As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can’t access the care they require. That’s equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being “killers” – and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.
These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors’ Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its “socialist” healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and “I wouldn’t be here without the NHS”.
Listening to Carl’s show dedicated to Charley just now and got all moist-eyed about (of all things) this great old WZ song (Send Lawyers Guns and Money)
It’s been a really bad week at the FOJ. The worst sort of arbitrary bureaucratic decisions f&&king with people’s lives. Stunned like after a body blow. Tears. Crushing headaches and gut-aches. Talking begging waiting. Looks like a middle course will be found (I hope; I find out this morning). And true gratitude for someone usually weak as a kitten who spoke up for once on our behalf.
For all this, it’s things like this that can bring a refining. A clarity of goals and purpose. One chooses a perspective and determines what’s meaningless and what’s important enough to fight for. And a gratitude for the valued people in one’s life.
Hence, horrible villain, or I’ll spurn thine eyes like balls before me; I’ll unhair thy head, Thou shalt be whipp’d with wire, and stew’d'in brine, smarting in lingering pickle. (from Antony and Cleopatra)
