ivan

how many of the 61% who disapprove of the law favored the old status quo i wonder? you're a tard-tard if you think anybody here is a raging o-care fan as...uh...nobody (?) has said they prefer it over single payer?

KISMET

muir on sunday ain't got shit to be scared of yet heard them blazers had themselves a bit of a hot-streak going - how'd that turn out?

true, i got them birds, but the next chicken that wakes me up at 530 in the morning WILL have to weather a double-barreled shotgun blast to the head though

cigs shouldn't be banned, but clearly the days of my youth when they were practically free was So Big retard. the main problem i see w/ a huge increase in the sin tax is that, at some point, you create fertile ground for a black-market to arise. there has to be some sweet point before that problem becomes too big, but yet still you achieve a combination of disincentivizing smokers and paying to treat them when (or if, shit, like the stats say, there's plenty of granola-eaters getting kilt in their cars) it all goes bad

indeed, for a man who fears Big Gubimint micro-managing our freedoms, where do you see the rabbit-hole of deciding which human behaviors deserve coverage or not hits bottom? hot chicks have to pay ten times higher premiums b/c they're 10X more likely to get the clap? no coverage for donut-fans? no covering tendon-pulls nor rectal sores for gay sport climbers? at any rate, the big boozers, bastards, brawlers n' butt-smokers i've known over the years are/were inveterate doctor-haters and don't generally use any of the services they pay for in their youth and usually accept death pretty rapidly when it wanders their way in the form of cancer, heart-failure, etc.

on a more serious note, have you tried buying a pack of cigarettes in the libturd fantasy world of england, canada or france?

hey, fairweather's threatening my life! isn't that a Baninatible offense!?!?

i only chain-smoke when putting Capitalist Fat-Cats against the wall for Special Attention - the rest of the time i just bullshit about chain-smoke'n, so i oughta be alright

holy shit it's getting cold in that thare gorge

nah, i'm forever channeling good'ole walt kurtz - i feel no need to judge (the requisite 1st step in hating), just to kill

indeed, they did a most excellent job advocating for the status quo, which was crap. they have no better proposal though b/c they have no soul and see working people as glorified bunny rabbits: needing to be fruitful and multiply, consume as much as possible, then die ASAP.

i've never tried to traipse back there in february, but might could be game to make a big raging party out of it - send me a pm mayhap when yer in the mood? i could probably scrounge up some other socio-paths to make a proper affair of the whole thign

Sounds like you're getting milked by your insurance company. They loves them some high health care costs. HELLOOoo....This is Obamacare, Washington State version. I'm getting milked by your program! Geeez, you guys really don't have any clue, do you. the point, dear sir, is that, as gene says, it could be done much more cheaply via single payer as so many nations have shown, but the political reality, as of 2009-10, was that, if we wanted to do anything about the old shitty status quo (denial of coverage/service for those w/ pre-existing conditions and even those w/o perhaps, copay/deductible schemes that ensured medical bankruptcy whenever you got badly sick/hurt, no coverage or thoroughly worthless coverage for a big # of working poor, etc) we had to have this insurance-company blowjob hybrid that is obamacare. no republican, then or now (or indeed, ever), was going to vote for any species of reform, if for no other reason than it had obama-cooties all over it (thus the name), and plenty enough democrats are corporate whores too and they weren't going to do anything unless the proper palms were greased. christ, the public option, the best compromise it seemed to be for those who wanted a private market and lots of choices, and quiet far from a universal single payer system, was dead-as-dillinger on arrival - didn't even get serous consideration. the choice was status quo or ACA, absolute shit or shit of unknown dimensions. our nation's historical retard-genius for fixing problems has been half-assed solutions, usually so shitty they goaded the machine eventually, after bitter experience, into something better. best case, obamacare as written does work and makes even you and yours happy. the case i'll live w/ though is not unlike the whiskey-junkie who goes on a coke-binge and only at the bitter end of it all realizes there's a 3rd, better, option: coffee obamacare, if it doesn't work, will hopefully lead sane folks to realize the best thing to do is ditch the shitty corporate-approved compromise and try the model of our northern neighbors and euro-friends. sounds like i'm paying the same amount now for my insurance (single earner w/ a family 4 though) as you, and if it's of any value, i sure would like to be paying less.

nope, but would love to know, via pm if'n yer one of them that likes to keep secrets off the interwebs - i got a wicked detailed topo awhile back that made it look like there's a seperate entrance that gets you into a "firecracker cave" that connects, but it seems you could get there from the regular way by throwing a toe-line through the upper roof and dragging up a regular line that could then be fixed to the floor? sounds fine in theory, so wouldn't mind hearing some more refined details

please stop making sense you were right the first time too - for a frightening big chunk of this body politic, patriotism IS not giving a shit about anybody but you and yours

yup, nothing more tyranical n' undemocratic than trying to get afforadable healthcare for everybody

"the early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese" - jesus-fuck, what a fractious omen! the season for spelunking once again upon us - last month a rare old time w/ rick n' company for his big 5-0 i think it 'twas - shindig at his new digs afterwards - guitar picking, chili n' gut laughs - howling at the moon around the fire - damn near passed out in opdyke's ride Pondering on the Divine today the best of days for bumbling around belowdecks - adam and i were out to take in the sandcastles after a toke or two - we took his ride, a most fateful decision - rumbling out through the sheets of solid rain and the double-reef gale roaring down the gorge, the truck sure seemed to be missing some beats here and there, stumbling even, but hope is a long-standing strategy of mine, and it usually answers...just not today. pulling into the deep mud of the parking lot, it konked out even before we came to a complete stop. sheeeeit. not much to do but drink an initial tall-boy and have a haw-geez moment. thought we could maybe push it back to the road and maybe get it push-started back to life. that proved impossible in the bottom-less muck and the uphill grade. tried then to rig up a hauling system to jerk it across the morass. had a bunch of pulleys but not enough in the end to generate anything like the amount of force it was gonna take. sodden as hell, it got kinda grim for awhile. short-commons for all the essentials: warm clothing, beers, food, smokes. spring sure seemed a long way off... modern technology managed it all in the end. pretty nice to know, when the shit goes down, that you can always Text the Right People. took a number of hours, but eventually the cavalry arrived in the lot even before the sun fuckered off in drowned dusk. adam's bro andrew, home-bound from the dalles w/ his righteous dame and a good-old boy sized rig, got us jumped back to life, which proved little help though as the truck kept dying anyway. eventually we man-handled the malingering fuck into a better location, then ditched it on the side of the road, stripped of all but the empty beer-cans, and set off in the growing dark tempest. amazing rain and hurricane winds along the 14, like ocean waves breaking over a sea-wall, beacon all about to carry away. and now for the recovery...

I agree, you don't strike me as a gulag type of guy. Quite the opposite. But your friends--not so sure. (Let's let history be our guide here.) i can count my friends on my fingers and i have faith in the lot of them

i don't know enough about this star-crossed pair to cast my lot in w/ them or not, but yes, in principle, i do think all nations have the right to do and act as others, as this is so common-sense a social expectation amongst individuals in a small-setting as to be incredible that it need be explained when scaling it outwards

i'm not looking to rebuild the world or fix all the fuck-wit that humans have wrought - i'm quite certain that treating others as equals though, whether they be so in actuality or not, nation-states or random nabobs rambling along the way, is not going to lead me to supporting gulag archipelagos and the like...

how were they to take those places back w/o a third world war? certainly there were americans in '45 like patton eager to keep fighting the ruskiis, but i don't see how that would have ended up better than what happened otherwise.

wonderful argument (not that it has anything to do w/ what i said?) sure, as you illustrate, the extreme liberal-take on foreign policy has over-tones of kumbaya and utopia, but the other side you seem to favor, the world in which the strong can do whatever the fuck they want to the weaker, dressing the whole thing up in equally bullshit ideologies, is easy to mock w/ a meme too i'm no extremist, but if i have to pick one over the other, i'll take unicorns over buchenwald, flying-pigs over falling heads, ruby-slippers over jack-boots.

this really ain't that hard to intuit through - are we currently in a declared war w/ iran? i don't think i have any right to dictate what government the people of iran have - i think the current shit state of affairs between our nation and theirs is precisely b/c people like you think the opposite - i don't give a fuck about their mullahs and they can do whatever they wish, including build nukes if that's w/n their abilities, so long as they wreck no harm in my homeland - i sincerely hope that, if they produce them, that we can talk out our differences w/o these terrible weapons being used (it seemed to answer in the cold war), but if that fails, then sadly many will die on both sides (many more on theirs, as we no doubt have a huge advantage), so let's focus on keeping the relationship positive enough that doesn't have to happen, eh? treating them like we're a bully doesn't seem likely to produce positive results...

how is that relevant? my point is that either all nations have a right to nukes, or none do. just b/c a nation has a right to a nuke doesn't mean others have an obligation to help them realize that right. indeed, restricting the trade of nuclear technology makes sense to me. but if iranians are advanced enough to build one themselves, than so be it, and we should probably save the lat n' longitude of tehran into the "favorites" menu on our minutemen