Though Mitt Romney is considered to be a frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, the national spotlight has forced him to repeatedly confront a major skeleton in his political closet: that as governor of Massachusetts he once tried to help poor, uninsured sick people.
Romney, who signed the state's 2006 health care reform act, has said he "deeply regrets" giving people in poor physical and mental health the opportunity to seek medical attention, admitting that helping very sick people get better remains a dark cloud hovering over his political career, and his biggest obstacle to becoming president of the United States of America.
"Every day I am haunted by the fact that I gave impoverished Massachusetts citizens a chance to receive health care," Romney told reporters Wednesday, adding that he feels ashamed whenever he looks back at how he forged bipartisan support to help uninsured Americans afford medicine to cure their illnesses. "I'm only human, and I've made mistakes. None bigger, of course, than helping cancer patients receive chemotherapy treatments and making sure that those suffering from pediatric AIDS could obtain medications, but that's my cross to bear."
"My hope is that Republican voters will one day forgive me for making it easier for sick people—especially low-income sick people—to go to the hospital and see a doctor," Romney added. "It was wrong, and I'm sorry." ...
"I don't know what got into me back then," Romney said. "Wanting to make sure people were able to have health insurance if they left their job. Providing a federally funded website so individuals could compare the costs of insurance providers. Making certain that somebody who earns less than 150 percent of the poverty level can receive the same health care coverage as me or any government official. All I can say is that I was young and immature, and I am not that person anymore."
"The only solace I can take is in the hope that some of the folks I helped were terminally ill patients who eventually withered away and died," Romney added.
Though Romney has apologized profusely, Beltway insiders said he would need to distance himself from his I-tried-to-help-sickpeople image. Sources noted that Romney's current promise to take away health care from anyone who can't afford it is a step in the right direction, but might not be enough.
"The major strike against Mitt Romney is that he not only tried to help people get medical care, he actually did help people get medical care," conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg said. "No other Republican in the field has that type of baggage. And in the end, in order to defeat President Obama, the GOP needs someone who has a track record of never wanting to help sick people." ...
"I don't think I can vote for someone like that," Pennsylvania Republican Eric Tolbert said. "He says he's sorry, but how do I know that's the real Mitt Romney? What happens if he gets elected and tries to help sick people again?"
"I like Michele Bachmann now," Tolbert added. "Because what this country needs is a president who doesn't give a fuck about helping people."
Dear fellow-unbelievers,
Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.
That essential sense of decency is outraged every day. Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private.
Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.
As the heirs of a secular revolution, American atheists have a special responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution that patrols the boundary between Church and State. This, too, is an honor and a privilege. Believe me when I say that I am present with you, even if not corporeally (and only metaphorically in spirit...) Resolve to build up Mr Jefferson's wall of separation. And don't keep the faith. - Christopher Hitchens
At 15, I read Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, the turgid romantic tale of a misunderstood genius-architect and his worshipful consort. They stand against a collectivist world determined to destroy the extraordinary individual and his equally extraordinary soul mate. Then I followed up with the even more turgid 1200-page Atlas Shrugged , which also involves misunderstood geniuses, collectivism and a sexy heroine fit for a superman. I fell in love with Rand the individualist and her atheism was a bonus.
What makes Rand the perfect philosopher-queen for a 15-year-old is that every adolescent considers herself a misunderstood genius hounded by that intimate collective, the family (which Rand considered the archetypal individual-destroying institution). So it says a good deal about the intellectual and emotional immaturity of the far right that Rand, who never really went away because there is an endless supply of teenagers responsive to her exaltation of selfishness as truth, is enjoying a huge revival in support of the Government-Is-The-Root-Of-All-Evil narrative.
The influence of Rand on the current generation of anti-government activists is powerful. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), who is actually 41 but still looks like a teenager (I’m wondering if believing in Rand after age 25 stops you from getting wrinkles), credits his reading of Rand for the philosophy embodied in his deficit-cutting budget proposal. The Ryan budget would, among its other brilliant ideas, “reform” Medicare by turning it into a voucher program for old people to buy insurance. That no private insurance company will be willing to provide good insurance for 80-year-olds at any price (the sort of reality ignored by Rand in her worship of the market) is no problem if you embrace teenage logic. In the world of teenage fantasy, one never grows sick or old.
What’s fascinating about Rand’s appeal to the right is that the tea party (which, contrary to predictions by pundits, has turned out to be every bit as culturally and religiously conservative as the pre-tea party Republican base) is able to ignore her atheism, strong support for abortion, unconventional sexual views and oft-repeated disdain for the traditional family. I guess Rand’s views on money trump everything. In Atlas Shrugged, she writes, “Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other.”
That phrase “blood, whips and guns—or dollars” is, as the commercial says, priceless. Rand apparently never heard of systems—say, slavery—that depended on blood, whips, guns and dollars.
I’m wondering if this idealization of feminine hero-worship, which comes through strongly in Rand’s novels, is the real reason why so many conservative men remain boyishly attached to her. Her attitude about relations between men and women bears about as much relationship to real sex as her attitude about money being the root of all goodness does to the real market.
The atheism of this third-rate philosophy fellow traveler has always bothered me, because Rand’s devotion to tooth-and-claw social Darwinism, her insistence that people owe nothing to one another, represent a stereotype that religious believers commonly use against atheists. That her “objectivism” is based on faith as strongly as Das Kapital or the Summa Theologica is obvious to anyone who has the good sense to fall out of love with her at 16 after falling in love at 15.
No doubt the boy’s memories are as vivid and sincere as the memories of all of those preschoolers, coached by adults and “recovered memory” therapists in the 1980s, who claimed that they had been sexually abused en masse in nursery schools by teachers practicing Satanic rituals.
This book, and its commercial success, remind us again of the effectiveness of religious indoctrination early in life. They recall the truth of the Jesuit saying, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.” Can there possibly be any child raised by devout Christian parents who does not, well before kindergarten, have images of winged beings and puffy clouds embedded in his or her brain? Small children believe in Santa Claus for the same reason--because their parents, whom they love, teach them to believe in Santa. The difference is that, at an appropriate age, parents admit that the Santa story isn’t true. They never admit, however, that heaven is the same sort of story.
What is truly disturbing about this book’s huge commercial success is that it attests to the prevalence of unreason among vast numbers of Americans. (The book is way down in the ranks on Amazon.com in the United Kingdom.) The Americans buying the book are the same people fighting the teaching of evolution in public schools. They are probably the same people who think they can reduce the government deficit without either paying higher taxes or cutting the military budget, Social Security and Medicare benefits. In this universe of unreason, two plus two can equal anything you want and heaven is not only real but anything you want it to be. At age four, the inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality is charming. Among American adults, widespread identification with the mind of a preschooler is scary.
Just when you thought the sad saga of Quran-burning Florida pastor Terry Jones couldn't get more absurd...
According to Southfield, Michigan police, Jones' .40-caliber handgun fired accidentally as he was leaving a television studio there on Thursday night. This is presumably the same handgun he said he intended to bring to his planned anti-sharia law protest in Dearborn, Michigan on Friday, though he's said he's come to Dearborn "totally in peace."
Police told The Detroit Free Press that Jones was getting into the passenger side of his car at 11:10 p.m. Thursday night, after an interview at the TV station, when the gun went off, putting a bullet into the floorboard.
If Dearborn practiced Sharia law, would we have three adult entertainment bars and more alcohol-licensed bars and restaurants per capita than most other cities?
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| 'Most of the water we drink is very acidic,' say the makers of Real Water. 'Most diseases flourish and grow rapidly in an acidic environment.' Photograph: Alamy |
"Did you know that most of the water you're drinking every day may actually be damaging your health?"
This is the bold claim made by Nevada-based Affinity Lifestyles. Fortunately, they have the solution: Real WaterTM with E2 technology.
The Real Water website describes how the water we drink – from the water I have in my glass right now, to the water you made your cup of tea with this morning – has been "damaged".
In an attempt to blind the reader with science, there are reams of misplaced claims and pseudo-facts. Take the claim that "many food and beverages ... are devoid of electrons" – which would make it an entirely new state of matter. ...
The E2, or Electron Energized, technology supposedly "adds hundreds of millions of free electrons" to "unclump" the water and give it an alkaline pH.
Professor [Stephen] Fletcher takes issue with the claim that the water was positively charged in the first place: "Water is always charge-balanced due to a scientific principle called 'electroneutrality'. It follows that the E2 technology cannot add 'hundreds of millions of free electrons' to anything, no matter how it works."
I asked Real Water about the treatment, but public information officer Xzavia Ross said: "Our process is proprietary so there really is no way we can disclose the process by which we add electrons to the water." ...
On the one hand this is an amusing read, leaving you astonished at the amount of tripe you can find online. On the other, this is a real company, making real sales at the expense of those who believe their outlandish claims. In an age when people are increasingly worried about their health, perhaps the most beneficial thing to take in large doses is scepticism.
ZOMBIES!!!! We all know the Zombie Jesus story, but a whole crapload of dead people were reanimated just after Jesus H. kicked the can. They took two days fighting their way out of their tombs before running amok within Jerusalem. It’s right there in Matthew 27.
51 At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split 52 and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53 They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.
Zombie mini-apocalypses must happen often enough in that part of the world that they’re not even worth recording. Come on! No one else even mentions it! I gotta hand it to whoever wrote the book of Matthew for having the foresight to include this enlightening event in the most infallible book ever written. If it hadn’t been for him, we’d only have one zombie stumbling around on Easter Sunday.
It took most of those zombies two days stuck inside their half smashed tombs before they could get out. Two days! While Jesus is out on holiday playing the last level of Doom III, a whole bunch of generally nice undead are stuck inside their graves scratching and moaning and breaking fingernails just trying to get a breath of fresh air. And brains.
This couldn’t have gone unnoticed. There have got to be a bunch of freaked out caretakers scared shitless because half their crop is trying to escape through damaged tombs. Did it make any difference that these zombies were holier than others? My guess is no. By the way, how could they even be holy if they haven’t accepted Jesus as their own personal savior? Something is amiss.
Back to the point. It’s Friday and you’re a caretaker of one of these graveyards. You’ve got a ton of cleanup to do after the earthquake and to make matters worse, a bunch of smug, holier-than-thou zombies are further damaging your tombs in their escape efforts. What do you do? Shit, they didn’t even have shotguns back then! I, for one, know when to get the hell out of town. I’d high-tail it out of Jerusalem, shrieking like a little girl all the way.
Do you sit around on Saturday as instructed by the big guy, all the while glancing furtively out the windows across the yard to make sure the undead are still underground? Or do you risk breaking the Sabbath by either repelling zombies or running like hell? I’m assuming, of course, that it is considered work to kill the undead. I have no proof of this. These poor saps are backed into a corner. It’s either death by zombie or death by zealous law abiding Jew.
The top lines of the WaPo/ABC Poll show a big problem for Republicans and their plan to gut Medicare. It's hugely unpopular. The vast majority want Medicare preserved as is, along with Medicaid, with (once again) tax increases on the wealthy the heavily preferred choice for addressing debt. Asked the basic question of what should be cut, 78% oppose cutting Medicare, 69% opposed cutting Medicaid, while 72% say tax the rich.
But drill down on the internals for the Medicare questions, and you find that when the Republican plan is spelled out, and respondents are told that beneficiaries would "receive a check or voucher from the government each year for a fixed amount they can use to shop for their own private health insurance policy," and that—as the CBO projects—the cost of private insurance will likely outpace the cost of Medicare, opposition to the plan soars to 84%. ...
It would really be hard to come up with a less popular policy idea than the Republican plan for Medicare.
In the spring of 1930, Aharoni staged an expedition to the hills of Syria, near Aleppo, one of the oldest cities in the world. His quest was simple: he wanted to catch the rare golden mammal whose Arabic name translates roughly as “mister saddlebags.” On finding the animal he would either ally it with its Hebrew name in the Torah or, as seemed more likely, name it himself. But there was another motive. One of Aharoni’s colleagues, Saul Adler, thought that the animal might be similar enough to humans to serve as a lab animal in medical research, particularly for the study of the parasitic disease leishmaniasis, which was and still is common in the region.
A paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes how Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and his colleagues followed eight Israeli judges for ten months as they ruled on over 1,000 applications made by prisoners to parole boards. The plaintiffs were asking either to be allowed out on parole or to have the conditions of their incarceration changed. The team found that, at the start of the day, the judges granted around two-thirds of the applications before them. As the hours passed, that number fell sharply (see chart), eventually reaching zero. But clemency returned after each of two daily breaks, during which the judges retired for food. The approval rate shot back up to near its original value, before falling again as the day wore on. ...
The researchers offer two hypotheses for this rise in grumpiness. One is that blood-sugar level is the crucial variable. This, though, predicts that the precise amount of time since the judge last ate will be what matters. In fact, it is the number of cases he has heard since his last break, not the number of hours he has been sitting, which best matches the data. That is consistent with a second theory, familiar from other studies, that decision making is mentally taxing and that, if forced to keep deciding things, people get tired and start looking for easy answers. In this case, the easy answer is to maintain the status quo by denying the prisoner’s request.
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