Letters to the Editor
juneausmog
Published Letters: 223 Editor's Choice: 10
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Advocating free market solution shows an inherent disconnect with democracy
[Read the article: Hillary Clinton's healthcare 2.0]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Did anyone recently read Karl Rove's plan for healthcare? He laid out a plan on how republicans can win the debate. Here's the solution: the brilliant free market solves everything. If you just provide interstate commerce, more competition, tax cuts and pool risk we can avoid government-ran healthcare. I would think that people would accept this as an appropriate solution if they weren't talking about their lives, health and security.
Any free market comes with a lot of risk, ups and downs and they have proven that they are incapable of self-regulation. I think they were fairly warned about their greed back when Clinton made it a national issue, but they kept going because they can't take their hands out of the cookie jar. Just like the car companies, just like the oil companies. Rove proposes to put lipstick on a pig, and call it a success. Gee, where did he do that again? Oh yes, in every Bush policy, and we are left with incompetency and failure.
But that level of risk is unacceptable to put into the hands of health care businesses who are public companies who are also answering to another market: Wall Street, the invisible strings that make all of us dance. What's the stock at today? Oh, it fell? Well, we better become more profitable or in other terms; deny more people.
It seems to me that conservatives suffer a huge disconnect with democracy. They want to force it down people's throats because its so awesome, but the lost irony is that it's a government of the people, for the people. Then, they want businesses to control all the aspects of our lives because the government can't be trusted. But still, we are a government of the people, for the people.
If people voted based on self-interest and believed in their democratic participation in govt, they would never buy into the idea that a for-profit business could be making better decisions for them than they could be making for themselves.
In fact, it exposes a whole deep level conservative frame that creates apathy and philosophically disenfranchises citizens. The frame: government does not have the citizen's interest in mind. Government is a separate entity that nobody controls. The example: bureaucrats making decisions for doctors.
Naturally, this kind of thing does happen (policy makers making bad policy), but in a people's government, the occurrence is a directly controllable problem. By comparison, in corporate administration scenarios, we have to work the invisible (and ungraspable) hand of the market to effect change.
At the base of it all, the message is: you do not have a people's government. This is a deep ideological difference between conservatives and liberals. Liberals don't trust corporations, and republicans don't trust our government.
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we have a king
[Read the article: Bush's stairway to paradise]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]finally, after 231 years.
Or did Yosemite Sam come to life?
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she should've been tased!
[Read the article: Is Star Simpson's "fake bomb" just an art jacket?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]isn't that how we treat our industrious, passionate, creative young people these days?
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Tim Grieve is not voting for Hillary
[Read the article: Hillary Clinton and the Mukasey bandwagon]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]pretty apparent by his writing and interest in de-crediting Hillary as much as possible today.
There has got to be other cynical news out there than this. Today's War Room is just the anti-Hillary War Room today.
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Jefferson is not a conservative
[Read the article: Is a new conservatism possible?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This has been the second time Jefferson has been cited by Salon writers as a conservative. This is totally erroneous. His political adversary, John Adams, is considered to be the original American conservative. This would make Jefferson, not conservative.
Perhaps you are confusing his libertarian bent (he certainly had that) with conservatism, but he was a progressive and a Deisist and certainly, believed that a natural order of aristocracy did not exist, but that any man of any social order, was entitled to the pursuit of happiness.
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She's a big girl
[Read the article: "Boys against girl," Part II]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's really a knee-jerk reaction in both directions: Hillary is the front-runner and should be ganged up on by those falling behind. After all, this is a competition. On the other hand, the thousands of years of patriarchal society tends to make women a little paranoid when they see this scenario played out.
Personally, I don't believe Hillary should be viewed as being victimized by good, liberal men. She'll definitely get pummeled by the misogynistic GOP though.
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Tom Tommorrow jumps on the Hillary-bashing train
[Read the article: This Modern World]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I remember Al Gore getting this same treatment from the left-wing and main-stream media in 2000.
A vote for Gore is the same as Bush! So vote Nadar!
Now we're eating crow with how we treated Gore...how we ASSumed we knew so much about him and his character.
This cartoon is a perfect summary of where lefties sit right now. They have joined the hype and because it suits their misperceptions about her, and they will happily pile on.
It doesn't help that many in the press corps seem to go out of their way to mislead news consumers about Clinton's vote and what she's been saying about it.
http://mediamatters.org/columns/200703050007
Meanwhile, she co-sponsors legislation with Jim Webb that states, that prohibits the use of funds for military operations against Iran without explicit Congressional authorization.
http://www.senate.gov/~clinton/news/statements/details.cfm?id=284618
And still Obama gets a pass on saber-rattling and hypocrisy when he himself co-sponsored the following bill in April, 2007: The "Iran Counter-Proliferation Act of 2007,"
It states that:
"The Secretary of State should designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a Foreign Terrorist Organization under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1189) and the Secretary of the Treasury should place the Iranian Revolutionary Guards on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists under Executive Order 13224 (66 Fed. Reg. 186; relating to blocking property and prohibiting transactions with persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support terrorism)."
How is this different than the Kyl-Leiberman resolution that Obama didn't show up to vote for?
Let's be consistent here, Tom. And please don't perpetuate willful ignorance on issues.