I’m not a true believer, so I can’t help you out there.

My main point, here, is that the right-wing equivalent of social anarchists in the United States hold far more influence over the political system, relatively speaking.

I also think that your definition of radical left doesn’t really bear out historically or currently. You’re right: you’re defining “radical” as “policies you don’t like.”

Massive regulation? Where exactly?

You think he wanted to bail out private industry? That has been one of the more hotly debated topics and I don’t think it’s a political issue. The question of whether or not the banks and/or car industry should have been bailed out has been tackled by economists smarter than you or I and I have yet to see a consensus come out of it. It certainly wasn’t a radical left decision; you think they want to help out banks???

The bank regulation bill that was passed has been widely criticized as being too favorable to the banks and not likely to change the way banks operate at all.

How is health care any more under the control of the government now than it was before? Medicaid was expanded to a certain degree, but it’s going to cover people who didn’t have health insurance before. It’s raising the floor, not creating a new system. And that was the point, the help cover part of the ~15% of Americans who weren’t covered. That number will go down to ~5% from what I’ve read, but they didn’t get there just by expanding Medicaid. If anything, the new healthcare bill is too favorable to corporations, not the government. They are getting a large influx of clients and really only had to give up one thing to get it.

You realize that the upper tax bracket in the US is one of the lowest of any Westernized country, right? It’s basically the exact opposite of extremely high.

the US owned like 80% of GM
this strategy was started by bush and paulson with the wall street bailout

i am not a leftist but it is not fair to call Obama extreme

not by a long shot. There is not nearly enough regulation, and bailouts are more a sign of private industry controlling the government, not vice versa.

I think Garoon’s points (laid out elsewhere in the thread) are pretty much spot on. To the extent that there is an organized “radical left” in American politics, they exert comparatively little influence on the day-to-day machinations of our government. I’m pretty pleased about that. On the other hand, we have large segments of the GOP congressional delegation who think evolution is a discredited scientific theory; believe that Jesus Christ walked the Earth alongside dinosaurs; believe that our country was “founded on Christian principles” (or believe in some cognate variation on that theme); and believe that the Laffer curve is something other than empirically demonstrable falsehood.

It’s a tough damned balancing act for these folks. God ordained an uninhibited free market and admonished regulators to stay out of the corporate boardrooms. Meanwhile, our congressional pharisees continue to take a keen interest in what happens in American bedrooms.

But really what bothers me most about the GOP (and the Dems are by no means guiltless in this respect) is that they continue to elect people who are simply ignorant of political and constitutional theory. It’s their persistent denial of empirical reality. It’s their steadfast refusal to acknowledge, even for a second, that politics is something more than Christian or neo-Hayekian tribalism. It’s their stupidity— their total, breathtaking, seemingly irredeemable stupidity.

…and have been for a long time.

That’s because you are left. I know that because you think of the right who wants to reduce taxes and government reach to merely 80’s levels (God forbid founder’s intent) and you are considering that radical.

Where did I write anything resembling any of that?

Also, I disagree with your definition of the radical right and left.

So what it comes down to is that maybe I’m overestimating Glenn Beck’s influence on American politics?

That could be, I guess, but in relative terms, the fact that the radical right is getting more airtime on political shows that are listened to by millions of people, and that the radical left isn’t — if we assume that neither group has much influence on the “inside” of politics at any level — suggests to me that the radical right does, in fact, have relatively more political influence than the radical left?

she’s not.

Led to the gilded age and the Great Depression after that.

Sorry to hear that about your wife/great to hear she is a survivor. Did she do chemo?

My dad died of lung cancer when I was a teenager. Watched him wither away more from the effects of the chemotherapy than the cancer. It’s tough sauce.

I saw a documentary where they had a woman who got some debilitating disease, I forget which, but it was enough that she couldn’t even do most daily tasks, much less hold a job.

The insurance company’s recission department combed through her medical records from the past 20 years or so. 15 years prior, her dad had died, and she had seen a psychiatrist a couple of times for grief counseling, and had been prescribed a few valium.

Well, one of the questions on her health care form was “Have you ever sought treatment for mental illness?” Mind you, she had filled out her curent health care plan appllication 12 years after this incident. Even if it was last month, I don’t think most reasonable, intelligent people would consider this “seeking treatment for mental illness.”

She checked “no.” She was denied for falsification of her application.

Not including pre-existing conditions shows a poor theoretical understanding of how disease processes work and seems to defeat the purpose of medical coverage. If health insurance companies don’t think that they can afford to cover people who already have some form of disease, that they can only afford to cover healthy people, then they can kindly step out of the business for somebody else to fulfill that role, be it government or non-profit.