U.S. Politics XL--Double Down it

[ThinkerX]

I'm amazed at how many people are so angry about the prospect of having health insurance (I know they're mad about other things too). But seriously, does anyone truly want to be uncovered?

Your looking at this wrong. Not so much 'wanting to be uncovered' as it is 'wanting treatment they can afford'. From these peoples perspective this bill does absolutely nothing to reduce costs, merely adds another ripoff bill that they are forced to pay (remember - insurance companies do not give a damn about their customers health, only their ability to pay).

You want to reduce medical costs, you skip the insurance malarky altogether and lock horns with the medical industry - the doctors and hospitals and pill companies and issue hardline price controls at that level.

[Annelise]

You want to reduce medical costs, you skip the insurance malarky altogether and lock horns with the medical industry - the doctors and hospitals and pill companies and issue hardline price controls at that level.

The people of whom you speak, by and large, wouldn't have supported this either, that's for sure. Or a lot of other people. It is politically unfeasible. :(

[Horza]

did I congratulate you guys on taking the first step towards what Australia was doing in 1973 yet?

[Nymeria Sand]

That's right, keep it coming suckas! :commie: I'm gonna write Obama and ask him to have the armored car bursting with Oklahoma taxes to make a pit-stop at my house on the way to Detroit.

Hey, send some our way, too. :) We won't be getting our usual tens of millions in pork projects now that John Murtha is gone.

[sologdin]

Australia was doing in 1973

the CIA oustered your PM shortly thereafter, though.

[Nymeria Sand]

I'm amazed at how many people are so angry about the prospect of having health insurance (I know they're mad about other things too). But seriously, does anyone truly want to be uncovered?

I dare any GOP politician or tea partier to tell 30 million people they've just been uncovered if by some chance the law gets repealed.

But hey, what's the well being of 30 million people when you have a point to make?

[Alcibiades]

The teabaggers are downtown at Boston Common today. A friend of mine is there; I'm hoping he can bring back pics of some kooky signs. As for myself: i don't even want to go to a protest I agree with, let alone the teabaggers. Protesting isn't something I really have the temperament for.

Scott Brown, on the same day we found out he was snubbing the above event and voting for unemployment benefits, was announced as my commencement speaker at Boston College Law School. <3 massachusetts.

[squonk]

Those questions on how white people view other races are sort of missing the point. The results are telling, I guess, but then if someone asked me if I thought black people were hardworking, I'd say it depends on the individual. It doesn't help that a lot of people identify themselves just as strongly with their race or ethnicity as they do others, if that makes any sense.

Being a kind-of-mixed ethnic guy myself, I never felt like identifying myself that way, never saw the point of it.

[DizoakiusMaximus]

But on a positive note for Tea Partiers, two thirds of them think gays should be allowed to serve in the military. :love:

Probably because they figure they'll get killed in battle, and voila!: Less gays to scare them.

[Former Lord of Winterfell]

Ahh, so you were talking out of your ass for no reason and backed down from your attempt to illogically link the Jeremiah Wright stupidity and all the stuff on the Tea Party together once I refused to fall for your blatantly obvious trick question?

No. And it wasn't a trick question, it was a rhetorical question premised on the whole "guilt by association" theme. I can't quite fathom what you think was "tricky" about it, but then, I don't really care either.

[Nymeria Sand]

Probably because they figure they'll get killed in battle, and voila!: Less gays to scare them.

That's what I was thinking, too.

[Shryke]

No. And it wasn't a trick question, it was a rhetorical question premised on the whole "guilt by association" theme. I can't quite fathom what you think was "tricky" about it, but then, I don't really care either.

So again, you are trying to draw some sort of retarded equivalency between "This is what this guy I knows said" and "This is what polls say this groups says, on average".

[Jaime L]

did I congratulate you guys on taking the first step towards what Australia was doing in 1973 yet?

In fairness and as is common knowledge, Australia exists in the future. It's what, like, Saturday there? Are you posting from your hovercomputer?

[Former Lord of Winterfell]

So again, you are trying to draw some sort of retarded equivalency between "This is what this guy I knows said" and "This is what polls say this groups says, on average".

No Shryke, no. Forget the damn poll for a minute, because my comment with respect to Wright was directed at a different post you had made.

You claimed that you weren't unfairly demonizing Tea Party supporters in general, and posted in support a link to some jackass in Dayton who tweeted something about "spics". Now, if you think that a tweet from that particular jackass somehow justifies broad condemnations of Tea Partiers because they happen to be present at an event where the jackass also was present, then that is classic "guilt by association" of the type the left deplored when it was used against Obama with reference to Jeremiah Wright. In fact, your own link stated that as soon as other tea partiers became aware of what this guy had tweeted, they started cancelling on his event.

[Watcher]

Your looking at this wrong. Not so much 'wanting to be uncovered' as it is 'wanting treatment they can afford'. From these peoples perspective this bill does absolutely nothing to reduce costs, merely adds another ripoff bill that they are forced to pay (remember - insurance companies do not give a damn about their customers health, only their ability to pay).

You want to reduce medical costs, you skip the insurance malarky altogether and lock horns with the medical industry - the doctors and hospitals and pill companies and issue hardline price controls at that level.

And what makes you think that will make health care affordable? Under this what would happened to people who have curable conditions that are very expensive to cover, like open heart surgery. Or something that is very expansive to control, like HIV or Crohn's disease? Or having something unpredictable happen to you like a serious fall or a venomous snake bite that requires months of hospitalization and rehabilitation therapy? Any of those conditions are vastly expansive and no amount of price controls is going to reduce those costs to an affordable level for the majority of Americans.

Spreading the risk around to as many people as possible unexpected illness is the most feasible option.

[Nymeria Sand]

And what makes you think that will make health care affordable? Under this what would happened to people who have curable conditions that are very expensive to cover, like open heart surgery. Or something that is very expansive to control, like HIV or Crohn's disease? Or having something unpredictable happen to you like a serious fall or a venomous snake bite that requires months of hospitalization and rehabilitation therapy? Any of those conditions are vastly expansive and no amount of price controls is going to reduce those costs to an affordable level for the majority of Americans.

This used to be called Major Medical or Hospitalization, and it was the kind of insurance that people with insurance had. It was for catastrophic care that you couldn't afford to pay cash for. For your everyday medical needs, there was the local public health clinic, or your private doctor. And you paid cash for everything because you could.

Not that long ago, the only people who had insurance of any kind were people who couldn't afford to pay out of pocket.

And then they invented HMO's, but that's another kettle of fish.

[Shryke]

No Shryke, no. Forget the damn poll for a minute, because my comment with respect to Wright was directed at a different post you had made.

You claimed that you weren't unfairly demonizing Tea Party supporters in general, and posted in support a link to some jackass in Dayton who tweeted something about "spics". Now, if you think that a tweet from that particular jackass somehow justifies broad condemnations of Tea Partiers because they happen to be present at an event where the jackass also was present, then that is classic "guilt by association" of the type the left deplored when it was used against Obama with reference to Jeremiah Wright. In fact, your own link stated that as soon as other tea partiers became aware of what this guy had tweeted, they started cancelling on his event.

Except this is nothing alike.

You posted a link claiming people were demonizing the Tea Party.

So I posted a link showing the leader of the Tea Party in that area posting blatantly racist statements.

You can't be "demonizing" a movement that consistently, constantly and repeatedly throws up stories of blatant bigotry like this.

You can say they aren't ALL like that, but the simply truth is there's ALOT of stories that come out all the time about bigotry from the Tea Party. It's not demonizing, it's simple looking at the evidence.

[lokisnow]

since I posted the first thing from five thirty eight that's caused most of the brouhaha in this thread, I'll also post the followup with the pollster posted this morning:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/04/pollster-responds-to-your-questions.html

quick summary: he's a respected pollster, question design was taken from standard highly respected polls. Only seven states were polled, 1000 people, about 350 complete responses (another 160 completed but said they'd never heard of the tea party). Strongly support tea party was 117 individuals, strongly oppose tea party was 66 individuals. The race presentation in the chart is based on regression analysis of sets of much less inflammatory questions.

There is enough info in this article to confirm every one of FLoW's suspicions (and not change his or any other conservative's mind about the veracity of the polling) and enough info to satisfy Shryke that the polling was totally above board and is reliable despite small sample size. In other words. reading the full article, I think there's a 99.99% chance that each person with an agenda--left or right--will see exactly what they expect to see and want to see from the following interview. I do think it is very clarifying, though.

Because the post I wrote Monday about a new tea party-related poll sparked quite of bit of controversy--not to mention insinuations that either I or the pollster are engaged in "hackery" of some form or other--I contacted the pollster, Dr. Christopher Parker# of the University of Washington's WISER institute, so he could introduce himself to 538 readers, explain his methods and findings, and answer some of the respectful questions raised by thoughtful readers.

I wrote that post to provide a partial response to the emergence of a new meme--one deriving from, and citing as "evidence," a recent Gallup demographic study--which asserts that, because tea party identifiers are similar in some (but not all) demographic characteristics to non-identifiers, their political views can therefore be taken as similar or "mainstream" or "not fringe" or "non-racist," to borrow terms utilized by others in their interpretations of the Gallup results. Although people who are similar demographically often do have overlapping political beliefs, it's fallacious to presume two groups with certain shared demographic characteristics automatically share the same attitudes. The way to determine that is to actually survey their attitudes, which Dr. Parker did.

...

Much of the instrumentation for the survey was extracted from existing polls, word-for-word. For instance, the items assessing the extent to which blacks and Latinos are hardworking, etc., are taken directly from the General Social Survey (GSS), one of the finest survey instruments in the social sciences. Likewise, the gay rights questions on the survey were borrowed from the American National Election Survey (ANES), another social scientific jewel. In fact, I'd say that approximately 70% of the items on the Multi-State Survey of Race and Politics were recently on the ANES or GSS. Beyond the theoretical import of the items, I drew so heavily upon these surveys because I need proven items, ones that had been thoroughly vetted. I also wished to have items that facilitated comparisons to other, more national comparisons. Obviously, the tea party question is new.

This leads to the question of why I chose the states that are in the survey. Because Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio were battleground states going into the 2008 election cycle, Matt Barreto suggested that we should examine racial and political dynamics in those states. California, the seventh state, was chosen because we thought it wise to include a state in which the election was never in doubt. Thus, it provides a basis for comparison.

...

I understand why some readers are curious about support for the tea party among whites who are not on either end of the distribution. Here's what I have: Based upon 354 valid cases for this item (30% say they never heard of the tea party or have no opinion), 19% (N = 66) strongly disapprove of the tea party; 17% (N = 59) somewhat disapprove of it; 32% (N = 112) somewhat approve of the tea party; and 33% (N = 117) strongly approve of it. (Of course, when those that have never heard of the tea party (30%; N= 157) are included, increasing the number of observations to 511, the cell sizes change: 13% strongly disapprove; 12% somewhat disapprove of it; 22% somewhat approve; and 23% strongly approve of it.)

...

I'll draw upon three for illustrative purposes. For the first two models, the dependent variables are ordinal, so I report predicted probabilities. The dependent measure for the third model is an index, and is therefore continuous. For this, I estimate a simple regression model. Controlling for political ideology and party identification, support for the tea party (as it goes from its minimum to maximum value) results in a 23% increase in the likelihood that whites believe that "recent immigration levels will take jobs away from people already here." Moreover, support for the tea party decreases support, by 22%, for gay or lesbian adoption. Support for the tea party also promotes racism. In this example, I draw on Kinder and Sanders' (1996) work on racial resentment. I use the following four items to represent racial resentment: "Irish, Italians, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors"; "Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class"; "Over the past few years blacks have gotten less than they deserve"; and "It's really a matter of not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites." (alpha = .75) I use this instead of the stereotype items because it better captures the contours of more modern racism, one in which whites perceive blacks in violation of traditional American values.

In any case, racial resentment increases by approximately 25% as support for the tea party increases from its minimum to its maximum value. Again, each model controlled for possible confounds associated with partisanship and ideology. In sum, based upon this analysis, the data suggest that increasing support for the tea party is likely associated with xenophobia, homophobia, and racism.

...

Another reason to proceed with caution is that I don't have an item that directly measures tea party membership. Indeed, support for the tea party isn't the same as accounting for group membership much less group identification, both if which tend to powerfully predict attitudes and behavior. With that in mind, it's entirely possible that I've underestimated the effect of the tea party on political attitudes, and will likely do so in future analysis on its effect on political behavior.

[awesome possum]

Except this is nothing alike.

You posted a link claiming people were demonizing the Tea Party.

So I posted a link showing the leader of the Tea Party in that area posting blatantly racist statements.

You can't be "demonizing" a movement that consistently, constantly and repeatedly throws up stories of blatant bigotry like this.

You can say they aren't ALL like that, but the simply truth is there's ALOT of stories that come out all the time about bigotry from the Tea Party. It's not demonizing, it's simple looking at the evidence.

Quit backtracking Shryke. FLoW has you nailed! NAILED TO THE WALL!

And you know what else? Idi Amin was a cruel dictator responsible for the deaths of thousands of his opponents. And he was black. You know who else is black? BARACK OBAMA!

FLoW,

Going back to Jeremiah Wright is just as ridiculous as the false equivalency I made. OK, maybe not as ridiculous, but still pretty ridiculous. And sort of old, considering you've tried to use it multiple times in defense of the tea baggers that you supposedly aren't a part of yet wholeheartedly defend on a near-constant basis - even after members repeatedly display their hatred and ignorance.

[TrueMetis]

did I congratulate you guys on taking the first step towards what Australia was doing in 1973 yet?

What took you guys so long? Canada had government run hospitals that had to treat all patients in the 18th century. :commie: