BJean

Thanks for the advice heartfire!

Isn't that the best feeling?! My DH keeps telling me that I'm wearing sizes that are too big for me. I'm so used to wearing tents that cover everything, I'm uncomfortable with clothes that actually fit. Maybe when I lose 20 or so more lbs, I'll get over that.

I'd like to see you in a bikini, Kartman. Whoo hoo, cheap thrills! Seriously you peeps are doing great! I remember when I went from a size "Omar the tentmaker" to a normal ladies 14. Now I'm wanting to get into a petite size 14. You all keep up the good work!!! bjean

Horrible if it keeps you upset, great if it inspires you to learn something, eh?

Hey Rodriguez, it sure looks peaceful around here. I think this thread was about to be burnt to the ground. And btw, I thought your points about AIDS were spot on. Glad you had the ammunition at your fingertips. I am sick and tired of people bashing gay people for that disease. Was it just me or did she intimate that it was a curse? I've heard that before, by some of the Bush politicos among others.

Btw, you never had to go off topic to bring religion into the discussion. But it was like you hijacked every thread. You didn't want to relate religion to any of the topics, you wanted to dominate every topic and you judged everyone else who posted in your usual extremely negative way.

patty with all due respect... the reason I participated in the discussion about AIDS and the rest is because it was being discussed here and I wanted to participate. I didn't bring it up, you know? I think you're the hypocrite and for some extremely obvious reasons. They run much deeper than the reason you used for accusing me of being a hyprocrite (for posting on a subject being discussed.) I think that you're probably quite willing to jump off this thread because you can't possibly keep up with all of the negative responses to your posts. Oh you've done a good job of prattling on after everyone posts, but you're obviously losing the battle. There are a few people here who have stated that they are atheists, but the majority do not say that they are non-believers or that they are not religious. If we go by your posts, you think you have the only key to the Bible, religion and spritiualism, the only one who has the knowledge that allows people to get into heaven, and yet you constantly put down your fellow man for nearly every reason in the book. So you come across as the hypocrite and that is why so many people jump on you full force. If you were the kind of person that demonstrated that she deserves to be respected for her beliefs, people would be deferential to you at least and they might argue a bit but they wouldn't get so outraged by the continual hypocrisy laced throughout your posts. See you over on the religious threads. Buh bye.

Yes plain, we do own a small business and we do offer a plan for medical insurance. Do you? Yes plain, I have talked to several doctors at great length about the insurance companies and what they have done to the quality of health care in America. Have you? I learned that not only have the insurance companies adversely affected the kind of care and medicine that are dispensed, it has trickled down to the medical schools. The best and brightest used to go to medical school in this country. Now they don't. And I challenge you to get a good ole' homegrown doctor for all your special needs in America. There's a good chance English will not be their first language. And most of them are not even educated in America. I know that you live in Texas, unless you lied about that, and I would imagine that you have it better than in most large cities with regard to the medical care and doctors who treat you. But in many large cities, it is true. How many large cities have you lived in? How many doctors have you seen who specialize in one type of medicine? What you're saying is that you believe you trust insurance companies to take better care of your medical needs than the government, with its' checks and balances, could. I disagree with you. It has been proven what the free market winds up giving us: inferior and even questionable decisions about our health. And once again, it's all about greed. What started out being a seemingly great idea - medical insurance for everyone to cover everything - has turned out to cause Americans as a whole to have inferior medical care than in many other industrialized nations. If you haven't experienced the decline of medical care in the U.S., then you're one of the lucky ones. I have lived in a country where the government was involved in providing medical care. Have you? My family and I were treated within that system for all of our medical needs. Have you ever experienced that kind of medical care? It was a much better system than what we have here in the U.S. Sorry to burst your bubble. I think that maybe you need to prove to me exactly why YOU are right instead of just declaring that the capitalistic approach to medicine is superior by conjuring up some hypothetical scenarios. Because it is my experience that says there is all evidence to the contrary, dear sir.

plain: " Single- payer system will totally abolish private insurance. Who can compete with the government when it comes to negotiating contracts, or buying power? Single-payer will end private health insurance..." Oh my, would that it were true! The insurance companies are the bane of our existence. They've got us all by the kahoonas and have for a long time. They're the reason we have the problems we have with our medical system. It is a complicated situation but it all falls back on the insurance companies in the end. It's partially our fault that it got so out of hand. It started with escalating health care costs, sometimes due to malpractice lawsuits. Now I think people should be able to have redress when they have been a victim of genuine medical malpractice. But the awards got out of hand and the doctors decided they had to be protected from those big awards that juries were willing to award their victims. So the whole thing snowballed and now we have lousy medical care for the masses in this country. If you are very wealthy you can get good care, but if you depend on insurance, or if you can't even pay for insurance, you are s$$t out of luck.

Oh yeah and plain, it didn't go unnoticed that she was for Ron Paul. I remember that he was your man too. Hope it didn't interfere with your rockin' sense of humor. Wonder who did the official numbers that claim that nearly all black voters voted for Barack Obama because of his skin color? That's seriously screwed up folks.

plain: "That's funny that you see self hate because she disagrees with Obama's politics." Really? Did you read her piece? It had a whole lot to do with her own personal history. You're ignoring that because you agree with the politics of the Republicans that she infused into her self-hate story. Cleo'sMom, excellent posts. Right on all counts. Don't you love the way the Republicans rewrite history?

Regarding the AIDS virus as a homosexual disease: "Your source is either a complete moron or is having a little fun with you because he believes YOU are a complete moron. I'll leave it to you to decide which. HIV entered the human population sometime during the early part of the 20th century in sub-Saharan Africa as a result of inadvertent transmission to humans of viruses that were already present in monkeys, probably as a result of blood exposure through hunting and butchering." Joel M. Gallant, M.D. There was an unbelievable amount of incorrect information that was passed around by the media that originated from various sources, including misinformation and conjecture put forth by our own medical profession. That information included the assumption that you are making, patty, that gay people started the virus and spread it. The fact is that it is a blood borne disease. Anytime there is blood transmission from infected monkeys or humans to others, there is an opportunity for the infection to be spread. Sex never has to be involved at all. There is evidence that intravenous drug users were the true culprits in the early spread of the disease. I have a friend who was a nurse who accidentally pricked her skin with a needle that she had used to draw blood from an infected child. Although she was treated immediately and monitored by the staff in her hospital, she contracted HIV from that exposure. To call AIDS a curse is utterly ignorant and typical of the garbage that some extremists use to fan the flames of intolerance and bigotry. The fact that you have bought into that and have actually posted it on a public website, reveals so much about who you are, patty.

patty on a different thread a while back, the discussion kept getting off the main topic of the thread. A regular poster, I believe it was plain, shut that thread down and opened another thread addressing the discussion that was inappropriately dominating the earlier one. I figured we shouldn't go that route here and that maybe you would just voluntarily take your religion discussion to the thread that you started (or is it threads?) on religion. I have never blocked anyone and don't intend to start now. I haven't said that you can't post anything you want to post. I merely made a courteous suggestion, hoping that you would understand why I suggested it and that you would respond by politely moving your rants about religion to the religion threads. Obviously you are having a field day and you probably think that you are winning souls over to Christ. Do you think that? Or are you just getting a thrill over the constant rebuttals that you get from all sides? As for me, you asked a question of me and the answer is: I do feel the way I do.

patty, I have a suggestion. I noticed that you have started a thread with a topic of religion. It is flourishing. Why don't you keep your sermons for that thread? Then when any of us get a fond yearning to read a patty sermon, or even to argue against its' merits, we can go there and get a good dose of it. As it is, you seem to be polluting every thread on rants and raves.

Boy I feel very sorry for her. Her self-hate is so deeply ingrained that she will never see her way clear to climb out. Her essay reveals many things, one of which is that sometimes an education can serve to further cloud a person's mind rather than opening it to new possibilities.

Well this place seems to have some kind of gravitational hold on me. Everytime I've decided I've about had enough I get pulled back in by some interesting thread. Go figure.

I guess the Swine Flu that has just been declared a pandemic was caused from some non-born again who kissed a pig. Wonder why a vision of Sarah Palin just flashed through my head?

Have you even looked at the quality of life in other developed nations, patty? If you measure our quality of life by the number of possessions we have, I'm pretty sure we win. Otherwise, in several cases we surely do not. Have you read the newspaper or watched the news lately? The killings in our schools, the murder of a doctor because of a radical extremist viewpoint contrary to the law, murder of a man just yesterday brought on by bigotry and ignorance, someone in Arkansas right before that, swine flu pandemic, near collapse of our economy, hundreds of thousands of people out of work, deaths in our hospitals from an extremely virulent virus, deaths in our hospitals from human error, people who are sick and injured being turned out into the street from our hospitals because of no insurance and lack of funds, do I need to go on? Just because you're enjoying life and you are quite comfortable with turning your back on people who need food in spite of the fact that they smoke, it doesn't mean that everyone else in this nation is better off than they might be if they lived in Sweden, for instance. If you're saying God gives us free will and then you tell us that bad things happen to us "... because of his starting to remove his blessings" you are cherry picking what you want to believe from the Bible and you're probably enhancing and embellishing as you go along to suit your beliefs on a daily basis. Yeah, I know, you'll come back at me with more arguments that you didn't say (God said them.) Color me unimpressed and turned completely off.

patty: "We can take just one town as an example: An Historian, Roger Mcgrath, went back through court documents and newspaper reports to reconstruct the actual crime rates in the five-year period when Bodie, California was booming.(1870's) The town of Bodie had 31 murders, for an annual rate of 116 per 100,000, twenty times the national rate for the U.S. in 2007. Even our most murderous cities like Baltimore and Detroit have murder rates less than half of Bodie’s. "The point is that crime ALWAYS steadily increases. It never decreases. No matter how hard people try to make laws and stall crime, it only gets worse. America's decline is due to God's removal of his blessings from us and the moral decline of it's people due to thier disbelief in Him." patty that is an amazing post. It is typical of right wing rethoric, which are often filled with extreme situations and data that may or may not have any bearing whatsoever on the topic in question. What about the town down the road? You know, the one where there were no crimes during the period you cited. I have so much more to say on the subject, but I have to leave my keyboard. My mind is still reeling from your inane posts. If you were a true historian, you'd know that cutting off people's hands, stoning them, hanging them in the public square never put an end to crime. And if you would just logic things through to their natural end, you'd realize that the population isn't decreasing so why should we expect crime to decrease? I'll tell you once more so that you will maybe go do some of your own research, capital punishment does not deter crime. There are volumes written on the topic. (The volumes I speak of are not right wing in nature, of course.)

rodriguez you can be pretty dang funny, you know that?

That was very thoughtful heartfire. I actually think my time here at LBT is mostly done. I can't imagine it being as fun and entertaining and as happy a place without green as my sidekick.

kartman: thank you very much for your 6 years of service!

patty, regarding her thoughts on how people get to heaven: "... I said that every person makes their own choice about if they want to go to heaven or not." Didn't you explain to us that the only way for that to happen is for us to become "born again" Christians? And that becoming "born again" is a direct command from God if we want to go to heaven? Why do I keep getting the feeling that you're talking in riddles? My apologies to the other gentle readers. This has become a seriously nauseating line of debate. But just when I think I understand what patty has declared to be the gospel, she does a retreat of sorts and says it is really different than what I've quoted her as saying. We probably all post too quickly in the heat of battle. I'm sure I'm as guilty as anyone else. After this long day at the keyboard, I am exhausted. I will try to be back at it early in the morning. I'm sure that patty will be waiting for me, guns cocked and loaded. Yee-haw.

Rodriguez I have a lot of respect for the military and I care a great deal about them and their families. I know that their job is often very dirty and sometimes thankless. We could not be the country that we are without our men and women in uniform. That is why I find it criminal that the Bush administration sent us into the war in Iraq. Many countries believe that he should be tried for war crimes. It has been said that some countries have made it clear that George W. Bush is not welcome in their country and that they will arrest him for war crimes if he sets foot in their country. Then there is the fact that his administration made all kinds of fluffy noise about how much they loved the military, but when it came to providing more benefits for them upon their return from war, they were against it. I certainly do not blame the military personnel for these things. I blame the politicians. I do have hope that the current administration sees things differently and will work to increase the pay and benefits for our military men and women.

"I can’t put her on ignore. She has opinions that are shared by others and there are still others that may be swayed by what she has to say. I personally feel obliged to challenge her on these issues because I find them to be wrong on so many levels. I think it would be a tragedy if Patty saying what she says convinces even one person that taking away a woman’s right to choose, further discriminating against gays, or forcing religion into schools is ok." kartman, you took the words right out of my mouth on this!