Society is communal. It requires human interaction. Human interaction is founded in the ultimate communal force: language. The ability to form concepts is part and particle of language.

Society is not a collection of individuals. The ‘collections of individuals’ concept precludes interaction. All other humans are, by necessity of that mindset, simply randomly self-motivated objects that poise obstacles for the only true being . . . Oneself.

Unfortunately for the idiots purveying this bull??it, the very ability to frame this bull??it betrays their insane ramblings.

Guest is operating on the assumption that the health care plan will force him to have health care.

This guy is a total Ass HOLE

I hate to see non-linguists try to make a linguistic argument. I did a search for the nonsense about "Barack Obama" being mentioned in the Bible with the phrase "Satan is lightning". The President's name comes from the Arabic word for "bless", "baraka". The Hebrew word has the same root consonants. The Hebrew word "baraq" means "lightning", and in Arabic is "barq". K and Q are not the same thing in these languages. They're basically trying to hang Obama on a pun. One could make a better case that a brand of root beer is Satan.

Also, the website predicated its case on the presumption that Jesus spoke Hebrew, whereas he actually spoke Aramaic, which is more distantly related to Hebrew than Arabic is.

Here is something to do- copy and paste this into your right wing friends email list:

The Official Health Care Parameters

…see no one is trying to kill your grandparents-

No discrimination for pre-existing conditions
No exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles or co-pays
No cost-sharing for preventive care
No dropping of coverage if you become seriously ill
No gender discrimination
No annual or lifetime caps on coverage
Extended coverage for young adults
Guaranteed insurance renewal so long as premiums are paid

http://www.whitehouse.gov/health-insurance-consumer-protections/?e=9&ref...

Here is a web site designed to battle the lies about health care reform http://www.pleasecutthecrap.com/

TFF,

Yes, that concurs with what Obama's former Dr. said, that if most of the docs became active, they would overwhelm the corporate anti-healthcare reform attempts.

Prominent Financial Writer: The Big Money Boys Call the Shots, The President is Just a "Figurehead" and All Politicians "Mere Pawns"

Long-time MarketWatch writer Paul Farrell explains in a new essay
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-8-point-goldman-socialist-manifesto...
that the big money boys call the shots, and that one of their basic strategies for maintaining control is to use the president as a "figurehead" and politicians as "mere pawns":

Always elect a figurehead president.

Putin skirted term limits by getting Medvedev elected president. Then Putin was appointed party leader and prime minister, the real power behind the throne. That's one way power stays in power playing the game. Wall Street is a master at playing this game, as the single largest money donor to political campaigns. Donations assure continued control behind an illusion of democracy, where all politicians are mere pawns.

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/

B Roll,

You sound irritated...

B Roll, Quark - Yeah ... I wondered about addressing Mark, too.

Re: my post above about allegedly pro-reform ads financed by big pharma - maybe they're just not running in NY media market? Anyone outside of NY Metro seen one?

Anybody ... anybody ... Buehler... ?

Thom,

My family was active for Goldwater, too.

AUH20

(Post 2 of 2)

Here is Parker’s Washington Post column:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/04/AR200908...

A Tip for The GOP: Look Away

By Kathleen Parker
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Southern writer Walker Percy liked to poke fun at Ohioans in his novels, just to even things out a bit.

“Usually Mississippians and Georgians are getting it from everybody, and Alabamians,” he once explained to an interviewer. “So, what’s wrong with making smart-aleck remarks about Ohio? Nobody puts Ohio down. Why shouldn’t I put Ohio down?”

Percy, the genial genius, laughed at his own remark.

Now, apparently, it’s the Buckeye State’s turn to poke back. In a fusillade of pique, Ohio Sen. George Voinovich charged that Southerners are what’s wrong with the Republican Party.

“We got too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns,” he told an interviewer with the Columbus Dispatch, referring to GOP senators from South Carolina and Oklahoma. “It’s the Southerners. They get on TV and go ‘errrr, errrrr.’ People hear them and say, ‘These people, they’re Southerners. The party’s being taken over by Southerners. What the hell they got to do with Ohio?’ ”

Down South, people are trying to figure out what “errrr, errrrr” means. Jack Bass, author of eight books about social and political change in the South, speculated in an e-mail that Voinovich really meant grrrr, grrrrr, as in “growling canines whose bark scares more than do Obama’s purrs, especially with the Dow at a nine-month high.”

Whatever Voinovich’s sound effects were intended to convey, his meaning was clear enough: Those ignorant, right-wing, Bible-thumping rednecks are ruining the party.

Alas, Voinovich was not entirely wrong.

Not all Southern Republicans are wing nuts. Nor does the GOP have a monopoly on ignorance or racism. And, the South, for all its sins, is also lush with beauty, grace and mystery. Nevertheless, it is true that the GOP is fast becoming regionalized below the Mason-Dixon line and increasingly associated with some of the South’s worst ideas.

It is not helpful (or surprising) that “birthers” — conspiracy theorists who have convinced themselves that Barack Obama is not a native son — have assumed kudzu qualities among Republicans in the South. In a poll commissioned by the liberal blog Daily Kos, participants were asked: “Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?”

Hefty majorities in the Northeast, the Midwest and the West believe Obama was born in the United States. But in the land of cotton, where old times are not by God forgotten, only 47 percent believe Obama was born in America and 30 percent aren’t sure.

Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity.

Though Voinovich’s views may be shared by others in the party, it’s a tad late — not to mention ungrateful — to indict the South. Republicans have been harvesting Southern votes for decades from seeds strategically planted during the civil rights era. When Lyndon B. Johnson predicted in 1965 that the Voting Rights Act meant the South would go Republican for the next 50 years, he wasn’t just whistling Dixie.

A telling anecdote recounted by Pat Buchanan to New Yorker writer George Packer last year captures the dark spirit that still hovers around the GOP. In 1966 Buchanan and Richard Nixon were at the Wade Hampton Hotel in Columbia, S.C., where Nixon worked a crowd into a frenzy: “Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, ‘burned the paint off the walls.’ As they left the hotel, Nixon said, ‘This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.’ ”

That same rage was on display again in the fall of 2008, but this time the frenzy was stimulated by a pretty gal with a mocking little wink. Sarah Palin may not have realized what she was doing, but Southerners weaned on Harper Lee heard the dog whistle.

The curious Republican campaign of 2008 may have galvanized a conservative Southern base — including many who were mostly concerned with the direction Democrats would take the country — but it also repelled others who simply bolted and ran the other way. Whatever legitimate concerns the GOP may historically have represented were suddenly overshadowed by a sense of a resurgent Old South and all the attendant pathologies of festering hate and fear.

What the GOP is experiencing now, one hopes, are the death throes of that 50-year spell that Johnson foretold. But before the party of the Great Emancipator can rise again, Republicans will have to face their inner Voinovich and drive a stake through the heart of old Dixie.

kathleenparker@washpost.com

WHEN WILL THE SOUTH STOP FIGHTING THE CIVIL WAR?
(Or, how can we miss you if you won't go away?)

Thom and Mark,

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697#32305519

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker was on Hardball last night. She "connected some dots" about which I have long been thinking.

Chris Matthews asked her what she thought was driving today's (now regional only) GOP and she said, "The Confederacy." She said that sesession and distrust of the government are part of the Southern culture.

I see it as more. So much of the Confederacy seems to be reflected in today's GOP, including the existence of the relatively few wealthy corporatists (read that "plantation owners and their enablers) and their racist attitudes (to keep labor cheap.) As recent books point out, most of the pre-Civil War South was willing to sign on to the abolitionist views of the North. The plantation owners, who had the most to lose, wanted to seceed. Of course, today's corporatists are not just located in the South, but I believe that is where at least part of their worldview comes from. And that is why the attitudes of the KKK and its stepchildren of today contribute to the dialogue.

Here is Parker's Washington Post column:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/04/AR200908...

A Tip for The GOP: Look Away

By Kathleen Parker
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Southern writer Walker Percy liked to poke fun at Ohioans in his novels, just to even things out a bit.

"Usually Mississippians and Georgians are getting it from everybody, and Alabamians," he once explained to an interviewer. "So, what's wrong with making smart-aleck remarks about Ohio? Nobody puts Ohio down. Why shouldn't I put Ohio down?"

Percy, the genial genius, laughed at his own remark.

Now, apparently, it's the Buckeye State's turn to poke back. In a fusillade of pique, Ohio Sen. George Voinovich charged that Southerners are what's wrong with the Republican Party.

"We got too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns," he told an interviewer with the Columbus Dispatch, referring to GOP senators from South Carolina and Oklahoma. "It's the Southerners. They get on TV and go 'errrr, errrrr.' People hear them and say, 'These people, they're Southerners. The party's being taken over by Southerners. What the hell they got to do with Ohio?' "

Down South, people are trying to figure out what "errrr, errrrr" means. Jack Bass, author of eight books about social and political change in the South, speculated in an e-mail that Voinovich really meant grrrr, grrrrr, as in "growling canines whose bark scares more than do Obama's purrs, especially with the Dow at a nine-month high."

Whatever Voinovich's sound effects were intended to convey, his meaning was clear enough: Those ignorant, right-wing, Bible-thumping rednecks are ruining the party.

Alas, Voinovich was not entirely wrong.

Not all Southern Republicans are wing nuts. Nor does the GOP have a monopoly on ignorance or racism. And, the South, for all its sins, is also lush with beauty, grace and mystery. Nevertheless, it is true that the GOP is fast becoming regionalized below the Mason-Dixon line and increasingly associated with some of the South's worst ideas.

It is not helpful (or surprising) that "birthers" -- conspiracy theorists who have convinced themselves that Barack Obama is not a native son -- have assumed kudzu qualities among Republicans in the South. In a poll commissioned by the liberal blog Daily Kos, participants were asked: "Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?"

Hefty majorities in the Northeast, the Midwest and the West believe Obama was born in the United States. But in the land of cotton, where old times are not by God forgotten, only 47 percent believe Obama was born in America and 30 percent aren't sure.

Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity.

Though Voinovich's views may be shared by others in the party, it's a tad late -- not to mention ungrateful -- to indict the South. Republicans have been harvesting Southern votes for decades from seeds strategically planted during the civil rights era. When Lyndon B. Johnson predicted in 1965 that the Voting Rights Act meant the South would go Republican for the next 50 years, he wasn't just whistling Dixie.

A telling anecdote recounted by Pat Buchanan to New Yorker writer George Packer last year captures the dark spirit that still hovers around the GOP. In 1966 Buchanan and Richard Nixon were at the Wade Hampton Hotel in Columbia, S.C., where Nixon worked a crowd into a frenzy: "Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, 'burned the paint off the walls.' As they left the hotel, Nixon said, 'This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.' "

That same rage was on display again in the fall of 2008, but this time the frenzy was stimulated by a pretty gal with a mocking little wink. Sarah Palin may not have realized what she was doing, but Southerners weaned on Harper Lee heard the dog whistle.

The curious Republican campaign of 2008 may have galvanized a conservative Southern base -- including many who were mostly concerned with the direction Democrats would take the country -- but it also repelled others who simply bolted and ran the other way. Whatever legitimate concerns the GOP may historically have represented were suddenly overshadowed by a sense of a resurgent Old South and all the attendant pathologies of festering hate and fear.

What the GOP is experiencing now, one hopes, are the death throes of that 50-year spell that Johnson foretold. But before the party of the Great Emancipator can rise again, Republicans will have to face their inner Voinovich and drive a stake through the heart of old Dixie.

kathleenparker@washpost.com

Has the Obama Administration sold out to big Pharma??!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/health/policy/06insure.html?_r=3&hp