>> ^chingalera:

No wonder Verizon has amped-up efforts to collect on an abandoned cellphone account after having given up 2 years ago!!


No they probably just want the money they are owed from the asshole who used service and did not pay for it.

Propaganda Analysis

There are two parts to this story. The first part is a compelling tale of a small surgery center that found a way to drastically cut costs by avoiding insurance company price gouging and bureaucracy. This part of the story is great. These Oklahoma doctors have come up with a seemingly great model.

The second part of the story is The Reason Foundation's editorial opinion that Obamacare is to blame for all of this, and that if only it would be repealed, people and business owners would make rational health care decisions that would save us all lots of money.

The problem is that the Koch’s are trying to give the impression that the doctors in the first part of the story are making the editorial points of the second. The Koch's are basically using these doctors as ventriloquist dummies. At no point do any of these doctors single out or even mention Obamacare as the source of these problems. The title should be "Koch Bros. vs. Obamacare", or at least "The Reason Foundation vs. Obamacare."

Obamacare did not create insurance industry price gouging, nor was it intended to be an insurance industry reform bill. The purpose of Obamacare is to provide universal healthcare. Insurance industry price gouging has existed since the dawn of the insurance industry and will likely die with it.

As further evidence that the folks at Reason are shameless, opportunistic hypocrites, check out this story on Reason.com in which they make a complete 180 and ACTUALLY DEFEND PRICE GOUGING in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Notice how they use the same ventriloquist dummy technique of trying to force their editorial position on a regular work-a-day cab driver. Ridiculously, the cab driver who ‘Makes a Case for Price Gouging’ in the title of this piece is actually quoted as saying, “No, there should be a law to prevent that (price gouging)” in the actual story. Journalism doesn’t get much more dishonest than that.

Take out the ventriloquist dummy editorializing and this could be a great piece in favor of insurance reform, or adding cost saving safeguards to Obamacare. But it isn’t.

This brand of faux populist, faux leftist propaganda is what the Reason Foundation specializes in, and considering the implications of the recent election, I expect more right wing media outlets to adopt the this approach.

*length=2:04 I assume Hurricane Sandy took this out. Bummer =o(

>> ^PostalBlowfish:

must be really tiring when every damn thing that happens is some kind of conspiracy.


It's sort of like being a true believer or a devote anyone. It's really tough to explain things away so much, they have to account for new advances all the time, new information.

Now imagine you are a campaign adviser- you just had an active (almost-)hurricane rip through the most "media-covered" city in the USA and its mayor consecutively openly addressing what should have been a core election-topic.

You advise your client to ignore the question.

I don't know what frightens me more - the fact that what is supposedly America's brightest Republican spinsters can't come up with a better solution to this... let's say somewhat foreseeable problem - or the fact that Obama campaign have gladly ignored this rather glaring chink in their opponents armor and hence probably doesn't have a truly debatable stance either...

@Yossarian FEMA's response to Hurricane Katrina was a fucking disaster.

If you treat people as children incapable of thinking ahead and worrying about disasters and such, you'll likely get more of that reckless behavior. Let them come up with their own solutions that don't involve imposing costs on others to support a failure of an institution, and they'll eventually learn to deal with problems more responsibly.

If it bothers you that an insurance company might take 10, 20, or 30% profit, why doesn't it bother you when government wastes a much bigger percentage of your tax dollars doing the same thing with no profits to show for it?

I'd appreciate it if you'd continue this discussion in the appropriate topic, not on my profile, thanks.

>> ^renatojj:

@Kofi if 200 billion is not enough, wouldn't that amount increase if government didn't take away so much from it? If people were allowed to keep more of their money, I think they would have more to likely donate to charity.


Well if you look at "charity" breakdown, it's only about $35B that goes to anything like disaster relief.

So let's use that real number. And then let's pretend that it's not already spent on ongoing everyday problems, and then let's pretend the ~$60B in tax revenue that these "charities" are exempted from costs nothing.

Are you seriously claiming that you could put together a lean-mean non-profit relief org that could manage to be prepared for, and provide aid in any arbitrary situation like hurricane Sandy for $35B a year? What about the next thing? What if you go a Katrina instead?

>> ^renatojj:


Also, I'm sure you'll agree that just throwing money at a problem is not a solution, whether it's 200 billion or 2 trillion, the amount isn't everything. Just look at how much more money government takes and how poorly it does its job. Wouldn't charity, without the wasteful middle man of government, improve the situation?
Besides, wasting money is the opposite of charity, because it's money that won't go into productive employment, goods, services, and investments. So society is worse off, and while most of us can still go on with our lives, those who are needy and poor are the most affected by any amount of wasted resources.


Large Organizations are wasteful, if they are for-profit, charity, or government, having a large enough infrastructure to address large problems is costly, that is not a government problem.

We live in a high infrastructure technological society. We don't form bucket brigades when someone's house catches on fire, we have professionals, with effective equipment, who show up and solve this problem more quickly and efficiently, and at a lower aggregate cost to society.

The same is true of disaster relief, we pay for the maintenance of a professional disaster relief infrastructure, and it's cheaper than either doing it ad-hoc, or not having anything in place at all.

Kindness and charity are good and real human impulses, but they are not preparedness, we have organizations for that, we call them governments.

People like this are fucking scary. These conspiracy nutballs who think EVERYTHING is a conspiracy. EVERYTHING is being controlled by the governments or secret cabals of hooded men.

He keeps harping on (haarping on?) about the storm being a distraction.

Isn't his batshit crazy bullshit really a distraction, rather than focusing on real issues?

This guy is a moron if he thinks they can actually control hurricanes as much as he thinks they can. When you do a cursory bit of reading you see that they have theories, they think they can lessen the impact of hurricanes (in theory), they have been trying for decades but never had conclusive proof one way or the other.

The bullshit that he keeps spouting as fact gets lapped up by the conspiracy nutjobs.

Fuck this man annoys the shit out of me. Not least of which because I have at least one friend who watches this dick and believes his shit.

So... Hurricane Katrina... worked out well for Bush.

>> ^Nexxus:

That's the way I react when people hold their cellphone cameras vertical instead of horizontal. Don't do it people!!


People complain about this constantly, but I think it's more a problem with youtube and other video sites than with the cell phones.

Holding a phone in portrait mode, you're capturing just as many pixels. For some scenes you might be capturing a more relevant set of pixels, as well.

It's just that the videos are needlessly squished because the Youtube player won't resize accordingly.

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>> ^ctrlaltbleach:

One more reason for us to rid the world of those god forsaken trees!


Kill nature before it kills you!

>> ^DuoJet:

Interesting choice of music.


*music

At least it is not ruined like by the hurricane, terrorists, etc.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'mitt romney, photo op, hurricane sandy, barely affected ohio' to 'mitt romney, photo op, hurricane sandy, barely affected ohio, Rachel Maddow' - edited by Boise_Lib