KartMan

Are you seriously trying to compare this to the atrocities of the Patriot Act and all of the other civil rights violations the Bush/Cheney administration implemented? There is a legitimate debate going on about healthcare right now in this country. A lot of people are making points in both directions, some are valid some are not. It looks to me like they are trying to collect the information so that they can refute the untruths, they are not specifically asking for the senders addresses. This is what Robert Gibbs said about it in the Press Conference today: GIBBS: Nobody is collecting names. This was -- we have seen, and as I've discussed from this podium, a lot of misinformation around health care reform. Some of it I think spread purposely. We have used on many occasions the Web site to debunk things that are simply not true. We ask people if they have questions about health care reform and about what they're hearing about its affects on them, to let us know and we'd provide them information to show that that wasn't true, but nobody is collecting names.

I’m so excited!!! I had my body fat tested hydrostatically today and found out that I am “Average” at 22.3%. You can read the details of my testing in this other post. I still have some weight to lose to get into the “Good” range and I need to do some toning of my arms, man-boobs, and tummy – but boy am I excited about being an “Average” guy:thumbup:

Beth: So... the scare tactic of "WE HAVE TO SIGN THIS THING NOW" is what, better? What's the left's hurry? Why are they playing Henny Penny on this thing? For no good reason, that's why. I just love how on the one hand Republicans say that we are rushing thru something people do not yet fully understand and on the other, they say we are trying to ram thru all the old “liberal agenda” that has been on the shelf. Which is it Beth? Which truth would your side like to go with today? The reason it is being rushed (actually, I personally don’t think it’s being rushed – there are no big surprises here to me) is (1) it’s the right thing to do, we should have done a lot of this stuff 20 years ago before we got into this mess. (2) The longer the Bill lies out on the vine, the more opportunity the Right will have to “Swiftboat” it and scare the hell out of everyone with baseless lies. This is the biggest reason. If you don’t believe me, listen to your guy Jim DeMint who says by stopping this legislation Republicans can make this into Obama’s Waterloo. (3) Like it or not, your side lost. Obama was elected with a mandate and one of his major campaign promises was to get this legislation passed. Personally I think this is one issue that he ought to force just on the basis of his popularity and the votes he has in congress. I don’t think he should even try for bi-partisan support. Beth: I'm sorry to be so crass, Kartman, but BULLSHIT. There is no way that ANYbody knows EVERYthing that's in 1400 pages of this shit sandwich. Your not being crass, you are being facetious. It was clear what I meant when I said what I said. Members of both sides of the aisle have more than enough time and staff to know the content of these Bills. The argument that they don’t is ludicrous and insulting to position that they hold. Beth: Look, ANY "bill" that has that many pages to it is usually full of so much shit that they don't WANT the average layperson to know what's in it. Laypeople should be able to know what it is that's being passed. Otherwise we simply have a case of elitist prigs who are speaking Latin to keep the masses in control. Oh wait, that was done once already. I'm sorry, but any government that muddies the Water as much as ours does is up to no effin' good. They know it, and some of us smarter "laypeople" know it too. If you need a stable full of lawyers and a secret decoder ring to figure the damn thing out, it's nothing but a smokescreen to take away more of our liberties, pure and simple. That is a ridiculous argument. Every law that is being passed by the federal or the state governments these days is written that way, this one is no different than any other in that respect. They are all in legalese because that is the language of the law. That’s not a liberal or conservative thing, it’s just they way things are.

Don’t buy into this not being able to read the Bill crap. It is just another of the many scare tactics the Right and the lobbyists are using to stall this Bill. Every single member of those subcommittees knows exactly what is in those Bills and those Amendments. They each have 20 plus staff members devoted to reading this stuff and knowing the contents. The big Bill in the Energy & Commerce that was signed on Friday has 1000 pages – for lawyers like them, 1000 pages is like the back of a Cereal box. For lay people like us, that may seem like a lot, but it is a Bill for crying out loud – they are always big. If these members can’t read the freaking Bill then they should be voted out, this is their chosen job after all – give me a break already.

I prefer to get news from journalists rather than entertainers. There is a time and a place for extremely biased commentators, but I try not to get too much from them. I do like to hear people’s opinions though, especially when the host brings in both sides and gives the audience a fair shot at participating. My favorite in this arena right now is Pete Dominick, he is a stand up comedian that has really impressed me with his political sensibilities. I find him to be a little left of center, but not so far that that he drives me crazy. What I like about him is that even though he is mostly left of center, he has an open mind about issues on the right and gives them a fair shot at defending their positions. Pete has a 2-3 hour show on P.O.T.U.S. in the afternoon and has stated popping up on some of the Cable News stations. He also warms up the crowd on the Colbert Report.

Alba, I was a portion eater too. At fast food joints I would have two value meals, I would always be the one eating the last slice of pizza, for home cooked meals I always had a big portion and went back for seconds. I was never a big snacker and am not really a sucker for sweets. I think that is why the band has worked well for me so far. I eat 3 small meals a day and rarely if ever have between meal Snacks. I haven’t had any problems in the six months that I’ve had the band. I agree with Luluc though about not ever wanting to gain the weight back. If I had a slip or other complication I would be looking at every viable solution to maintain my loss.

I have read about some on here that really struggle for every pound lost. My experience has not been that way. Don’t get me wrong, it’s no walk in the park but if you follow the rules it can work for you – it has for me. I started in February at 285lbs with a BMI of just over 38. Here I am almost 6 months out and I’m down over 85lbs and only about 15lbs from goal, which BTW will be a “normal” BMI. So how much can you lose? Well, that may be up to you. Follow the pre-op, don’t get too frustrated with “bandster hell”, listen to RestlessMonkey every time she tells you to DRINK YOUR WATER, eat your protein, listen to your doc, get your fills when you need them, and come here for moral support. Oh, and don’t just focus on weight. I see a lot of folks on here and that I know personally that are not shedding pounds as fast as they want, but they are dropping inches and clothes sizes – this counts too and is a real indicator of success.

Keith, That is so awesome. I recently culled out all of my oldest “small” 38W pants and XL shirts, I just can’t wear them any longer. I went out and bought a bunch of 36W and L shirts and boy did it feel good. Some of the 36W pants are already feeling a little loose, I think I’ll been in 34W within a month. If nothing else, LapBand has been a boon to my local Goodwill.

Cleo’s Mom’ Kudos to you, great posts. I think you have made some excellent points in this thread and have backed those points up with some relevant references and real world scenarios. It’s tough to compete with the “wisdom” of Glenn Beck though, LOL.

It ends up being low carb/low calorie. I’m not really trying for low carb, it just works out that way because I don’t have much room after the Protein. I end up with 3 meals a day of between 300 and 500 calories per meal. Typically for Breakfast I will eat two eggs over easy and a slice of toast (I can usually only eat the yolks and a tiny bit of white). lunch will be some sort of meat and a bite or two of carb (rice or bread), dinner is similar to lunch. I try to mix in a small V8 during the day to make up for the veggies I am missing. If I feel like snacking I usually go for microwave popcorn or a handful or two of almonds. I think it is just the tiny portions I am eating that make all the difference. I have had good restriction since the start and I might even be a little too tight right now.

I made it this morning. I jumped on the scale and it read 198.2lbs. Yippee:thumbup::thumbdown::thumbup: This has been an incredible journey since February 2009 and I don’t see it stopping anytime soon, I have a whole new me. I love my band. I feel great with the amount of food I am eating and the weight is still coming off. I am only about 15 pounds from goal and think at this rate it should be done in about a month or so. I am shifting the goals that I am striving for from weight and BMI to Body Fat % as measured from a hydrostatic test. I was just tested on Friday and my Body Fat % is 22.3% right now which is “Average” for a male my age. I am starting a workout routine that I am hoping will increase my muscle mass as I continue to lose fat mass in an effort to get my Body Fat % down to 15% which is considered “Ideal” for my age. Assuming I can lose fat and not muscle, that should put me at about 180lbs. I’m so excited:thumbup:

Monkey, I’m with you!!! I have been going strong since February of this year and it has been great. This morning I actually tipped my toe into Onderland for the first time since I was in boot camp over 20 years ago. I am looking real good in regular sized clothes (I have a whole new wardrobe) and feel great about myself. I am close to my goal (about 15lbs to go) and am not regretting any of it for a second. I will admit I am probably a little too tight, not so much that I need an unfill but tight enough that I have to be real careful in what I eat. Keep up the good work and all of your inspirational posts on here.

It sure is easier getting in and out of this little beauty now that I am 200 instead of 285.

I’m using the BF% test as a baseline. I was lucky enough to lose all of my weight so far without much exercise. Now that the fat has melted away, I am seeing some damn skinny arms and some flabby pecs. I feel the bug now to hit the gym and am planning on working on at least those two areas pretty hard. I’m really curious to see what the BF percentage is relative to lean mass after 3-6 months of regular workouts.

Nanook, If you have access to SirusXM (if you are not a subscriber, I think you can still stream online) I would suggest checking out P.O.T.U.S. I started listening to them during the election and am now totally hooked. Beth, The “mainstream media” term is a red herring; it implies that they are somehow in collusion – a ridiculous conspiracy theory if you ask me. I think in order to be truly informed one needs to listen to the biased pundits on the right and left (Fox and MSNBC) are good for this – but not too much because you will risk being sucked into their madness. Then I try to get most actual news from “unbiased” news outlets. Personally, I like CNN, Mcneil/Lehrer, NPR, BBC (I need a world perspective too) and P.O.T.U.S. Unbiased is in quotes, because obviously no source is really unbiased. They all have political affiliations and corporate sponsorships – but to me they seem to be more middle of the road. Well, except for CNN - they sometimes can be as bad as Fox and MSNBC.

When you hear exactly what you want to hear rather than all sides of an issue you are being entertained, not informed (IMHO).

Sorry, Glenn Beck is an idiot. He is nothing more than an entertainer with a skewed view of reality. So is Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Kieth Olberman and Rachel Maddow (see, there are idiots on both sides). You can’t really take anything that any of these nitwits say seriously.

You know Beth, believe it or not I am with you on some of this. I would not take quite as harsh a tone, but I have to admit that I agree with at least some of what you are saying. I do believe that there should be a quid pro quo on entitlements. I also believe in the old adage “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. I was a sucker and believed Bush the First when he coined the term “Compassionate Conservatism”. I think he and his son were nowhere near compassionate, and they defied many of the tenants of conservatism – but the concept is sound. I think we should strive for that. Help people that need it, but help them in a way that they help themselves. I also agree that apathy is a huge problem here, but I don’t believe it is because of government handouts – I think it has simply become a part of our culture. I can tell you that some of the hardest working people I know are on the lowest rungs of our financial ladder. I see these people bust their a$$ on manual labor all day for little pay and they work day in and day out. I see a lot of young people from affluent families afraid to break a nail typing at a keyboard all the while making way more money than they are worth. Where is the justice in that? As an electorate, we don’t vote in any significant numbers and yet we complain about politicians. Most high school kids can’t name more than a handful of elected officials, yet they know all the names of the Jonas Brothers. Stop 5 people on the street and I would be shocked if more than 2 could point to countries on a map that you reference by the capital city, or even states in this country for that matter. As for immigrants, I live in San Diego so I see this issue first hand. While I am the first to agree that we have a problem and need to do something about it, just blaming the immigrants is pretty short sighted on your part. I see the work they do and believe me, they are a hard working lot and for the most pat do not have an easy life. If you want to blame somebody, blame the companies that hire them or the officials that do not enforce the laws on the books. Or maybe you could blame yourself (and the rest of us) for being happy to pay the artificially low price for fruits and vegetables that are subsidized by the artificially low wages that are paid to field hands.

Seriously? I’m really getting tired of this argument. Here http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20090714/aahca.pdf is one of I believe 4 versions from the House. I think there are one or two versions from the Senate side that you can find with a little effort. Why do people keep saying “let us read it” and yet they don’t even make an effort to look for it? Here it is in plain site, read to your hearts content. It is a work in progress, so what is contained here will likely be marked up before it’s done, but it is here in its current format for you to read. You make it sound like there is some conspiracy to keep you in the dark, there is not, all you have to do is read it. As for congress, each one of those folks has a staff of over 20 (paid by us), so they should be able to read over these 1000 pages fairly easy. The fact that you make a comment like “The things that I've read that are supposedly in this thing are downright damn scary.” means that you are letting someone else make up your mind for you. Take the initiative and figure out for yourself what is in it. Or, at the very least, try to distill what people on both sides are saying so that you can form a more realistic opinion rather than one that is completely weighted in one direction. As for myself, I have read parts of it online, but I’m not a lawyer or a legislator so it’s a tough read for me. I get the majority of my TV news from CNN which I find mostly to be from the center (ok, a little left of center) then I sprinkle in a dose of Fox and MSNBC (as much as I can stand from those two anyway) to give me the more left and right sides of the issue. The most meaningful and unbiased info I have gotten lately is from P.O.T.U.S. For those of you that haven’t discovered this gem on SiriusXM, I would highly recommend it. I started listening to them during the election and am now totally hooked.

Not completely snarky, let me see if I can make sense of it. California is not alone, it is one of at least 40 states (some believe it is more like 46) that are out of money (VA is on that list too BTW). Here is Google search http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLJ_en&q=which+states+are+bankrupt on “which states are bankrupt”, you can see all the references yourself. It just so happens that CA is the biggest, our GSP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_(nominal) was $1.8T last year, that is about 25% larger than TX which was number 2 on list and about 75% percent larger than VA (number 11). A bigger budget equates to bigger problems in an economy like this. To say that CA is any more of a clusterf*ck than any other state is pretty narrow minded, it is simply larger form a dollar perspective than any other state. You may recall from PolySci class that most states have to operate without a deficit. CA is mandated by its constitution in this respect, so when we are out of money it means that everything has to come to a halt and we have to make cuts to alleviate the problem - hence the clusterf*ck (ok, I’m being gratuitous because I like using that word of yours:thumbup:). I’m the first to admit that this state has spent beyond its means and got a little too fat when the economy was good (so did I BTW:blushing:), but as far as I can tell most of the other states are in a similar situation. Maybe we would do better as a state if we got as much in Federal Tax dollars as we put into the system, but unfortunately the state that gets the most right now is VA http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/07/24/which-states-get-the-most-federal-money/ , would you care to give some of that back BTW:confused:? Dollar for dollar, CA contributes more to federal budget too, in fact we pay nearly double the amount in federal taxes as NY does. Ok, so let’s not make this about which state the person is from as to whether the programs are right or not. Also, I’d rather not make it about whether what one pays in taxes gives them more or less reason to gripe about the validity of those taxes. I have worked hard my whole life and have done pretty well for myself, so needless to say I pay a grunch in taxes:cursing:. I don’t like to pay taxes any more than you do, but I do think they are a necessary component of a functioning society. The point I have made all along on this thread and others is that there are very legitimate reasons for many of the entitlement programs. You have said yourself that there are certainly people that are in need. Form my side of the argument, I have said that some of those people getting the entailment need to be policed too – I offered a solution about how people could be penalized if they are using aid money for drugs. The difference between you and I (the way I see it) is that you see a broken system and want to throw everything out and force people to fend for themselves. I see a different alternative. I think we should keep the programs (although I would agree that some have outlived their useful lives) but make them work as intended. Increase the enforcement arm of the agencies that are responsible for them and vote out the politicians that abuse their power in dealing with those programs.

The reasons for the programs don’t go away just because people abuse them. Fix the abuse, that is the answer. Getting rid of the program because it has abuse is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I’m not ok with your (or my for that matter) tax dollars being misused or abused. I think programs to help with poverty, addiction, and the needy are necessary and can be run effectively. There is plenty of abuse to go around by the way. Not all of your tax dollars are “wasted” on those programs. There is also plenty wasted on wars that we don’t belong in, corporate welfare, and inappropriate tax breaks to the extremely wealthy. The point is Conservatives can and do waste your tax dollars too, they just have different ways to do it.

I don’t disagree with you in principal, just in tactic or maybe in timing. If we have people on assistance, there should be a path to get them off the assistance – I think most people would agree with that. My point is that if people go on the dole for legitimate reasons (and yes, there are legitimate reasons whether you choose to believe it or not) we should find appropriate ways to get them off. That way may be in training, work incentives or even drug treatment. Poverty is an illness of society, not just of the person that is poor. I support using your (and mine, BTW) tax dollars for the good of society. We may have a difference of opinion of what those needs are, but that is the purpose of tax dollars.

You would think by now he would at least have a MySpace page:confused: Sorry, just trying to inject a little humor. If I believed in a God, I would pick one that has a sense of humor, just so that he wouldn’t smite me for a comment like that:tt2:

Or… We could think outside of the box. Lets just say for example that we are paying somebody $600 a month in assistance and they are found to be a chronic drug user. We could reduce their assistance by the amount necessary to rehabilitate them. Once they have shown improvement or success with the drug problem they are able to claim the full benefit. Why does every idea form the right have to be so harsh sounding and every idea from the left so wimpy? Think from the middle people!!!. Come up with ideas that help people and make society better. Is the concept really that hard to grasp?

Some on here may be surprised to hear that I would not necessarily be opposed to this concept. I don’t think I would make it quite as cut and dry as you stated it, but I could see that as a reasonable option. Just like I have no problem with the government exerting board pressure on the Auto Companies after we essentially bought them. If the government is subsidizing an individual by way of public assistance, then I think that invites the government to set some ground rules on how that person chooses to live their life. I may not cut assistance immediately after a positive test, but I think being forced into rehab would be totally appropriate.