A bit self-righteous, I think.
"Give me first priority all the time, wah wah wah" meh.

Hmm - I'm more curious about INTENT here than anything else. Let's suppose for a moment that Joe Q. Theist sees the video and says, "Hmm - well he made a couple decent points." What then?

1. It could be simple self-righteous shadenfrued. Such persons may simply enjoy wagging their finger at what they consider to be the quaint, anachronistic, and occasionally foolish behaviors of their fellows.

2. Another goal could be recruitment. He may be seeking to convince others to abandon religion and faith completely so that they can join together as a larger group of similarly minded persons.

3. Possibly fame & money are his goals. He may simply be trolling for attention by attacking establishment morality. Or, if he's got a website with advertisers, then he could just be interested in hiking his own profits by addressing a controversial topic and garnering traffic.

Hey - this sounds familiar... Self-righteousness... Prosoletyzing... Attention... Money... This guy is a missionary for his church. Ah - nice try there pal. I've got 7th Day's and Jehovah's hitting me up to join their churches already. Not interested in hearing your particular spiel.

Seriously though - what is with atheists anyway? Faith-based initiatives contribute to society and the world with massive charity, good works, and personal benefits. They're clearly not 'all bad' as some would have us think. And - if you don't want to have 'faith' then none of them are forcing you to do anything. What's so awful about just taking personal satisfaction in your own beliefs privately? Why do you feel the need to bash someone for having different beliefs than you?

"Wah wah wah - I got treated bad by some religions guy when I was a wee tot and it scarred me for liiiiiiiiife..." Pht - grow up. They're PEOPLE. If they do stuff like that it is not because God told them to. It's because they're jerks, and they'd have been jerks to you as a kid whether you were a theist, atheist, or a purple flying spaghetti unicorn. You're blaming something that's tertiary to the issue at best (God) and ignoring the primary problem (the PERSON).

wah wah wah *beg

Dead horse

Amen to that. Not THIS again...

There's plenty of blame to go around on Katrina. The Army Corps of Engineers had people who knew the levies were bad for years and years. This is something that goes much further back than Bush. The ACoE wanted to conduct extensive building projects on the levees, floodgates, and all kinds of stuff as far back as 1997.

But they weren't allowed to do anything. Why not? A combination of local and national politics. In the 1990s, Clinton's administration gave strong weight to environmentalist lobby groups like the Sierra Club, Audobon society, and American Rivers. These organization strongly opposed any and all levee repairs or upgrades because they were concerned about the Sockeye salmon, the wetlands, and the standard array of enviro-nut agendas. They sued, stonewalled, and delayed levee repairs well into the 2000s. Then Katrina hit. Boom. Levees broke.

Bush had no power to just roll in and repair the levees by fiat. Various lobbies both national and local (New Orleans unions) would not allow the ACoE to so much as spackle a levee wall. If Bush had just gone in anyway then the environut lobbies and other liberal activist groups would have screamed bloody murder like they do every time someone wants to drill in ANWR. Federal funds were given to New Orleans year after year specifically for the purpose of the city fixing the levies. But year after year the New Orleans political system (run by Democrats) frittered the money away and nothing got done.

Then - surprise surprise - the levies broke and then everyone is like "Wah wah wah - Bush didn't do enough..." Whatever. The stage was set for that particular mess long before Bush so much as printed his first campaign sign.

More examples...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1209034/The-babies-born-hospital-corridors-Bed-shortage-forces-4-000-mothers-birth-lifts-offices-hospital-toil
ets.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1208970/Man-collapses-ruptured-appendix--weeks-NHS-doctors-took-out.html

The point Farhad is that every system on the planet - public or private - is facing tremendous challenges of various kinds. Your side of the debate keeps trying to paint a glowing picture of public health care that does not really exist. Public health care systems are NOT panaceas of happiness, contentment, and perfect medical care with low costs. Quite the contrary. They are cumbersome, slow, expensive, routinely deny or delay basic care, and frequently are UNABLE to provide advanced treatments for less common conditions.

The real debate here is what kind of country is America? America was founded as a country where its citizens were specifically protected from government by the Constitution. The Bill of Rights does not 'give' rights to citizens. It tells government what it CANNOT do. It acknowledges that these rights are God-given to all people, and attempts to ensure that government cannot infringe on them. Ever.

Establishing a public health care system (or any public social system in general) goes against that basic, core of what America is. Making health care a public 'right' gives the government the power to step in and take away your freedom at any time under the rubric of maintaining its 'program'. Even the mere act of taking your tax money to fund the program is a an involuntary removal of finanicial freedom. That isn't what America should be.

I keep hearing comments like, "Every other country is doing this..." So what? Just because a bunch of other nations have foolishly decided to cede freedom and power to thier governments is no good reason to do it here. I also quite often hear equally foolish arguments along the lines of, "What do you have against taking care of the poor?" The American way to care for the poor is to do it at the state, municipal, or personal level through voluntary donations and volunteerism. I do it all the time and it's great. You don't need a 'government system' to take care of the poor. That is a false choice and I reject it utterly.

Even in the very kindest interpretation, swapping to a public system is not going to 'improve' health care or reduce costs. The CBO said so. IT WILL NOT SAVE MONEY. If it isn't going to save money, and isn't going to provide better service then why should we cede huge powers to the government to do this? It would be nothing more than trading one bad system for another system that is equally bad, or potentially worse. The cost for making this change is the sacrifice of personal liberty and freedom. America has always succeeded as a nation of rugged individualists. That's the proper answer here. Constantly whining that "everyone ELSE does it this way" and "wah wah wah why don't you care about the poor?" are nothing but illogical red herrings.

The real question you should be asking yourself should be, "Why should be waste our time creating a worse system just because other countries do it?" Or perhaps, "Why am I opposed to volunteering my time and money at the local level for the poor?"

As I walk along,
I wonder what went wrong,
With our love, a love that was so strong.
And as I still walk on,
I think of the things we've done
Together, a-while our hearts were young.

I'm a-walkin' in the rain,
Tears are fallin' and I feel the pain,
Wishin' you were here by me,
To end this misery
And I wonder--
I wah-wah-wah-wah-wonder,
Why,
Why, why, why, why, why she ran away,
Yes, and I wonder,
A-where she will stay-ay,
My little runaway,
Run, run, run, run, runaway.

I'm a-walkin' in the rain,
Tears are fallin' and I feel the pain,
Wishin' you were here by me,
To end this misery
And I wonder--
I wah-wah-wah-wah-wonder,
Why,
Why, why, why, why, why she ran away,
Yes, and I wonder,
A-where she will stay-ay,
My little runaway,
Run, run, run, run, runaway.
Run, run, run, run, runaway.
Run, run, run, run, runaway.

I really enjoyed this show at first too, but I lost it in mid-third season I think. Watching was becoming a chore -- the characters were all "wah wah wah, look at my personal problems". No thanks.

Bale has apologized for his outburst:
Here as well
http://kroq-data.com/wah/wah/audio/?a=1129

Needs Yakety Sax and a WAH WAH WAHHHHHHHHHH...

*teens acting like babies!

WAH! WAH! IT'S NOT FAIR! I HATE YOU! I WISH I HAD NEVER BEEN BORN!

Damned if you do. Damned if you don't. "Fortress America" did the world a whole lot of good in the 1920s and 1930s, didn't it? The problem is that the entire world wants America's 'stuff'. They want the food, the money, the weapons, the expertese, and everything else so they beg for it. If America withheld everything, they'd be condemned. We share it, and we get condemned by the people that don't want us giving stuff to the people 'they' don't like. There is no good solution. Wah wah wah.

wah wah wah i have a penis and sexual gratification means i treat some part of your body like a toilet wah wah wah you must always submit to me wah wah wah

"So yes, Biden did spank the rightwing hack. So where is the bias?"

Your statement is flawed because Biden didn't 'spank' her. He just fumbled around, acted amazed that she even had the gall to ask such questions, and in the end ran away crying like a little girl. "Wah wah wah - no more interviews for you...!" If Palin acted like Biden after a tough interview then she'd be hassled for it, but the Cowardly Biden gets yet another free pass from neo-libs.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/orl-barbara-west-joe-biden-102808,0,5063691,print.story

These are questions the SAME reporter asked McCain...

"There are reports now on in-fighting between her [ Sarah Palin's] staff and your staff. Is that indicative that she believes your ticket is not going to win, that she's positioning herself for the future?"
"You've made Joe the Plumber the centerpiece of your campaign in the past week, yet independent analysis shows that he would do better under Obama's tax plan. How do you respond to that?"
"Your plan has tax cuts for the wealthy. Do the wealthy really need tax cuts?"

Tough questions for both candidates. That's not a right-wing media hack. That's a JOURNALIST doing thier job for a change. Biden/Obama have been getting free-rides and everyone knows it. The 'hacks' all left-wing neo-libs deperately trying to get Obama elected and abandoning all professional ethics in the process. They aren't journalist anymore. They're cheerleaders. What else can explain them totally falling asleep at the wheel (on purpose) regarding Obama's background?

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Story?id=6099188&page=1

Just like this guy says... Everyone knows the media is slanted 90/10 towards Obama. You guys here are just a sad, pitiful reflection of how stupid the general public is, dancing to the media fife. How does it feel to be such a mindless pile of complete and total tools?

wah wah wah waaaaaaaaaaa

I always get a good laugh out of those subjective Copenhagen interpration zealots, mindlessly repeating their mantra: "The universe does not exist without conscious observers, wah, wah!". No wonder some take this as a substitute for religion, mysterious bullshit and all. Sorry guys but in the off chance that the Copenhagen interpretation is ever found to be the best one (dunno how you'd find that out... maybe in retrospect when an entirely new physics paradigm comes up), it will probably be in the form of one of the objective or agnostic variants.