Truths and myths about Canadian health care
6 comments July 29th, 2009
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Archive for July 29th, 2009
Fox News legal analyst says cops violated law in arresting Henry Louis Gates
7 comments July 29th, 2009
Former Judge Andrew Napolitano (above), a legal analyst for Fox News, told the network’s viewers the other night something they probably didn’t want to hear — namely that POLICE ERRED in arresting Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates.
Move over, birthers! Here come the deathers!
2 comments July 29th, 2009
As a growing number of semi-respectable conservatives quietly slink away from the birther movement so as to avoid further embarrassment among polite society, their nuttier brethren have come up with a new theme:
Health-care reforms sponsored by Democrats are PART OF A PLOT to euthanize sickly old folks.
Gee, at the rate things are going, these loonies will soon be impossible to satirize. I mean, how can you parody the deathers? Not very easily. They’re parodies of themselves.
UPDATE: Wow! The Republican retreat from birtherism has become a STAMPEDE.
Is this over the top or what?
2 comments July 29th, 2009
A Baptist church in Florida is pushing this video, which strongly implies that Barack Obama is the Antichrist:
Conservatives ignore facts regarding health care
5 comments July 29th, 2009
Jonathan Chait BLOWS THE WHISTLE on the penchant among conservatives for peddling falsehoods about health care.
As Chait puts it: “[I]t’s very frustrating to debate public policy with people who are unaware of the basic facts. The problem seems to be especially acute on health care, an issue conservatives have just never paid much attention to. Thus an enormous swath of right-wing commentary is based on simple factual misunderstandings.”
UPDATE: Nate Silver has a LIKE-MINDED TAKE on the matter.
Incontrovertible evidence that Bill O’Reilly is not the sharpest knife in the drawer
4 comments July 29th, 2009
Fox News blowhard Bill O’Reilly argued the other night that the reason life expectancy is lower in the United States than in Canada is that we have 10 times as many people and therefore more deaths.
Mind you, this was no slip of the tongue. It was sheer dimwittedness.
Paul Krugman had an APPROPRIATE REACTION to O’Reilly’s idiocy.
Despite the enduring myth, Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet
18 comments July 29th, 2009
An item I posted here yesterday regarding global warming inevitably drew several comments in which Al Gore was mentioned, including one that alluded to the popular myth that Gore falsely claimed to have invented the Internet.
This fiction about Gore and the Internet pops up regularly in letters to the editor, in talk-radio conversations and otherwise in contexts in which a point is made about delusions of grandeur.
And, of course, the myth is commonplace in the rhetoric of global-warming skeptics who want to denigrate Gore for his views on climate change, as was the case here yesterday.
But the reality is that Gore never made any such claim about inventing the Internet.
In an interview on CNN in 1999, Gore, who was then the sitting vice president and a candidate to succeed Bill Clinton in the White House, said this by way of reviewing his record:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth, environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Notice that Gore took credit for leadership in Congress in creating the Internet. He never said he “invented” the Internet. Was his claim to such leadership legitimate? Well, here’s what Republican Newt Ginrich said about that:
(I)n all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is—and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a ‘futures group’—the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the ’80s began to actually happen.
Way back in 1988, The Guardian, a British paper, reported this:
American computing scientists are campaigning for the creation of a ’superhighway’ which would revolutionise data transmission. Legislation has already been laid before Congress by Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, calling for government funds to help establish the new network, which scientists say they can have working within five years, at a cost of Dollars 400 million.
Years later, when Gore was vice president, computer scientist Vinton Cerf, widely known as the Father of the Internet, had this to say:
I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president.
History shows that Gore’s claim on CNN that he played a leading role in congressional action regarding the Internet was ignored by most other media for the first few days and wasn’t distorted into a claim that he invented the Net until the Republican Party cooked up that falsehood a few days later.
A useful chronology of the controversy can be found HERE (you have to scroll down a little to get to the good part).
America hits the reset button
1 comment July 29th, 2009
Kurt Anderson has come up with a PROVOCATIVE ESSAY in which he argues that the nation’s economic future is not as dire as it seems.
Here’s a little excerpt to whet your intellectual appetite:
Every now and then…an abrupt and severe end of flush economic times happens to coincide with the natural end of a conservative political era, making the historical waves fall powerfully into sync. That’s what happened in the 1930s, following three straight conservative presidencies, a period of whiz-bang technological progress—electrification, radio, automobiles, aviation—and a culture of bon temps rouler. And that’s what’s happening now.
