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 …
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 …
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 …
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 they can keep
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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 Clinics …
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 44 …
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 bill …
Yesterday in the Congo, Hillary Clinton presented a plan to combat the epidemic sexual violence that has become a weapon of war in that country. But in reading the coverage of the proposal in the Times today, I’m struck by how hard it is to actually do anything tangible to deal with this kind of sexual violence, what Clinton called “evil …
Just received this in the mail, apparently a response to my post this morning about how my family is coping with the need for end-of-life counseling:
You liberal SOB!! How far has Obama got his dick pushed down yout throat!!! You sir, are a liberal asshole!!!!!!
*** user_email ***
gtec08@gmail.com
*** user_name ***
Gene
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One of the most telling moments in Obama’s New Hampshire town hall yesterday came at the very end, when one of the last questioners said:
I’m very, very concerned about the elderly. I don’t know if this is also correct, but I understand that a federal health board will sit in judgment of medical procedures and protocols to impose
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Michael Scherer’s excellent interview with Ezekiel Emanuel below should be required reading, and so should Ezra Klein’s interview on Monday with Senator Johnny Isakson, who has made end-of-life counseling a personal cause. It is difficult to bear the nihilist cynicism of mainstream Republicans like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh on this …
Much of this “death panel” “controversy” can be traced to a New York Post column that selectively quotes from White House health adviser Ezekial Emanuel’s academic career. I caught up with Zeke, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who is now vacationing in the Italian Alps, for a response. My Time.com story begins …
Slowly, slowly, I now begin the effort to re-enter American reality after a two-week holiday–well, the holiday doesn’t end for a few days yet, but I figure I have to prepare myself gently for the toxic splash. I have not watched cable news for ten days now. I have not read Krauthammer. I am beginning to get twitchy with anxiety over the …