“America already has the best health care in the world,” says Glenn Beck, insisting that we should change nothing.
Well, that’s what he says now. Jon Stewart shows that his tune has, um, changed somewhat:
As if the “death panels” crap wasn’t bad enough, the RNC has now gone totally shameless with baseless fearmongering. A recent RNC fundraiser mailing includes a “survey” which asks, among other things,
“It has been suggested that the government could use voter registration to determine a person’s political affiliation, prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system. Does this possibly concern you?”
“It has been suggested”. Nice use of weasel-word passive voice there, guys. You know, it’s also been suggested that the RNC leadership are a bunch of PCP-addicted, hooker-murdering transvestites with intestinal disorders and ties to the Ukrainian mob. Does this possibly concern you?
Kate passes along this informative link:
The bill for services rendered is below, although the vet gave us an idea of how much things would cost beforehand.
A couple of things came to mind.
First, in all the experiences I have had with a hospital, I cannot remember ever receiving an itemized bill for services without demanding it and refusing to pay for services until I receive it. In this case, we got it before we paid the bill without even asking for it.
Second, the total bill, including an overnight stay in the doggie hospital, was under $600, which we gladly paid. I know that we can’t compare human care to veterinary care in most senses, but some of the items charged are comparable. Ondansetron or “Zofran” is the same medicine humans receive for vomiting. One dose of Zofran in our emergency department costs more than $100.
The vet charged $15.20.
Metronidazole is the antibiotic “Flagyl” that humans use.
The vet charged $13.25.
X-rays are x-rays. A GI series in the emergency department is $450. This one cost $175.
The health care situation, as explained on the back of four napkins.
(Or watch all four napkins together as a slide show.)
The Fox “News” (sic) model of “if you don’t like something, scream real loud”, as employed at town halls everywhere, seems not to work. Shocked, I am.
A new SurveyUSA poll finds that 77% of people still believe that having a choice between a public and a private option is either “extremely important” or “quite important”.
Many people, including Keith Olbermann (as we blogged here) noted the all-too-coincidental timing between Bush’s falling poll numbers and Homeland Security terror alerts. Turns out, yeah, it wasn’t coincidence.
In a new book, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge reveals new details on politicization under President Bush, reports US News & World Report’s Paul Bedard. Among other things, Ridge admits that he was pressured to raise the terror alert to help Bush win re-election in 2004.
Rep. Barney Frank lashed out at protester who held a poster depicting President Barack Obama with a Hitler-style mustache during a heated town hall meeting on federal health care reform.
“On what planet do you spend most of your time?” Frank asked the woman, who had stepped up to the podium at a southeastern Massachusetts senior center to ask why Frank supports what she called a Nazi policy.
“Ma’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it,” Frank replied.
He continued by saying her ability to deface an image of the president and express her views “is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated.”
Update: watch it yourself.
Conservative economist Bruce Bartlett argues:
In January, the Congressional Budget Office projected a deficit this year of $1.2 trillion before Obama took office, with no estimate for actions he might take. To a large extent, the CBO’s estimate simply represented the $482 billion deficit projected by the Bush administration in last summer’s budget review, plus the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, which George W. Bush rammed through Congress in September over strenuous conservative objections. Thus the vast bulk of this year’s currently estimated $1.8 trillion deficit was determined by Bush’s policies, not Obama’s.
I think conservative anger is misplaced. To a large extent, Obama is only cleaning up messes created by Bush. This is not to say Obama hasn’t made mistakes himself, but even they can be blamed on Bush insofar as Bush’s incompetence led to the election of a Democrat. If he had done half as good a job as most Republicans have talked themselves into believing he did, McCain would have won easily.
Conservative protesters should remember that the recession, which led to so many of the policies they oppose, is almost entirely the result of Bush’s policies.
The President himself opines in the New York Times:
Our nation is now engaged in a great debate about the future of health care in America. And over the past few weeks, much of the media attention has been focused on the loudest voices. What we haven’t heard are the voices of the millions upon millions of Americans who quietly struggle every day with a system that often works better for the health-insurance companies than it does for them.
Nate Silver of the great political-statistics site fivethirtyeight.com is ordinarily very businesslike and objective in his presentation.
But sometimes something gets his dander up and he gets all snarky. And then he’s really fun.
So enjoy his latest post about “socialized medicine”.
Over at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver lays out the “Economic Headlines You Won’t See on The Drudge Report”:
– Job losses slowed to 247,000, their lowest total since a year ago, beating expectations by roughly 100,000.
– The unemployment rate actually *declined* to 9.4 percent from 9.5 percent.
– May and June job loss estimates have been revised *downward*.
– Hourly earnings improved.
– The average workweek lengthened, particularly in manufacturing.
– The manufacturing sector added jobs on a seasonally-adjusted basis.
– The NASDAQ will open today about 33 percent higher than when Obama took office.
Of course, he does fairly warn that
…these numbers do not point toward a “good” economy. Some of them, like the decline in the unemployment rate, are even a bit misleading, since some of that has occurred because a lot of dispirited job seekers have given up on looking for work.
But they do speak unambiguously toward an economy which has almost certainly bottomed out and has probably begun to improve. It is more likely to be a slow recovery than a fast one, especially in employment, but this is arguably the best news that Obama has had since taking office.
“Birther” wingnuts have been circulating a document “proving” that Obama was born in Kenya. Of course, it has been proven a fake.
Perhaps they even used this awesome Web site to make it.
Over at the Huffington Post, Chris Kelly has shown that if Obama isn’t eligible to be President, neither was Reagan. Or, for that matter, Abraham Lincoln.
Ann Coulter says it’s a non-issue and that the birthers are a bunch of cranks.
Since everything Coulter says is either wrong and/or a lie, clearly the birthers are right, and my entire worldview has just inverted.