Ron Paul Is No Hypocrite

That clip I ran yesterday, in which Ron Paul said that it's not his responsibility to care for the uninsured, was based on a hypothetical guy. Let's take a look at a real one!

Back in 2008, Kent Snyder — Paul's former campaign chairman — died of complications from pneumonia. Like the man in Blitzer's example, the 49-year-old Snyder was relatively young and seemingly healthy when the illness struck. He was also uninsured. When he died on June 26, 2008, two weeks after Paul withdrew his first bid for the presidency, his hospital costs amounted to $400,000. The bill was handed to Snyder's surviving mother, who was incapable of paying. Friends launched a website to solicit donations.

Charity fell short in this case, by about 9/10s of what was needed. If Paul seems a little more troubled in the clip than your typical Tea Party candidate, that's probably why; the question wasn't hypothetical at all. Tentative props to Wolf Blitzer for bringing it up.

I know that bad things happen to good people, and no system is perfect, but we're the only Western nation in which this guy couldn't receive care. On the whole, Germany's economy or France's or England's is no worse off than ours is, and they manage to provide medical care for everybody. When you're figuring death panels into your policy decisions, keep in mind that one hero of the Right is absolutely okay with trimming you from the herd.

We Can't AFFORD An Eye And A Tooth

California is in the middle of a budget crisis so bad, we re-elected Jerry Brown as governor. Among his plans to solve it is allowing people to vote on whether they'll accept a tax increase, though the Republicans are blocking that one.

The Republicans won't allow people to decide for themselves. Now THAT'S what our founding fathers wanted!

Anyway, something that isn't on the table yet but also surely would be blocked - abolishing the death penalty. The case was made yesterday in an Op-Ed at the L.A. Times by Donald A. McCartin, who was also known as "The Hanging Judge" of Orange County. McCartin's point is that people sentenced to death are rarely executed because the appeals process capital cases is byzantine and endless (he sentenced 10 people to death, none have been executed) and this appeals process is incredibly costly compared to simply imprisoning someone to life without parole. Which these inmates are serving, because they'll never be executed. So that's essentially $125 million a year saved, starting today if we abolish the death penalty in California.

So biblical imperative aside, sounds like a pretty easy fix to me. Anybody want to take the Hanging Judge up on it?

Panels? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Panels

Like a lot of things that emerge from Republican Talking Points, the idea that the Democrat-sponsored Health Care bill will result in killing the elderly is rooted in a form of projection. As Jacob Weisberg points out in Slate last week, Republicans have done more to kill off the elderly than anyone.

Take the conservative push to privatize Social Security, which George W. Bush proposed and failed to get Congress to pass in 2005. Social Security has driven life expectancy up and death rates down since it was instituted. It has an especially pronounced impact on suicide rates for the elderly, which have declined 56 percent since 1930. Had Bush prevailed, we would now be undoing income security for the elderly. Those who gambled on the stock market and lost would be less able to afford medicine, food, and heating for their homes. In aggregate, they'd presumably die younger and commit suicide more often.

Republicans continue working to shorten and sadden the lives of the elderly in more oblique ways, too. One of President Obama's first official acts was to reverse Bush's executive order limiting government funding for stem-cell research, which remains the most promising avenue for new treatments of diseases that afflict the aged, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Clean-air legislation, which the Republicans defeated in 2002, has the potential to save 23,000 lives per year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Many of those victims are elderly people, who suffer disproportionately from cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses exacerbated by air pollution. Because emissions of carbon monoxide and such are merely a contributing factor, you can't name the individuals who have died because of this policy choice. But there are tens of thousands of people who would still be elderly today if Republicans didn't value the rights and campaign contributions of polluters more highly than their lives.

Weisberg also points out that the inheritance tax, which was co-written by Chuck Grassley to expire in 2010, will encourage old people who are worth more than a million to ALSO expire by the end of 2010. If they won't die on their own, there's gonna be a lot of relatives around to help 'em out.

It's tounge-in-cheek, scurrilous logic; but that's what those guys get for not arguing the bill on its merits in the first place.

Mr Novak

Robert Novak, dead at 78. Hard-working reporter, made a few especially controversial choices towards the end there. Journalism is poorer for his loss.

It Doesn't Happen in Threes

During the last few days, we lost FOUR famous people - Sky Saxon, garage-band icon and leader of The Seeds, passed away yesterday. If you don't think Sky counts, you're not pushin' hard enough.

Enough already!