Urologist Jack Cassell has a message for anyone who supports President Obama and health care reform: Find a new doctor. He posted a sign on his front door with the following message:
The sign reads: "If you voted for Obama … seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years."
As if it weren't enough to put out that particular flavor of welcome mat, there's also this little gem:
In his waiting room, Cassell also has provided his patients with photocopies of a health-care timeline produced by Republican leaders that outlines "major provisions" in the health-care package. The doctor put a sign above the stack of copies that reads: "This is what the morons in Washington have done to your health care. Take one, read it and vote out anyone who voted for it."
Beyond the obvious temper tantrum, I'm at a loss to understand exactly what his problem might be. It's not like he accepts patients from a myriad of insurers. According to his Doctor.com listing, the only insurance he accepts is CIGNA. Since he's a specialist and surgeon, I can only assume he's a little angry that he might get some new patients down the road as more people are able to get health insurance and seek medical treatment?
Oh, and in case you wondered, the answer is yes. He's a registered Republican, and his wife is running for local office. For all of his education, it seems he can't be bothered to read the actual provisions of the law, preferring the Frank Luntz abbreviated version instead.
No warm fuzzies for Dr. Cassell from Rep. Alan Grayson, either.
The outspoken Grayson described Cassell's sign as "ridiculous."
"I'm disgusted," he said. "Maybe he thinks the Hippocratic Oath says, ‘Do no good.' If this is the face of the right wing in America, it's the face of cruelty.... Why don't they change the name of the Republican Party to the Sore Loser Party?"
Seriously. I'll let the medical community sort out the ethics, but if I saw that sign on my doctor's door, I'd find a new doctor. Pissed-off urologists aren't my cup of tea.
UPDATE: Via Huffington Post, a video of the good doctor, in his own words:
Dishonest morons motivated purely by ideology have decided to throw a scream-fest over a proposed "stay in school" speech from the President to children.
President Obama wants to deliver a message to students next week emphasizing hard work, encouraging young people to do their best in school. The temper tantrum the right is throwing in response only helps reinforce how far gone 21st-century conservatives really are.
This is no small, isolated fit, thrown by random nutjobs. The New York Times, Washington Post,LA Times, AP, and others all ran stories this morning about the coordinated national effort to either keep children at home so they can't hear their president's pro-education message, or demanding that local schools block the message altogether.
The people organizing this protest and the people mad about the President daring to "indoctrinate" their children are the people who said nothing when Ronald Reagan talked favorably about tax cuts to schoolkids, when George Bush sat in a classroom on 9/11, and when they waged a campaign to put PRAYER in American schools. It's OK, then, to indoctrinate your children to almighty God, but not for them to hear a speech about hard work from the elected President of the United States. Conservatives have waged war on respect.
But the award for lack of self-awareness has to go to NBC News, which asks today:
Finally, here’s one more thought about the entire controversy over Obama’s education speech on Tuesday: Since the White House has said the text of the speech will be available for 24 hours before he delivers it and since they altered the lesson plan language, why is this still a controversy? The ability of the conservative media machine to generate a controversy for this White House is amazing. In fact, this is an example of a story that percolates where it becomes harder and harder for some to claim there's some knee-jerk liberal media bias. (Does anyone remember these kinds of controversies in the summer of 2001?) The ability of some conservatives to create media firestorms is still much greater than liberals these days.
Now, at least they admit that it's impossible to claim liberal media bias, meaning they understand who's to blame here. But do they really have to say "The ability of the conservative media machine to generate a controversy for this White House is amazing"? Isn't the answer that the non-conservative media will simply blindly follow whatever conservative media decides to gun up? Don't media types privilege conservative mini-controversies and hissy fits? Isn't there literally no way they could lay off something like this? Isn't that the problem?
Conservatives have cracked the code: yell real loud about some invented outrage, and watch the media chase the soccer ball. They actually don't have to cover it.
Krugman was right again. Instead of taking a strong leadership position and insisting on a larger package, Obama played nice with the so-called "moderates" of both parties (i.e. morons who would sell their own mothers to feed their swollen egos). And here we sit, in a stagnating economy that sinks even deeper in recession as jobs are flushed down the drain.
I'm reminded of one of my favorite business books, "Management by Baseball." Author Jeff Angus (who also has a great blog) says one of the most common management mistakes is when a manager assumes a strategy that has been successful for him as a player will apply to all situations when he's a manager. Obama's built his career on being a cautious incrementalist, but what's called for now is bold vision.
So what do we have to counter this scary prospect? We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3½ million jobs by late next year. That’s much better than nothing, but it’s not remotely enough. And there doesn’t seem to be much else going on. Do you remember the administration’s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I.
All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren’t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.
So have we failed to learn from history, and are we, therefore, doomed to repeat it? Not necessarily — but it’s up to the president and his economic team to ensure that things are different this time. President Obama and his officials need to ramp up their efforts, starting with a plan to make the stimulus bigger.
Just to be clear, I’m well aware of how difficult it will be to get such a plan enacted.
There won’t be any cooperation from Republican leaders, who have settled on a strategy of total opposition, unconstrained by facts or logic. Indeed, these leaders responded to the latest job numbers by proclaiming the failure of the Obama economic plan. That’s ludicrous, of course. The administration warned from the beginning that it would be several quarters before the plan had any major positive effects. But that didn’t stop the chairman of the Republican Study Committee from issuing a statement demanding: “Where are the jobs?”
It’s also not clear whether the administration will get much help from Senate “centrists,” who partially eviscerated the original stimulus plan by demanding cuts in aid to state and local governments — aid that, as we’re now seeing, was desperately needed. I’d like to think that some of these centrists are feeling remorse, but if they are, I haven’t seen any evidence to that effect.
And as an economist, I’d add that many members of my profession are playing a distinctly unhelpful role.
It has been a rude shock to see so many economists with good reputations recycling old fallacies — like the claim that any rise in government spending automatically displaces an equal amount of private spending, even when there is mass unemployment — and lending their names to grossly exaggerated claims about the evils of short-run budget deficits. (Right now the risks associated with additional debt are much less than the risks associated with failing to give the economy adequate support.)
Also, as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms.
So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it’s essential.
Obama administration economists understand the stakes. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the “lessons of 1937” — the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda.
What I don’t know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far.
So here’s my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don’t, you’ll soon be facing your own personal 1937.
By now most of you have seen the "don't tase me bro" video, watched morons like Brian Kilmeade from Fixed Noise endorse the use of tasers and brutal violence against protesters or heard of the growing number of incidences involving tasers around the country. This video, of what should have been a routine traffic stop in Utah, ended up with a young father face down on the highway with his screaming, pregnant wife and young child in the car while 50,000 volts of electricity shot through his body. He was tased and immediately arrested -- all without having been read his rights or warned that he was in danger of being tased.
The driver, Jared Massey, refused to sign a speeding ticket because he believed he had slowed down before his vehicle passed the speed limit sign. The officer became visibly upset and that's where things went downhill. More details from ABC News.
Calling Gov. Corzine a crash dummy is pretty appalling. This was a tragic event, and a serious car wreck, but these morons can't help themselves. Yes, he should have worn his seat belt, but his family are suffering tremendously right now and you'd think they would give it a few days before they turned ugly like they always do.
Back in 2002, when the U.S. was debating whether to invade Iraq, those who opposed the invasion were, for that reason alone, dismissed as unserious morons and demonized as anti-American subversive hippies. Despite the fact that subsequent events have largely proven them to have been right, and that those who did the demonizing were the frivolous, unserious, know-nothing extremists, this narrative persists, so that -- even now, when most Americans have turned against this war -- the only way to avoid being an "extremist," and to be rewarded with the "centrist" mantle, is to support the continuation of this war in one form or another...read on
Milblogging.com claims to have the world's largest index of military blogs - searchable by a variety of attributes - providing an unprecedented depth of information necessary to find your favorite milblog. From Iraq to Afghanistan, Kosovo, or anywhere.
What kind of mouth-breathing morons walk among us? Watch this.
Billmon has an excellent analysis of Saturday's referendum in Iraq. "The constitutional process, upon which so many hopes have been pinned, has become a win-win scenario for the insurgents." Read it all.
Hey, I was waiting till the end of the year to release this very influential poll, but since they jumped the shark even further after similarly saluting Power Lie, the stockholders made me release this data now. Putiing up phony pictures was the last straw.
Skippy says: it's bad enough that time magazine chooses annthrax as a cover girl, but they also are stupid enough to proffer third-rate conservative satire as facts. in their photo gallery of annthrax through the ages, they show a picture of the parody group "communists for kerry" with this caption: uh, guys..."communists for kerry" is a satire group, the hardly-ever-right counterpart to "billionaires for bush."
both groups pretend to be extremists supporters of said candidates to make fun of the opposite side. as anyone with a sense of humor, or, failing that, a lexus-nexus subscription, could tell you.
