In case your week has been all-death-panels all-the-time, here’s Paul Slansky’s News Index of what else happened this week. It includes the totally shocking news that Jenny Sanford is moving out of the governor’s mansion and back to the family’s Charleston home. No word on whether she’s changing the locks as well.
It’s gotten pushed to the background this last week in all of the uproar about town hall protests and death panels, but the question of whether a public option would include abortion coverage remains controversial for a fair number of Catholics and evangelicals who are otherwise supportive of health reform. Before Congress broke for recess [...]
You would think that if Republicans wanted to totally mischaracterize a health care provision and demagogue it like nobody’s business, they would at least pick something that the vast majority of them hadn’t already voted for just a few years earlier. Because that’s not just shameless, it’s stupid. Yes, that’s right. Remember the 2003 Medicare [...]
I just got an email helpfully alerting me to a “Hands Off My HealthCare” rally this Saturday during the president’s visit to Grand Junction, Colorado. Conservative activists will be gathering “to protest Barak Obama’s socialized medicine proposal” and have been asked to wear solid red, white, or blue clothing so they won’t be mistaken for [...]
Christopher Hitchens begins his review of Elizabeth Edwards’ latest book (which reminds me–you stay classy, John Edwards), by complaining about the condescending fingerprints of her publisher on the text. “On page 88, [Broadway Books] makes Elizabeth Edwards tell us something that ‘Edmund Wilson, the incomparable twentieth-century literary critic, said.’” Like Hitchens, I hate the fact [...]
At his town hall in New Hampshire on Tuesday, President Obama again positioned himself as an opponent of the drug companies. One of the things I want to do is to speed up generics getting introduced to the marketplace, because right now drug companies — (applause) — right now drug companies are fighting so that [...]
The former Alaskan governor, Sarah Palin, better explains today why she is concerned about President Obama’s support for allowing doctors to offer living will consultations to patients with government funding. It is, I believe, a must read, if only as an exercise in logic. Palin is arguing in plain terms that doctors cannot be trusted [...]
If you’d like a break from reading about the foolish rantings of the Limbaugh-Palin Republican mainstream, this column in the New York Times today suggests a smart path toward controlling health care costs. Nothing radical here. And I suspect, in the end, the real answer is putting doctors on salaries as the Mayo and Cleveland [...]
You may remember that back in May, Gallup released a poll showing that for the first time, a majority of Americans in their survey described themselves as “pro-life” rather than “pro-choice.” The results represented a fairly dramatic flip in abortion numbers–51 to 42, when just six months earlier the spread had been a 50 to [...]
Senator Chuck Grassley has announced his membership in the Limbaugh mainstream of the Republican Party on the non-issue of Death Panels. This is the man who is the lead Republican negotiator in the Senate Finance Committee’s effort to create a bipartisan health care bill–and he either (a) hasn’t the vaguest notion of what’s in the [...]
