An interesting article by two long time health care experts. In a nutshell, they advocate adjusting our priorities to focusing on quality not quantity of life years. They support targeting a increase of life expectancy to about 80, increasing quality of life across the board with the highest investment being in children, then the adults that basically run the country and finally, seniors over 80 years of age. They believe the government dollars being poured into disease processes that we've shown mostly small advances in don't equal money well or wisely spent.
Allocating our scarce assets accordingly, they claim would put us on a healthier path to success. It will involve quite a fundamental mind set change of our citizens. Some would call it rationing and therefore evil.
Now I know some people look up to this woman as a hero, but whoo boy...if you don't know, don't try and deal with details, eh?
Look, anybody can get tripped up over the exact details of history, so this is NOT a big deal. However, if I were even potentially going to run for President, I'd have some local talking points ready to roll for everyplace I stopped.
Wouldn't you?
UPDATE: Did some quick research as to some of the language Palin used. She said he warned "...the British" which sounds wrong, but at that time, everyone still considered themselves British subjects, so technically thats not necessarily an incorrect statement. But to say he warned the British makes it sound like Revere was warning the English that the English were coming. Really, he warned the Americans that the English were coming across the Charles River into Charlestown. When we have to split a hair this finely, I call it a mistake.
Revere did not actually say, "The British are coming, the British are coming!" When a local asked to him to not make so much noise as he rode through the countryside, he said, "Noise!" cried Revere, "You'll have noise enough before long. The regulars are coming out!"
No account I could find described Revere firing warning shots or ringing bells. Actually, he and the other Patriots who were trying to get the word of the British advancing on the city were trying to do so as quietly as possible. I have no idea where she got warning shots and bells from.
To the claim she made that Revere gave the British a warning that they weren't going to "take our arms," is possibly a reference to a weapons store in Concord. Its an awkward way to describe it. Its possible that's what she meant, or its possible she wasn't sure. I can't tell.
She said he rode through town, when he actually road from one town (Boston) to another (Lexington). Technically, some of his ride occurred in both of those towns, so make of that what you will.
She said Revere showed the British that "...we were going to be secure and free." I also couldn't find anything that remotely suggested that Revere had said anything of that nature to the British soldiers who had captured him and questioned him.
The nicest spin I can put on this is that Palin gave a partially inaccurate description of Revere's ride. She chose an odd way to refer to the British being warned. The gunshots and bells things-I have no explanation for.
A harsher spin would be that she really didn't know what the hell she was talking about and winged it, getting some of it kind of right, some of it totally wrong and added five "ummms" in 19 seconds. Which suggests she was making this up as she went along.
All of us have tried to describe something and gotten it correct in a kinda/sorta way. Palin's guilty of this, joining a long line of speakers who stumbled on tape.
I say if we have a right to live in this world, we also have a right to not live in this world, especially those with a terminal disease process. If a person feels prohibited from ending his or her life because of a faith based reason, that's one thing. Government has no place, whatsoever in a terminally ill person who decides they've had enough.
There's quite a bit of talk these days about Government being too big and too intrusive. Currently, most Conservatives feel Progressives have expanded Government's reach to new levels. They're not entirely wrong.
I recall a young lady named Terri Schiavo who was terminally ill and our Government, which was led by a Republican President, George W. Bush saw the question and the case of her right to die in a different light. Mr. Bush signed legislation to keep her alive and her feeding tube place back in. Over a dozen failed court appeals later, her tube was removed and several days later, she passed away.
If we think about the debate on government death panels and the faux controversy about end of life directives, we obviously aren't comfortable with the idea of death. Someone who was totally in a vegetative state, was forced to stay alive longer than she perhaps needed to. An effort to see that Physicians are able to be compensated for their time spent with patients explaining end of life issues and options, was scuttled by an ignorant mob in the Affordable Care Act.
And in Dr. Kevorkian's case, a physician who was compelled to assist terminally ill people, to facilitate their choices and end their suffering, was ridiculed, imprisoned and turned into a punch line.
I guess that's one instance where many Conservatives had and have no problem with Government getting in between a patient and their doctor.
This isn't going to be a long essay on how I feel about the wars we find ourselves in. I'll have something more formal over the next few weeks. Today, I want to share three things that I feel resonate with me about our military involvement in Afghanistan and to a lessor degree, Iraq.
This is a recent comment from a US Army Captain, who currently commands a company in Afghanistan:
"Although American citizens should definitely be more interested in what their military is involved in, they should not think that their military is somehow "standing watch" to protect the citizens' freedom just because the politicians say it is so.
But standing watch in Iraq, Afg, etc, etc is not protecting Americans freedom IMO. This just seems like some sort of romanticized feeling about loving one's own military no matter what. While that is not necessarilly bad, it sometimes misleads people into thinking their military is actually defending freedom (the military's real job) instead of just being grossly misused by ineffective political leaders (the military's current job).
A draft or mandatory public service (military or civil option) would do much to bring normal citizens into the fold on caring about public policy.
Remember your military on Memorial Day, yes. But don't say we are doing something that we are not. As I'm standing in the TSA security area of a major airport right now listening to a detachment from the local police play The National Anthem, it strikes me ironic that we are "the land of the free" but also the land that strip-searches old women and relies on big brother to ensure we fly safe.
Some might take these comments as un-patriotic, but you'd be sorely mistaken."
Matthew Hoh's resignation letter:
"I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end." Matthew Hoh
The video the US Military doesn't want you to see:
Take a few minutes and digest the content of each. They are examples of other people's opinions of our involvement in these wars. I give the most credence to Hoh's resignation letter. The Captain's comments are on one level anecdotal yet a very common theme reported by our returning servicemen. The video I thought was a bit over the top. Its too sensational as it comes across to me as "let's find the worst clips possible and edit them together and make a video."
There is no evidence that our military presence is really making us safer. We have hundreds of thousands troops chasing hundreds of Al Qaeda terrorists. All indications suggest they aren't even in Afghanistan any more and have departed for Pakistan, Yemen and other countries. We're not at war with the Taliban. The Taliban didn't blow up the World Trade Center, fly a plane into the Pentagon nor attempt to crash one into the Capitol.
What are we doing there?
At a time when elected officials are saying we don't have enough money to help the victims of the Joplin, MO tornado, we need to ask ourselves is this military action worth two billion dollars a week to continue? If you feel we should remain in Afghanistan indefinitely, I'd love to understand why.
