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[Catloaf]

I know I'm late to respond, but I can't help but want to join in on piling it on Brentai as his post inspired so much rage many energetically argumentative humors within my being*.

100% of women don't need birth control.

Except the ones with tendencies to develop ovarian cysts and/or have unusually disabling (more/worse cramps, anemia, etc.) periods.

100% of women who need birth control don't need government assistance to buy it.

1)This directly contradicts the immediately prior statement.
2)Except for the poor women who can't afford it and have no other means of obtaining it.  The type of people who can't afford the time/effort/capital it would take to verify their 'special cases' meaning that the only way they would be able to get it is if every person in their largest applicable categorization were guaranteed it.

*Not anger, and I couldn't think of a non-fancy/archaic wording to properly express the feeling.

[Shinra]

everybody has said nearly everything I wanted to say better than I could have, but this really struck a nerve with me:

And I'll let you in on a little secret: I completely agree with him on this point.  It's not really a medically vital thing.

This is the #1 beef I have with the right on how we view health care in the United States vs how literally everyone else views health care. IMO, "Medically Vital" should not be entering the equation when it comes to health care. Strictly speaking, my type II bipolar does not require anti-manic medication - i am not really a danger risk to myself or others - and I can survive on the 4 hours of sleep I get every other day without ambien to battle my mania-induced insomnia. These issues are not medically vital, but they massively affect my quality of life and my long term health. In the US, insurers and politicians seem very disinterested in either of these issues. I know this is the case with my insurance company, as it's actually more expensive to buy either my Lithium or my Ambien with my insurance than it is to just get it on the store plan at my pharmacy. But my premiums are absolutely outrageous, so I am paying for health care that does nothing for me because my insurers think that if blood isn't coming out of my eyes, I need to just bootstraps it up and shell out my own hard earned money (which, I already am, since my employer is subsidizing my insurance costs out of my paycheck, and since the government is subsidizing the uninsured out of my taxes) to pay for my medicine.

You know, when I really think about it, if I couldn't afford my pills and my insurance wouldn't cover it, it probably would save the government a lot of money in the long run, since I would probably just bootstraps it up by putting a bullet in my fucking head. my QOL has improved so much since I started taking Lithium and Ambien that I don't think I could go back to living the way I used to.

Beyond that, the Republican party is not campaigning against birth control because it's not medically vital, they're campaigning against birth control because they have an issue with women having control over their own bodies. Last I checked, they weren't starting a rallying cry to take Viagra and Propecia away from government workers and medicare recipients.

edit; for the record, I'm not saying we should throw open the floodgates and allow people to start putting boob jobs on their insurance, but here's an example of a (mostly ) not-at-all medically relevant procedure that should never be denied by an insurer: Cleft Palate repair. (warning: gross) A person with a cleft palate can have a healthy, full life. The only time it's medically relevant is in infancy, where a cleft palate can cause feeding issues, but if they live past infancy, well, beyond the suicides and depression, it doesn't reduce your lifespan at all! But most insurance covers Cleft Palate repair, despite it being a purely cosmetic surgery, because living with a wedge cut out of your face tends to carry some social stigmas with it.

I guess we could argue that birth control is totally way different, but the social stigmas of a teen pregnancy are the same or worse, and the long-term effects on the success of the teen mother later in life are almost certainly worse.

[Doom]

Last I checked, they weren't starting a rallying cry to take Viagra and Propecia away from government workers and medicare recipients.

The rash of "MEN GO BAAAAAAAAAALD IT'S JUST LIKE WOMEN BIOTRUTHS AM I RITE" editorial cartoons that came out during the Sandra Fluke thing made me break a window every time, so now I live in an underground hobbit-hole.

[Bal]

A properly made hobbit hole has many fine windows, usually round.

Also, this segment on The Daily Show outlines the Fox News response to the "47%" video in appropriate fashion.

Chaos on Bullshit Mountain

[Thad]

Romney: If you're sick you can just go to the ER.

Romney invoked the so-called free-rider problem as recently as two years ago in defending his state healthcare overhaul.

"It doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility, particularly if they are people who have sufficient means to pay their own way," he said on MSNBC in March 2010.

[Shinra]

Mittens shows us how out of touch he is every time he opens his mouth.

I guess when you have a quarter of a billion dollars it's not a big deal to go to the ER, but usually what happens to these people is they end up with a 25,000+ dollar bill that they can't pay that ends up getting written off by the hospital and subsidized by the government and insurance companies. It's the exact reason why our health care costs are so high and why health insurance mandates were necessary in the first place.

[Doom]

That wasn't even his best gaffe this week.

Do you make $50k a year? Romney thinks your taxes should be higher than his to encourage economic growth.

HOLEY MOLEY.

[Shinra]

More trickle-down bullshit from the party of Reagan. Can we invent a gun that goes back in time and murders wannabe cowboys? We'd get a two for one special on shitty presidents.

[Bal]

Man, I know after trimming away all of my expendable income I'm just raring to buy buy buy.

[Thad]

Mittens shows us how out of touch he is every time he opens his mouth.

I guess when you have a quarter of a billion dollars it's not a big deal to go to the ER, but usually what happens to these people is they end up with a 25,000+ dollar bill that they can't pay that ends up getting written off by the hospital and subsidized by the government and insurance companies. It's the exact reason why our health care costs are so high and why health insurance mandates were necessary in the first place.

Well, it's worse than that; read the quote I included: Mitt knows all that perfectly well, has used it in an argument AGAINST this system in the past two years, and is now yet again changing his position for the sake of (his idea of) political convenience.

That wasn't even his best gaffe this week.

Do you make $50k a year? Romney thinks your taxes should be higher than his to encourage economic growth.

HOLEY MOLEY.

“It is a low rate,” Romney said. “And one of the reasons why the capital gains tax rate is lower is because capital has already been taxed once at the corporate level, as high as 35 percent.”

I always love the "It's unfair to tax something twice!" argument.

Unlike, you know, taxing my payroll, putting a sales tax on everything I purchase, and then making me file income tax at both a state and federal level.

[Shinra]

On a bit of a tangent; honestly, the 47% comment polarized me even further to the left not because it was so hilariously insensitive, but because it made me realize I make more than 53% of the country with my whopping 31k/yr and still can't pay my fucking bills. I don't even have kids. How the fuck are we expected to survive on that?

[Classic]

It almost seems like Mitt has realized that the Republicans are run and endorsed by horrible people and seeks to completely dismantle it.

[Büge]

Can we invent a gun that goes back in time and murders wannabe cowboys?

Isn't that how Batman killed Darkseid?

[TA]

[Brentai]

When pressed on whether or not he believes that rate is fair, Romney said he thought it was the “right way to encourage economic growth — to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work.”

Am I misreading this or does he literally not understand how money works at this level?  I get that that's the formal definition of "out of touch" but... wow.

I've literally spent the last three years waiting on my ass to invest* because I can't get the standard minimum together.  I can this year entirely because, as stated before, I have two new tax breaks that were created with the sole purpose of getting people like me into the market that his buddy Ryan is trying to toss out.

It's easy to handwave it away as "he's evil and just saying whatever sounds good at this point" but I'm willing to accept the possbility that an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the situation may be causing him to believe some fucked-up stuff.  Not so sure he'd be as willing to accept an explanation of what he's doing wrong, though.

* Okay technically I did put in for real estate but that's not what he's talking about.

[Brentai]

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2012/president/candidates/romney/2012/09/24/romney-assails-obama-after-ambassador-death/JgssIZSZ28HKRNtx8dv8aP/story.html

And now he's criticizing Obama for... not treating the death of an American ambassador with enough respect.

What.

...

What.




...





What?

[Zaratustra]

I always suspected Mitt Romney just has no idea how a lower-class person lives. He's like a six-year-old guessing at what adult life may be like.

For example, he thinks emergency rooms are free.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/09/24/no-health-insurance-no-problem-romney-says-that-freeloading-in-the-er-is-now-all-good/

[Bal]

I think that's a fair assessment, given how often he appears to have no idea what the fuck he's talking about, or what, indeed, is happening around him.

[Brentai]

Okay, NOW I get it.  His pattern of responses have seemed bizarre lately - contradictory to himself, contradictory to reality, contradictory to everything that an even basically competent campaigner would do.  But it's so consistent that I'm forced to conclude one thing.

He's trying to see what the hell he can get away with.

Not just for shits and giggles, though.  It's as clear to him as it is to anybody that his actual chances of victory are nil, so he's turned himself into the next most beneficial thing for his party: a political minesweeper, of sorts.

Just say the most outlandish shit and see what happens.  Nobody's going to hit the party itself for it - they're all positioned to disconnect from him when the time comes - and he's got nothing to lose, so just test the waters.  See if you can get away with suggesting the emergency room as primary care.  See if you can get away with suggesting the middle class should pay higher taxes.  See if you can get away with tripling down on hawkish foreign policy.

Basically try out all the stupid shit the right wing WANTS to pull, but is too politically careful to actually do.  By the time he finally gets booted off the stage in November, the GOP will have a roadmap of where they can and cannot safely make a point of being total dickbags.

It's actually somewhat brave and forward-thinking, in a League of Extraordinary Chucklefucks sort of way.  Godspeed, you hateful shell of a human being.

[Brentai]

Gingrich backs Akin.



Nowhere to go but down, I guess.