Posted on 03/23/2010 11:23:59 AM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
Journalists love the marketplace of ideas until people start selling ideas they find objectionable. The liberal media somehow manages to shout about its right to speak freely while demanding others be silenced.
Glenn Beck is probably the most popular target for the left's demands for censorship. Cokie Roberts and her husband Steve picked up that ball and ran with it today in their joint syndicated column. They dubbed Beck "a traitor to the American values he professes so loudly to defend" and claimed he is "corrupting the very essence of democracy." And all this just by speaking.
Unsurprisingly, the immense damage Beck is doing to the American political process can only be demonstrated anecdotally:
Steve recently took part in a lunchtime panel sponsored by a local radio station. A beefy young man in the audience grabbed the microphone and challenged the speakers, in a sneering and confrontational tone, to name one good thing about President Obama's health-care proposal.
Steve's answer: People without insurance flood hospital emergency rooms and push up medical bills for everyone. So it would be in the "national interest" to expand insurance and hold down costs.
"The national interest?" retorted the questioner in an even louder voice. "That sounds like fascism!"
We have been in this business a long time. We welcome tough questions and certainly don't believe we have all the answers. But "fascism"? That's over the line -- way over the line -- for any sensible or civilized conversation.
We don't know what the beefy guy reads or to whom he listens, but we would bet he's a disciple of Glenn Beck. The popular author and broadcaster who has turned nonstop name-calling into an art form is a big fan of the "F-word."
(Excerpt) Read more at newsbusters.org ...
I think facsism is a perfect word Cokie
They would actually have to watch his show to know what he says. These people just make up stuff as they go.
When she said this, was she in a studio in front of a “Green Screen” wearing a winter coat with a snowstorm superimposed behind her? What a phony hypocrite and all around idiot - i.e. a typical liberal.
This is true. And apparently he’s right on target with all the bashing he gets.
God Bless Glenn!
My friend named his favorite illegal substance after her.
This will destroy the insurance companies.
Anyone with an IQ of two-or-more digits will skip the insurance, pay the fine, then buy a no-preexisting-conditions-exclusion policy when they get very sick.
Thus getting a quarter-million dollars worth of care for $1000 a month.
I’m finding myself restraining my speech more and more as days go by. It’s probably for the best. I know I’m on a list somewhere lol
What an odd statement. We're not a democracy. A true democracy is nothing but mob rule (like the Oboma administration). We're a Representative Republic that's bound to the Constitution - the Bible of American values.
Maybe there's another America somewhere? She's not talking about ours, that's for sure.
I am getting so ticked off it is hard to restrain myself.
First of all, is it not the spoiled entitlement mentality that has ruined American values in this country? Is it not the Poor Me, Poor Me, I deserve, I want it now Veruca Salt enablers that have caused this mess?
If we still believed in individualism, American exceptionalism, a hand up and not a hand-out, and free markets this would not be going on. I say that coming from the very generation that is completely aloof to anything that is going to come down the pike. In fact I almost blew a gasket with several friends of mine trying to compare Health Care to Civil Rights.
The only corruption of our Republic and the democracy that we are supposed to be practicing is the very government that we have; back room deals, minimal transparency, kick-backs, special interest favors, lies, socialist thinking, and out-and-out corruption. Yet this woman has the audacity to call out one person as the reason why our country is teetering on a precipice.
The very essence of how she and her husband think, i.e. we already have ERs that are overwhelmed by the amount of people who need health care who get it free as it is, is driving up HC costs, but apparently adding more people to the rolls is going to bring down those costs when it’s a very basic principle that mandates cost more money!).
Or the other way of thinking that says - let’s point our fingers and blame our problems on one person or one situation and make that the whole. This is typical liberal “stinkin’ thinkin’” and it is disastrous.
Too many people in this country would rather be a victim requiring the government babysit them, than pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make something of themselves, believing that hard work and know-how make anything in this country possible.
Hum ... this isn’t, by any chance, the same Cokie Roberts who made a mockery of the judicial confirmation process by leaking unsubstantiated allegations made by a mentally unstable woman against (now Justice) Clarence Thomas, could it? The same Cokie who was the organizer in chief of an electronic lynch mob for a man with whom she, as a supposedly unbiased journalist, personally opposed? The same Cokie who tried to block a Supreme Court nomination through some illegal leaks? Could it? /sarcasm
An aging strumpet..
"How often, for example, have you heard the emergency-room argument? The uninsured, it's said, use emergency rooms for primary care. That's expensive and ineffective. Once they're insured, they'll have regular doctors. Care will improve; costs will decline. Everyone wins. Great argument. Unfortunately, it's untrue."
"A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that the insured accounted for 83 percent of emergency-room visits, reflecting their share of the population. After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, emergency-room use remained higher than the national average, an Urban Institute study found. More than two-fifths of visits represented non-emergencies. Of those, a majority of adult respondents to a survey said it was "more convenient" to go to the emergency room or they couldn't "get [a doctor's] appointment as soon as needed." If universal coverage makes appointments harder to get, emergency-room use may increase."
Thus getting a quarter-million dollars worth of care for $1000 a month.
I see this happening at first, but I then see the rates being jacked, perhaps directly, probably at least through subsidies and taxes on others outside of the strict insurance cash flow system. The system cannot reject for pre-existing condition, but I would be surprised if level rates were required. Even if they are so now, that will be changed once the government hires the actuaries who then prove what is going to happen on particular bureaucrats' watch. They don't mind making sure somebody else gets the blame when things go bust, but with the insurance companies tied so closely to the gov't there will be little confusion about who gets the blame if, say Humananov starts looking financially green around the edges. Those with policies with that company will want the gov't to rescue them (which it likely will) and thus the industry won't go away, it'll just be asbsorbed into the governmental leviathan. So, maybe we're saying the same thing with different degrees of detail.
The hypocrisy of progressives is unfathomable...do they happen to recall the constant accusations they threw at president Bush? Fascist was one of them. Liberalism is indeed a mental disorder, and it appears to impair memory in addition to logic centers.
Cookie Roberts is a racist slut.
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