Wingnut extraordinaire Doug Ross, the unhinged knucklehead who served as a static display of statistical incompetence as he spent weeks accusing the Obama administration of rescuing only Democratic Chrysler dealerships, is out with another blockbuster, and the usual idiots are linking him, having learned nothing:
Actually, I’ve been leaked details of the plan, and Doug has missed something. The plan is to only euthanize the white folks. Merry Kwanzaa, bitches.
ironranger
OMG.
This is strait jacket territory.
DBrown
How about just Blue Dogs being euthanized – I’m sure PETA will support that.
schrodinger's cat
What percentage of the population is wingnutty? Do they as a group appear larger than they are because they make the most noise? I wonder.
beltane
President Obama plans to build an enormous stadium in which elderly white Christians, armed with oxygen tanks, will be forced to battle African gladiators and their specially trained lions. This will be done to provide cheap entertainment to his young, pagan followers. It is all written in the Book of Revelations.
And what’s up with the ad on the left here (not the Sarah Palin one)? Is there really such a thing as a Christian escort service?
Tim H.
Do we get crystals implanted in our hands that turn black when we’re supposed to report for euthanasia? Because that would be cool.
SGEW
Accounts Recievable: We just had a conference call for Obama supporters and well, when he gets into office, there’s gonna be some changes.
Accounts Payable: Oh god!
Accounts Recievable: You have a gun, right?
Accounts Payable: My dad’s old ’22, yeah.
Accounts Recievable: Well, someone from the campaign is gonna come by and take it for the “give all the white people’s guns to the black people” program
Accounts Payable: God damnit!
rachel
reliapundit comments: “terri schiavo was a test case for these lefties….”
JGabriel
beltane:
Yes. Instead of saying “Ooh, you like that, baby, don’t you?”, they say, “Ooh, come to Jesus!”
.
El Cid
Erick Erickson describing Jimmy Carter as ‘history’s greatest monster’. (H/T GOS.)
——————————–
Does anyone really care that History’s greatest monster, the man who laid hands on, endorsed, and applauded many of the most heinous regimes of the last part of the twentieth century, has left the Southern Baptist Church?
And he did so now because of, among other things, the role of women in the church?
That, like most of what Jimmy Carter says, is simply attention getting pablum by an senile old leftist.
The man is an unrepentant anti-semite and leftist. About the only part of the Bible he likes to take literally is the part about the Jews killing Christ. That gives him his anti-semetic justification.
Other than that, Carter wants to be free to live as he wants, not as God wants him to.
Good riddance.
Tim H.
Ross also forgot to mention the part where after euthanization your body is taken and used to make Soylent White.
Comrade Dread
Soylent Green is people! PEOPLE!!!!
Michael
For those of us who hate stadium beer pricing and prefer to watch from the comfort of our living rooms (particularly for the great camera angles, zooms and color commentary), is there going to be a special “Sunday Ticket” cable package, or are we going to have to buy each session as a pay per view?
And will there be any product licensing based on the forced gay male orgies using the first half survivors for the halftime shows?
Dave
John, I almost wish you had been right about “Peak Wingnut.” But it’s so damned entertaining…
kid bitzer
whereas under our current system of health care, old people are never allowed to die for lack of money. or lack of insurance.
nope–it’s a health-care paradise here in america. why would anyone want to change that?
why do liberals hate america?
Elroy's Lunch
Although I haven’t quite reached to sell-by date that Ross says Obama has in mind, this should work well for me. I’ll be able to get a good deal on one of those used mobility chairs that will left lying around. Win.
SGEW
@JGabriel:
No, no. It goes “get thee behind me, Satan!”
MysticalChick
Honestly, they are so hitting the very dregs of the barrel (beneath even the bottom), that it’s just sad. (Still laughable, though.) Were it not for morans actually believing this shit, I’d be under my desk laughing at it.
Keith
Obama doesn’t want to euthanize the elderly; he just wants his party to defeat them in the 2010 elections.
WereBear
Well, of course President Obama is starting the whole “Grandparents on Ice Floes” program now.
Now that he doesn’t have grandparents anymore.
Don’t you see, people!?!?!?!?
Napoleon
@schrodinger’s cat:
SC said: “What percentage of the population is wingnutty? Do they as a group appear larger than they are because they make the most noise? I wonder.”
I think depending on the subject you are looking at 20% to around 33%, with enough fellow travelers who will vote Rep no matter what to bring that block to 45%. They are undoubtedly the noisiest and I suspect that is why the press is so cowed by the right. Just look at comment threads to newspaper articles or places like that and it appears the right wing nuts are about 50% of the population.
The Moar You Know
I just spent the weekend with a kid who has the occasional epic temper tantrum.
These guys are throwing one 24/7. It never stops. I’m about ready to haul the next one I hear this horseshit from out to the woodshed and give them a beating they’ll not soon forget.
Next stop on this crazy train: Under the Obama Health “Care” plan, hard working White Republicans will be packed up in boxcars and gassed.
GregB
Word is that Adolph Saddam Stalin Obama has planned to give “history’s greatest monster”(hat tip Erick Erickson) Jimmy Carter, the position of Euthanasia Czar.
-G
Dog is My Co-Pilot
What’s driving these crazy idiots is that they are utterly consumed with anger to think that a black man is in the White House. It’s driving them insane, literally.
cleek
i guess their problem is that the bureaucrats would be in DC instead of Hartford or Charlotte or NYC ?
because it takes Google 0.22 seconds to come up with page after page of articles about insurance companies refusing to pay for life support. and i don’t see any wingnuts complaining about that.
Crashman06
@Michael: Oh man. You made me laugh so hard I spewed tea all over my keyboard.
General Winfield Stuck
And Strata highlights Obama quote that lends credence to “dems will snuff granny meme”.
They are so un-yoost to having a president state simple facts as a matter of course, they instantly believe there must be a nefarious liberal fascist plot afoot.
With the irony being that the wingnuts could care less about the 40 mil Americans who are denied, or are unable to afford basic health care. Due to those folks being lazy DFH types anyways. So much for the culture of lifers who pick and choose who to care about and who to throw under the bus.
There are other ways to reduce end-of-life healthcare costs.
One would be implementing protocols whereby terminal patients are given options simply by discussing them frankly with their doctors.
cleek
FYI, that’s actually a Simpson’s quote.
ironranger
Epic temper tantrums=perfect fit.
JGabriel
The Moar You Know:
That’s because they keep passing the tantrum ball to the next point guard (™SP).
.
arguingwithsignposts
Wow. Just wow. Maybe Obamacare can subsidize some brain implants for these folks (And Erickson? Carter = history’s greatest monster? Huh? Compared to …?)
BTW, has anyone else noticed that there was a lot of MSM pushback on the birther crap yesterday – rick sanchez and the entire stable of MSNBC evening commentariat (Chris Matthews destroyed that congressman).
Hopefully it will take hold, although the terminally insane (like that woman who yelled at the congressman) are probably beyond hope. I’m just wondering who’s going to be the first WH correspondent to actually pose the question to Obama or Gibbs.
GregB
Soylent white mofos….soylent white!
-G
Michael D.
General Winfield Stuck
@GregB:
Tastes like chicken
gnomedad
Can Jerkstopper do anything about this?
Da Bomb
Okay, it “Happy Kwanzaa!” “Merry” sounds to close to whitey.
Now you have to recite the seven tenets of Kwanzaa:
Umoja (Unity) To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race by oppressing whitey, ala Pat Buchanan
Kujichagulia (Self-Determination) To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves by destroying whitey.
Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility) To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers’ and sisters’ problems our problems and to solve them together, by euthanizing whitey!
Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics) To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together by selling teabags to whitey!
Nia (Purpose) To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness, by getting rid of whitey and getting our 40 acres and a mule!
Kuumba (Creativity) To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it, which officially we haven’t received since whitey broke their promise and didn’t give us our 40 acres and a mule. Please refer to tenet # 5.
imani (Faith) To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle against the honky!
There you go. I am sure that this is also listed in the health care reform plan, since Obama is a muslim-socialist Kenyan.
GranFalloon
Just try and catch me on my Rascal (which, BTW, the Rascal Company will pay for if America’s Commie insurance won’t cover)
PanAmerican
Fixed.
“As you surrender your body, what musical and visual orientations would you like to experience?” “I want to hear the Glenn Miler Orchestra and see Cops beating up Hippies.”
The Grand Panjandrum
Please you are overstating the case by several orders of magnitude. The plan is to kill all the white MEN so they can have our women. (Isn’t that the really scary scenario to these guys?)
linda
and this is only six months into an obama administration; christ, what is this country gonna look like by 2012.
i’m seriously expecting some major domestic violence.
GranFalloon
Please you are overstating the case by several orders of magnitude. The plan is to kill all the white MEN so they can have our women. (Isn’t that the really scary scenario to these guys?)
Correct. After the government, under Obama’s new Health Care plan, pays every African American 5 cents to bust up an old chiffarobe.
JGabriel
Michael D.:
That’s just a rumor. I tried to get out of being euthanized by pointing out that they couldn’t prove I’m white without a birth certificate, but the government euthanized my pale ass anyway.
.
valdivia
@arguingwithsignposts:
Chip or tapper?
Pangloss
Couldn’t they have found a photo of him feasting on the intestines of the elderly?
Poopyman
And this is just 6 months into his term. What’ll it be like 3 years down the road?
I’d look at Bush’s final approval rating. That would be it, more or less.
CapMidnight
@Comrade Dread:
And Obama‘s birth certificate is a cookbook!!
linda
I’m just wondering who’s going to be the first WH correspondent to actually pose the question to Obama or Gibbs.
jake tapper or major garrett…
rock
Is there a reason why I don’t hear about “Obama derangement syndrome” with anywhere near the frequency I heard about “Bush derangement syndrome”?
And, yes, that is a rhetorical question.
MattF
Both over the top and under the bottom. Not to mention shake it all around.
Adrienne
@General Winfield Stuck: But it needs some seasoning. You know y’all white folks ain’t got no flava.
General Winfield Stuck
@CapMidnight:
Note to wingers. Obama, he just wants to serve you.
Bwwaaa ha ha hee!
Just Some Fuckhead
Faceborg is slowing down for me, John. I may need you to entertain me again.
Michael
Mmmmm – chitterlings. Just the thing for a black guy.
arguingwithsignposts
@linda:
@valdivia:
I’m sure someone in Vegas has a line on this.
I highly recommend the rick sanchez takedown on the birther stuff from yesterday. he had some wingnut radio host who’s actually banned the topic from his program, but who still trotted out the “all he has to do is show the birth certificate” argument, even while Sanchez was showing the factcheck.org photos of the hawaii cert of live birth.
OTOH, that footage from the town hall meeting with that woman screaming that she wanted her country back … that was freakin’ scary.
Napoleon
@Poopyman:
“I’d look at Bush’s final approval rating. That would be it, more or less.”
The only problem I have with that theory is that the meme on the right by that time is that he was not a true conservative, so I suspect he lost a measurable number of wingnuttia on the theory he was a closet liberal.
Beeb
From the memeorandum link: “In other words, faceless bureaucrats in Washington — not your family — will decide whether your grandparents live or die.”
Apparently Doug Ross didn’t get the memo. That’s not a decision your family gets to make. That’s a decision Congress gets to make. Just ask Michael Schiavo. So the real problem here is that those are faceless executive branch bureaucrats. Just another shameless power grab. Democrats do not respect the separation of powers. C’mon, Ross, get with the program.
El Cid
Do my insurance company bureaucrats have faces? ‘Cause, I never see ’em.
Zifnab
@cleek:
But that’s just the free market at work. Those old people were dying by the invisible hand of the economy.
If you implement a national health care policy, every case of liver failure or heart disease or old-dude-on-a-motorcycle-accident becomes the direct responsibility of the state. Plausible deniability goes out the window. We can’t just close our eyes, cover our ears, and announce “Your sick ass ain’t my problem” because now the taxes I’ve been dodging with my Caymen Island accounts and for-profit religions and foreign investment trusts will be going towards your hospital bills rather than buying more F-22s from the military industry contractors in my stock portfolio.
arguingwithsignposts
@Zifnab:
That invisible hand is a bitch, i tell ya’.
Michael
No, no, no, dammit. The plan is to take the white women for black impregnation and to force marry the white men to gay guys from San Francisco for the sexual use and pleasure of said gay guys. All of it is to be enforced by gun toting fat lesbians and black activists.
Hunter Gathers
So is there a hard cut off age for this euthanasia program? Are Grams and Gramps eligible? Do I receive a bonus, should I deliver them to said euthanasia clinics? How much do I get if I round up, say 20 people? I am more than willing to do my share to increase the amount of Soylent Green that is available. It’s my patriotic duty.
Tsulagi
Unless they convert to Islam. Allahu Akbar, bitches.
Da Bomb
My comment is still in moderation, I am sad.
Punchy
If they’re faceless, how do they communicate this decision on living or dying? Clearly winking and frowning are out…
ellaesther
Re: Ross’s reference to “faceless bureaucrats” who will decide whether my grandparents live or die (or, presumably, my mother, as everyone else is already singing in the Heavenly choir) — do these people, these people who keep talking about someone standing between me and my doctor, do these people NOT KNOW ABOUT INSURANCE COMPANIES??
Faceless bureaucrats already DO STAND between me and my doctor, and every other American and their doctor! And if we’re talking about an American without a doctor, it’s still bureaucrats standing there, it’s just that in this case, THEY’RE SAYING NO!
Oh my God. Sorry for the caps, but this kind of pointed, willful stupidity makes my hair stand on end. Either a word means a thing, OR IT FUCKING DOESN’T!
Oy.
JGabriel
Michael:
Shit, I didn’t get my copy of the plan yet. It’s supposed to come with my Soros check.
.
Redhand
Wow. I just loved the post title.
The Moar You Know
@linda: I’m not. Some, yes. But not a lot. These people have no courage whatsoever.
JGabriel
Punchy:
Surgically implanted cell phones. It’s like mind-reading, but with per minute charges.
.
Alan
@arguingwithsignposts:
I loved when they did the Pledge of Allegiance and you could hear that women emphasize “under God!” through the crowd. If someone, for a yarn, started marching around the room singing “Onward Christian Soldier” she would’ve joined in.
maya
Euthanized the elderly would certainly move healthcare reform along in the Senate faster. Wouldn’t be many left to oppose it. That’s the genius behind O’s plan.
SGEW
On the other hand, Liz Cheney was on Larry King yesterday and (according to Joan Walsh) made an apologia for the Birthers:
That is some powerful propagandizing hoodoo right there: drags the neocon agenda down into the rabbit hole with the Birthers by pushing the “foreignness” of that black guy with the funny name (foreign and therefore untrustworthy, even treasonous: “other,” in any case).
Shorter Liz Cheney: “He must be ‘foreign’ and ‘unAmerican’ – he won’t bomb Iran, like any good
white supremacist theocratic warmongerAmerican would.”This thing has legs. Bill Kristol will address the issue soon.
ellaesther
@schrodinger’s cat: I’m pretty sure that might have something to do with it.
Also, “cake or death?” Seems an appropriate question here. “We only brought three pieces, we didn’t think there’d be such a rush!” (say the faceless bureaucrats lining up grandma and grandpa for death, having run out of cake).
jenniebee
@kid bitzer:
whereas under our current system of health care, old people are never allowed to die for lack of money. or lack of insurance.
Actually, they’re not. Medicare, and, if necessary, Medicaid, cover them. It’s the people who are too young for Medicare and who don’t qualify for Medicaid who are in trouble.
Da Bomb
As a blackity-black, I have some insight into Obama’s Healthcare reform. We, Blackity-blacks have secret underground meetings in a secret lair.
The Health Care reform plan involves the seven tenets of Kwanzaa:
Umoja (Unity) To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race by oppressing whitey, ala Pat Buchanan
Kujichagulia (Self-Determination) To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves by destroying whitey.
Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility) To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers’ and sisters’ problems our problems and to solve them together, by euthanizing whitey!
Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics) To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together by selling teabags to whitey!
Nia (Purpose) To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness, by getting rid of whitey and getting our 40 acres and a mule!
Kuumba (Creativity) To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it, which officially we haven’t received since whitey broke their promise and didn’t give us our 40 acres and a mule. Please refer to tenet # 5.
imani (Faith) To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle against the honky!
I just had to repost this, since my original comment is moderation.
Zifnab
@Michael:
They’ll be totting tasers. The government is going to take all our guns.
Llelldorin
@ellaesther:
`The question is,’ said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
`The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master — that’s all.’
–Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Humpty-Dumpty even looks like a wingnut.
Just Some Fuckhead
Down with whitey! Up with people not whitey!
Ash Can
@arguingwithsignposts:
Some genius really did ask this at a Gibbs press briefing some months back. It cracked everyone’s shit up, but good.
PS: I found the YouTube video by Googling “gibbs press question birth certificate.” The Google results, as well as the comments posted on the YouTube vid, are un-fucking-believable. If I were a writer for the Onion, I wouldn’t know which end was up at this point.
ETA @ Da Bomb: LOL!
R-Jud
@GranFalloon:
Nice. I’ve spent five minutes trying to come up with a play on “Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passing.”, but to no avail.
SGEW
@Da Bomb:
Of course it’s in moderation – you’re giving it all away!
Silence, you fool! We must not let Whitey find out about our secret plans! How then will we force them all to wear dashikis and work in our white women factories?!
Legalize
I believe that this strengthens my theory that we have always known peak-wingnut and that “teh crazy and teh stupid” is all a matter of our own perception. This is just one more tendril of dumbassery.
cleek
the cake is a lie
Alan
@maya: The dirty little secret, Medicare exists because the insurance companies were headed in the euthanasia direction. It’s government that saved the elderly from that Logan’s Run ending. :)
Just Some Fuckhead
I wouldn’t call it unfuckingbelievable. This time in the Clinton presidency, they were already calling Clinton a rapist and a murderer. Obama’s getting off easy by just being accused of being a foreigner.
JGabriel
Adrienne:
You’ll have to fatten us up on Brasilian and Indian food – which is probably a good idea since we keep longer when fed, and taste better when freshly butchered and grilled.
.
Ted the Slacker
Doug Ross is a whackjob, no question at all. And having lived in the UK, with the much maligned but actually very effective NHS, the additional security from having a universal healthcare is something that I absolutely wish we had here, it will undoubtedly make this a better country for all.
But in terms of healthcare economics, there is an underlying serious point. I’ve seen research that says some 75% of our total lifetime spend on medical care comes in the last 18 months of our lives.
When you have an aging population, this can loom as a pretty significant issue, and healthcare economists and policy makers have to delve into the rather gory cost-benefit analysis attached to such matters.
But the product of this analysis in the present case is the opposite of what wingnuttia would hope – because we have Medicare already to cover the elderly, extending universal coverage to people of all ages will make caring for the elderly more affordable. And obviously, taking away all public options would all but guarantee that anyone elderly (who is not wealthy) will die more quickly because no private provider will take up the risk.
To me, this is truly classic fake-smart wingnut – latches on to a fundamentally important issue, completely misunderstands it, draws conclusions that logically turn out to support liberal positions, and announces WIN.
These people are the ultimate fucking clowns. Think Glenn Beck, who just this week discovered that per capita calculations are part of CO2 emission negotiations… except that they were a bedrock principal on which Kyoto was first agreed, and haplessly tried to deny the fundamental sense of this approach.
These people are so stupid, that given enough time and space, they end up totalling their side’s propaganda.
Gordon, The Big Express Engine
@arguingwithsignposts: Also an editorial pice by Roland Martin on cnn.com today ridiculing them…
ellaesther
@Da Bomb: Dude! I’m a Jew, and we have a secret club, too!
I suspect we may eventually have to rumble with your secret club, but it’s at least nice to know that we can be all clubby about our clubbiness until then.
arguingwithsignposts
@SGEW:
I can’t believe these people give her a stage to spout this bullshit. she has no business commenting on most of the stuff she talks about. And it’s funny that she says this pres. hasn’t defended the nation abroad, since he’s still sending troops to a-stan and iraq on that fool’s errand her fuckin’ dad put us into.
!@#$!#@!!!!! i hate these people.
Scott
All of it is to be enforced by gun toting fat lesbians and black activists.
And evil Mexican lady judges wearing gigantic cartoon sombreros.
Da Bomb
@SGEW: As long as they don’t figure out the secret brotha man handshake, we are fine.
gnomedad
@arguingwithsignposts:
I am all for Obama being asked wingnutty questions at pressers. He will knock them out of the park.
Michael
Anybody know who that trembly voiced old cracker was who asked it?
Dr. Loveless
@beltane:
Fixt.
jenniebee
@arguingwithsignposts:
Carter = history’s greatest monster?
In defense of Erick Erickson (and boy, there are five words you think you’d never be the one to type) I suspect that this was his attempt at snark. The line is lifted from a Simpsons episode, Marge in Chains.
mclaren
So it’s a reverse blaxploitation film! Great! All we need now is the white Shaft to save the world from that cabal of evil black guys plotting to destroy white civilization.
But where’s Pam Grier? She’s got to have a starring role. And who plays the white Richard Roundtree? Bill O’Reilly? Will he crash through the window of the White House and shove a .45 in Obama’s face while shouting, “I’m gonna git you, suckah!”?
Or is the white Shaft Glenn Beck? Seems too hysterical. He’d have a fainting spell before he could line up all the evil conspirators who are trying to destroy the white race and machine-gun ’em in the Oval Office.
Also, the problem with Glenn Beck as the white Shaft is that when he was crossing the street through New York traffic, they’d have to play polka music, instead of funky Motown jazz…
Da Bomb
@ellaesther: It shall be dashikis against dreidels.
steve s
I actually have relatives who were convinced that Beel Cleenton was going to use Y2K to force Americans into cities where they’d be more easily controlled. The plan involved chinese shock troops who were being housed and trained secretly on American military bases. A friend of mine, Mike, who was in the 82nd airborne at the time and drove hither and yon around one of the bases specifically mentioned by the wackos, tried to tell said relatives that there were no such 30,000 chinese troops stationed on that base. Later one of them told me “I guess they’re hiding it from Mike, too.”
arguingwithsignposts
@jenniebee:
Erickson capable of snark? will wonders never cease.
Comrade Darkness
@SGEW: Oh man, you guys slay me, brother.
(sorry, after reading gates’ police report I feel like bad impressions of black men are hep… hep I tell you!)
jake 4 that 1
Just imagine what you’d hear if you played the recording backwards!?
Robin
where’s the GatesGate post the rss feed promised me?
ellaesther
@cleek: Well, yes, the cake might be a lie, but (in a blatant thread jack) THAT RICK ASTLEY-NIRVANA MASH-UP OVER AT YOUR PLACE IS AWESOME!! And will soon be appearing on mine, as well!
I’m sorry, I’m pretty new here, so I don’t know for certain that what I just did was ok, but blame cleek. The awesome was just too powerful, and I was forced to do it. By the awesome. Ahem.
arguingwithsignposts
OT, but I’ve now eaten more food (Mickey D’s and a potato soup at the airport) and slept more than I’ve done in at least four days. In honor of that, here’s a video from a band I’m still waiting to see in concert – redbird. if you’re in Wisc., check them out.
Bubblegum Tate
@Michael:
His voice sounded like a character from Futurama or something.
@Da Bomb:
I learned the seven tenets of Kwanzaa from listening to X-Clan. Surely this means my family and I are safe from the upcoming wholesale slaughter of overaged whiteys at the hands of Barack HUSSEIN!! Obama and his jack-booted thugs in the Peace Corps, right?
Ash Can
@Da Bomb: LOL!
Da Bomb
@Bubblegum Tate: Maybe. You have to apply for the “Not down with teh old WHITEY” pass. Once your application is reviewed and approved you be notified in the mail of our decision.
Sorry, but I believe my comment has been posted twice. Oh, well.
ellaesther
@Da Bomb: I have a feeling we’ll win then. Have you ever had a dreidel flung at your head?
Michael
You’ve missed the obvious – white Shaft is Limbaugh, wheezing and waddling his way around patriotically. Palin can be the plucky love interest. Also.
It’ll be great. The musical score could consist of that insipid Christian Praise Music and multiple repeats of “God Bless America”, with the opening and closing credits being Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”.
Erickson will watch it while rubbing one out so many times that the laser will actually burn holes in his DVD, and it will have to be replaced.
Seanly
@GregB:
D’oh! I was going to make a Soylent Green reference. Look out, Edward G. Robinson!
I will say that the economy in Soylent Green did seem better than our current one.
GregB
Liz Cheney is the Billy Baldwin of the Cheney Klan.
-G
P.S. Soylent White is crackers!
Ash Can
@Michael:
It was talk-radio jerkoff Lester Kinsolving.
Da Bomb
@ellaesther: No, I hope never experience it either. I can honestly say that none of my jewish friends have ever threatened me with one. Even my friend who’s name is David Duke and kid you not, he’s jewish. With that name you would think he would have one cocked and loaded when I came around.
But I don’t know, we do have the those spears, bones and bushpeople working on our side. As well as OJ Simpson who is instant white woman repellant. So it will be a tough call!
ironranger
If a wingnut blogger is attempting a snark post, how can you tell the difference from the usual lunacy?
Michael
Jesus Christ on a stick. Now I remember.
Next time, it will be Major Garrett.
Jennifer
@steve s:
Here’s what I find most fascinating about the nutters: none of these crazy predictions ever come true, and not only does it not stop them from being taken in by the next crazy conspiracy theory or prediction, but they can’t even acknowledge how sold they were on the last crazy conspiracy theory/prediction that turned out to be complete horseshit – in fact, they probably still believe it’s true, despite the fact that the crazy prediction never came to pass.
These are the “some of the people you can fool all of the time.”
And I’ll just take this opportunity to remind everyone that it’s an incontravertible mathematical fact that half of all people are of below-average intelligence. You have to keep that fact in mind whenever you hear one of the nutters expounding on their stupid ideas. Stupid people, stupid ideas.
bago
@cleek: As a cake denialist, your ARE aware that Chet and Erik were behind the “Time To Crate” rating system, yes?
schrodinger's cat
If you can’t tell the difference, then peak wingularity has been achieved.
Ash Can
OT: I’m just wondering how long it takes edits to show up on posts right now. I added a giggle @ Da Bomb’s masterpiece to an earlier post, but edit time ran out while the change was saving and no change appeared. Now I see that the change is there. While Da Bomb’s humor is certainly double-LOL-worthy, I’m left scratching my head over the site’s technological whizbangery once more.
Tom Betz
This meme was Dick “prostitute toe-sucker” Morris’ message on Hannity’s Insanity Monday night. Listen here to Morris spinning his insane conspiracy theory:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXcE1O1y4es
He gets into the euthanasia bit about 6:08.
RareSanity
Obligatory Simpson’s quote:
(after watching “Meat Council” film extolling the virtues of meat and the idioticy of vegetarianism)
Lisa: They can’t seriously expect us to swallow that tripe.
Skinner: Now as a special treat courtesy of our friends at the Meat Council, please help yourself to this tripe. (Class cheers and runs to table loaded with tripe)
Lisa: Stop it, Stop IT! Don’t you realize you’ve just been brainwashed by corporate propaganda?
Janie: Hmmph, apparently my crazy friend here hasn’t heard of the food chain.
Uter: Yeah, Lisa’s a grade A moron!
Ralph: When I grow up, I’m going to go to Bovine University.
In Wingnut nation, wash, rinse, repeat…
steve s
Oh I know. After Clinton left office, and I asked them how that Y2k thing went, the responses I got were typically things like “Well, They just haven’t done it yet.“
steve s
Lately I haven’t heard much political stuff from them. It’s been more about how cell phone signals are destroying their lives, vaccines cause the flu, and how aspartame is way more deadly than, say, cyanide.
ricky
Why go to the bother and expense of euthanizing people about to die of apoplexy?
A Ghost To Most
@General Winfield Stuck:
Tastes like
chickenlizard.fixt.
ironranger
@schrodinger’s cat: It’s damn close but not there yet, if ever. There is no end to the batshit crazy lurking in their heads.
The Grand Panjandrum
@The Moar You Know:
McVeigh and his co-conspirators were cowards in every sense of the word.
Adrienne
@mclaren:
Just got off the phone with his agent and it looks like Justin Timberlake will be able to fit us in btw canoodling with Jessica Biel and taping his next SNL appearance.
I’m betting Joss Stone could be the white Pam Grier or would the characters have to be stereotypically white bread white the way the characters are stereotypically black in those films?
So many choices, so little time. The folks ain’t getting no younger ya know.
Mojotron
@BubblegumTate: unless Barack starts calling you “sissy”, you’re safe.
Brick Oven Bill
The reality is that society spends an unaffordable amount of money on end of life care. This will have to change and I wish Obama would just be honest with us about it. People who choose to spend their own funds to prolong their life should be allowed to do this. People do cannot or choose not to pay for their own care should be given whatever drugs they want.
Regarding killing whitey, we should not forget the mentor of the President’s spiritual advisor. Now this is some good Neolithic, not yet tested by the metals ages, religion. I think a Jew came up with it in reality though.
“If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill gods who do not belong to the black community.”
Llelldorin
@schrodinger’s cat:
No, that’s just the equiwingularity manifold with γ=1. It’s a wackiness turning point, but it’s hardly peak wingularity. By the time we get to γ=3, the Onion will give up and just start publishing RNC press releases unmodified, because they’ll be far wackier than anything their best writers could devise.
Sirkowski
This is straight up Lyndon Larouche propaganda.
angulimala
@ellaesther
Exactly. Insurance Companies already ration care. Do these people think they make their money by accepting every claim put their way?
Do they not understand that, the moment they get seriously & expensively sick, the insurance company will give someone the job of finding any remotely arguably legal reason to deny them coverage and that, even if the insurance company is in the wrong, it will be up to them to pay for a lawyer to file suit and attempt to prove it?
jcricket
Actually, wingularity is a “limit function” (or whatever it’s called, my calculus is rusty) – where you can approach the wingularity, but never reach it.
Llelldorin
@jcricket:
I believe that it’s actually called a wingular function. You can try gauge the order of the wingularity by constructing a Limbaugh series with reciprocal terms, but, frankly, given the claims that grannies will be murdered in their beds and that Obama started an evil plot at a negative age, it’s far likelier that this is an essential wingularity.
Jennifer
I kinda hate to agree with BOB on anything but…one of my friend’s grandfather was diagnosed with brain cancer at the age of about 82 and given the option for surgery, chemo, etc etc etc…for a cancer with a very high terminal rate. Her grandfather declined the treatment.
“End of life care” is always going to be the biggest cost in any health care system, for the simple reason that really sick people are the ones most likely to die and it costs more to treat really sick people. What doesn’t show up in that stat are the people who were really sick and didn’t die. But before treatment, how are you going to know which patients will live and which won’t make it? You can’t with any certainty. But at the same time, don’t we need to acknowledge situations like the one outlined above, in which a person has already attained an above-average lifespan and has a condition that even much younger people rarely survive…that in those cases, heroic medical intervention probably isn’t called for, unless it’s being privately financed…don’t we need to just be sensible about some of this stuff?
Poopyman
Given that we’re talking about a wingularity, and we’re talking health care, can the wingularity be solved by L’Hopital’s Rule?
jcricket
@Jennifer: I know this is ludicrous, but imagine we had a single payer NHI system like Taiwan recently implemented. Covers everyone, administrative costs of 2-3%, paid through a broad base of income/corporate taxes and has managed to bend the cost curve down to around 5% (mostly through things like CER, better risk pooling inherent in the system, capitation-based salaries for doctors instead of fee-for-service, pushing of generic medication, etc).
We’d have a ton more money to, if we chose, pay for end/beginning of life care. Or, we could decide just not to spend that money and feed it back into disposable income.
As it is, we haphazardly do everything (who we cover, for what, when, why) so it’s just a fucking mess.
I’d love a national conversation about what the reasonable parameters are for health choices at beginning or end of life. There’s never gonna be a “one size fits all” approach because the situations are all unique, but from what I’ve read, when doctors honestly describe all the alternatives in a particularly grim/tough scenario, the number of people that make the “less invasive” choice is surprisingly high.
downtown Lad
Hmmm – Last time I checked, Grandma and Grandpa already had socialized medicine. It’s called Medicare.
cleek
as long as les Hopitals aren’t run by le gouvernement.
Nazgul35
@Tim H.:
There is no sanctuary!
BC
Yesterday Rush said, and I kid you not, “If you have a perfectly healthy 100-year-old who needs a pacemaker . . . ” – I had to laugh, what perfectly healthy person needs a pacemaker?
The Moar You Know
@Jennifer:
Should IWhen I find myself in the same situation, all I want is someone to check on me a few times a day, a large bag of weed, all the opiates I want, an IV drip to stay hydrated and a TV set with a full selection of porn.Anything past age 35 is a gift; we weren’t designed to live this long, pure and simple.
D-Chance.
Big Ben… rapist? The NFL Kobe?
shelley matheis
LongHairedWeirdo
I just spent the weekend with a kid who has the occasional epic temper tantrum.
These guys are throwing one 24/7. It never stops. I’m about ready to haul the next one I hear this horseshit from out to the woodshed and give them a beating they’ll not soon forget.
Well, I hope you didn’t do that with the *kid* (much though I understand the temptation). I think the best response to a kid is to more or less ignore them until they start to feel the adrenaline drop. And then ask them, seriously, how do they feel? Usually, the answer is “pretty bad”. And tell them, yep, that’s normal. Not only do they not get what they want, getting worked up like that feels bad, and makes them look like little kids (ever notice kids are *never* “little kids”? :-) ).
You don’t want them to feel ashamed for losing it – it’s part of growing up. But you want them to learn that it’s in their own best interest *not* to lose it. They look bad, they feel bad, and it doesn’t accomplish anything.
Then again, with those adults for whom the behavior has been reinforced positively, so it’s become a habit, maybe that trip to the woodshed is a good idea.
lurkergirl
@steve s: LOL. I remember hearing the ‘aspartame is deadly’ theory from wingnutty co-workers 20 years ago. Funny to hear that it’s survived all this time in the face of a total lack of supporting evidence.
But of course, for the tinfoil hat types lack of evidence is simply proof that someone’s still hiding the truth, isn’t it?
LongHairedWeirdo
(Razzafrazza HTML tags. That last quote is supposed to be italicized through the first “not soon forget”.)
Jennifer
@jcricket:
I could see a system in which, for example, someone within a certain range of average lifespan (+ or – 10 years, say) would have their medical options dictated by likely success for whatever particular intervention as defined by previous experience with other people of similar age/health profile. So, for example, you are 65 years old and diagnosed with a type of brain tumor that, when surgically treated, yields a 7 year survival rate of 40%, and a 2 year survival rate of 90%. That 7 years gets you to average lifespan and thus this is deemed a good course to take.
Suppose on the other hand the same scenario, but intervention for the type of tumor you have yields a 2 year survival rate of only 30%. Perhaps then your public insurance plan will pick up 30% of the cost of treatment if you want to pursue it, and you have to have a supplemental private insurance plan to pick up the rest or pay it out of pocket.
It gets really hard to make these kinds of calls because in all cases, those are real people involved, and it’s impossible to calculate the value of a few more days, or weeks, or months, or years of life to those people. But I think a sane system would have to limit care to people at or beyond life expectancy with terminal conditions, and make the same kinds of decisions with regard to premature infants. If an infant is born at 4-1/2 or 5 months of term with so many major health issues that it is unlikely to survive more than a couple of years despite massive medical intervention, those interventions probably shouldn’t be done, unless the parents have private insurance to cover the costs or cover them out of pocket. At some point, doing anything and everything to keep a person technically alive is “playing God” a lot more than simply allowing nature to take its course.
It goes without saying that procedures unrelated to terminal conditions that are known to improve quality of life for people regardless of their age need to be covered. But we have to be prepared to make and stand by judgements that, for example, knee replacement surgeries for 100 80-year-olds are a wiser and fairer use of limited resources than brain cancer treatment for 1 80 year old that might buy another 2 years of life.
Brachiator
@Zifnab:
It’s amazing how dangerous a taser can be.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1201111/Australian-bursts-flames-Tasered-police.html
Elie
I think that both much of the MSM and the right wing political types are unable to engage in true discussion of policy alternatives or ideas of how to improve our lives in any substantive way. They clearly have nothing to say. When you have nothing to say, you can either shut up and think about what you can do to become relevant, or in the absence of any brains, you throw poop and otherwise act out.
I find it hard to believe that anyone except the nuttiest of the wingnuts find their behavior and lack of substance anything but appaling and embarrassing. They have nothing to change that because they spent the last two generations grooming leadership on emotional tribalism and fear generation. They are arriving to the battle with spears and rocks against an opponent that is flying over them. The only thing that we have to be careful with is not getting too close to them in hand to hand combat. They are vicious with little to loose.
Brachiator
@Jennifer:
What if the 80-year old were a Ben Franklin?
It’s not just a matter of limited resources. Just as the decisions of an insurance company can be arbitrary, capricious, and cruel, the idea that under some form of national health care, there will always be some collective wisdom determining the greater good doesn’t always hold up either.
Should we deny knee surgeries for boys who play football or young women who dance, and instead insist that these people stay away from activities that might cost us all more of our health tax dollars?
The issue of health care decisions isn’t just a matter of the end-of-life expenses. How would people decide this recent real world British case?
The full story can be found here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1200692/Please-help-Mum-I-dont-want-die-Last-words-alcoholic-22-died-refused-liver-transplant.html
This is a sad case, and I think that the reasoning behind the decision was sound. But there is an element of it that is just as heartless as any denial of service decision made by an insurance company bureaucrat.
demimondian
Reinbach is truly a tragic case — particularly since the rule that they had to follow was named after the soccer player who drank himself to death after being given a liver which could have saved someone’s life. That strikes me as just the kind of punitive decision which comes from *not* listening to the actuaries, either in the Best case or the Reinbach case.
Catsy
@lurkergirl: I don’t know about aspartame being deadly, but it sure tastes like shit.
Adrienne
Maybe you aren’t aware, but the same thing ALREADY HAPPENS here. You already have to meet certain criteria in order to get an organ transplant. So, I would decide it the way we already do – apply the already agreed upon standards. I don’t view this as a particularly sad story since he quite literally drank himself to death to the point that he had advanced liver cirrhosis at the age of 22. He wouldn’t have gotten a transplant here either.
Axe Diesel Palin
Ever read Christopher Buckley’s “Boomsday”?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomsday_%28novel%29
Dr. Morpheus
To all those posters who are arguing that “certain people” who have a “low chance of survival” shouldn’t receive medical care, or it should come out of their own pocket I have one thing to say to you.
FUCK YOU ALL
My girlfriend has had Leukemia, TWICE.
The survival odds for her was 20% the first time she got it (because of the particular type of Leukemia and how far it progressed). And the second time was 0% because she developed a number of opportunistic infections.
She had to relearn how to walk because she was bed-ridden for so long.
Her skin turned bright purple because the bone marrow transplant attacked her skin.
She is now cancer free for the last five years. And is healthy, active, and working as a lab technician. You could not tell from looking at her that she ever went through such a horrible experience.
Yes the insurance companies did duck out of paying for much of her treatment and she is in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars but because she worked (and still does) work for a Catholic hospital the hospital still provided the treatments and did not refuse them because of a lack of coverage.
But she never would have survived if you fuckers had anything to say about it.
Snark Based Reality
Me thinks someone is failing at reading comprehension when it comes to snark.
Dr. Morpheus
@Snark Based Reality:
No, I’m not talking about the obvious snark. I’m talking about posts like
@these
And yes, I know that’s BOB, but there are a couple of posts afterwords that agree with him.
Health care costs should NOT be balanced on the backs of the elderly (no matter what age) or those who are extremely ill merely because conventional medicine deems their chances of survival to be small.
Brachiator
@Adrienne:
Really? Then you should know that the “standards” you allude to are not as set in stone as you suggest. For example,
The link can be found here;
http://www.naturalstandard.com/index-abstract.asp?create-abstract=/monographs/allergies/allergy-hivtransplant.asp
And the larger point of my post was to try to move away from the over-simplification of focusing on elder care when considering health expenditures.
As soon as anyone advocates universal health care, you automatically include a wider range of people of all ages with significant health issues and the challenge of making hard decisions actually increases.
Blue Raven
@Snark Based Reality:
Funny thing about being close to a subject. It leads you to not see it in the same way as someone else.
Just Some Fuckhead
Tell me again why I care whether your girlfriend lives or dies?
Snark Based Reality
@Dr. Morpheus:
Oh FSM…
I doth say you are about to get eaten by the wolves… It was a BOB post!
Was your girlfriend 80 at the time she got Leukemia?
Jennifer
Please with the drama.
No one suggested that a person in prime of life have that type of a rubric applied.
But come on, dude. An 80 year old with terminal brain cancer ain’t the same thing as a 20, 30, 40, 50 something with leukemia.
At some point, you have to accept that people die, it’s the natural order of things. Most of them die before age 80. Therefore, should we really be spending millions to treat an 80 year old terminal brain cancer victim to stave off the inevitable for a few months, or should we be reasonable and say, ok, well, at this age you probably can’t even weather the type of treatments this disease requires for survival of even another 2 years, you’ve already outlived the average lifespan, and if you want to proceed with heroic medical intervention, you need to do so with your private supplementary insurance coverage or on your own dime?
Dollars, in any system, are not unlimited. One of the way you control costs is by accepting that there at some point has to be a cost-benefit ratio applied. Cost-benefit on someone in the prime of life is quite a bit different than someone who has already outlived most of their peers, or someone born 4 months prematurely with massive impairments. Cost-benefit also varies according to the severity of the health issue. Some very serious medical issues are a lot more treatable than others and have much better outcomes. Whether you think it’s “moral” or not, these are the types of things that have to be addressed when it comes to covering everyone with health care.
John Cole
@Dr. Morpheus: Wait a minute. You are telling me to fuck off because your girlfriend’s health insurance screwed her over? And this is an argument against single payer?
It is too early to be drinking.
Brachiator
@Jennifer:
But my question was what if the 80 year old was a Ben Franklin, or an eminent scientist on the brink of a climate warming breakthrough?
You are implying that old age is an automatic slam dunk with respect to spending health care. This is needlessly narrow.
John Wooden, former coach of UCLA, is 98 years old. Has he reached the end of his useful life in your eyes?
This is really quite nonsensical. Even in your hypothetical, you are saying that you would ignore a person’s individual medical history and determine treatment availability by some faulty reliance on “averages.”
And do you understand how wrong your notion of an “average lifespan” is? Do you know anything about actuarial analysis?
So let’s say that the average life expectancy at birth is 77 years, if you are a woman and make it to age 81, there’s a good chance that you will live another 9 years.
And who is the “we” making these decisions? You seem to be implying that the automatic trade-off for national health care which covers more people is to restrict the available health options of people you think are less deserving of care because of their age or the severity of their illness.
How does what you say here, however reasonable, differ from the cold attitude of insurance companies currently at the center of the health care discussion?
Are you saying that people should be willing to give up some of their current health coverage so that more people can be covered? Would you, for example, shut down some pediatric intensive care units so that more children overall could get medical care?
Jennifer
@Brachiator:
I think I was pretty clear, in both comments, in indicating that treatment at the actuarial fringes for survival would be something that should be handled via private supplemental insurance or paid out of pocket.
Any universal healthcare or coverage system has to acknowledge the inevitable: all people die at some point, regardless of how much heroic medical intervention you devote to them. We also have to acknowledge that the interests of the individual faced with imminent death don’t entirely line up with those of the rest of society. That’s because many of us as a species have a really hard time accepting death and spend a lot of time fearing it. For you personally, intervention to save your life that essentially uses up the resources of 90% of the people on Earth may seem like a really good idea if it buys you a few more days or weeks. For 90% of the people on Earth, however, it’s not such a swell idea, and in fact, you can’t really present it as a fair outcome if buying you a few more days costs them everything. That’s a very extreme example of course, but the same principle applies to any situation requiring any type of cost control. This is hardly a radical idea, and it will be implemented in one way or another whether you approve of it or not, by either a private insurer or a government one. It’s not one of those things that it’s “polite” to discuss, and even broaching the subject exposes one to charges of “cold-heartedness”, but just pretending it doesn’t go on and won’t go on in the future is, well, just pretending.
Jason
The fact is that socialized health care leads to rationing and less choice – period. I’m originally British and have had years of experience with their National Health Service, so I know exactly what goes on. Those who glamorize or romanticize European health care are just not prepared to face the facts. In Britain, every kind of treatment is rationed so that the doctors have to make decisions about who is worthy of, say, a lung operation – and who isn’t. Guess what? They make that decision by scoring you points based on the lifestyle you’ve led. If you’ve ever smoked at any point, you go to the back of the line. They just denied a young alcoholic a liver transplant because he was too sick to leave hospital and prove that he was prepared to abstain from drinking (that’s the kind of warped no-win logic you get from faceless bureaucrats). The poor kid just died in his mothers arms with doctors refusing to help him.
Waiting lists are terrible because of rationing – when I had skin cancer here in the US I made inquiries about going home to have it done for free. I needed surgery within 6 weeks to stand a 95% chance of survival. I was told I would wait at least 12 weeks in Britain. For this same reason, many people die on waiting lists after their operable cancer spread to become inoperable. If liberals want this quality of care for Americans then I have no respect for them whatsoever. Did they ever stop to think why the cancer survival rate is so much higher in the US? Probably not.
Yes, health insurance is too expensive here. That is the ONLY problem with American health care. The quality is the best in the world, period. So because a few million are uninsured (many are illegals, many qualify for Medicaid, many choose not to purchase insurance when they can, but anyway…), liberals wish to completely wreck our quality of health care, impose rationing, snatch away our freedom of choice and destroy the mother lode of medical innovation (which so many other countries reap the benefits of too)?
Just because our health care system has problems does NOT mean that state run health care is the solution. Giving the government more power over our economy is a disaster. The Republicans have an extremely sane, rational and efficient health care reform plan and yet not surprisingly, the demented Democrats, drunk on the idea that they finally have the chance to enact all of their left wing fantasies, refuse to even look at it. And of course the liberal mainstream media have gone out of their way to ignore
Brachiator
@Jennifer:
Yep. You are clear on this point, and I don’t disagree with you on this.
Your criteria for pushing people onto supplemental insurance (average life expectancy, for example) is not really reasonable. In your example you did not allow any room for individual medical history and instead fell back on some fuzzy idea in your own head about the worthiness of a human life.
This is a very debatable point. Individuals have rights. Societies don’t. It’s odd that you would even broach the topic in this way. Republicans oppose gay marriage because of claims of a larger good to society, some anti-abortion people claim that society and its institutions are damaged if women have a right to choose.
This is totally irrelevant to the issue of how health care dollars should be spent.
I don’t agree that the “resources” of the people on Earth are collectively owned. If I did, I might suggest that Americans are only entitled to minimal health care, and that the majority of the Earth’s resources be spent on raising the health standard in Africa, Asia and other underdeveloped areas of the world.
Would you be down for this?
The situation gets more complicated when you take public money through taxation and then apply controls and rationing, especially when you try to rationalize a decrease in health coverage simply because you are insuring more people.
Yawn. In another post, I reference a link to a NY Times Magazine article on health care rationing. I will post it again here (“Why We Must Ration Health Care,” by Peter Singer).
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.html?_r=1&hpw
The issue isn’t just about the allocation of health care resources. It’s about who makes those decisions, what these decisions are based on, and the potential coercive element of any of these decisions.
Oddly enough, we seem to agree that issues of rationing and control, but I your examples and reasoning are not really useful. Imagine if someone said that men should have more health care because their lives are worth more than women because on average they are involved in jobs that expose them to greater risk of illness or injury.
It’s also interesting that some health care systems, such as that of France, seems to succeed even though in some respects it goes against your draconian model (courtesy of Wiki)
More info can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_France
So while I agree with some of your descriptions of the problem, I don’t agree with any of your analysis or your idea of what the solutions might be.
Jennifer
@Brachiator:
Well it sounds like we ain’t so far apart after all, since we both agree on the need for cost control and some rationing as some sort. I was just speculating on what that system for rationing would look like and what the criteria would be. Maybe I’m not on the same page with you there in my speculations, but I’d argue that there is some logic behind them, in that long-shot life-saving care has more potentially to offer a young person than someone in their 80s or 90s (many decades of life vs. probably a few more years). On the issue of your hypothetical Ben Franklin, I’d say you are the one slipping over the line into illogic, because a day of life for him is of no more value – to him – than a day of anyone else’s life is to them. That’s exactly the route you wouldn’t want to go when rationing care, as it puts into place a standard that some people’s lives are more important and worth more than others based on who they are, and if this 15-year-old kid has to forego treatment so the 80 year old Ben Franklin can have 2 more years, where’s the fairness in that?
Mitchell Blatt
You’re an idiot. You want people to die with this plan. You want to take away healthcare from most people–over 100 million even–and then you want to deny care and ration care.
Your own party can’t even get this passed. Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama are failures. Mike Ross has more power than them.