As someone who skews libertarian overall, I have to say I'm glad Obamacare is a go. It's one of the times I totally break with the Libertarian line.

I'd have been just as happy with a bunch of Romneycare clones popping up at the state level, too, though. I don't see why the blue states should be stuck with a broken system just because the red states don't want it (and conversely, if the red states want to keep their broken system, I don't see why they should have to get something better).

My main concern with Obamacare is that it won't do enough. I wish we had gotten the public option as well. I'd have more confidence in prices coming down with the extra competition.

Wow. What the hell? It's like someone watched Kevin Smith's Red State and thought: "That seems like a great idea!!"

This makes a great argument against organized religion.

My dad... Vietnam veteran and lifelong Republican says he won't vote for any of the current Republican candidates. He told me "They've tossed out any sort of common sense or common decency to secure the votes of paranoid idiots.">> ^VoodooV:

Look at it this way. Doubling down on stupid like this is just hastening their demise. I live in a red state and I work with a lot of Republicans and more and more of them are just fed up with this ludicrous bullshit. They have no love for Obama, but the feel alienated from their own party because NONE of them buy into this insanity.

Look at it this way. Doubling down on stupid like this is just hastening their demise. I live in a red state and I work with a lot of Republicans and more and more of them are just fed up with this ludicrous bullshit. They have no love for Obama, but the feel alienated from their own party because NONE of them buy into this insanity.

Shit like this will either be the end of the conservative movement in the US, or it will finally drive rational Republicans to take their party back from the whackos.

This nonsense is just guaranteeing Obama's win in November. Maybe you don't agree with Obama, but odds are, you won't buy into this charade so it just drives them away from Republicans.

How much you want to bet that NONE of the remaining GOP candidates will touch this with a 10 foot pole. Even they're not that stupid.

@messenger said: "The crap the two Fox guys are coming up with though is just silly, and the same old false tropes, like the protesters are against capitalism, their message is incoherent, and so on."

Yeah, I agreed above that the two Fox people said some dumb things, but there are countless similar things in Cenk's discussion, and his supporters always conveniently ignore them all. If Clinton had left office 6 months later, the dot-com bubble would have been burst, and we'd today be talking about how bad his performance was. That's been known for a decade, so when can we expect ideologues to understand it? Probably never.

Also, since Cenk is a college graduate (I checked; he went to some of the best schools possible), surely he knows to base his case on a variety of metrics, which would help him avoid errors like the one discussed above. For example, since Cenk is more interested in increasing his intelligence than in scoring statistical-artifact cheap shots, he'd surely be interested to add the comparative performance of red and blue states to his analysis.

I'll help:

The study looks at factors that affect state prosperity and economic outlook, such as tax burdens and population change. What’s clear is that red or red-leaning states dominate the top positions while blue states have the dubious distinction of dragging in last. In the economic outlook section, for example, the top 20 states are bright red or lean red, while eight out of the bottom 10 are very blue: New York, Vermont, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, Illinois, Oregon and Rhode Island.

Most of the “poor states” states, as ALEC calls them, have the highest personal income tax rates and the largest unfunded state pension liabilities. Source

That's something I have a personal interest in because my home state, California, went from being one of the best places in the world to one of the worst states in the country on some measures. This happened despite (or because of) having some of the most liberal policies and the highest taxes in the country, so that path doesn't seem very reliable.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------

@messenger said: "It's not professional, but speaking extemporaneously, I get it."

Yeah, Cenk is a nice guy, but it doesn't seem proportionate to give him a free pass because (1) in the same breath he's giving his opponents zero leeway for making the same kind of mistakes, and (2) even when he has endless prep time, he still seems to make the same 'ideologue type' mistakes. I don't expect Cenk's performance to ever improve, but it seems pro-social to at least talk about it.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Do you think it's warranted to change the title of this video, since it doesn't appear to be true?

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^ghark:
Besides, by saying the GOP made nice comments about Arab Spring then bad comments about these protests, aren't you highlighting their hypocrisy? So what's the big deal about highlighting hypocrisy when it comes from the other side?
Yes, I'm highlighting their hypocrisy, because they are actually being hypocritical.
Democrats are not. They are sympathetic to OWS. They are saying good things about OWS. They are not capable of issuing orders to the police protesters are clashing with, and they definitely are not ordering a violent crackdown on demonstrators who are largely arguing for Democratic proposals.
>> ^ghark:
I agree that Republican obstructionism is not good, but if Dem's had the significant majority in both the house and senate would it make a big difference? I think in the past it might have, when the corporate influence in politics wasn't so great, these days... I think it's a very hard argument to make, especially considering the fact they didn't do anything significant when they did have the numbers after the last election.
Let's do some quick math. Suppose the Democratic Party consisted only of clones of Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin. Further, let's suppose that in any given election, the Democratic party sends 80% Bernies, and 20% Joes to Congress. For simplicity, let's assume all the Joes always vote with Republicans, and that 100% of the Republicans vote against anything OWS wants.
You need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. How big does the Democratic Party's margin of victory need to be for there to be 60 clones of Bernie Sanders in the Senate? Answer: 75. You need Democrats to carry 75% of the Senate. That means a minimum of 25 of 50 states need to have both their Senators be Democrats. Are there 25 blue states? And that scenario also requires ALL the remaining states be purple, with no pure red states at all.
Now, if Republicans weren't filibustering everything and anything, then the math changes only slightly. Democrats could pass legislation with just 50 votes (plus Biden), but as long as the Republican party stays 100% unified against anything even remotely like what OWS wants, you need 63 Democrats in order to wind up with 50 Bernies.
This is my way of saying "Democratic purity isn't the problem" -- 80% Bernies would be a massive, massive leap forward in Democratic ideological purity, and it still wouldn't do jack shit for us, because the deck is stacked against us by a) the rules of the Senate, and b) lockstep Republican opposition to sane policy.
So, are you out there working to help give Democrats that kind of majority, or improve their purity, or at least doing something about Republicans? Fuck no, you're out there taking potshots at Democrats because you didn't get a pony from Obama.
It ticks me off, because it's part of what's killing this country. To quote Yeats, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."


I think the argument has to go a little deeper than that - you are talking about improving the number of 'rational-acting' Democrats which is a noble idea, and one which I of course support. However, at some point (if things stay the way they are) people are going to be unhappy with the system so you're going to get swing voters voting Republican. So unless both parties are brought into line we'll just persist with the current system where, no matter what anyone votes, there will never be enough Bernie Sanders' to make a difference.

The answer to both your Democratic problem, and the Republican problem can be mostly solved by just one change, removing the money in politics.

I don't think it should ever be about which side is better, it should be about 'how do we get the results we want' - talk is cheap after all.

The reason I don't think you can just hope for more people to vote Democrat and expect change that way is Obama had a huge wave of support in the last election; you'd just had years of Iraq war, Afghan occupation, colonialism just about anywhere there was oil, corporate looting, disastrous economic decisions etc by Bush, 2008 was the moment where the Democrats could have made a difference. But what have they done? I mean seriously, while we debate this nonsense people are getting slaughtered all over the world in the name of oil, by your troops, by your private armies, by your weapons and often with other countries support (including mine). There is a time for debate, but we must also realize that we are destroying our own livelihoods and the livelihoods of our children, we need to fix the path we're on sooner rather than later.

>> ^ghark:
Besides, by saying the GOP made nice comments about Arab Spring then bad comments about these protests, aren't you highlighting their hypocrisy? So what's the big deal about highlighting hypocrisy when it comes from the other side?

Yes, I'm highlighting their hypocrisy, because they are actually being hypocritical.

Democrats are not. They are sympathetic to OWS. They are saying good things about OWS. They are not capable of issuing orders to the police protesters are clashing with, and they definitely are not ordering a violent crackdown on demonstrators who are largely arguing for Democratic proposals.

>> ^ghark:

I agree that Republican obstructionism is not good, but if Dem's had the significant majority in both the house and senate would it make a big difference? I think in the past it might have, when the corporate influence in politics wasn't so great, these days... I think it's a very hard argument to make, especially considering the fact they didn't do anything significant when they did have the numbers after the last election.

Let's do some quick math. Suppose the Democratic Party consisted only of clones of Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin. Further, let's suppose that in any given election, the Democratic party sends 80% Bernies, and 20% Joes to Congress. For simplicity, let's assume all the Joes always vote with Republicans, and that 100% of the Republicans vote against anything OWS wants.

You need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. How big does the Democratic Party's margin of victory need to be for there to be 60 clones of Bernie Sanders in the Senate? Answer: 75. You need Democrats to carry 75% of the Senate. That means a minimum of 25 of 50 states need to have both their Senators be Democrats. Are there 25 blue states? And that scenario also requires ALL the remaining states be purple, with no pure red states at all.

Now, if Republicans weren't filibustering everything and anything, then the math changes only slightly. Democrats could pass legislation with just 50 votes (plus Biden), but as long as the Republican party stays 100% unified against anything even remotely like what OWS wants, you need 63 Democrats in order to wind up with 50 Bernies.

This is my way of saying "Democratic purity isn't the problem" -- 80% Bernies would be a massive, massive leap forward in Democratic ideological purity, and it still wouldn't do jack shit for us, because the deck is stacked against us by a) the rules of the Senate, and b) lockstep Republican opposition to sane policy.

So, are you out there working to help give Democrats that kind of majority, or improve their purity, or at least doing something about Republicans? Fuck no, you're out there taking potshots at Democrats because you didn't get a pony from Obama.

It ticks me off, because it's part of what's killing this country. To quote Yeats, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

At 3:44, Romney pronounces the word nuclear as "new-kew-lur". He's obviously trying to sound less like a New England elite to appeal to southern and mid-western red state voters. His training is not complete: see how he says it at 5:03.

The victim card. Thanks for obliging.

>> ^quantumushroom:

DarkenRahl,
Any relation to the DarkenRahl who, in the context above, started with this line?
Make it eternity and you're on.
What were you expecting in return for your meanness?

>> ^DarkenRahl:

I'd say it was nice to meet you, but we would both know it was a lie.
>> ^quantumushroom:
dystopianfuturetoday: A contest! If the movie is 'fresh' on rottentomatoes (60% or higher), qm takes a month off. If the movie is rotten (59% or lower) Darken Rahl takes a month off.
Do the two of you accept these terms?

Darkerahl? Never heard of him; not going to make a name for himself off of my infamy.

Do the two of you accept these terms?
This bet is between the oh-so-memorable kymbos and me.
rottentomatoes rating is acceptable.
Oh, and if I win the bet? kymbos changes his avatar to a fruitcake for a week.

Don't understand the kerfuffle over my original comment.

Only Obama and His Gay Atheist Muslim Diversity Team can save us now!

Here's how the majority sift sees these items:

Obama = positive
Gayness = positive
Atheism = positive
Diversity = positive

Aren't these the polar opposites of all the negatives depicted in this cineturd?

Religion
Christianity
Whitey
Southerners
conservative voters
assault rifles

Sometimes I deserve to be called out for wankerism; this wasn't one of them.


>> ^kymbos:

Um, how does 'fuck off' sound? I'm not defending Kevin Smith or proclaiming his film a success. I'm taking the piss out of you for being a wanker, in apparently memorable fashion.
Make me a bet about something I care about, and I'll be happy to partake.

DarkenRahl,

Any relation to the DarkenRahl who, in the context above, started with this line?

Make it eternity and you're on.

What were you expecting in return for your meanness?



>> ^DarkenRahl:


I'd say it was nice to meet you, but we would both know it was a lie.
>> ^quantumushroom:
dystopianfuturetoday: A contest! If the movie is 'fresh' on rottentomatoes (60% or higher), qm takes a month off. If the movie is rotten (59% or lower) Darken Rahl takes a month off.
Do the two of you accept these terms?

Darkerahl? Never heard of him; not going to make a name for himself off of my infamy.

Do the two of you accept these terms?
This bet is between the oh-so-memorable kymbos and me.
rottentomatoes rating is acceptable.
Oh, and if I win the bet? kymbos changes his avatar to a fruitcake for a week.

I'd say it was nice to meet you, but we would both know it was a lie.

>> ^quantumushroom:

dystopianfuturetoday: A contest! If the movie is 'fresh' on rottentomatoes (60% or higher), qm takes a month off. If the movie is rotten (59% or lower) Darken Rahl takes a month off.
Do the two of you accept these terms?

Darkerahl? Never heard of him; not going to make a name for himself off of my infamy.

Do the two of you accept these terms?
This bet is between the oh-so-memorable kymbos and me.
rottentomatoes rating is acceptable.
Oh, and if I win the bet? kymbos changes his avatar to a fruitcake for a week.

As much as I wouldn't like it, that does sound pretty epic.
>> ^cito:

Toward the end of the movie they drag Obama out of the oval office and hang him up from the white house eaves on the front lawn.
epic fucking movie!

From here: http://videosift.com/video/Kevin-Smith-s-Red-State-second-trailer

dystopianfuturetoday: A contest! If the movie is 'fresh' on rottentomatoes (60% or higher), qm takes a month off. If the movie is rotten (59% or lower) Darken Rahl takes a month off.

Do the two of you accept these terms?

Darkerahl? Never heard of him; not going to make a name for himself off of my infamy.

Do the two of you accept these terms?

This bet is between the oh-so-memorable kymbos and me.

rottentomatoes rating is acceptable.

Oh, and if *I* win the bet? kymbos changes his avatar to a fruitcake for a week.

Oh! Oh, you're a communicator. I had no idea, perhaps because most of your comments are a spray of made up words in an incoherent jumble.>> ^quantumushroom:

Don't need your approval, acceptance or attention. Someone needs to inform The People(tm) this cineturd is DOA, if the trailer didn't 'explain' it already.
Here's a nice bet for you. If this fat a-hole's movie is a success, I'll stay off the sift for a month.
>> ^kymbos:
QM: "Notice me!!!!"