I see where you're going, but I can't see how we'd get there.

The point was was trying to make was that blaming Democrats for the “one against the other” game that hurts both blacks and latinos is exactly half right. The republicans that run manufacturing, processing, and housing are quite happy to use undocumented labor and charge their customers full price. They cheat their workers and pass the savings on to no one.

I want to charge those who underpay, not those who are underpaid. Your right that blacks have gotten screwed by this cozy arrangement. So have Latinos. So have you and me by having to pay for a fiction regular rate of pay.

I believe the undocumented must first go to the back of the proverbial citizenship line before they become citizens. That's the fairest way to give them the chance I'm willing to offer them. In the meantime, nail those who have hired them while working to keep them illegal.

I hope that helps explain my comment. It's not about one party over another, it's about power and trying to keep it at others expense.

“…make it a felony to hire illegal immigrants…” I'd settle for enforcement of the laws already on the books.

I'm no Republican…I'm an independent now…I've been a registered Democrat bordering on Communist for most of my life. I'm not trying to play anyone against anyone else. My musing about black american support for the Democratic Party is not without merit. In fact it is based not just on insight but many conversations had with black construction contractors who've watched their share of that industry dry up while the Dems fall all over themselves to flood the market with more illegal immigrants. I can't help but think that your saying 'playing one against the other' is a bit off mark. Since when were illegal immigrants part of the voting block? Furthermore, Latinos are not unanimous in their opinions on anything.

Here's a healthcare proposal:
- the immediate need is to cover the uninsured, right?
- why don't we give the illegal immigrants the access to citizenship they deserve (rather than continue their servitude), in the process charge then 5,000 to 10,000 USD (plus additional penalties for egregious tax code violations).
- AFTER the processing fees are taken out we put the BILLIONS of dollars left over in a congressionally created temporary fund for the uninsured. This fund would be set up to handle those costs for the next year ONLY, a reasonable amount of time for Congress to put together something more coherent.

Here is one thing I know for sure from years working with immigrants – they act like any other American once they become one. For instance, they ask for comparable wages…

Faced with dropping poll numbers and nationwide protests by angry voters, President Obama conducted a Potemkin Village townhall in New Hampshire, much like Stalin created fake Russian villages with fake prosperity and villagers ordered to smile and answer correctly to Western journalists. The New Hampshire Potemkin townhall was pathetic. Over 1,000 anti-Obamacare protesters were outside. Inside, staged softball questions, including one from a wee moppet whose mom ran part of Obama'selection campaign in Massachusetts. And a moronic analogy between Obama's proposed public health option and the US Postal Service. Does Obama want us to think the public health option will suck more and more taxpayer money into a black hole, while providing shoddy service, little innovation, and being forced to close hospitals and leave communities with diminishing services, as does the Post Office? Does he think that the governmental Post Office was created AFTER FedEX and UPS came into existence, to keep them “honest” by providing competition, as he dishonestly claims a government funded health insurance is needed to keep private insurance companies honest?

Leaving aside the Obama crew's failure to grasp that insurance companies provide a check on each other, as long as we are free to pick among them (and would provide more options and be more competitive if the government did not regulate them into uniformity with mandates and prevent them from competing across state lines for our business), what about the question of innovation? The US Post Office only managed to figure out a vending machines could sell a stamp decades after private retailers had been using them to sell gum, snacks, condoms, tampons and everything else. Governments do not innovate, and have little incentive to do so.

And what of government's failure to innovate if we allow Obama to nationalize the 1/6 of our economy devoted to medical care? One of President Obama'
s recent statements about the furor he is facing from voters is that it's OK that nationalized medical care may mean old people (and others? the handicapped? disabled? incurable? genetically compromised?) will be strongly “nudged” (to use Obama team member Cass Sunstein's new Orwellian term for totalitarianism) to forego costly treatments and just take pain killers and expire without making trouble, because “we” already ration health care in that those evil insurance companies sometimes say “no” to such treatments.

Of course one can always pick an insurance company that does cover what you need treated. Or you can pay cash for a treatment, even if that means mortgaging a house, borrowing from relatives, or appealing for donations. Obama is either dishonest or dumb in that he evades the way innovations happen, perhaps because he intends for innovation to end, or at least be strictly controlled by a federal government that will decide when any are needed. Innovators in a market economy usually create new products and services that are extremely expensive and available only to the wealthy initially, and then are made more cheaply by new competitors entering the market. A recent example being flat screen TVs or cell phones, once luxury items, a few years later, cheap and ubiquitous. Medicine is, or should be, no different, as such things as lasik surgery have shown.

Most medical services, other than cosmetic surgery, today are provided in very heavily regulated markets, and paid for by government-controlled health insurance provided to employees through their employers because of the tax code. Consumers do not have the same control they do in their free market purchases where they shop and control the purse strings. As a result the medical technologies covered by current government-regulated insurance have not fallen in price as rapidly as lasik surgery. Overall health expenditures increased from 5.9 percent to about 14 percent of gross domestic product from 1965 to 2001 and to 16.2 percent of GDP in 2008.1 Henry Aaron, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, recently asserted that medical spending continues to rise faster than the GDP because the population is growing and new medical technologies and therapies are constantly being developed to enable more people to receive treatment than previously possible.2

Professor Mark Pauly of the Wharton School of Business stated, “Basically, most of the data I know about indicates that the lion’s share—whatever that is—of the growth in medical spending per capita, even after you adjust for the aging population, is accounted for by what we call technology.”3 Before the development of hip-replacement surgery, an arthritic hip was treated with aspirin and a walker. Now a single hip replacement can cost from $20,000 up to $50,000 depending on age and the length of hospital stay.4 Advances in medical equipment also drive medical expenses ever upward. MRI (magnetic resonance imagery) machines involve both heavy capital outlays and additional personnel. The average x-ray costs $80 while a similar MRI machine costs over $1,200 per examination. Unlike x-rays, MRIs can detect brain and muscular disorders.5
Obamacare plans to solve the problem of costs, not by deregulating and allowing consumers to shop as they do with lasik, and profit-seeking firms to compete, but by denying you access to the new services. Obamacare means that new drugs, treatments, procedures and medical devices will not come into being. Perhaps we will have a somewhat more equal access to treatment (except for the ruling political class, like Congress, who are more equal than others) unless we are elderly or in some other group deemed socially value-less. But the care we will be receiving will never include anything that did not already exist in 20
09.

Notes

Steve Eisenberg, medical director of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, September 19, 2001, at http://www.ssc.k12.mn.us/insuradvminutes.htm.
Geri Aston, AMNews staff, “Medicare sound for now, but long-term outlook is=2 0gloomy,” April 17, 2000, Amednews.
com: The Newspaper for America’s Physicians, at http://www.ama-assn.org/sci-pubs/amnews/pick_00/gvl104....
“Health Policy Discussion” from “Productivity in Health Care: The Value of Medical Technology,” AEI Conference, February 28, 2001, at http://www.newt.org/forum_aei_
health.htm.
Leigh Hopper, “Hip replacement firm issues recall,” Houston Chronicle, January 23, 2001, at http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/topstory2/788942.
Mark H. Gurda, “Rising costs, September 18, 2000,” at http://www.healthinsure.com/rising_costs.html.

Bruce Majors is an unpaid Tea Party community organizer

I cannot wait for the citizens tribunals where we get to try you Obama fascists and Soris funded media whores. I am going to operate the guillotine.

That's a _huge_ issue missed or deliberately suppressed by the media. It's not only the history of other government encroachment into health care such as the Oregon “list” of this being paid for, but not that, or liberal academics involved with “ethics” and the rationalization of rationing and disfavoring of the elderly (not to mention experience with government elsewhere such as the National Health Service in the UK).

Simply the fact that one way quickly (rashly and cynically) decided to pay for part of the expansion of federal health care to new beneficiaries was simply to swipe half a trillion dollars out of Medicare, whose reform and saving was deliberately deferred, was enough to make a lot of seniors (current beneficiaries of Medicare) nervous and resentful — obviously.

(But the fools who stupidly support this effort insist on being ignorant about this, while hypocritically saying at the same time that government health care is good by naming _Medicare_, specifically, as their example of excellence!)

The Atlantic (resembling the Militant in this case) or the other liberal media? Their obscession with a few loudest protesters and their blatant mischaraterization of widespread public growing opposition to the Dems' ever-progressively-worsening misconduct (not limited to health care, of course) and hatred for the public who isn't mindlessly obeying Obama and the Congressional Dems' edicts, only worsens their own reputation. It's not surprising they'd collaborate with the Dems, but disgusting how low they will stoop.

It's not just that.

Obama joined the current crazy health care effort by continuing his campaign behavior (which now only appeals to the truly gullible; how pathetic can these people be? Of course, they're also the ones who will unthinkingly insist that this health care effort succeed, ideal for staged shows to manipulate public opinion, even though fewer and fewer of the rest of the public is manipulable, too…) with staged “Town Hall” appearances. Manufactured, organized, the _real_ instance of such a thing, for deception purposes.

Opposition to the health care effort (a continuatino of growing opposition to what else the Dems have been doing, more and more in succeeding months this year) is dishonestly mischaracterized, hypocritically, by the opposition as “manufactured” or “organized” to make fools believe it's not authentic, whereas it is, of course — and includes even those on the farther Left, who are drowned out when they manage to get on liberal media outlets such as CNN programming.

Then, what do we see on the extreme fringe Left (“health care is a right; the true party of hatred, hating anyone not lock-step mindlessly leftish) but a “need” to organize “in response” [sic] — including the unsurprising instances of violence such as we saw involving SEIU, an example of common leftist hatred finding a suitable outlet.

(Incidentally, will SEIU and AFSCME be joining ACORN on Main Street during the Census next year?)

Obama admitted re the Post Office vs. FedEx & UPS.

LOL This has more to do with the Internets and email, than that darn old Post Office. Why spend 45 cent when you can tweet or email for free.

Polling indicates a growing dissatisfaction with ObamaCare that drops by the day. He is losing seniors big time – and they are the largest voting bloc in mid-term elections. As the town halls became more vocal, support for ObamaCare eroded further – not something one would expect of a backlash. Blue Dogs and other Democrats are quite aware of this and it is the poll numbers that will dictate their voting behavior. Should they choose to ignore the polls and vote for ObamaCare, look for a real backlash in 2010. So theory one looks like swiss cheese upon further scrutiny and is not worthy of additional discussion (the extra CO2 required would exacerbate global warming).

Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic is following the media script of “backlash, backlash, backlash!” in an effort to silence the town halls, because they are eroding support for ObamaCare. Of course, nobody is listening to such nonsense. Whatever does pass – if anything at all – will be a watered down version of reform. August 22nd is national recess rally day – look for some real fireworks by millions, not a few hundred at a town hall. It won't be so easy to dismiss that level of protest. I can't wait to see Nanny state Nancy try. She is the gift that keeps on giving.

Blue Dogs are also aware of the opt out amendments in Florida and Utah and up to ten other states that will be using the 10th amendment to fight ObamaCare. Throw that dynamic in the mix.

If the first theory is true and the town halls have backfired, why are the poll numbers for Obama and his health care plan plunging? Explain that with the first theory.

If you want real backlash, check out http://www.michellemalkin.com and look at the connections the little girl's parents have with Obama. Documented, proved and case closed. Obama lies once again, stating the members of his town hall were not screened. Of course, anyone with half a brain knew better. Look for further plunging poll numbers. Everytime Obama opens his mouth on the subject the numbers drop. Marc's sense of “relief” at the White House belongs in the same boat as Obama stating he was never for a single payer system – fabricated.

It's clear that they support the Democratic party because the Republicans have the owners of all the business owners who use illegal immigrants at cut rate prices on their side. You know, it's good business to screw your labor force and keep the padded profits for yourself. It's also the Republican way.

You really do need to try a different tactic. Trying to split blacks and Latinos in the Democratic party by playing one against the other is an old, old game. If you want to solve the illegal immigration issue, why not support labor laws that make it a felony to hire illegal immigrants? It was your lobbyists who have consistently blocked a decent verification system. I guess it's simpler to blame the poor than constraint the greed of the rich.

Don't you mean “so people don't have to pay *more* taxes”?

I can't believe anybody could spout so many false talking points in such a short comment.

We're actually running a huge deficit so people don't have to pay taxes. In fact, George W Bush cut taxes in spite of running two poorly managed wars and creating the Medicare drug benefit.