Category Archives: NADA – New American Dark Ages

New American Dark Ages

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Death to Death Panel Bullshit

The Albuquerque Journal is lucky to have a writer of the calibre of Winthrop Quigley. Quigley has a knack for stepping through a logical process with dispassion. I’m thankful he takes on Calcified Cal Thomas’ resurrection of the death panels, a coldly calculated effort to frighten the townfolk into raising their pitchforks at the start of the new Congress.

ABQJOURNAL UPFRONT: Doctor Discussion Hardly a Death Panel

By Winthrop Quigley
Journal Staff Writer

          It was probably too much to expect that we might enjoy at least a brief respite, now that the elections are over, from much of the nonsense that passes for public discourse. We managed to get only to the second day of the new year before Cal Thomas revived the death panel canard in his syndicated column, which the Journal publishes.

        The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as required by the health care law passed last year, has started paying medical professionals about $111 to spend time discussing with their Medicare-eligible patients anything on their minds. CMS has issued a rule saying that these so-called wellness visits, available annually, can cover the care the patients would like to receive at the end of their lives, if that’s what they want to talk about. Patients have the discussion only if they ask for it. …

Self-described conservatives like Thomas argue in other contexts that given enough information individuals make the best choices for themselves. …

When patients’ desires aren’t known, the health care system has an incentive to provide excessive care and run up expense unnecessarily, if only to avoid a lawsuit. …

In the world of death panel fabulism, it’s better your doctor not know what your preferences are. It’s better that you not know your options. It is a world where personal freedom is threatened by information and achieved through ignorance.

ABQJOURNAL UPFRONT: Doctor Discussion Hardly a Death Panel

NADA - New American Dark Ages

Net Neutrality

The FCC took steps toward assuring everyone’s equal access to the Internet. And the puppets of the Chamberpot of Commerce, windbags like Lush Limbaugh, are braying that it is just the opposite. Liars and fools, filling their pockets with money from people who believe money equals access and, therefore, those with more money *deserve* more access in all things in life. Truth is what you pay these guys to say it is.

NADA - New American Dark Ages

“decades of Republicans packing the federal judiciary with activist judges has finally paid off”

ThinkProgress » Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli Thanks His ‘Teammate,’ Hate Radio Host Mark Levin, For Help With HCR Case

“[T]he decision that just came down from the federal judgment in Virginia — that the federal health care mandate is unconstitutional — is an example that decades of Republicans packing the federal judiciary with activist judges has finally paid off.”

ThinkProgress » Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli Thanks His ‘Teammate,’ Hate Radio Host Mark Levin, For Help With HCR Case

I think Bush v Gore removed all doubt about the ethics of some “conservative” judges. And made the Radical Wrong’s braying against activist judges clearly hypocritical.

NADA - New American Dark Ages

Jefferson Writing Madison About Taxes

Thomas Jefferson on Wealth Inequality – Grasping Reality with Both Hands

Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise.

Thomas Jefferson on Wealth Inequality – Grasping Reality with Both Hands

Geometrical progression! The roots of the tree of liberty must be watered with the excess wealth of the rich.

NADA - New American Dark Ages

Not That I Trust Krauthammer…

It might be worth holding your nose and trying to keep down your lunch to read Krauthammer’s entire column. Makes Obama look brilliant. (And we know Obama is damn smart.)

Charles Krauthammer – Swindle of the year

Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 – and House Democrats don’t have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years – which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat?

Charles Krauthammer – Swindle of the year

NADA - New American Dark Ages

Accepting the President

Very interesting take by Andrew Sullivan. Did the GOP just legitimized Obama’s presidency?

How Do You Compromise With Stalin? – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

By simply rallying behind Obama against his liberal base, the GOP leadership has deeply damaged the grass-roots campaign to make Obama seem like a remote alien, who has taken over America, rather than a president who is trying to govern it. That’s one big concession that cannot be measured in dollars and cents, and it will benefit Obama almost as much as the massive second stimulus the GOP just gave him for re-election.

How Do You Compromise With Stalin? – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan