Obama: Legalize illegals to get them health care

[newton]

Here's hoping, Arb, but I suspect you're asking "elephants" to fly.

[OhBrother]

Maybe Newt can explain why the dems love tossing out that race card.

[TypesWithFist]

No, It’s Not About Race

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: September 17, 2009 NYT
WASHINGTON


You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I go running several times a week. My favorite route, because it’s so flat, is from the Lincoln Memorial to the U.S. Capitol and back. I was there last Saturday and found myself plodding through tens of thousan ds of anti-government “tea party” protesters.

They were carrying “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, “End the Fed” placards and signs condemning big government, Barack Obama, socialist health care and various elite institutions.
Then, as I got to where the Smithsonian museums start, I came across another rally, the Black Family Reunion Celebration. Several thousand people had gathered to celebrate African-American culture. I noticed that the mostly white tea party protesters were mingling in with the mostly black family reunion celebrants. The tea party people were buying lunch from the family reunion food stands. They had joined the audience of a rap concert.

Because sociology is more important than fitness, I stopped to watch the interaction. These two groups were from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum. They’d both been energized by eloquent speakers. Yet I couldn’t discern any tension between them. It was just different groups of people milling about like at any park or sports arena.

And yet we live in a nation in which some people see every conflict through the prism of race. So over the past few days, many people, from Jimmy Carter on down, have argued that the hostility to President Obama is driven by racism. Some have argued that tea party slogans like “I Want My Country Back” are code words for white supremacy. Others say incivility on Capitol Hill is magnified by Oba ma’s dark skin.
Well, I don’t have a machine for peering into the souls of Obama’s critics, so I can’t measure how much racism is in there. But my impression is that race is largely beside the point. There are other, equally important strains in American history that are far more germane to the current conflicts.

For example, for generations schoolchildren studied the long debate between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians. Hamiltonians stood for urbanism, industrialism and federal power. Jeffersonians were suspicious of urban elites and financial concentration and believed in small-town virtues and limited government. Jefferson advocated “a wise and frugal government” that will keep people from hurting each other, but will otherwise leave them free and “shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”

Jefferson’s philosophy inspired Andrew Jackson, who led a movement of plain people against the cosmopolitan elites. Jackson dismantled the Second Bank of the United States because he feared the fusion of federal and financial power.

This populist tendency continued through the centuries. Sometimes it took right-wing forms, sometimes left-wing ones. Sometimes it was agrarian. Sometimes it was more union-oriented. Often it was extreme, conspiratorial and rude.

The populist tendency has always used the same sort of rhetoric: for the ordinary people and against the fat cats and the educated class; for the=2 0small towns and against the financial centers.
And it has always had the same morality, which the historian Michael Kazin has called producerism. The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for their own output. Money should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites.

Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.

Given all of this, it was guaranteed that he would spark a populist backlash, regardless of his skin color. And it was guaranteed that this backlash would be ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top — since these movements always are, whether they were led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin or anybody else.
What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the=2 0Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.

“One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy,” the economic blogger Arnold Kling writes. “The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa.”

It’s not race. It’s another type of conflict, equally deep and old.

[newton]

Just check out some of the signs at these tea party gigs--the ones with the monkeys are especially clever--and you might suspect that Obama's color is as much of an issue for these folks as his policies, most of which they probably would be incapable of understanding or articulating. Ever since Tricky Dick's Southern Strategy, the Republican party has cultivated and fed off of thinly-disguised racism, masquerading as redneck, love-it-or-leave-it populism. Even David Brooks wouldn't deny this, although he underplays it and prefers to talk in terms of "class" rather than race. But you know, maybe we should ignore the obvious and stretch for a more benign, charitable interpretation. Let's see...the monkey sign people and the others around them who think the signs are funny don't have to be racists. They might, for example, be PETA people.

[goodintentions]

I think that people forget...I'm so sick of hearing the race card....
Obama's mamma is WHITE. He is just as much a white man as he is a black man.
As far as... what if some poor little child of an illegal need health care... DUH. They already get our health care..
Anybody ever been over to the public aid office... the health department... There are plenty of people getting care... Thats a lame reason for accepting Obamacare. Fact is and everyone knows it... illegals come here & begin making those anchor babies..... no worries..

[Busboy]

Newton its is quite obvious that Obama will not explicitly state that illegals will be covered, but that his intention is to have them covered, by failing to provide an enforcement mechanism. THAT is the lie that Joe Wilson was referring to. Are they treated now in emergency rooms? Of course they are, just as my family has been. The differences are that we only go to the emergency room for emergencies, and we pay our bills. Why can't the hospitals demand that people in the emergency room actually have emergencies, and then make an effort to get them to pay their bills?

[Blackdiamond]

NO $HIT! (I HAD PUT THIS IN AS A REPLY TO WHAT ADMIN HAD SAID ABOUT A MEANINGFUL CONVERSATION) I DON'T KNOW WHAT HA PPNED TO THEIR QUOTE.

[gmg77]

So whats the answer? Again all this hatred of "illegals" shouldn't blind you from getting good health insurance for yourself. illegals become legal its a "status" not always due to a crime. Denying good health to our illegal neighbors only increases you and your kid's chances of getting sick.

BTW Joe Wilson voted for Medicare Prescription Drug and Modernization Act, In Sec. 1011 it authorizes greater government reimbursements to hospitals who provide treatment for uninsured illegal immigrants. So it seems he agrees with Obama illegals need health care funding if they cant buy there own.

[JazminH]

BTW Joe Wilson voted for Medicare Prescription Drug and Modernization Act, In Sec. 1011 it authorizes greater government reimbursements to hospitals who provide treatment for uninsured illegal immigrants. So it seems he agrees with Obama illegals need health care funding if they cant buy there own.

That's like saying crime victim compensation programs condone rape.

[Frankzilch]

BTW Joe Wilson voted for Medicare Prescription Drug and Modernization Act, In Sec. 1011 it authorizes greater government reimbursements to hospitals who provide treatment for uninsured illegal immigrants. So it seems he agrees with Obama illegals need health care funding if they cant buy there own.

That's like saying crime victim compensation programs condone rape.

I think the analogy is a little weak. Compensation to a hospital (your analogous "victim") would tend to perpetuate or even increase the likelyhood of a repeat because the monetary compensation acts as an incentive to the hospital (the victim) to do so. Depending on how lucrative this monetary compensation is, hospitals (the victims) will be begging for more. Whereas compensation to a rape victim would likely be in the form of psychiatric care and would tend to decrease, or at least not increase, the likelyhood of a repeat to the victim. There would be no incentive for the rape victim to repeat the rape.
Anyone who supports an increase in monetary compensation to hospitals for treating illegals has to know such a policy will only serve to perpetuate that process.