Philip Dearmore's Library tagged politics → View Popular

10 Feb 09

Here's about the best summary of Obama's first three weeks I have seen...

I probably missed a few things, but I think you get the drift. Undo whatever Bush did. Expect appointees to obey the law, with a mulligan given for first-time offenses less than $128,000. Pay back Democratic special interests like unions, trial lawyers and Planned Parenthood. Define "bipartisanship" as inviting Republicans to lunch and telling them, "I won." Spend really, really huge amounts of other people's money. Make terrorism a law enforcement issue instead of a national defense issue. And watch terrorists and nuclear proliferators be released, from Pakistan to Yemen to Gitmo.

04 Feb 09

One has to keep a keen eye out for the components of the bill that don't just steal your money, but that may actually do you great physical harm, if not kill you outright.
Section 9201 of the stimulus package establishes the "Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research." This body, which would be made up of federal bureaucrats will "coordinate the conduct or support of comparative effectiveness and related health services research."
3 more annotations...
- Once a panel of government experts decides what is and what is not cost-effective by their definition, the government will stop paying for treatments, medicines, therapies or devices that fall into the latter category.
- Thus, if a handful of government employees deem a therapy not cost effective, no health insurance will cover it and it will become virtually unobtainable to patients at any cost.
- If the feds step in and say, no, that new treatment is too expensive, it will never have the chance to become better, the supply will not increase and it won't become more cost-effective. It will just die on the shelf, and so will the patients who potentially could have benefited.

21 Jan 09

The spin begins already...

"Joe had the choice to be secretary of state or vice president," she said. Her husband turned to his wife with his finger to his lips and a "Shhhh!" that sent the audience into laughter. "OK, he did," Jill Biden said in her defense.
After the exchange aired on television three hours later, Biden spokeswoman Elizabeth Alexander denied Jill Biden's account in a statement e-mailed to reporters.

19 Jan 09

President Bush fixed the man-made global climate change problem! Yay!

George W. Bush will leave office on January 20 with the earth's temperature cooler than when he took office in 2001.
"We put up satellites in the atmosphere to measure the lower troposphere. We did this 30 years ago because of the global cooling panic. So we're measuring where we would find the cooling or warming signal, which is in the lower troposphere," he explains. "And we don't see either; there has been a slight cooling in the last few years. The warming of two decades stopped in 1998."

14 Jan 09

29 Dec 08

13 Dec 08

The question, Mrs Furedi argued, was “not, when does human life begin? but, when does it really begin to matter?”.
She admitted that “the embryo is a living thing”, and that it “is clearly human in the sense that it’s not a gerbil”, but stopped short of according it the same status as “a born person”
1 more annotations...
- Mrs Furedi is married to Frank Furedi, the founder of the British Revolutionary Communist Party and currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent.