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[SalmonGod]

And then they gained influence by being bankrolled and assimilated.  It just wasn't the influence they had been originally hoping for.  Since then, the people who regard themselves as "original" or "true" Tea Partiers have mostly cut off their association.

OWS was regarded as a joke at first too, and still is by many, except it has gone a different route by gaining incredibly unexpected amounts of popular support and virility.

Actually, no.  As far as I remember, the first time anybody started mentioning a "Tea Party", it was in March of 2009, as a preemptive reaction to Obama administration's first health care proposals.

Actually, I remember it coinciding with a large increase in property taxes that really hurt a lot of lower middle class.  I couldn't put a month and year on that, though.

[Criptfeind]

No?

Something.

What was it then?

[Aqizzar]

What was it then?

Beats me, you'll have to look it up.  I don't remember there being anything like a public protest group in 2007, since that was about when I started thinking the entire idea as an element of American society was dead.

And then they gained influence by being bankrolled and assimilated.  It just wasn't the influence they had been originally hoping for.  Since then, the people who regard themselves as "original" or "true" Tea Partiers have mostly cut off their association.

Heck, the original and latecomer Tea Party people have pretty much all gone back to being plain old card-carrying Republicans now, after they won the electoral sweepstakes.  Go to almost any of the great Tea Party blogs and websites that the professional media followed, and they haven't been updated since last December.

[ECrownofFire]

So here's some actual news on Occupy Portland.

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/11/occupy_portland_portland_mayor.html

[darkflagrance]

There are currently people Occupying Harvard of all places.

The administration locked everyone out and now I think they're camping the gates.

[GlyphGryph]

I've been following the development of "OccupyGovernment" and frankly its pretty dissapointing, all told. I was hoping this would give us a bit of momentum and opportunity for a new kind of independent candidate to push to the forefront, but its not happening yet, and I think they're focus on pushing national candidates instead of State level candidates is a huge mistake.

[Criptfeind]

Not a protest group.

I dunno. Perhaps my grasp of time is weak enough to be off by two years.

Eh. I guess it does not matter.


Anyway. On things that matter. A new... Rule or whatever was made that said protesters can not put tents up. At first it was because "they might be making bombs or something" so the protesters said they would get clear tents. Then it became no structures on it and some vague "we need to clean it." Also something about people should be able to use the plaza.

[GlyphGryph]

So here's some actual news on Occupy Portland.
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/11/occupy_portland_portland_mayor.html

Oh god, everyone on the government's side here sounds like a total asshole. What the hell is wrong with them? I can understand (while totally disagreeing with) their desires, but do they think it helps to be dicks about it?

[SalmonGod]

Yeah, that's been the tactic going around from city to city for at least three weeks, starting in New York when Bloomberg announced his intentions to clear out the park to be cleaned.

Indianapolis forbade tents from the very beginning.  Actually forbade protesters from laying down at all.  They're forced to remain sitting or standing at all hours, and have a few vans parked in nearby spaces where they go to sleep in shifts.

[mainiac]

and eventually wound up with a "package" that was basically just a business-friendly mandate with almost none of the policy reforms and cost controls that anybody who wasn't a paid spokesman of the pharmaceutical industry actually wanted.

Except for health care policy experts who pretty much universally agreed that it was a good reform even if it could have been better. 

The ACCA takes a deeply broken market that has a cycle of skyrocketing cost increases and makes it less broken.  With the status quo, any company that tried to control costs wouldn't reap any benefits (look at the failures of HMOs).  The ACCA levels the playing field to help that.  This is why the bill passed when push finally came to shove, it was unpopular but at the end of the day the democratic party needs to occasionally contribute to the general welfare to justify it's existence.  The gap between our healthcare costs and the healthcare costs of a normal advanced economy costs us 1/12th of our total economic output with nothing to show for it in terms of better health outcomes.  That is 8 cents out of every dollar we as a nation earn.  The money we save by shrinking that amount is well worth a few industry friendly policies.

I say all this because you of all people should know better Aqizzar.  I don't expect uninformed populism of you.  I expect informed and witty populism.

[SalmonGod]

So here's some actual news on Occupy Portland.
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/11/occupy_portland_portland_mayor.html

Oh god, everyone on the government's side here sounds like a total asshole. What the hell is wrong with them? I can understand (while totally disagreeing with) their desires, but do they think it helps to be dicks about it?

Just read a couple pages of comments.  You're not kidding.  I've come to expect that sort of attitude, but have never seen it so dominant.

[Aqizzar]

I say all this because you of all people should know better Aqizzar.  I don't expect uninformed populism of you.  I expect informed and witty populism.

Then I suppose I'm uniformed, but your response isn't making me any more so.  I don't suppose you have some analysis you could point me to?  Because the only impression I got from everything I read about the Act was that it guarantees the already oligarchic health insurance market a 100% customer base (even if there's technically no penalty for personal non-compliance), with some fantastic but fairly basic consumer protections like the pre-existing conditions clauses (which I have no doubt they're finding ways around), and extending coverage of "children" to age 26.

I remember being exited about the idea that health insurance providers would be bound to spend a certain portion of their yearly outlay on actual medical services (I recall 85%, up from the current effective 35%) as a way of controlling costs by basically making it illegal for an insurance company to make too much money without a way to spend it.  I also remember all such ideas dying in the service of getting it passed.  I have no doubt that I could be wrong about all that, and I'd love to be, but I freely admit that it's been a while since I've looked into it.

[Osmosis Jones]

Unfortunately though, it still boils down to this

The ACCA takes a deeply broken market that has a cycle of skyrocketing cost increases and makes it less broken.

That's still broken. Indeed, by an objective standard, that's still horribly broken.

I am honestly amazed that you Americans are even still alive with your health care system. Seriously, come to Australia some time, we even have bulk-billing and a system designed to stop you getting bankrupted by big pharma!

[Tellemurius]

You realize are population is more than you guys. So lets see, $6.5 billion for 22 million people. then $88 billion for 300 million........... wtf

[Dsarker]

88 billion is pocket money for America's budget.