Scott Fritzshall

No, none of the Tea Party people voted for him in the first place and all of them already thought he was a Communist Fascist Muslim Atheist who was born in Kenya. They're incoherently mad because someone they didn't vote for is in the White House and because ethnic minorities now appear to have more of a say in who gets elected than they do. They're mad about the tax increases that don't exist and they don't want socialist medicine in their Medicare. If anyone is being disillusioned currently it's the left.

Also, how many more times is Obama going to have to reneg on every slightly progressive promise he made before you admit that he's basically a pretty conservative president who just happens to be black and a Democrat? Every time he says something like "we're going to start treating homosexuals like equal human beings," he has his DoJ defend the Defense of Marriage Act by comparing homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality. Every time you insist that he's engineering a government takeover of healthcare, he proposes a plan with a crippled public option that would cover less than 5% of the population. Every time he hates America because he sat in church with a guy who talked (correctly) about how 9/11 was the direct result of our foreign policy, he increases the defense budget, escalates war against Afghanistan, and makes virtually no effort to actually close Guantanamo. Every time he talks about how we're not going to torture people anymore and is accused of wanting to destroy America, his actual actions do nothing to close black sites or end extraordinary rendition, and in fact now he introduces the concept of "preventative detainment" to continue to imprison prisoners who have been found innocent. Right now he's talking about reforming regulation of the financial industry and I'm pretty sure that Beck is going to call him a communist for it and you're going to agree with that, but in actuality he waited until the urgency has dissipated, none of the regulations he's proposing would have prevented the collapse last year, and he's going to end up compromising on even that to a set of new laws that essentially have no effect. And every time you waste your time crying about how some guy he hired to oversee an inherently Capitalistic department is a communist, he's giving out tax cuts because Republicans asked for it. You're whining about stupid, irrelevant crap because if you actually looked at anything meaningful that he's doing and not just saying, you'd have to realize that he's actually doing stuff that you approve of and you wouldn't be able to sustain this ridiculous idea that you're being persecuted because you lost an election. The only things I can think of offhand that Obama is doing that is more liberal than what McCain would have done is that he's not actively trying to provoke war with Iran (watch me be proven wrong in the next year) and that he's apparently not going to prevent states from having medical marijuana stores. Oh, and that he's allowing Holder to attempt to prosecute people from the previous administration for breaking the law w/r/t tortute, but that's also not going to end in anything meaningful beyond maybe sending some lackeys to jail. So at what point will you admit that he's basically doing what a Republican president would do except that he's slightly less hawkish and slightly less anti-intellectual?

Does it not strike you as a bit odd that an administration which you claim is incredibly left wing is so terrified of being perceived as left-wing that it is apparently allowing Glenn Beck to dictate its decisions?

I hadn't heard about that, so I just looked it up. I'm simultaneously not in favor of what this guy did, and not in favor of Glenn Beck (where you obviously got this, as well as most of what you've posted in this thread) distorting it.

Having this conversation with you, typing out actual arguments, only to be met with responses that amount to nothing more than "no I disagree" is quite frustrating and reminds me more than a little of this classic Onion article from several years ago.

You really haven't paid attention to a single thing that's been posted in this thread by anyone other than yourself, have you?

Yeah basically you're required to pay the insurance companies, and if you can't afford what they want to charge you, then tax money fills in the gap. So basically everyone in the country will be subsidizing the insurance industry's profits. You also won't be allowed to chose the public option if your employer offers you coverage, even if it's really awful coverage. The "public option" is being set up to be as weak as possible, so that as few people as possible are able to use it, and so that it won't offer any real competition to the insurance companies because that would be unfair.

You're going to have better luck with a camera rig than by warping your images. The rig you're looking for is something similar to the "Crazy Horse" rig that was used in 300. You can also look at Ocula from The Foundry as far as stereo image tools go, but I don't know if it will fit your needs and it's going to be really processing-intensive and it's probably never going to look like what you want it to- at least not automatically. Also make sure your cameras are genlocked when you shoot.

http://www.fxguide.com/article556.html

There are some companies who are developing HDR video cameras. The only way I can think of to make this work with current cameras is to use the same sort of beam-splitting rig that was used on 300 to simultaneously film the same image through a single lens with 3 different cameras set at different exposure levels.

David, how do you feel about the fact that President Barack Obama is going to murder you in the secret FEMA death camps that he's building? Additionally, how long do you think it will be until another angry white person murders a bunch of people because Fox News told him the world was about to end?

So you're ok with the fact that you yourself are paying much more as a result?

Out of curiosity, David, what would you propose as a solution to those who choose not to purchase health insurance?

The number of uninsured is the same regardless of how much you try to minimize it. Undocumented immigrants still need healthcare just like the rest of us, and our failure to cover them actually ends up costing us more money. They, like the rest of the uninsured, end up using emergency rooms for primary care, which ends up raising the costs for the rest of us. The remainder of the uninsured tend to be the young and the poor. By "MSLSD" I'm assuming you're referring to MSNBC? The same "liberal" network that regularly gives everyone's favorite racist grandpa Pat Buchanan airtime and treats him as though his opinion was worthwhile? The same Pat Buchanan that just this week published an article defending Hitler? Just checking. You bring up the Constitution for the second time, again without any specific reference. Again I'll remind you of Article I, Section 8, which explicitly permits Congress to levy taxes to provide for the welfare of the nation. The idea of allowing people to purchase private insurance across state lines is an utterly horrible one. We already tried this with Credit Cards. Banks issuing credit cards used to be limited by the laws of the states that their customers lived in, until we changed that law. Almost immediately, every credit card company moved to the state with the loosest laws, and begun to charge usurious interest rates to everyone in the country. Why exactly would this not happen with insurance providers? Some state will want more tax revenue, so they'll drop all of their regulatory laws, which will entire every insurance company to move there. Then they'll jack up the prices and provide even less care, for everyone in the country, because there is no longer anyone stopping them. It is substantially not true. Millions of people, including many who are technically insured, cannot afford health care, and so they avoid necessary treatment. There was a huge event pretty close to me last month where doctors filled a stadium and gave free treatment to thousands. People lined up for days in order to get treatment for conditions which they've had for years, which they had been unable to have treated because they could not afford it.

Oh also, the "high tax rate" that Richard pays for his health care is actually less than ours; we spend more tax dollars on health care than any other advanced country because single-payer insurance is inherently much cheaper than a private system. You could start by addressing that if you like.

It's really cute that when you actually engage in discussion here, it's to haggle over an insignificant throwaway rather than actually addressing the substance of the conversation. Would you care to back up a single one of the arguments you've made thus far?

TAXES??? You poor, oppressed thing. Here in the US, we cut taxes all the time! And then we wonder why we have have crumbling infrastructure, no social safety net, little available health care, etc. Reagan told us that we could have something for nothing though, so we got rid of all that stuff., Instead, we put our tax dollars where they belong- into the pockets of billionaires and into the defense industry so that they can blow up impoverished brown people and develop multi-billion dollar weapons to fight enemies that haven't existed in decades. And, of course, into top-secret illegal wiretapping programs to spy on us. We would never spend money on giving people health care though, that's just Orwellian (we read 1984 in high school but forgot most of it, it was about the horrors of the government paying for your operations, though, right?).

I also just saw this somewhere else and thought it was probably an accurate reflection of your mindset:

Let's see some evidence for what you're saying. Back this up. Since your assertions are "Absolutely" fact, you should have no problem with this.

Richard, why are you failing to mention the death panels? All Canandians must appear before a death panel each time they want to see their doctor or have a medical procedure performed, in order to determine if they're a productive enough citizen deserving of receiving care. If not, they're told that they'll just have to die! I know this is true because both Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have said so, and they also said that anyone who says otherwise is being paid by Obama to spread lies. Why aren't you telling the truth about how no one in Canada is able to receive health care after they turn 65 because they're no longer valuable? The truth must be told!

For instance...?

I'm fairly far left, and there are few to no mainstream voices that are anywhere close to my views. The far left barely exists in this country.

Yeah basically, except that we actually spend more tax money on healthcare than Scandinavia, or anyone else for that matter.

Rasmussen has been noted as being kind of a "take this with a grain of salt" kind of organization, although to be fair most of the pollsters have been dodgy at one point or another. The thing with polls is that you've really got to check the methodology and the questions they're actually asking, because I've definitely seen some Rasmussen polls that asked incredibly leading questions. This particular poll seems pretty straightforward in its questioning, however, so I can't really find fault with it. And honestly, given the climate of the last few weeks, I don't find the results surprising in the least. There are a whole hell of a lot of people who are really angry about healthcare reform. The problem is that they're angry at things that aren't even part of any of the proposed bills, like "death panels," "rationing," "government takeover of healthcare," "loss of choice of doctors," etc.

My understanding is that there are a bunch of hypothetical bills floating around, and that a few groups are trying to synthesize them into something that will eventually be voted on. Whatever ends up coming out is pretty much guaranteed to be absolute garbage, and it's going to end up making things a lot worse. I theoretically agree with you on the issue that it's a pretty big problem that congress doesn't tend to read bills before voting on them, but I think it's really amusing to hear it coming from conservatives given that they seem to be pretty highly in favor of the PATRIOT act, which was an even more sweeping bill that was also like 1000 pages long, which was passed before anyone had read it. It's also pretty amusing that the ones who have actually read any of the current bills seem to wildly (and purposely?) misinterpret things like "allows for voluntary end-of-life counseling" into "mandates death panels."