^ you’re comparing apples to nazi’s. not even close.

In terms of rhetoric, there is precious little difference between the shit that Obama’s church espouses about whites, and what Hale espoused about blacks.

Election season brings out the crazies, doesn’t it?

You know what would be crazy? Being quick to see racism in every government action and policy that ends up targetting a lot of black people, but ignoring the reality that Obama’s “spiritual advisor” of the last 20 years is somehow different than a white candidate being advised by someone like Matthew Hale.

Face it, you would be spittling about the “vile racism” if the latter were true, and would be quick to crucify a white candidate for that.

Or are we just giving black candidates a pass because racism suffered renders the target immune from responsibility to rise above that behavior and try to not become the very monster that attacked them?

You are aware that Obama does NOT mandate healthcare coverage, right? His plan is more market-based. Lower the costs and make it affordable and people will choose it on their own.

If it’s a market-based solution then it doesn’t require the government to be involved in creating it. Politicians who use the term “market-based” in their proposed solutions for how government can fix things are generally liars who deserve to be publicly flogged.

The government lowering the costs involves installing price controls. Price controls, while lowering visible cost for the consumer, also have the unfortunate consequence of lowering profitability for the provider, which limits the medical community’s ability to recoup the money they’ve spent on things like research and development of new drugs (slowing new drug development to a crawl), improvements in facilities (a common problem in Britain), hiring more personnel (generally resulting in less specialist services…like oncologists, cardiologists, or even general practitioners)

http://www.liberty-page.com/issues/healthcare/uklagbehind.html

http://www.liberty-page.com/issues/healthcare/ukoneineight.html

http://www.liberty-page.com/issues/healthcare/ukpay.html

Also, the lowering of visible cost to consumers creates an incentive for people to use health care more, which isn’t a problem in a free-market health care system because it increases profit, but is a problem in a government-run and regulated health care system with prices controls because it’s not profitable and therefore leads to the eventual rationing of services and the degradation of service quality for even paying consumers. That’s why, in Britain, people who can afford it try not to go to the NHS when they need medical care…they go to private routes like BUPA that provide better quality health care at additional cost. Of course, since the taxpayers are all still helping subsidize the health care system they don’t want to use because the government’s forcing them to, the number of people who would otherwise be able to afford private health care is much smaller and it’s the middle class who usually end up suffering by being forced to use the inferior government-managed system because they can’t afford to pay for both.

This is exactly right. There was a recent thread about Sarasota, FL impounding cars for noise violations. Most of the commenters had as much of a problem with the noise ordinances as with the actual impounding. But show them a black candidate who, in complete sentences, makes a speech about solving racial problems by throwing more money at public schools and some nonsense about corporate culture and everyone is on his nuts. I just don’t get it.

Health care should not be a right, as far as I’m concerned. The problem is that when people are confronted with that principle in action, human compassion takes over, treatment is provided, and costs are incurred.

I can understand where you’re coming from, it doesn’t make you a schmuck and I actually do sympathize. And if it’s the individual hospitals or healthcare providers choosing to volunteer their treatment and pass the costs of that along to their customers on their own, without government involvement, I don’t have a problem with that…they’re in the best position to choose what level of service they’re able financially to provide while staying profitable and I have the option of either helping them pay for it or, if their costs become prohibitive to me I can go find somebody else to provide my care. The free market proves an equilibrium and a balance against going too far. It’s when the government gets involved and removes that equilibrium and the element of choice from me that I get angry, partly because it’s not charity or virtue when it’s mandated under the force of law, but mainly because whenever government gets involved with anything to relieve human suffering all they generally do is make things worse. For all the major problems you see with health care in our country as it currently standards, few of them will be resolved and a dozen more major ones will pop up the more you introduce government intervention and regulation to the equation (as the second link I sent you, under the one I wrote, illustrated).

http://www.angelfire.com/pa/sergeman/issues/healthcare/socialized.html

But I agree that private options are the best, and I think it should probably be discussed (in another forum, of course) why it is that private charity doesn’t appear to be stepping up and how we can remedy that.

You are aware that Obama does NOT mandate healthcare coverage, right? His plan is more market-based. Lower the costs and make it affordable and people will choose it on their own.

But I suppose the spectre of more insured people outweighs the assaults on libertarian values that will continue in an extension of the Bush Administration via McCain…

I’ll take Obama over McCain any and every day of the week. And I too voted for Paul in the primary.

read your two posts here and your old blog post (quickly). Sorry I don’t have much time here so this may not be well thought-out.

It’s not that we’re in intellectual disagreement. Health care should not be a right, as far as I’m concerned. The problem is that when people are confronted with that principle in action, human compassion takes over, treatment is provided, and costs are incurred.

Confronted with an actual patient who is in obvious need I’m going to do everything I can for him, even though I’m uncomfortable with the way it’s paid for. That’s how health care people are, for the most part. I see the problem with it; indeed, I feel it acutely; it’s been a source of internal conflict for me for years. But I can’t hold to principle when it means watching someone suffer. I don’t believe that’s a moral flaw on my part. If so it affects almost everyone in the business.

The point is, people are always going to be treated whether or not they can pay, because some softy schmuck like myself is going to see to it that they are. Given that, there is some room for considering the most efficient way to do it, and that means some form of socialistic system. I’d like to keep that aspect to a very small segment of the industry to cover the poorest people, but there’s room for argument. And I agree with you that private charities are the best way to approach this, but that’s not currently a realistic total solution.

Anyhow, it’s a gray area, for me, even though I get what you’re saying. Most relevant point to this discussion is that I’m not so clear on this that Obama’s health care policy would deter my vote.

Still not too sure. But, I think it is very reasonable to conclude that all religious leaders are whack-jobs. Hagee, Haggard, Wright, Falwell. In some way or another, they all espoused some sort of contempt for others. I think these things we can be assured of.

But as I’ve echoed above, it would be hard to believe that an ivy league graduate would take to heart, word-for-word, what a religious pastor says and integrate it into his own personal doctrine. If a man wants to get into politics, he’s gotta have a church. And if he’s gonna have one, it should be the most beneficial to him. You stay there long enough, and you’ll probably start making relationships regardless of your individual thoughts.

It’s not hard to believe that any black person over the age of 45 has some personal connection to the racist past of this country. it is thus hardly a stretch to think that a pastor, who unifies the voice of the community, is also going to carry those long-held sentiments…

Just read a few things that Wright has said:

” He called the United States ‘the No. 1 killer in the world.’”
Well, we have manages to start a number of wars, under the guise of freedom by force. This isn’t entirely correct, but it’s really not inaccurate, unless you think the American government can do no wrong.

“He accused the government of having ’started the AIDS virus.’”
Bit of a stretch, but there is the understanding that the government did nothing while it continued to spread.

“After 9/11, he said, ‘America’s chickens are coming home to roost.’”–> Blowback, anyone?

“And he said, ‘God d—- America,’ for ‘killing innocent people.’”
Also not inaccurate, unless you believe only guilty people get the death penalty, that only the guilty people have died in Iraq, and that our foreign policy is virtuous.

As far as I can tell…he’s pretty damn critical of the American government. Which is ironic, considering he’s being condemned by a block of people who have historically been known to be skeptical of an ever-expanding government and the powers it gives itself to overreach into our private lives.

Being critical of the government, yes, even the American government, has never been a bad thing…in fact it’s what this country came to be created by. Telling us that we should otherwise accept that our government can do no wrong is outright absurd. particularly in light of what I read here on a weekly basis.

-Radley Balko
February 12, 2008
http://www.theagitator.com/2008/02/12/i-voted/

Read the whole thing.

But given Radley’s recent playing of the racist card, and his other comments about Obama, it’s understandable that some people would read what they do into this brief blog post.

Anyhow, to agree with you in some sense - no, I’m not satisfied with Obama’s plan, or anyone else’s that I’ve heard.

We are in agreement on that. Personally, I feel that most of the problems with the high costs of medical care in our country today can be tracked back to government intervention and regulation. Despite what the “universal” health care supporters would like to believe, our medical care is not private enterprise, it’s managed care. The solutions of politicians like Obama are headed in the wrong direction…they intend to add more of the elements of our health care system that don’t work. The best of all possible worlds would be to find a politician who will look at de-regulation (starting with the FDA and its drug approval process). Failing that it’s better to have a politician who’ll simply do nothing.

you fucking pathetic shitheads

If you believe, as I do, that no one should be denied emergency care, then it is only sensible to look at more efficient ways of providing care, and ideally of preventing the need for emergency treatment.

I have no problem with someone believing that everyone should be entitled to medical care (emergency or otherwise). It is an admirable goal. My problem lies with the idea that everyone else should be forced to pay for it…particularly since doing so will insure that the quality of health care for everyone else will degrade as a result of those bad methods (as I discussed when I wrote a guest post about my experience in England at The Liberty Papers).

http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2007/08/01/you-like-europes-health-care-so-much-then-go-live-there/

And as multiple sources in the mainstream press from countries with socialized medicine have noted:

http://www.angelfire.com/pa/sergeman/issues/healthcare/socialized.html

If you believe people have a right to health care, there’s nothing wrong with individuals, hospitals, businesses, or any other private entity setting up funds, programs or charities to help take care of those who lack the funds for adequate medical treatment. Once that charity becomes compulsory and the cost becomes so high that people find their health care options taken from them (as has happened in every country that has installed “universal” health care), it is no longer an admirable goal.

I agree that the best way to improve the economy would be to make it more libertarian, and ending the Drug War might be the single biggest thing that can be done to help eliminate racial disparities. But none of the three big presidential candidates will do either of these (at least from what they say on the stump); the only candidate that seems to have the will, insight, and–pardon me–*audacity* to actually move the country forward in terms of race is Barack Obama.

I agree with you that Obama would probably try to help move us forward in regards to race relations. On the other hand, based on his comments in this speech and elsewhere, I think he would also do a lot to move us backwards in all the other areas I referenced in my original comment (economics, health care, economic class hatreds). The trade-off is simply not worth it.

Of course, Bush is a MAJOR exception to that rule. But I would argue that the South at least partially embraced him because he wasn’t “one of them lawyers from an Ivy league school”.

Actually, it was the best, non-violent revenge we could ever have on the North for burning down half of the South in the Civil War. 4 years of rape and pillage, eight years of Bush. I think it evens out, don’t you?

All kidding aside… if the races were reversed, Radley would be spittling about racism and nazism were it a white guy like McCain. As Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost put it, if you replace “black” with “white” and “African” with “Aryan” you get a church doctrine that is pretty much identical to the pseudo-Christian, Nazi-created “German Church” while Hitler was in power that embraced all manner of vitriolic racism.

http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2008/03/obama_and_me.asp

“…I grew up on the south side of Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s so I have a bit of local interest in Senator Barack Obama’s race for the White House.

Obama and his family live in my old neighborhood, Hyde Park. My siblings and I all attended our local public high school – Kenwood Academy. Obama’s wife Michelle went to Whitney Young High School. The city swimming championship was always held there. My older brothers were members of Kenwood’s swim team. Aside from its swimming pool, I never saw much of Whitney Young. It was a magnet school. But my parents always said that didn’t mean much. All of Chicago’s public schools were basically horrible.

Kenwood was reclassified an academy rather than a regular high school sometime in the 1970s. It was the principal’s way of expelling the gang members from the school. In the Chicago public school system, if you attended an academy and weren’t passing your classes you could be expelled. I understand that the distinction was removed a couple of years after I graduated in 1987, and the school rapidly declined to its previous status as a gang and drug infested flophouse for adolescents. The year after I graduated, in a sign of what was happening, the school authorities installed metal detectors at all the entrances.

When I went to Kenwood, the school was 85 percent black and 15 percent other. The others were mainly white with a sprinkling of Asians and Latinos. Going to school there probably gave me a somewhat skewed view of the reality of race relations in America, because the only bigotry I experienced was black bigotry against whites.

I was one of the only white girls on the track team and my coach, Joyce Brown was quite a black bigot. She made every white girl on the team run the mile and two mile. Only the black girls could sprint. It didn’t matter to her that I was better at the 200 than the mile. When I asked to run sprints, she just said, “No, that’s not for you girl.” So I quit.

I was in 9th grade in the lead-up to the 1984 presidential elections. Most of the kids in the school were fired up about Jesse Jackson’s candidacy. I was personally offended by their support for a man who referred to New York as a “hymietown,” and I let my feelings be known. I don’t think that anyone thought worse of me for saying I didn’t support a man who was anti-Jewish. But then, it never occurred to me to care. If they had thought worse of me for standing up for my rights as a Jew, then that was their problem, not mine.

At any rate, I remembered my exchanges with my classmates about Jackson today as I read Obama’s speech about race and his pastor Jeremiah White. It was an excellent speech as far as it goes. But it left me feeling very uneasy about the quality of Obama’s character.

I was 13 years old when I stood up alone to all my classmates and told them that I thought they should be ashamed of themselves for supporting an anti-Semite for president. I was a child. But Obama came to Wright as an adult. And as an adult, he sat through 20 years of Wright’s anti-white, anti-Jewish, and anti-American vitriol and said nothing. Indeed, until just a few months ago, he was honoring him as his spiritual mentor. What does that say about him?

As a child, I thought that my track coach was discriminating against me because I was white and so I got up and left. When he — as an adult — heard his pastor spewing poison, he never said anything and he didn’t quit.

It can be argued that there is a difference between how I reacted to black bigotry and how he reacted to black bigotry because I was an outsider and he was an insider. I wasn’t trying to become a member of the black community. I was simply demanding to be treated with respect as a non-black by blacks who happened to be the vast majority of my classmates and teachers.

But then, here’s another example.

In January, I spoke at an anti-jihad conference in Dallas, TX. It was organized by a group called the America Truth Forum. Basically, it was a conclave of an anti-jihad public with anti-jihad speakers. That is, we were all members of the same ideological community – or so I thought when I agreed to attend.

One of the speakers on my panel was an older man named Paul Williams. I had never heard his name before. He approached me before the panel and flattered me, saying that I was the best writer around. So it goes without saying that I was not ill-disposed to him.

But then he began to speak; and pure poison came out. He began his remarks by telling the audience of mainly religious Christians that some woman had told him that he is a prophet. That already had me questioning his character. But then he went on, giving incorrect statements about Muslims. Rather than provide information about jihadist doctrine or infiltration of American mosques, he simply began demonizing Muslims as a group. They became this amorphous “other” incapable of individual choices or actions. It was bigotry pure and simple.

And so, I walked off the stage and out of the hall. I didn’t return until he finished speaking and when I returned, I refused to shake his hand or have anything to do with him.

I saw that the audience had given him a standing ovation and so I began to wonder if I shouldn’t simply return the check I had received from the organizers and leave. But I decided to stay and to challenge him.

And that is what I did. I quietly and forcefully explained why what Williams said was wrong, un-American, and in defiance of both Christian and Jewish values and approaches to human beings. And, as luck would have it, I received an even larger standing ovation than Williams did.

The point here is that I didn’t nod my head to fit in, or treat him politely simply because we sat on a stage together. And I didn’t surrender the floor to him. We were supposedly on “the same side,” but his statements were so contrary to what I believe that it occurred to me that I’d rather be shopping with Nancy Pelosi than sitting through his hateful nastiness.

And I write all of this not to puff myself up. I don’t think I did anything extraordinary by standing up to Williams or to my classmates and teachers in high school. I think that it is how people should behave particularly if they are smart enough to understand that ideas are important. And Obama is certainly smart enough to understand that ideas are important.

Obama’s denunciation of Wright’s bigotry amounts to too little too late. The time to stand up to him wasn’t now, when his association with Wright is sinking his hopes for the White House. The time to have stood up to Wright was when Obama was just another member of his church. If he truly believes in what he says he believes, he should have walked out of Wright’s church or grabbed Wright’s microphone and told his fellow churchgoers that Wright was wrong and that they mustn’t hate. In twenty years of attending Wright’s church, why didn’t Obama once stand before his fellow church members and tell them that they mustn’t hate their country and their fellow Americans?

The fact that he didn’t, and the fact that he upheld this man until just a few months ago as his spiritual mentor and still refuses to condemn him and his deeply flawed character tells me everything I need to know about Barack Obama. I think that he is an opportunistic, weak man. I hope and pray that he doesn’t become President….”