM

Very interesting theorizing -- but, sadly, ultimately irrelevant. Bet it felt smart to type and post that, though.

The smug condescension of know-nothings at SMBIVA is a klaxon's shrieking, worse in sensory offense than a Mossad agent's gefilte-fueled fart in temple.

I hardly know that to be the case

This will not stop the sputtering in pretentious mis-spellings presumed clever and cute, however. The pontiff must issue his studied moral and academic cautions, appraisals of meaningless differences, and grandiosities found in the ether long unseen by mere mortals. Why not mirror the circus you pretend to be above, denying the pregnant ironies all the while?

A klaxon shrieks ?
sounds more like a grunting constipated ass hole

Orville

The Mosad figure is over wrought
Though it suggests a deep obsession or two
And as a depth analist I enjoy that

I like butt fucking myself
Between non consenting adults of course
so it imposes itself often on my demotic metaphoring

Doctors professors pastors lawyers

One needs to take them as squire Weston might take them

Willfully ignorant large Property holders
ordering talent about
Really gets to em

Only the usurer has the squires balls

And in that instance u have the grotesque squeezer
thrashed and robbed By a pack of your " off duty " tenants

They often share your animus toward " creditors"

I admire hunter thompson's love of Georgian ways among bikers

Bull lee's fondness for 18 th century Bucs
Is of course superior

In either case as a true receiver
I'm too much the coward faux menace
Too much the tender falstaff
To share in reality the fruits
Of
either of those rough trade modes

I'd need a gentle giant in my rape cage I suspect

Son of kong not the old king

Fancy that! Armchair psychiatric diagnosis based on a comment created solely for its entertainment value! Deep-seated this, neurotic that, and bigoted the-other-thing! Meanwhile, more pretentious mis-spellings and a bunch of projections of buggery impulses!

Perhaps the know-nothings accusation was too well-aimed.

Orville
You try too hard
It smothers the entertainment value

Lighten the touch

Read some super Al commentary

Then get some one to spank u

On average, they successfully prosecute around 5 doctors a year, usually for operating pill mills, so the idea there is some kind of "war" against doctors is highly exaggerated.

How many do they unsuccessfully prosecute? You don't need to actually go to jail to be ruined financially and professionally by a prosecution. Fighting and winning will drain your legal resources, take you away from your practice, possibly break up your family. And the stress can kill you outright. You only need to read about 1 or 2 prominent pain doctors being prosecuted to get the message. Rape cages are scary, quintuply so if you're a soft-handed 50 year-old.

The rest of your post is pile of red herrings, including your link.

You paint a terrifying picture Jersey, while ignoring the fact that the odds of a doctor getting sent to a rape cage for anything are almost nil. If I were a doctor, I'd be infinitely more frightened of slipping on the ice on the way to work and ending up at the tender mercies of my colleagues than of having the DEA kick my door in for writing scripts for pain meds.

Denying access to adequate pain relief for millions of Americans due to the demonstrably minimal threat of a doctor being successfully prosecuted for drug offenses is moral cowardice on a pathological scale. I'd like to think that on the Left at least, we haven't internalized the self-serving logic of careerism to the point any conceivable threat to someone's career no matter how slight or improbable can be offered as justification for barbarism on this scale.

"I can't imagine; they must be people of much better moral character than I am; in their place I would certainly be an even more insufferable asshole than I already am."

I highly doubt that. Faced with the reality of human suffering right in your face you might discover you have more compassion and guts than you ever imagined you have. The kind of people who end up as assholes in the medical profession are the people who started out that way. Being indoctrinated with right-wing authoritarian misanthropy and predatory capitalism for 13 years doesn't help but I think you have to be naturally inclined to that kind of mindset for the conditioning to stick.

Here's an interesting take on the authoritarian aggression that pervades the medical system. Being an asshole is really all about "staying in lane" as you put it.

http://anarchistnews.org/content/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagnosed-mentally-ill

Seam
N I think the merit system no where more vicious then the filter for med school
Screens for a high ass hole count

Med school is for highest school room achievers
A very ass hole biased gantlet

The medical calling is not a calling
The high incomes are earned merited rewards
The personal potlatch gleefully embraced
by the likely spouse and
One sort of off spring

likely these people will
not be able 'to buy
insurance or else' -

http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/