Muslim nightmare lands.

Yet I’ve been to most of those countries and they really don’t strike me as mini-USSRs.

The Muslims are not a majority yet, so they are kept out of sight of tourists. Or to be more accurate, tourists like you are kept out of their enclaves, for your own safety.

You think you’ll have a private say in things then?

Not even google could defy the NSA, even as they kept saying “do no evil”.

Hahaha, very funny, Ymarkasar. No, I work in the private sector tech industry, thank God.

>actually, Fox doesn’t do it

I’ve heard that before, yet there are numerous examples of the contrary, even within the supposedly evenhanded news division. There’s the fairly well-known exposé of the internal workings of the news division at Fox, where former executives have come forward detailing the memos that come from the top regarding how to talk about news stories in a way that makes conservative and Republican viewpoints appear in a better light. For instance, some examples:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Fox_News

http://mediamatters.org/research/2004/07/14/33-internal-fox-editorial-memos-reviewed-by-mmf/131430

http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=3395

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/29/i_was_a_liberal_mole_at_fox_news_from_bill_oreilly_to_roger_ailes_heres_all_the_inside_dope/

Ultimately, however, as usual I’m not really that interested in bashing Fox News or conservatives — I’m mostly posting here to argue against the notion that liberals march in lockstep towards some sort of “government takeover of everything” agenda which seems to be the bugaboo of a lot of your commenters here. That is patently absurd and has never been the belief system or goal of mainstream liberals now or ever, even if it might have been the goal of some radicals in the 60’s before they grew up and learned better. I daresay none of the 99% of your liberal friends and relatives actually believe that the world would be better off if the government actually ran everything, and almost all of them would fight to stop that from ever happening.

In other words, no, Obamacare is not the beginning of the end of freedom. If Obamacare is the beginning of the end of freedom, then the British, the Swedes, Canadians, French, etc., all must live in Stalinist nightmare lands, because their health care systems are about 1000x more government-centric than Obamacare. Yet I’ve been to most of those countries and they really don’t strike me as mini-USSRs.

I personally think that NHS in the UK sucks and that keeping private incentive structures is better than what they do in the UK. So that puts me to the right of Jolly Ole England’s health care policy. Am I going to be kicked out of the secret liberal conspiracy?

As opposed to what, the government IT contracts you were working on before the website launched?

Or the contracts your buddies and social circle have been paid for to do?

I suppose in that kind of job, ideological loyalty will be held at a premium. If so, your presence here can have interesting consequences for you down the line.

That’s the liberal line, all right: Fox does it!

No, actually, Fox doesn’t do it. Fox has opinion people (talk show type people) who do it, but Fox’s straight journalism is quite straight, and in fact doesn’t lean very far to the right at all. The Times news stories are very often opinion journalism masquerading as news journalism, quite a different story.

Oh, and by the way, I’m not saying this because I’m conservative. It’s one of the things I noticed at the beginning of my change experience, and one of the many drivers of that change: I noticed to my surprise (as a liberal) that the conservative news reporters were far more objective than the liberal ones. And I was being pretty objective, I think, because at the time I was a liberal and had been for my entire life.

>if a Republican does it

I’m not claiming that the NYT isn’t biased at all, but I daresay that it isn’t as systematically biased as Fox News, which does precisely what you’re saying, in reverse, often comically reversing views they expressed in the past depending on whether an R or D is doing it. When it comes to the NYT, I think the judgement varies depending on the story, but it’s certainly not the case that every editorial judgement is simply based on party.

You’d best be careful of failing your review quota.

The last guy that did that got gunned down by Mexican cartels supplied by Eric Holder’s ATF, Obama’s right hand man. Although you may not think yourself important for a drone strike, Obama is always interested in seeing humans die on that tv of his, so don’t think you’re safe.

We also know that Obama is paying for websites and information. His paid propaganda agents are in the news, where they cover more people for the buck. So if you’re in IT or some such company, you’re being scouted for your loyalties and then paid out of the enslaved debt slaves in the US.

So how much money did your company and friends take out for their “new and improved” healthcare website proposal? 1.2 billion this time, as opposed to the 650billion last time, is it.

Right.

Oh, they (the editors) have a different kind of judgment, all right.

And different criteria. Such as, for example (the main one): political party. What is made into a big brouhaha if a Republican does it, and covered every day as negative front page news (and is often misrepresented, lied about, misquoted, and/or exaggerated to make it seem worse) is almost always hushed up if a Democrat does it, or covered up, or spun, or blamed on a Republican anyway, or excused, or downplayed, or lied about to make it seem better.

The phenomenon is so ubiquitous as to be almost humorous if it weren’t so dangerous. And you don’t even notice it! Or you pretend not to notice it; I really can never tell whether you are as naive as you sound, or as unaware, or whether you’re just tweaking us.

I vote: naive and unaware. But I’m not at all sure.

I think that there are structural reasons why the Federal government will likely never be able to execute IT projects as efficiently as states, or the private sector, for all the same reasons you do, most likely: too big and too bureaucratic. But, they can probably do somewhat better.

>keepers

My overlords are paying me overtime to sit in my jeans on the floor of my apartment, typing to you on my laptop for all the tens or hundreds of people who read this blog. Given how nearly totally I’ve failed to convince anyone here of anything over the years, I daresay they’re not getting their money’s worth.