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It's heating up. Time for the muscle to come in. It'll take more than some loser 300lb. wannabe bouncer to keep these people out.
It's just you. Particularly if you believe these things are a manifestation of the right.
Birthers are to the right as Code Pink is to the left.
Tea Parties are getting results.
Faked protests interfering with town halls? And, most of the protesting begins when the politician -- who organized the town hall -- starts lying to the assembled crowd. I don't think there's anything faked about them and Obamacare protesters are hardly confined to one political party.
Of which moderates and, of what vilification, do you speak?
It's heating up. Time for the muscle to come in. It'll take more than some loser 300lb. wannabe bouncer to keep these people out.
Republicans trying to scare people- what else is new?
It's heating up. Time for the muscle to come in. It'll take more than some loser 300lb. wannabe bouncer to keep these people out.
Yikes! That was ugly. I'm not a big fan of the chanting "drown out" technique. That's how they teach lefties to debate in college.
The board liberals are neck-deep in denial right now. Glenn Beck on Fox News is not suddenly this great community organizer who gets all of conservative America to do his bidding. (This week, as we've learned, community organizing is bad.) Astroturf protestors are marked by their slick color-coordinated handbills, posters, T-shirts, and banners, not random messages scrawled on posterboard with a black marker.
I also know from my week in Oregon that to a white liberal "well-dressed" means wearing a clean T-shirt, so when people show up in knit tops with *gasp* collars, apparently liberal politicians get su ious. Believe it or not, in flyover country, people actually dress that way. One night, I wore a bona-fide button-up shirt with khakis to dinner, and my wife wore a dress, and Portlanders, most of whom apparently think hair-washing should be done at most weekly, stared at us like we were black people or something else they had never seen before.
People are protesting at these rallies because they are genuinely pissed off about the current track of health care reform. It's just like when left-wingers protest, with the exception that the typical Midwestern mindset is far less about protesting just to be an attention . For Democrats to just start labeling all these people Nazis and redneck mobs, even though they may truly believe anybody who does not obey their agenda is as bad as a Nazi, is a strategy that will end at best in an electoral experience akin to what the Republicans went through in 2006 and 2008.
There isn't even a finished bill so what about the current track of health care reform are they pissed at?
And how do they know that there aren't some moderate Democrats that are critical of Obamacare?
Well, obviously they are apprehensive that the cost of health care will go up, their taxes will go up, and the quality of health care will go down, so much so that when the administration says otherwise, people don't believe it.
To maintain that unless Grandma in Omaha personally reads some 1100-page bill her represntative hasn't even read, she has no right to complain, is simultaneously so asinine, so intellectually dishonest, and so contrary to the workings of democracy that I propose the next person who suggests such a thing be suspended from the nearest lamppost to think about his misdeeds for a while.
The Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, so much so in the Senate as to prevent even a filibuster from derailing their agenda. They have a sympathetic media willing to listen to them as they try to sell their message on health-care reform. All their ducks should be in a row if they had a good plan and the werewithal to communicate it. But, due to what I can only ascribe to sheer stupidity, they are responding to a skeptical populace by villifying the protesters with whom much of that skeptical populace is identifying and therefore villifying much of the populace.
How is that intelligent politics? Do they think the Republican strategy of "Do what we say or you're a traitor" is a template for success? How did that work out for Republicans?
And enough of these stupid, "Wah, wah, the Republicans do it too" responses. Do you think maybe the reason the Democrats got elected is because after watching the GOP smear finger paint all over the walls, break all the china, and crap on the carpet of the republic, voters were hoping to put adults in charge? And maybe when they think the Democrats were mad not because the republic was being torn up, but rather because they weren't getting to have fun doing it, the next solution in line might not be to elect the Republicans again, but rather just to get rid of this whole form of government entirely?
Wrong. You don't get to be called a protester if you don't have real rational for your loud and ferocious 'protests' . These people may believe the worst; that's because they're fools. em.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/op...rugman.html?emThere’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting led “Freedom of Speech,” depicting an idealized American town meeting. The painting, part of a series illustrating F.D.R.’s “Four Freedoms,” shows an ordinary citizen expressing an unpopular opinion. His neighbors obviously don’t like what he’s saying, but they’re letting him speak his mind.
That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.
Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.
And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.
So this is something new and ugly. What’s behind it?
Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, has compared the scenes at health care town halls to the “Brooks Brothers riot” in 2000 — the demonstration that disrupted the vote count in Miami and arguably helped send George W. Bush to the White House. Portrayed at the time as local protesters, many of the rioters were actually G.O.P. staffers flown in from Washington.
But Mr. Gibbs is probably only half right. Yes, well-heeled interest groups are helping to organize the town hall mobs. Key organizers include two Astroturf (fake grass-roots) organizations: FreedomWorks, run by the former House majority leader Armey, and a new organization called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights.
The latter group, by the way, is run by Rick Scott, the former head of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital chain. Mr. Scott was forced out of that job amid a fraud investigation; the company eventually pleaded guilty to charges of overbilling state and federal health plans, paying $1.7 billion — yes, that’s “billion” — in fines. You can’t make this stuff up.
But while the organizers are as crass as they come, I haven’t seen any evidence that the people disrupting those town halls are Florida-style rent-a-mobs. For the most part, the protesters appear to be genuinely angry. The question is, what are they angry about?
There was a telling incident at a town hall held by Representative Gene Green, D-Tex. An activist turned to his fellow attendees and asked if they “oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.” Nearly all did. Then Representative Green asked how many of those present were on Medicare. Almost half raised their hands.
Now, people who don’t know that Medicare is a government program probably aren’t reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing. They may believe some of the disinformation opponents of health care reform are spreading, like the claim that the Obama plan will lead to euthanasia for the elderly. (That particular claim is coming straight from House Republican leaders.) But they’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is.
That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.
And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.
Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.
Many people hoped that last year’s election would mark the end of the “angry white voter” era in America. Indeed, voters who can be swayed by appeals to cultural and racial fear are a declining share of the electorate.
But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.
And if Mr. Obama can’t recapture some of the passion of 2008, can’t inspire his supporters to stand up and be heard, health care reform may well fail.
It's funny because its true.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/op...rugman.html?em[/quote
Thanks for that Times article; if it isn't cited 400 ways to Christmas, it's an opinion piece, regardless of the page it appears on.
Your take is arrogant and condescending, btw.
Also, this isn't half as distorted as what was said about Bush's Social Security proposal; but those distortions were reiterated by the press, not questioned.
Krugman believes opponents of Obamacare are all racists? Shocking!
Just add it to the dungheap of articles and video clips of liberals losing their minds over this.
It would be nice if he had actually said that.
Continue with your distortions. It makes debate that much easier.
the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety
Distort.
Omit.
Lie.
Whatever works for your side.
Yes, because after the stock market collapse of 2008 I think we can all agree that the left was so wrong about the danger of privatizing Social Security. Distortions? GMAFB.
It is. The lies about a health care bill that hasn't even been written are meant to appeal to the same lowest common denominator who believe in fake birth certificates and lynching black people. I'm sorry you guys don't want to face the fact that the GOP is made up of so many backwater bigots, who don't know anything about anything, but sadly, that's just reality.the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety
It bears fruit in some polls. Scroll to the bottom here for some old data: http://people-press.org/commentary/?analysisid=95
Clearly shows a trend of movement from Democrat to Republican thinking as education level goes up.
What I've always heard is that the uneducated and the highly educated (graduate degrees) usually end up favoring liberal, while the middle typically favors conservative.
You can probably find studies to support however you want to say it though. In a couple minutes of searching I've found studies that pointed education towards conservative, education towards liberal, and education have absolutely zero effect.
It's unfair to criticize people as being racist, or that being the only undertone message. However, to dispel that there is no hint of racism being fuel to the fire is ridiculous!
This is getting so old. You keep repeating the same garbage that's been shown to be untrue. Racial Segregation was pushed and supported by the democrats - they're the party of Robert "KKK" Byrd. Not all republicans believe in fake birth certificates - but I bet there's far fewer "birthers" than there were those libs who believed the Bush fake National Guard memo.
We know there hasn't been a final bill written - so why are they pushing it so hard? Why did Obama insist they had to vote on it before the August break? The House has voted out of committee one bill - and that's the one people are looking at and referring to. If there's so much "misinformation" out there, wouldn't it have been better for them to write a final bill and then let the people read it and THEN have the Townhall meetings so people would know what they're protesting?
Instead, they want to ram thru a bill that no one has read - much like the stimulus bill. They want it rammed thru BEFORE those pesky voters have a chance to find out what's in it. And that's why people are so angry.
so the left was afraid that the stock market might not always do good? wow. thank you left for shedding that light for me. i thought they were gold.
A sensible Republican get shouted down...
Talk about a Congressman who doesn't "get" his cons uents. Sheesh. This ain't your party, buddy. The GOP belongs to Beck, Rush, O'Reilly and their ilk.
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