Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) lays the smackdown on Republicans who claim to support a free market but are opposed to the repeal of the antitrust exemption for health insurance companies -- and gets put in the House of Representative's equivalent of a penalty box. Parliamentary proceedings can be fun:



Background: in the House, if a representative makes remarks during a debate that another representative finds inappropriate, that representative may move to have the speaker's "words taken down". The transcriptionist reads the statements back to the chair, and if the chair determines believes the statements to be inappropriate, then the speaker must step down and is not allowed to speak for the rest of the day without special permission.

More background: The smiley old guy you see at one point is a representative from Oregon. The reason the chair recognizes him is because he was allowing Weiner to speak on his behalf (i.e., Weiner is speaking during the time allotted for the Oregon rep).

Trivia: Jon Stewart and Anthony Weiner are old friends. Stewart's roommate was Weiner's girlfriend back in the day, and Weiner practically lived with Stewart during that time.

i love shit like this, it's fun. i wish i had a more thoughtful response to give you other than "i like it".


ummmmmmmmm, so do you agree with what he says? that the republican party is subsidiary of the insurance industry

Well, the trite but mostly correct response is that just about any politician is a "wholly-owned subsidiary" of some industry or group.

You have to look at the context of this debate for a good answer, though. The debate was about repealing the anti-trust exemption for insurance companies. Monopolistic practices go against the nature of a free market. I think that it's interesting that the Republican Party claims to support free market economics, but is standing in the way of numerous health care reforms that would promote a truly free market. Some money is changing hands somewhere.

(And, of course, there's the even clearer case of Sen. Joe Lieberman, whose connections to the health care industry are quite obvious.)