Title: Watch Tea Party Favorite GOP Prez Hopeful Herman Cain Battle Bill Clinton on Health Care Source:
The Atlantic URL Source:http://www.theatlantic.com/politics ... -clinton-on-health-care/69683/ Published:Jan 19, 2011 Author:Joshua Green Post Date:2011-01-19 17:05:49 by Happy Quanzaa Keywords:ObamaCare Kills Views:19662 Comments:31
In my short profile of Herman Cain, the Tea Party favorite and GOP presidential hopeful, I mentioned his auspicious debut on the national political stage. It came in 1994, when Cain was CEO of Godfather's Pizza and challenged Bill Clinton at a nationally televised town hall meeting supposed to shore up support for Clinton's flagging health care plan. (It didn't.) As I say in the piece, this strikes me as an enormously valuable thing for someone seeking GOP support in 2011, since health care will be a central issue in the Republican primaries. Today, every Republican is critical of the Democratic health care plan. But Cain was fighting the Democratic health care plan 17 years ago! That counts for a lot. Especially when the presumed GOP favorite, Mitt Romney, was, at that very same time, doing his best to outflank Ted Kennedy to the left on the question of who was more vehemently pro choice. The video of Cain's classic confrontation with Clinton was harder to turn up than I expected. But I finally got a copy, uploaded it, and it certainly lives up to billing. If this video goes viral among conservative activists, Cain's candidacy will be even more interesting to watch:
But Cain was fighting the Democratic health care plan 17 years ago!
The Democratic health care plan 17 years ago was very different from the ACA, the ACA is much closer to the alternative Republican plan proposed in 1993.
I think by this definition the cuts to organ transplant programs for the poor in Arizona are "socialist", right?
The fact that Arizona has a transplant program for the poor is socialist. Ending the program would be an affirmation of the most holy workings of the free market, blessings be upon its profit.
The fact that Arizona has a transplant program for the poor is socialist. Ending the program would be an affirmation of the most holy workings of the free market, blessings be upon its profit.
right, it's darwinian, kill off the poor and only the rich will be left.
The Reagan years and the rocketing stock market of the nineties convinced most Americans they were rich people waiting to happen. They became too proud, Ames says, to identify themselves as the working people they remained in the interim. But those who are old enough to remember Reagan’s first term can’t help but feel the sting of Ames’s coup de grace at some level.
“When Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers in 1981,” he asserts, “he told America he was literally willing to kill us all [in plane crashes, presumably] if we didn’t give in to his wealth-transfer plan….The air controller’s union broke — and so did a whole way of life.”
But it’s hard not to agree with Ames that failing to address the structural issues of, no, not society — but the economy — will continue to impose intolerable strains on Americans.
As long as the gap between the rich and the rest of us continues to widen, social shootings will remain the meltdown of choice for many. Just like suicide bombings in the Middle East.
