The Truth About Barack Hussein Obama Revealed:
Yes, Obama was clearly wearing an earpiece during the debate. That's how William Ayers feeds him his lines! [/Sarcastro]
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What is that? Some kind of Muslim code word?
Thus, if Obama plans to use gasoline imports to put pressure on Iran, the policy will be dead before he even gets into office.
More to the point, would anyone be satisfied with the quality of the answers that hypothetically emanate from said earpiece? I mean, if either candidate were wearing such a device, I'd be even more underwhelmed with his comments.
This I think is a good point.
If he was wearing an ear piece I would have expected better answers out of him. Actually I found a lot of his answers while not terrible, didn't have much substance either, they were more stump speech than real answers (although I think McCain's answers were also very stump speech, but I think he had more details without as much rambling).
So, if Obama was wearing an ear piece, he needs to put somebody different on the microphone for the next debate, because it sure as heck didn''t give him an advantage this time.
The whole frame looks just wrong.
I'm wondering what the hell the video engineers were doing to it, and whether they even knew.
It may be their excuse this week, but it doesn't make sense. They generate electrical power with natural gas, no refining needed. Their big problem is lack of gasoline for cars and nuclear power isn't going to help with that.
IF?!!
Who was at the microphone? One of my freshmen?
In fact, have you seen both of them in the same room at the same time?
I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
Uncharitable reading: He doesn't know that the holocaust as it is understood didn't begin until after the Wannsee conference in January 1942, by which time the U.S. was already at war with Germany. What more moral justification do you need to intervene than an active war already underway?
Charitable reading: Was a reference to stopping (or at least slowing down) the death camps. The U.S. could easily have bombed rail lines in 1944 leading to places like Auschwitz, but did not. But again, there is no extra moral justification needed to bomb those lines -- we were at war with Germany.
More to the point, would anyone be satisfied with the quality of the answers that hypothetically emanate from said earpiece? I mean, if either candidate were wearing such a device, I'd be even more underwhelmed with his comments.
Actually, both candidates' hesitancy and quick changes of topic, often within the same sentence, are consistent with their being whispered to. I challenge you to sound coherent when someone's talking to you and you have to not repeat what they say but reformulate it into something that sounds good, while they're still talking.
Oh forget that, someone confirm something for me. I heard this over the radio as I was driving. Barrack seemed to suggest he would put pressure on Iran through its lack of gasoline refining capability. In short he would hit them in their gas tanks. But according to T Boone Pickens, Iran is converting their vehicles over to run on Natural Gas. Iran is T Boone Pickens example of how we can stop using oil and run our vehicles on natural gas.
Thus, if Obama plans to use gasoline imports to put pressure on Iran, the policy will be dead before he even gets into office.
The first rule is: don't believe the stuff you're hearing on the radio.
The second rule is, think critically about what you're hearing.
What countries have fleets that run entirely on natural gas (answer- look to Brazil)?
What cars does Iran manufacture for natural gas? (basic manufacturing capacity)?
What would it take to convert the current gasoline distribution network in Iran to natural gas (pipelines for Natural gas, natural gas filling stations)?
Once all of those issues are solved, how are they going to retrofit their existing stock of cars to natural gas vehicles (see again Brazil, but at a cost)?
How will this happen in the first eight years of the Obama presidency, especially when the Iranians, while having vast reserves of natural gas, are unable to exploit them due to lack of investment?
In related news, I heard on the radio that I had a pony.
That doesn't make any sense, does it? Suppose my employer-provided health benefits are worth, say, $10,000. You add this figure to my income and tax me on the now larger amount. But, I don't really have $10,000 in new income that I can spend. So, what is this stuff about "what's left over"? There's nothing left over. But, according to McCain, I'm free to take what's "left over," add the $5,000 credit he's going to give me, leave my employer-provided health plan, and go get another one. Is that correct? Am I missing something here?
Only when Gotham City turns on the Sacastrosign. Or during a full moon.
1. Tax health benefits
2. Get employers to drop coverage for employees
3. Provide $5,000 for families to shop for health insurance plans than run more than double that amount
4. Save tons of money for big business, while absolving them of any feelings of guilt for the millions of additional Americans who will then have no health coverage
What it amounts to is that the average company will save about $7,000 per year per employee in health costs, and the employee then has to pay $7,000 per year more out of his/her own pocket to maintain coverage.
Interesting that McCain would criticize "Gold plated Cadillac" health coverage when he has the best health insurance coverage in the world through the Congress.
Well, yeah -- what else could he have meant?
Without pronouncing on the subject either way, there is a lively debate as to whether such intervention was feasible or effective. Obama's in the mainstream by implying that it was not.
For example, Ebay's Q2 profits were up 22% to $460 million. Their profits for Q3 are projected to be higher than Q2. However, Ebay just announced it was cutting 1,600 jobs, fully 1/10th of its workforce. Those profits obviously are not spilling down to employees.
Actually, I was waiting for Obama's response when McCain mentioned Ebay's Meg Whitman as possible SecTreas. "John, Ebay is making a profit of nearly $2 billion per year, but despite that just announced that they were firing 1,600 workers to improve their profits even more. That's who you want to put in charge of job creation?"
He's not selling any new ideas to you, and that idea is just as broken as it is today. If you make health care a total consumer choice, you will pay for other things first. Then when you don't get a physical or a screening, your health problems get chronic and far more expensive; your bronchitis turns into pneumonia as one simplistic example. Nobody saves anything in that broken system. You can bitch about Medicare but the consumption side of health care is what must change before you can reform the entitlement side.
If you force consumers to purchase insurance, similar to your car insurance or a penalty system like the current Mass health care initiative, then more people will be covered and there are more premium dollars in the system to help offset the costs from those who remain uninsured and rack up huge expenses that can often be prevented.
Meg Whitman's no longer in charge of eBay, so she had nothing to do with that decision. It would be like accusing McCain's PR man of lobbying for Fannie Mae, when he's been working exclusively for McCain for the past two years.
By this reasoning, not only would companies not pay the employee the $10000 they save, they could equally well just reduce everyone's salary by $10000 right at this moment. Everyone would be earning minimum wage. They don't, because of competition in the market.
Anyway, I would be unable to afford the same level of health insurance under McCain's plan, and that's assuming I could get my child's pre-existing conditions covered at all. I don't know what he's thinking, but if he wins the election I'd be counting on Congress to rectify the problems in that proposal. Please!
You seem to forget that (i) a company without any workers would be unable to make any profit, and (ii) companies compete with each other for labor.
First, what about the other NINE-TENTHS of employees? Now profit per employee will be at least 10% higher as a result of shedding all those jobs? Anyway, if those 1,600 jobs aren't necessary to increase profits, why have them?
Second, jobs are not a mechanism by which everyday people drain money out of profitable businesses. At least, they are not supposed to be. The job you have should contribute to the company's profitability, even after accounting for what they pay you. If it doesn't, for the sake of not only the company's shareholders, but also everyone else in our economy, it should be eliminated.
I believe one problem with health care today is that the health insurance companies' customers are not the health care consumers but the companies that largely contract for their services. While consumer pressure would tend to reward the company that provides best service for best price, the main pressure from employers is often price alone.
Uuuh, yeah, its a common misconception that we entered WWII to stop Hitler and the Holocaust. Lots of HS kids think this. Ask any historian, or any Jew: we didn't. We sat on our hands until Pearl Harbor (FDR's illegal battle of the Atlantic notwithstanding). The "final solution" was implemented after the Nazis had conquered most of Europe and that's not a coincidence. The policy choice not to try and bomb Auschwitz, other camps, and rail lines behind the front had pros and cons and I think we made the wrong choice, but even if we had made more of an attempt, we didn't have the power in 1943-44 to intervene and put an end to the Holocaust, our resources were deployed elsewhere and the Nazis were in a strong position. The Holocaust was mostly stopped by the advancing Soviet armies. Neither the USA or USSR was particularly motivated to stop the Holocaust so much as defeating the German war machine.
I'd prefer to have heard some greater nuance on this question, especially as it concerned refugees from Europe before the war. We couldn't intervene and simply put an end to Nazism by fiat, it took a major war, one we had good reason to try and avoid from an immediate self-interest point of view. Our long term interests, of course, would have been better served by willing to stand up to evil that threatened someone else first. Even so, short of war, there were things we could have done, but chose not to.
So, while Obama's answer is correct and understandable at one level -- we didn't have infinite power to just decide to end the Holocaust after 1942 -- the Holocaust didn't start in 1942, and it would have taken national leadership willing to explain our enlightened, long term interests as well as the morality of proactively helping the Jews, and that was lacking.
Believing that we did intervene to stop the Holocaust, perhaps an uncharitable reading of Hoosier's comment, now that would be something a uninformed freshmen might say.
It's more complicated . . . the employers would pass some of the savings on, but there's no reason to think that it would be a simple linear, full cash back relationship--it depends on the slope of laborers' demand curves and so forth. And employees currently do not pay taxes on in-kind benefits, whereas they would on the extra cash. And of course, without employers providing the health care and the (arguable) economies of scale of group plans involving big pools to spread risks around, individual health policies could well wind up being more expensive. The health insurance companies currently are largely exempt from antitrust regulation, and there's every reason to think that they would act more anticompetitively (i.e. to the detriment of consumers purchasing the plans, now on their own) if allowed to under another Republican administration.
She could delete it, it's her blog. Trouble is, she's not embarrassed. Althouse is blessedly incapable of recognizing her own inanity.
Nicestrategy is correct about America and the Holocaust; we were at best indifferent and at worst unwilling to help (the Bermuda Conference, anyone?). I have never found it plausible that the Allies couldn't have figured out some way to bomb the rail lines into Auschwitz and other camps, though how lasting a solution that would've been, I dunno. It would at least have been an effort.
The best that can be said is that the top Allied leaders had a lot of other things on their minds and could not fundamentally believe what was happening to the Jews. As Herman Wouk pointed out in one of his novels, many of the Jews had a hard time believing it too, until it was too late.
The actuarial risk of understanding the cost of employee claims goes down at that 1500-person data point, so it's easier to understand who will have cancer claims, who will have heart attack claims, etc.
Without that large data set, predicting claim costs for the year ahead (which is how insurance companies know what to charge an employer for health insurance each year) becomes difficult. The insurance companies then have to hedge their bets and the employer ends up paying a lot more for the same level of coverage...
Iran doesn't manufacture any cars. The folks who actually make cars can easily make them to run on natural gas instead. The added cost is under $100.
> Once all of those issues are solved, how are they going to retrofit their existing stock of cars to natural gas vehicles (see again Brazil, but at a cost)?
I knew "shade tree" mechanics in the US who were doing conversions in the mid-60s. It costs about $100 (including tank) in parts but it may cost a bit more to convert a fuel-injected car.
google "natural gas car conversion"
> What would it take to convert the current gasoline distribution network in Iran to natural gas (pipelines for Natural gas, natural gas filling stations)?
They don't have to convert anything. (We don't pipe gasoline to gas stations so why would they have to pipe natural gas to filling stations?)
Tank-based natural gas delivery can use the same roads that gasoline tank trucks use. (Worst case - instead of picking up gasoline at the dock where gas imports come in, they'll pick up NG at the NG dock instead of exporting it. More likely, they pick up NG closer to the source.)
Tank-based NG filling stations are very inexpensive - tanks are low-tech (inexpensive). The expensive part is the meter, but it's less than $500.
Of course, any place that has natural gas piped in (as a gas) can be a filling station - you just need a compressor. Honda sells expensive ($3500) ones for home use in the US but it's trivial to do it for a lot less.
A lot of US biz have been using NG for vehicles for quite a while. They have their own tanks. They replaced gasoline tanks at their "fleet yard".
The first rule is: don't believe the stuff you're hearing on the radio. Loki13, are you talking about what Obama said during the debate or Pickens proposal.
The second rule is, think critically about what you're hearing. Loki, I have two degrees in engineering and have been reviewing the Pickens plan.
What countries have fleets that run entirely on natural gas (answer- look to Brazil) I live in Los Angeles and practically every bus here runs on NG for smog control.
What cars does Iran manufacture for natural gas? Again, as Andy said they don't need to. New cars are bought from europe or Asia designed to run on compressed NG. As for Older vehicles, these are converted all the time to run on different mediums. In nations were safety laws exist conversions are expensive but well done. In areas were the rules are lax the conversions are cheap, just not as reliable as one would like. In Iran they are very cheap.
What would it take to convert the current gasoline distribution network in Iran to natural gas? How much of a network do they even have today. Developing countries have a far easier time setting up infrastructure then developed countries because developed countries have to build the new while maintaining the old.
How will this happen in the first eight years of the Obama presidency? The "first" eight years. How long do you expect Obama to be in office?? We do have a law passed after FDR that limits presidents to only two four year terms. or are you expecting Michelle to run after Obama.
It's more likely he meant intervene to stop it before it began, when we could have actually stopped it. At least, that was my immediate understanding of his comment.
We can't win this election!
I on the other hand am Self Employed. Since I buy health care myself, I can claim it on Schedule C, but I must still pay self employment tax (FICA) on it. Why should it mnatter what form employee compensation takes? It should still be subject to FICA.
So what the McCain plan would do is correct this inequality - and businesses will still be able to decuct health care costs on their regular income taxes.
And BTW, in my wife's scenario, she had 3 plans to choose from. Since I had to get my own health insurance, I went online,and had at least 10 plans to choose from. Her premium (which covers both of us) is 8 times higher than mine (which only covered me).
Sorry guys, WF won the thread waaaaay back on the 7th comment. Move along please, nothing left to see here... ;~)
[and Professor Kerr as Sarcastro explains a LOT... makes almost as much sense as the allegation that Dave Kopel is really a pro-gun control spy for the Brady Campaign...]
If her premium is so much more--why don't you both get the same insurance you had before? Are the benefits that different?
I don't see how employer-provided health care provides "economies of scale". Health insurance companies will seek out many subscribers, regardless of whether they all work for the same company, in order to spread the risk around. That's the fundamental idea of insurance.
On anti-competitive behavior, my instincts say that if anything, anti-competitive behavior would be more prevalent under employer-provided care, given that the who's in charge of buying the health care (the company) is not often the same as the ones using the health care(the workers)...but that's just my instinct....I don't know anything about the legal status of health insurers, and would love to learn more. What regulations are health insurers exempt from?
...
No, wait, that won't do it. Althouse lives in Madison and teaches at UWM. Socialists are just "people who live in the neighborhood".
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