Coffee and TV

It still won't bring down the overall costs of health care and health care coverage. I'd be in favor of a two-tier system like Australia. They provide health coverage for everyone, but also give big tax rebates to anyone who buys a health care plan on top of that.

Too bad, cause he's kind of a dick.

Yes. Yes, but the power to tax is definitely constitutional and court ruling after ruling has said this.

Wouldn't that be the dream.

And Congress mandating health insurance won't be found unconstitutional either, but that's not my point. Rick's cool with Congress spending ungodly amounts of money on bombs, but not with mandating a requirement for health insurance.

But that wasn't what you were just arguing. I made the comparison that Rick's ok with paying for wars, yet not for health insurance. Congress signed off on both, which is what you're argument was.

Congress didn't sign off on the health insurance mandate?

Wars are cool, just not health insurance that you already have, right?

Anti-war government ninja, right Rick? Ninja?

He's still wearing a coat....

I agree, its kind of disgusting.

If he's under arrest, I'm making the assumption that he was wearing those clothes at the time of the shooting, and couldn't change before getting put in a squad car. Can I continue under that assumption? If that's the case, why aren't his clothes bloody? If he's getting pummeled from someone 'laying' on top of him(bleeding from the back of his head, grass stains on his back, broken nose are the claims) and he shot Martin, wouldn't his shirt be covered in blood? If you shoot anyone from close range, isn't there a high probability you've got blood on your clothes?

But the average person does. Everyone has a body. Pretty much everyone gets sick, and of course everyone dies. Without the mandate, what if your average Joe who makes $40k chooses not to have it, and then has a heart attack? Are you going to refuse him service at the nearest hospital? Are you going to have the taxpayer pick up the bill? Those without jobs and the poor people who do work are already on medicare. This is for everyone else who simply needs insurance to deal with illness, do try and keep up. Wrong answer. So, at least everyone knows where you stand. A few do, but Canadians overwhelmingly support their health care system. I even heard some disgusted that the family of the snowboarder who died was having to bear the brunt of the very expensive treatment she received in the US.

Right. The average person's salary can cover cancer, heart surgery, or falling off the roof and becoming paralyzed. Yeah. Normal people can afford that without insurance. That's why illness is the number one cause of bankruptcy in America, because we're just lazy and not thrifty. Of course not. Modern conservatives pretty much live under the motto "f you, got mine". Let me ask you this then: Is a country like Canada either of those things?

If you have insurance, you're already doing this if you're healthy. Anyone that shares your health insurance plan is essentially subsidizing the very sick that are on that plan. This bill only seeks to make sure everyone is covered so more people can share that. So its unconstitutional because it doesn't allow millionaires the right to not buy insurance? Boo hoo. Take your angry 1960's re-hashed talking points elsewhere.

Thomas Jefferson thought we should write a new one every 19 years. I guess he's just old and crazy too.

That's funny. Instead of making the taxpayer foot the bill for someone's emergency room visit because they have no insurance, the mandate actually puts the responsibility on the person to pay up through their insurance. You conservatives should be all over this.

Well, that's complete speculation and impossible to gauge. There very well would have been defections from other Dems had he gone for a public option: Nelson, Lieberman, Landrieu, or the Arkansas Democratic senators.

Right. Which is why he backed McCain in 2008, no? If Obama had unchecked power over the Senate they wouldn't be debating mandates on the Supreme Court right now, it would be single-payer, or at the very least, a public option.

Sort of. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_Congress#Party_summary In July Franken was sworn in, and then in August Ted Kennedy died. In September Kirk took his seat until Scott Brown won it back in February. And this is counting Lieberman as a Democrat, who does caucus as one, but not always reliably a Democrat. Either way, it wasn't 2 years, and just because you have 60 votes doesn't mean there's the unchecked power as you describe.

Kennedy is known for playing devil's advocate and asking tough questions. I wouldn't put too much stock into his actions today.

For whatever reason, people aren't watching soccer on TV. The few matches that Fox showed on Sunday morning got good ratings, but cable tells a different story. I didn't make the argument that its the 2nd most popular sport, I just linked the article showing it was 2nd among that demographic.

Listen, you people can argue all day about who the deficit belongs to, but I will correct this little tidbit. The Senate was still split 59-40 until Franken was certified the winner in Minnesota in December 2009 if I remember correctly. Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's old seat in January of 2010. Not only that, but unless you've got 100 Senators on your side, the rules of the Senate are so quirky that in some cases any 1 Senator can put a hold on a bill in so many ways. To say Obama had a filibuster proof majority is technically correct, but it was nowhere close to 2 years.

And its absolutely trippy for me to even comprehend that. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthvideo/9168817/James-Camerons-first-footage-from-the-deep.html

You can still feel guilty without feeling like you did something wrong. They're not mutually exclusive terms. If a supervisor fires an otherwise superior employee for minor theft, or a white lie, they might feel guilty for doing it even though they can justify their actions. EDIT: A friend of Zimmerman claimed that he cried for days about taking Martin's life, but the issue at hand isn't whether or not he felt guilty, rather whether he's guilty of a crime.