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[Aqizzar]

Dunno if this was already discussed or not, but here's something to chew on:
Obama-hating Republican refuses to get insurance, gets diabetes and is going blind, blames Obamacare.

Even better, because he lives in South Carolina, he can't receive Medicaid benefits because SC Republicans refused the Medicaid expansion. Who does he blame for that? Obama.

Hey guys, remember the South Carlonian who missed the concept of metaphorical resonance when he refused to get medical insurance in protest of the ACA, then fell direly ill and blamed Obama for that too?

Well, a reporter from ThinkProgress caught up with Luis Lang and asked him about the national attention he's gotten.  His answer: He doesn't want to be the poster-boy for either Conservative demagogues or Liberal critics, and is walking away from the Republican party.

“Now that I’m looking at what each party represents, my wife and I are both saying — hey, we’re not Republicans!” Lang said. He added that, though he’s not a political person by nature and has never voted solely along party lines, he wants to rip up his voter registration card on national television so Americans will have proof that he’s making the switch.

It feels vaguely asshole-y for having not cared about the guy's fate when it sounded like he was on his way to being a self-made martyr, but I can respect anybody who's willing to change their mind about something.

Reading further, apparently nobody really bothered to give Lang much of an interview before and his views on the ACA insurance thing were a lot more nuanced than people gave him credit for.  Or he's changing his story under all the attention.  Either way, nice to see somebody using their head in such a weighty situation, instead of turning into another Joe The Plumber.

[penguinofhonor]

.

[Helgoland]

Well, that really depends on how much you care about collateral damage.

[RedKing]

You'll have to excuse me if I take a 5-pound bag of salt with Mr. Lang's change of heart. The guy seems like an opportunist of the nth degree.

[nenjin]

Seems like he's just trying to go a-political in an effort to stop the hate directed toward him. Somehow I think making a spectacle out of abandoning the Republican party isn't going to achieve the results he's looking for.

[Aqizzar]

Complete change of subject: Los Angeles city council votes to raise minimum wage to $15 within city limits.  Noteworthy that California is one of several states that does not exempt tip-earning jobs like waiters from the minimum wage requirement, and that roughly one-third of non-contract workers in LA make less than $15 an hour right now.

Expect it to come up in debates as soon as they start.  Probably along the lines of, "Is paying entry level workers $15 an hour outrageous or merely unconscionable?"

Personally, I do think it's kind of an absurd amount of money, but the ridiculous cost of living in LA does justify it somewhat.

[Descan]

Eh, it's a little less than inflation-adjusted minimum wage from the fifties, so I don't really see the problem. If minimum wage was worth it then, then it should be worth it now.

[Helgoland]

You didn't have China in the fifties though, and a million other things. It was a whole different situation. Who claimed that the standard of living can't sink?

[RedKing]

I didn't realize China was less than 65 years old as a nation. 

No, I think one of the considerable difference then was that CEOs didn't get paid like royalty. A lot easier to spread the revenue around to your employees when you're not taking home the equivalent of 275 of their paychecks. Or more. 275 is really just the average.

By comparison, Larry Ellison of Oracle made enough in 2008 ($84.6 million) to equal 5,609 minimum-wage salaries.

By one calculation, labor wages, adjusted for inflation, rose 5.7% from 1978 to 2011.
CEO compensation rose 726.7% in the same timeframe. That's just obscene. Even my most hideously exploitive capitalist Tropico games didn't have an income gap that big.

[mainiac]

And now we're supposed to say, "oh well, nobody could have known they were wrong, its okay to gloss over that because its been 13 years." FUCK THAT NOISE.

Fuck that I didn't say that.

I asked for what substantive policy difference Clinton's words made.  I received in reply a bunch of people whining "SHE HURT MY FEELING".

I was 14.  I disagreed with the war.  I sent the spam protest email shit that was popular back in those days.  I even marched an an antiwar rally at one point.  But whenever I do anything but slavishly declare my hatred for each and every person who signed off on the debacle people on these forums get butthurt like I personally waterboarded Robert Byrd in a backroom to stop the signal.

In my opinion it's the most disgusting thing about politics.  You talk about something related to a subject and people feel that they're entitled to immediately pigeonhole the debate into their ideological talking points.  I wasn't justifying the goddamn war then and I'm not now but when it comes to politics people show less reading comprehension then a forth grade english class.  I think that liberals are a lot better then conservatives in a lot of ways but the two sides are fucking indistinguishable in that regard.

[Angle]

*Battens down the hatches*

Actually, no, I'm going to try and contribute to the conversation. Foolish, I know, but here we go:

I was, like, eight at the time, so I don't really remember much, but in hindsight it certainly looks like a stupid war, and from what I see it should have been relatively obvious even back then. On the other hand, people were pretty crazy back then, and I can see how Clinton might have decided it was suicide to try and go against it. I'm not particularly sympathetic, but I can understand it. I'm afaid I don;t really follow the rest of the conversation, though.

[RedKing]

Hyperbole much?

No, you don't have to personally throw Hillary under the bus.
But you also don't have to act condescending to those of us who WANT to see tire marks all over that pantsuit.

Those who had the courage to stand up against the war deserve respect for it.
And those who voted against it and are now changing their tune because the political winds have shifted, deserve to have their noses rubbed in their own shit the way you would break a bad dog. There need to be consequences for gutless/stupid voting, otherwise it dis-incentivizes principled votes.

For that reason alone, I'll be voting for Sanders or Chaffee in the Democratic primary. Even though neither of them are liable to still be in the running by the time it gets here.


And even more, the pundits and talking heads who were so vocal against the opponents of the war should be held to account. If I had my druthers, they'd all be publicly flogged and barred from the airwaves. Which ain't going to happen, but it galls me that memories are so goddamn short in this country.

[mainiac]

Hyperbole much?

Yes everyone was using extreme hyperbole and that is why I'm pissed off.  Thank you for noticing.

[SalmonGod]

Hyperbole much?

Yes everyone was using extreme hyperbole and that is why I'm pissed off.  Thank you for noticing.

I think you're over-reacting.  Since I think this started out with you mostly responding to me and things exploding from there, here is the sequence of events as I see it.

1.  You and GJ point out how opposing the war was politically unpopular.  I understand that this wasn't necessarily in defense of the war, or of politician's stance on the war.  It was to point out that the reason politicians all look so bad on this subject now, is because the ones who stood against the war consequently didn't advance their political careers... except Sanders, but whatever.

2.  I make a typical SalmonGod thinking out loud-type post and state that I'd still rather judge candidates based on the principles and outcomes of their actions, rather than their skill in protecting their political careers.  I don't say this because I'm disagreeing with your statement, or accusing you of having different values.  I'm just waving my distaste for political reality like a flag, because to some extent you're right about my attitude towards authority and I won't deny it.  But also because I feel an impulsive need to keep it present in people's minds that politics have to be judged by effort to produce desirable outcomes, because any other way only locks political realities like these into permanency.

3.  You directly challenge me on this.  My paraphrased interpretation of your challenge is that you asked me why I should care whether a candidate opposed the war or not, because the war was unstoppable and thus the sacrifice involved in that opposition was worth no benefit.

4.  I respond that the benefit for the candidate is not losing my confidence as a voter in the future, and I don't understand why sympathy for being faced with a difficult career situation should counter the fact that past behavior as an official is not the type of behavior I want representing me.

5.  You respond with this scathing character assessment and things are kind of fucked from there.  I don't think there was any hyperbole before this point.  I'm not sure what the hell, but your posts since indicate that this came from some misunderstanding prior to this.  I never said that you supported the war or meant to criticize you for not jumping on my politician-hating bandwagon, and I don't think anyone else did, either.  I was simply stating my opinion.

[GreatJustice]

As I recall, basically everyone back in 2003 was of the mind that if you didn't support invading Iraq then you must be some sort of terrorist-supporting, naive hippy that probably would have let Hitler invade Poland, and this was in Canada. Then again, I was about seven at the time and I lived beside a naval base so maybe that has something to do with it. Regardless, you shouldn't just let a politician off the hook for a decision because it was the popular decision at the time, especially not when there are actually other politicians that made the right decision that aren't getting any credit for having been right after all. I mean, if you have to choose between two such politicians it doesn't necessarily have to come down to this one issue; if you had to choose between a regular politician and Hitler, you wouldn't automatically support Hitler because he made a courageous stand on animal rights once. But a candidate being consistent and standing by what they believe in, especially if it turns out in retrospect that their reasoning was correct, should definitely be a factor in whether they deserve support.

On a completely different note, Rand Paul is (indirectly) filibustering again, this time in opposition to the PATRIOT Act. i wonder whether he'll break his personal 13 hour record this time.