Yes, you parents are such heroic altruists. Let’s double your child tax credit yet again.

His odious homophobic views aside, Ferguson’s views on childless people are fairly mainstream. I’ve had more than one liberal call me selfish and immature for choosing not to have children. I’ve even been told I should get less Social Security for my failure to produce a future worker to pay into the system. By a liberal. Don’t get me started on the tax code…

“Somebody had gone out of their way to stuff into the very center of the pile, not the bottom, mind you, but the dead center of the pile, a shitty diaper,” she said.

Another example of how Parenthood Makes You A Better Person(TM).

But your silly data doesn’t produce convenient scapegoats to blame election losses on.

Dems continue to hippie punch because it worked a time or two back in the 90s. These days it doesn’t impress moderates at all. I’m just shocked it’s still going on with such vigor this close to the election. If you’ve worked on a campaign you know that you win by getting your supporters out and persuading as many fence-sitters as you can. You don’t waste a moment of time with voters who absolutely won’t vote for your candidate under any circumstances, regardless of which side they’re coming from.

Yeah, them and the low efficacy ’08 voters who aren’t as enthusiastic this time around. Those groups combined are a way bigger number of voters than disgruntled DFHs and 99.9% of them have no earthly idea who Jane Hamsher is.

In all the bleating about the importance of the precious, precious mandate to curb “adverse selection” they just assumed states would go along with the Medicaid expansion. Now we have a REAL adverse selection problem with red states refusing to implement it.

Unfortunately that won’t matter to red state legislatures such as ours in AZ. On purely ideological grounds they will reject this. AZ was covering “childless adults” until last year because voters had approved a measure to provide Medicaid to everyone up to 100% FPL in 2000. When the budget crisis hit they found an excuse to end that and they have already indicated they will not reinstate it. Out of pure hatred for Obama and the desire to make the poor suffer.

Exactly what I thought when I read that. WTF?

In 2011 the AZ Legislature refused federal unemployment extensions that would have cost us nothing. They did so because UI makes people “lazy” and few of the Republican legislators cited the federal deficit as a reason. So yeah, never underestimate red states’ ability to cut their own noses off to spite their faces if it means poor people suffer.

They know but they don’t care. They’re not spending no money to help no poor minorities.

The Arizona Legislature refused federal unemployment extensions that would have cost the state nothing, simply because the Republican majority thinks UI benefits averaging $200 a week make people lazy. Oh, also it would add to the federal deficit. We are not dealing with rational people here.

Hospitals were very active here in AZ opposing cuts to Medicaid. Low reimbursements are better than no reimbursements and loss of Medicaid funding would contribute to the loss of thousands of jobs and shutting down several hospitals and clinics.

I’ve said it before: I honestly think many proponents of the mandate are simply old grouches who relish the idea of forcing those damn kids to buy insurance. I have tried, with no success, to persuade them that the law is salvageable without the mandate using many of the cogent arguments Jon has presented here. They typically respond in a stick-their-fingers-in-their-ears fashion and repeat talking points about adverse selection and free riders and those damn kids who think they’re invincible.

Mandates have become to (some) Democrats what tort reform is to Republicans. As we all know, Republicans think health care costs are high because litigious lowlifes constantly sue doctors to get a payday. A lot of Dems, OTOH, are truly convinced that there are masses of young healthy people with very high incomes who are willfully and wantonly withholding money from the system and if we just make those selfish whippersnappers buy insurance everyone’s premiums will magically go down. Because, you know, health insurance works exactly like car insurance, which is why Dem pundits and politicians use that analogy to compare people without health insurance to uninsured motorists.