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Somebody said something rather stupid today in the Dallas Morning News. For those of you who just flew in from the face of Venus, I’ll provide you the link.
Almost one of every four Texas residents – 24.8 percent – were uninsured in 2006 and 2007, based on an average of the rates for those two years. That’s up from 23.9 percent for 2004 and 2005.
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But the numbers are misleading, said John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank. Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain’s health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)
So most of the liberal blogs stopped there and had a roast of John Goodman. Fair enough. What Goodman said is ridiculous. He hasn’t been what we call in my business, “media trained.” In other words, don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to see in print. No doubt, he’s wishing someone had given him that little nugget before a reporter from the Dallas Morning News called him up yesterday.
But the blogs ranting on Goodman do a bit of an injustice in not reporting the rest of his (still foolish, but somewhat rational) quote. Here, I’ll help:
“So instead of producing worthless statistics that people fling around in vacuous editorials and pointless debates, the Census Bureau should produce meaningful numbers, identifying all of the sources of funds people will draw on if they need medical care,” he said.
To his point, to say this person is uninsured, or that person is insured, lacks nuance. It lacks context and most of all it doesn’t address the problem.
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[ This opinion piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal on February 20. It is reprinted here with the permission of author Betsy McCaughey Ross, a former lieutenant governor of New York, currently serving as an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute (the original "think tank"). ]
On March 4, voters in the Texas Democratic primary will choose between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The battle is shaping up to be a health-care Alamo. Twenty five percent of people living in the Lone Star state are uninsured, according to the U.S. Census. That’s the highest rate of any state.
Sen. Clinton has issued the challenge, telling Sen. Obama “I’ll see you in Texas.” She promises to provide health coverage for “every single one of the nation’s 47 million uninsured,” and she accuses Sen. Obama of offering a “band aid” solution that would leave about a third of those 47 million uncovered.
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At first I was totally outraged when I read about GlassBooth. That in itself isn’t much I realize, I get outrage over a bunch of things, some not even that significant and some, once I have had a bit of time to reflect and have actually looked at the site or read the article I am outraged by I tend to reconsider a bit. Of course this model of thinking held true for GlassBooth as well.
Basically GlassBooth comes off as a site for the lazy voter. You are given a “quiz” in which you are given 20 points to distribute among 14 different political hot buttons. Then you are asked to rank how important each of these topics are to you on aa scale of 1-5 with targeted questions. After you have gone through that (it takes about 5 minutes or so) the site tells you the top three candidates who share your views ranked by percentage and has a drop down menu of all the other candidates to see how you compare with their views. Read more »
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In 1998 President Clinton discreetly got a BJ in his office. Okay, maybe it wasn’t the best thinking on his part to do this while on the phone with some other world leaders, but hey, no one lost their life over it.
Months later, when this news leaked out, the Republicans (and folks at Fox News) flipped, they saw weakness and they struck. Not only did they run every one of their campaigns since 1998 on Family Values and their moral superiority (as they continue to do), but they called for Clinton to be impeached. And, as we all know, this was not just the public, this was everyone.
Clinton getting a little something-something under his desk was such a scandal that the Republicans in office thought they might actually have a chance to impeach the president. While they failed at doing so (as they should have), they were able to create a platform to run on for the next presidential election and a core set of beliefs that made them appear superior to enough people to keep them in office for a while.
The Republican Machine saw the President’s screw-ups (no pun intended) as a chance to build up their own platform; not just with subtle innuendo during their campaigning, but by making it a national issue for everyone to see.
Now, let’s fast forward to 2005. President Bush has just acknowledged that the WMD’s that we were positive were in Iraq, thus prompting us to go to war in 2003, well, they may not be there after all. Oh and those close ties that Iraq had with Osama may not exist either, and that Mission Accomplished banner, well, it may have been a White House PR faux pas, but who are they to take credit for their mistakes?
So, at this point in 2005, we are now aware as a country that we have been lied to not once, but at least a few times already about this war we are involved in. Okay, cool, time for the White House to make it up to us, right? Maybe call back some of our troops, tell France and Germany they were right in the first place and that this was an unjustified war, and basically ease off a little, right? Well, apparently not, instead it is time to increase troops in Iraq. And we see this tactic again and again. We fucked up, something is going wrong, let’s increase troops.
Fast forward to 2007. The Democrats have finally gotten power back in the House and the Senate. The people have decided they are tired of the B.S. we are being fed on a daily basis by the people in power and want to see a change. Instead, what do we get? Lies from the Attorney General about firing judges because they were a bit more Democrat then the Republicans liked. The President allowing “behind closed door” testimony to Rove and Miers in the same scandal, essentially so they would not tarnish their names too badly when they ran for re-election. As well as a number of other Presidential blunders, including threats to Congress if they did not back his plans for escalating the effort in Iraq.
Now I ask: Where are the calls for impeachment? Our current President is not only doing serious damage to our country and our relations with foreign nations, but also causing the deaths of thousands in Iraq (as of today at least 3320, while we wait on confirmation from the Department of Defense on another 12).
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