Obama General Discussion, vol. 3

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
Status
Not open for further replies.
Right, but certain preventive services are also required to be covered at no cost. part of the argument is that birth control is also preventive, so it should be included. Whether it's used for actual birth control or for whatever other medical issues BC helps.
 
Unfortunately Mrs Springsteen never gives the sources of her articles but I'm sure you'd find this one was written by someone partial to Obamacare. Let me rewrite it and see if that helps

Uh, ok..I don't. I just make it all up. I think it was just on Yahoo :shrug: But I'll make sure I do from now on, if that makes you happy. It wasn't written by MSNBC or Keith Olbermann or Sandra Fluke or Nancy Pelosi.

And I also think you're wrong about that, the Blunt Amendment would have allowed exemptions to go way beyond contraception. All you needed was a moral objection. Myriad of wide ranging possibilities there under the umbrella of HEALTH SERVICES. It was written that way, NOT just exclusive to contraception.

And I think you can stop putting contraception in quotes as being health care/services-just do a little research. That's offensive to me, might be offensive to some other women too.

Viagra is health care and health services too. Interesting.
 
Uh, ok..I don't. I just make it all up. I think it was just on Yahoo :shrug: But I'll make sure I do from now on, if that makes you happy. It wasn't written by MSNBC or Keith Olbermann or Sandra Fluke or Nancy Pelosi.

It was still loaded. Maybe no one else cares but I like to know who the author of articles posted is and who they work for.


And I think you can stop putting contraception in quotes as being health care/services-just do a little research. That's offensive to me, might be offensive to some other women too.

I didn't put contraception in scare quotes I put them on health services as apparently "health services" not provided for free are "health services" that are being denied. And what "health services" must be provided at no cost is now whatever the hell the current Secretary of Health and Human Services mandates.

Just remember, someday that Secretary of Health and Human Services might be the toady of a bible and rifle-clinging conservative and do you really want that secretary in charge of your "health services"?

Viagra is health care and health services too. Interesting.

??????? Don't know what you're getting at here but I'll bite because I'm feeling feisty. Viagra is used to treat erectile dysfunction caused by physical factors. Pregnancy is not, as far as I know, a dysfunction. And before you accuse me again of being uninformed I'm actually quite educated as to all the non-contraceptive uses of oral contraceptives (chiefly endometriosis, acne and metrorrhagia). And guess what? Even the Catholic church approves of their use for these indications. So again ???????? on raising (sorry), inserting (oops), ah... introducing Viagra to the argument.
 
pregnancy is certainly a medical condition, though?

or maybe you want abortion used as birth control?

And maybe a future Secretary of Health and Human Services will deem abortion a free "health service" under Article 45, section B1, clause 42..........................

Who's to argue? They wouldn't want to start another "War on Women" now would they?
 
Right, but certain preventive services are also required to be covered at no cost.

"required." By whom? (or is it who?) The federal government? Under what authority?

part of the argument is that birth control is also preventive, so it should be included.

So's toothpaste and coincidently 99% of American women have used that also (congratulations Kentucky women :wave:, you are the new 1%). So who's buying my Colgate from now on? And since it's free I want the one with mint stripes too!!
 
Viagra is used to treat erectile dysfunction caused by physical factors. Pregnancy is not, as far as I know, a dysfunction.
Is being an ordinary 70-year-old ever a "physical factor"? And isn't ED only a problem in the first place if you're sexually active?

I don't have any problem with insurance covering Viagra. A healthy sex life is a goal worthy of medical support. Fertility management is part of that too.

I know you dislike Obama's healthcare reforms, period, as well as the system of employer-provided healthcare, period. I'm not talking about that here.
 
Last edited:
plus viagra's actually taken each time you have sex. talk about slut shaming. "mr. brown, we only refilled your prescription five weeks ago. perhaps it's time to give mr. bojangles a rest, geeez!"
 
And also funny given the large amount of Viagra without a prescription that was discovered in Mt. Rush's bag when he was returning from (noted sex tourist hotspot) the DR a few years ago.
 
plus viagra's actually taken each time you have sex. talk about slut shaming. "mr. brown, we only refilled your prescription five weeks ago. perhaps it's time to give mr. bojangles a rest, geeez!"

Yep. Where's the slut shaming there? Deafening silence from all corners, and definitely from Rush Limbaugh.

Pregnancy is most certainly a medical condition. All the resulting changes that happen in a woman's body, to her medical health. All the dire consequences that can possibly happen. It's not about dysfunction, it's about proper medical and health function of women. Fertility management can be medically necessary too. I have no problem with insurance covering Viagra either, but if you're going to have no problem with that you shouldn't have a double standard about female medical conditions. Including pregnancy.

The Catholic church may approve of the use of the pill for medical conditions that have nothing to do with preventing pregnancy, but I don't think they approve of having to pay for it in their institutions. I'm Catholic and I haven't heard one word that they would make any exception for that. I've even heard my bumbling pastor try to talk about it from the pulpit and he clearly didn't know a thing about medical use for the pill, or say one word about it. It's all about pregnancy for them.


Women can slut shame too

msn.com

Apologetic Patricia Heaton returns to Twitter
14 hrs ago

Actress Patricia Heaton is back on Twitter, days after directing a number of angry Tweets at Georgetown student Sandra Fluke. Heaton had slammed the reproductive rights activist with tweets like, "Hey GTown Gal: How about only having sex on Wednesday? (Hump day!)" but eventually deleted her entire account after being criticized for the comments. Earlier today, the actress reactivated her account, tweeting, "I apologized to Ms Fluke last week. I may not agree with her views but I didn't treat her with respect and I'm sorry. I was wrong. Mea Culpa."
 
"required." By whom? (or is it who?) The federal government? Under what authority?

I wasn't saying that to start a debate about the government mandating anything, I was just saying it because that's what I understand part the argument around the contraception debate to be.

So, yes. The federal government. Right now, health care reform is on the books, and employers/insurance companies have to get moving on implementing it, regardless of what might or might not happen in the next few years (i.e., it gets voted out again). And as preventive services being covered at 100% is one piece of the reform, I was answering within that context.
 
Meet the Press; Mar 4, 2012

MR. GREGORY: Let's turn now to the Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Mr. Speaker, welcome back to the program.

FMR. REP. NEWT GINGRICH (R-GA): David, it's good to be with you.

MR. GREGORY: I want to talk about the campaign and the numbers that I just went through with Chuck Todd, but I have to ask you about access to contraception. I realize it's not at the, the core of your stump speech, but it is a debate that is certainly highly charged here in Washington and Congress...

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: No.

MR. GREGORY: ...and on the airwaves.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: You know, David, I am astonished at the desperation of the elite media to avoid rising gas prices, to avoid the president's apology to religious fanatics in Afghanistan, to avoid a trillion dollar deficit, to avoid the longest period of unemployment since the Great Depression and to suddenly decide that Rush Limbaugh is the great national crisis of this week.

I feel Newt's pain, everyone here would rather talk about Rush too.
 
I guess at times like these all you can do is blame the media or whatever other Pavlovian bitterness cues you can come up with.
 
Did no one notice my post about how Mitt Romney wants to raise the poor's taxes and cut the rich's taxes while adding hundreds of billions to the deficit?
 
On second eighteenth thought ....

Excuse me, Newt, but reproductive health is an important issue to me and to many others, as is a public figure (even one so blatantly trolling) calling a woman a slut and a prostitute.

But I guess no, I'm supposed to be raging against Obama for whatever he has done or hasn't done. Because the gas prices have (surprise!) gone way up (again!). Because that's never happened under any other president or anything.

Me and my babymaking parts will just be over here, concerning myself about stuff that is important to me. You carry on with your Newtness. Knock yourself out.
 
It's not just about Rush Limbaugh, it's also about the fact that the strongest GOP statement about what he said came from John McCain. Checking...not a candidate this year.

If birth control and babymaking parts are not important issues, why has Santorum been talking about that so much?

Women remember in November-that's all that's really left to say
 
Only when a Republican is in charge. The ecomony is growing despite Obama. Probably surging because of such strong leadership in the GOP :wink:
 
I feel Newt's pain, everyone here would rather talk about Rush too.

Newt Gingrich needs to shut up. So does Rush Limbaugh. They're both assholes and I'm tired of their crap.

I would respond to your response to me but I think others here have handled this properly enough. Bottom line, pregnancy and matters related to it are health issues. And if an employer is willing to cover other various health-related stuff for their employees, there is no logical reason why birth control can't be among the things covered. None. The "moral reasons" argument is BS and nothing more than a lame excuse.

Also, don't really appreciate the side remark at MrsSpringsteen. She just posts the articles and makes her comment on them occasionally. I trust her source-gathering abilities.
 
Slate, March 6
In his speech Monday explaining when he thinks the U.S. government can kill American citizens, Attorney General Eric Holder offered bare bones without much meat. We know now that the Obama administration thinks its lawyers don’t have to get a judge’s approval before a top government official makes the call to assassinate someone. As Holder put it, " 'Due process' and 'judicial process' are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security." We know that the internal review process includes some limits. As Adam Serwer explains, “The target has to pose an ‘imminent threat of violent attack’ to the United States and be beyond the ability of American authorities to capture, and the strike can't violate international standards governing the use of force by killing too many civilians or noncombatants.”

But that’s about it. Holder didn’t explain how the administration arrived at the conclusion that due process within the executive branch is enough. He has refused to release the legal memo from the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice that must lay out how the administration got to here from there—the meat that was missing from his speech. And he didn’t say how the government arrived at the conclusion in September that it was OK to kill not just Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American cleric in Yemen whom the government says is linked to underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab, but also Awlaki's son, Abdul Rahman al-Awlaki, who was also an American citizen.

If you want to believe that the government does its grim best to fight terrorists, and you’re inclined to think that their dirty tactics justify some ruthlessness on our part, then maybe a few killings of bad guys in faraway lands doesn’t bother you much. But there are a couple of unsettling implications here that are so obvious that it’s amazing Holder thinks he need not address them. The first is that if the Obama administration claims this kind of extra-judicial power for a few cases, what’s to stop the next president from expanding upon it—and citing this step as precedent for taking others that Obama wouldn’t countenance? And the second is that when the executive branch won’t release the legal memos that underlie its decision-making, we’re blocked from evaluating how strong or weak the arguments are. When the federal government takes a bold and new step like this, testing the boundaries of the Constitution, it’s crucial for Holder and his lawyers to explain how and why. Instead, we’re being asked to take the wisdom of the president and his national security apparatus for granted. That’s a precedent that the Bush administration set in the bad old days of Attorney General John Ashcroft. It was this Department of Justice that produced John Yoo’s legal memos approving waterboarding and other interrogation techniques that amount to torture, the finding that the Guantanamo detainees weren’t prisoners of war protected by the Geneva conventions, and approved of warrantless wiretapping. Yoo’s legal innovations were dizzying—to put it kindly—and the leaking of his memos in 2004 was the first step toward official Department of Justice repudiation of them.

Maybe the Obama administration is standing on more solid legal ground with its targeted assassinations, and maybe not. The point is that this is the fully informed conversation worth having, not the skeleton version Holder is now offering. The New York Times and the ACLU have each gone to court arguing that the memos should be made public. Holder, of course, doesn’t need a court order—he could disclose his department’s legal reasoning himself. Until he does, it’s hard to see what more speeches will accomplish. If you were a critic before, you remain one now. Maybe even more so.
 
Excellent questions/concerns raised there. These are the sorts of things that would be worthy of a reasonable debate between the Obama administration and the Republican candidates (and for Obama supporters and other Democrats to confront the administration on, 'cause this is kind of a disturbing thing to be tied to).

But, of course, as noted, given that the Republicans are guilty of approving this sort of thing under Bush, it would make them look just a tad hypocritical.
 
Apparently, membership to anti-government militia has increased during Obama's first term.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center:

The radical right grew explosively in 2011, the third such dramatic expansion in as many years. The growth was fueled by superheated fears generated by economic dislocation, a proliferation of demonizing conspiracy theories, the changing racial makeup of America, and the prospect of four more years under a black president who many on the far right view as an enemy to their country.

The number of hate groups counted by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) last year reached a total of 1,018, up slightly from the year before but continuing a trend of significant growth that is now more than a decade old. The truly stunning growth came in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement — conspiracy-minded groups that see the federal government as their primary enemy.

The Patriot movement first emerged in 1994, a response to what was seen as violent government repression of dissident groups at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and near Waco, Texas, in 1993, along with anger at gun control and the Democratic Clinton Administration in general. It peaked in 1996, a year after the Oklahoma City bombing, with 858 groups, then began to fade. By the turn of the millennium, the Patriot movement was reduced to fewer than 150 relatively inactive groups.

But the movement came roaring back beginning in late 2008, just as the economy went south with the subprime collapse and, more importantly, as Barack Obama appeared on the political scene as the Democratic nominee and, ultimately, the president-elect. Even as most of the nation cheered the election of the first black president that November, an angry backlash developed that included several plots to murder Obama. Many Americans, infused with populist fury over bank and auto bailouts and a feeling that they had lost their country, joined Patriot groups.

The swelling of the Patriot movement since that time has been astounding. From 149 groups in 2008, the number of Patriot organizations skyrocketed to 512 in 2009, shot up again in 2010 to 824, and then, last year, jumped to 1,274. That works out to a staggering 755% growth in the three years ending last Dec. 31. Last year’s total was more than 400 groups higher than the prior all-time high, in 1996.

Meanwhile, the SPLC counted 1,018 hate groups operating in the United States last year, up from 1,002 in 2010. That was the latest in a string of annual increases going all the way back to 2000, when there were 602 hate groups. The long-running rise seemed for most of that time to be a product of hate groups’ very successful exploitation of the issue of non-white immigration. Obama’s election and the crashing economy have played a key role in the last three years.
The 'Patriot' Movement Explodes | Southern Poverty Law Center

Interestingly, author John Avlon, a self-described political centrist, has coined the term "Hatriot", since he doesn't believe the "Patriot" movement is truly patriotic, but is instead rooted in hate and extremism.
 
"I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you're not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration."
-- Hillary Clinton 2003

:hmm: Now what's changed since 2003?
 
You're absolutely right. I'm sure all these people just have reasonable, rational disagreements that would lead them to arm themselves and form militias.
 
"I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you're not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration."
-- Hillary Clinton 2003

:hmm: Now what's changed since 2003?
We're in a better place and the opposition has gotten together with a shitload of guns?
 
"I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you're not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration."
-- Hillary Clinton 2003

:hmm: Now what's changed since 2003?

And the very same people attacking Obama now were the ones who back in 2003 were all "Support the president/country! Love it or leave it!" :shrug:. Your point?

You can disagree with Obama all you wish and say so. I voted for the guy and I don't agree with everything he's done. I wholeheartedly agree that the idea that if you don't support the president you're not patriotic is ludicrous.

But I've also never felt the need to stock up on guns to "protect myself" from whatever psychotic fear I have of my president "taking away my rights" or whatever and/or make threats against the president's life or any other government official's. There's kind of a massive difference between that and simply disagreeing with a president's position on something.
 
(AP)WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama is hitting back at Republican criticism of his energy policies and his role in controlling gasoline prices.

Obama used his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday to underscore his administration's work to develop alternative energy sources and increase fuel efficiency.

"I'm going to keep doing everything I can to help you save money on gas, both right now and in the future," Obama said. "I hope politicians from both sides of the aisle join me."

He accused Republicans of a "bumper sticker" approach to solving the nation's energy problems.

It's a familiar theme --Obama stuck many of the same chords during two out-of-town trips this week and during a White House news conference on Wednesday.

"We can't just drill our way to lower gas prices -- not when we consume 20 percent of the world's oil," Obama said in the address, recorded during a visit Friday to a Virginia jet engine component plant.

In the Republican weekly address, North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple accused the Obama administration of blocking projects and technology that would allow greater energy production. He singled out the Keystone XL pipeline project, which Obama deferred.

"We cannot effectively market our crude oil domestically without a large north-south pipeline," Dalrymple said. "North Dakota oil producers were scheduled to feed the Keystone pipeline with 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day."

Obama said there wasn't enough time to properly study the project ahead of the deadline forced upon him by Republican congressional lawmakers. On Thursday, the Democratic-controlled Senate blocked another Republican bid to speed approval of the pipeline, which would stretch from Canada to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Also Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Obama is partly to blame for higher prices at the pump.

Gasoline prices paused this week in their march toward $4 per gallon.

After 39 straight days of increases, prices fell nearly a penny from Tuesday to Thursday and held steady on Friday at $3.758 per gallon for the national average. The lull won't last long, and gas is still nearly 50 cents higher than it was at the beginning of the year.

Despite Romney's assertions, economists say there's not much a president of either party could do about gasoline prices. The current increases at the pump have been driven by fears of a war with oil-rich Iran and by higher demand in the U.S. as well as in China, India and other growing nations.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom