“Just last week, DeLay marshaled a budget resolution through the House of Representatives that would cut funding for Medicaid by at least $15 billion, threatening the quality of care for people like Terri Schiavo.”
DeLay spokesman Dan Allen fired back: “The fact that they’re tying a life issue to the budget process shows just how disconnected Democrats are to reality.”
Yes, the medicaid budget has nothing at all to do with reality. It’s not a “life issue” It’s a process. Sorry. Carry on.
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Vomito
Via TBOGG
I’ve been waiting for this:
THE AGONY OF HOLY WEEK [Peter Robinson]
As Terri Schiavo is being starved to death, reports indicate, the successor of St. Peter is finding it impossible to hold down his food. A young woman, martyred by the culture of death. An old man who has poured out his life combatting it.Sitio. I thirst.
Posted at 10:24 AM
TBOGG notes
Meanwhile, the Brides of Jesus ponder whether the the Little Black Cocktail Dress will be appropriate for both mourning and wake binge drinking.
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Living Forever
There are many fine articles all over the left blosphere about the social security trustee report written by people far more conversant with the details than I. So I’m not going to weigh in on the particulars except to note that I think I understand why the projected death rates have inexplicably gone down precipitously from last year to this.
Now that we are learning to respect the culture ‘o life (as Dear Leader so endearingly puts it) we can expect that in the future no one will be allowed to have life support removed. The actuaries are simply factoring in the probability that many of the people who could be expected to shuffle off their mortal coil when their brains have liquified will be kept alive by artificial means for decades longer than expected just last year.
Let’s just keep our fingers crossed that their private accounts do well in the market …
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The Poor Dears
Atrios has already issued the call to action on the sensitive, delicate Democrats of the NDN who were swooning over the coarse, indecorous criticism they received for voting for the Bankruptcy bill, so I’ll just send you there for the information.
However, I’d like to make one little suggestion. When you obstreperous partisans write your e-mails you might want to ask them what exactly they mean by this:
“The center [CAP] could have made the argument on the merits, but it chose to do so in a personal way,” said Schiff, one of roughly a dozen lawmakers who attended the meeting.
“The [NDC] wanted to say, ‘We’re all under the same flag here, and let’s not forget that,’” he said
[…]
“The unfortunate thing about the e-mail is that it questioned the good faith of the Democrats who support the bankruptcy bill. Whenever you question the good faith, that’s problematic,” he [Artur Davis(D-Ala)] said. “But I certainly don’t blame John for that e-mail. I don’t think it was authorized.”
“Certainly there is a disagreement over the bankruptcy bill,” he said.
(Oh my stars, it was rude to get so personal and all, wasn’t it? How ill-bred.)
Without upsetting their fragile nerves, when you send your e-mails you might want to ask politely why any Democrat would think that the bankruptcy bill would be good for their constituents who are, after all, who they actually represent. Are they creating jobs by doing this? Are they creating a more dynamic economy? Why would it be “pro-business”, as Democrats define that term, to enable just one business — the credit card companies — to reap ever higher profits while they charge usurious interest rates to average Americans?
If it isn’t that they’ve whored themselves out to such an extent that they are now the credit card companies’ bitches, (pardon my french!) what exactly is the reason they support it?
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Idle Hands
The Poorman has a copy of the House agenda for Wednesday. Our representatives are very busy these days.
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Visual Aids
Via Media Matters, here is a CNN chart showing the partisan differences in the Schiavo case.
WTF? Did Daryn Kagan have her boyfriend design that for her last night while she was changing into something more comfortable?
This isn’t really surprising. Here is one issue about which the media seem to have absolutely no interest in what the public thinks. Usually, they’d be pulling polls out of every orifice to try to explain things. Not this time. Eric Boehlert discusses this in Salon:
Imagine how differently the televised debate would have unfolded over the past few days if journalists had simply done their job and asked Terri Schiavo’s pro-life proponents why an overwhelming percentage of Americans disagree with them about this case. Indeed, polls taken over the past two years show that Americans are adamant that the spouse, and not the parents, should decide on a loved one’s right to die. And in the past week, an overwhelming majority — 87 percent — of Americans polled by ABC News and the Washington Post said that if they were in the same state as Terri Schiavo, they too would want their feeding tube removed.
Just as every judge who has heard the Schiavo case so far has ruled in Michael’s favor, so has every poll taken shown that the majority of the public supports the husband’s position. In survey after survey dating from 2003 to the present, asked who should have the final right-to-die decision, the majority of Americans have answered: the spouse. From national polls (e.g., ABC News/Washington Post, 65-25; and Fox News, 50-31) to statewide polls (e.g., KING-TV in Washington, 67-19; and St. Petersburg Times in Florida, 75-13) to unscientific, interactive polls (e.g., CNN, 65-26; and MSNBC, 63-37), the response has always been the same. A 2003 poll by CNN/USA Today had a similar result: Eighty percent agreed that a spouse should be allowed to decide whether to end the life of a person in a persistent vegetative state.
Which is why it has been so startling to find so few mentions by major news outlets of the recent polls regarding the Schiavo controversy. For instance, last Friday at 11 a.m., a Fox News reporter referenced a poll from earlier this month conducted by Fox that found that a strong majority — 59 to 24 percent — would remove Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube if they were her guardian. According to TVeyes, a digital, around-the-clock television monitoring service, that was the last time a Fox News reporter mentioned Fox’s own poll. Then again, that’s typical of Fox, which on Friday night’s “Hannity and Colmes” invited six strident pro-life advocates to argue why Congress should intervene on Schiavo’s behalf. No guests were booked to appear on the show and argue Michael Schiavo’s side.
But perhaps even more peculiar are ABC News and the Washington Post, which, like Fox News, commissioned their own poll regarding the matter, and yet, again like Fox, seemed to downplay the findings once the story became a political one. On March 15, when ABC devoted its “Nightline” program to the Schiavo story, host Chris Bury informed the audience, “A new ABC News poll suggests that a clear majority of Americans, 65 percent, believe that husbands and wives should have the final say in family disputes over life support. Only 25 percent say parents should make that decision. And when asked, ‘Would you want to be kept alive in Terri Schiavo’s condition?’ an overwhelming number, 87 percent, said no.”
The article goes on to show how the papers have ignored this finding as well. It might have been helpful, however, if certain pundits had their assistants and interns google the question because they might not sound so dumb. Here’s what passes for insight on this issue from the media sages, Chris Matthews and Tim Russert last night:
RUSSERT: It becomes this symbol that becomes irresistible to the politicians and then irresistible to the media. And I‘m quite interested to see how this plays out with the voters, with the public. What are they thinking?
And, again, I go back to the point of, I‘m so intrigued as to why a Democratic senator wouldn‘t stand up and say, I don‘t know the specific details of Terri Schiavo. I do know it was heard in court after court, judge after judge in the state of Florida. But I also know that these kinds of issues and these kinds of decisions are being made every day in practically every hospital in every state in the union.
And all of us in our own families have probably been affected by this in one way, shape or form.
MATTHEWS: I can tell you, when you have an Alzheimer‘s victim in your family, like my mom, you know all about this territory. It‘s terrible territory. It‘s murky, morally murky in terms of medical science, and yet, in the end, in many of these cases, where there is a supreme almost diminution of human life, that eventually, you stop feeding, you stop hydrating. These cases happen all the time, as you said.
Let me ask you a question. This is a tough one. Are we living in an era where there is no middle ground?
RUSSERT: That is a great question, because life is filled with complexity and contradiction. We live in middle ground.
MATTHEWS: But these parties don‘t seem to operate in middle ground.
I was thinking, if somebody came on the floor last night and said, let‘s use some common sense here. If this woman is a vegetable, let‘s leave it up to her husband. If she is not, if she has emotional life, let‘s hold back and restrict it. But nobody seemed to be talking about the clinical questions.
RUSSERT: Yes. The phrase we all grew up with, middle America.
MATTHEWS: Yes.
RUSSERT: That represents to me where most Americans really are. They live in the middle. And, on some issues, they‘re conservative, right of center, some left of center. They‘re not rabid ideologues.
Russert wonders what people are thinking even though there have been numerous polls taken in just the last few days telling him that a vast majority oppose the Republican right wing on this issue. There’s no splitting the difference. It’s clear. Even a majority of Republicans oppose it, for gawds sake.
Matthews wonders why nobody makes the common sense argument in this case. But the majority of the AMERICAN PEOPLE already hold the common sense position that Tim and Chris are advocating and the Democrats clearly are on the side of that common sense position. And who is backing this macabre sideshow? The Religious Right and the craven Republican leadership.
Don’t expect these bozos to know that, however. Or care. They are too busy toasting each other’s pumpkinheaded faux-populism to even look into it. Convinced of their intimate connection with the common man, these millionaire pundits proclaim from on high that this is a fiery partisan issue and then bemoan the loss of comaraderie in the senate cloakroom. Apparently, they just don’t realize that the common men and women on both sides of the political aisle hold them both in utter contempt. You want common ground? I think I’ve found one issue even Hinderocket and I can agree upon. Kumbaya.
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Competing Realities
Responding to Kevin Drum’s post of the other night and mine which followed, Michael over at Reading A1 has posted an interesting piece extolling the virtues of partisan media and reminding us that this idea of a “objective media” is fairly new:
… to Kevin and Digby I say, stop worrying. A little historical perspective works wonders here. The simple truth is that, for most of its proper existence—from the beginnings of mass-distribution journalism in the mid-nineteenth century to roughly the start of World War II—the American press has been explicitly partisan. Newspapers were often the overt organs of political machines; when they weren’t, they differentiated themselves for their audiences based on ideology and partisan identification. Competition was fierce, and was very often a competition over what facts were actually facts, and over what sorts of things ought to be reported. (Strangely enough, this situation was understood by no one during the period as some sort of “postmodern” hell. Nor was it considered a challenge to the very possibility of democratic self-government.) The neutral, “objective” press that we now think of as a natural property of democratic civil society is, broadly speaking, an invention of the corporate, managerial capitalism of the twentieth century, and tracks its growth.
As I’ve written previously, the elevation of the “objective” press to almost an institution of state, a semi-official fourth branch in the American constitutional system, is a phenomenon of the post-World War II period. Like so much of what we regard now as the natural order of political things, in other words, the constitutional place of our so-called mainstream press is an artifact of the Cold War. In its pose of objectivity, the corporate press had a central role to play during that struggle: both in the maintenance of the internal consensus necessary to confront the Soviet Union over a long period, and as a support for, and embodiment of, the claim of Western liberal democracy (over against Communism) to represent a universal, historically unconditioned solution to the question of political and social freedom.
I think this is largely true but I would take issue with a couple of things. I’m no expert, but my understanding is that the partisan press began to die out around the turn of the last century with the commercialization of the press and the big media barons (along with the general revulsion amongst the population at the corruption of the parties.) And I think that journalism reacted strongly to the new field of public relations in the 20’s and 30’s by developing this professional code of objectivity quite a while before the cold war. However, there is no doubt that there was a general disgust at the propaganda of both the fascist movement in Europe and the Soviet regime that propelled this new fetish for objectivity in the American press into the cold war consensus. And certainly our current lame definition of objectivity as “he said/she said” is thoroughly modern.
It appears to me that some of the conditions that created the concept of “Objective Journalism” in the first place have strongly re-emerged. The right is not running a partisan press. It is running a corrupt partisan propaganda machine based on the techniques of public relations and paid for by big money interests. That’s why I was a bit rueful in my piece the other day. I don’t particularly want to be part of a propaganda machine. I have no problem being a fiery partisan and working hard to persuade people to my side. But outright lying for the cause turns my stomach. And that’s what the other side does.
But at this point I am resigned to the idea that we are going to have a partisan media battle for the forseeeable future so I’m not fighting it. It may, as Michael suggests, turn out to be a good thing in the long run, revitalizing our political system and getting people engaged. In the meantime, however, I would very much like the allegedly non-aligned media to come out from behind their absurd notion that they are objective because “both sides complain so they must be doing something right” and simply report when people are not presenting the facts accurately. That’s all I want. When you have the government, business and the radical right consistently cooking the truth you really need somebody, somewhere who can be an honest broker of the facts. The mainstream press is the logical institution to do that, but they seem to have lost their ability to sort through the right’s sophisticated propaganda.
Perhaps if they just concentrated on the simple reporting of the who, what, when where and get that right, we partisans could fill in the “why.” Without that, I doubt very seriously that our modern society can rationally cope with what is shaping up not as competing political visions but competing realities. If that continues I think we are paving the way for demagoguery to become the default mode of political persuasion.
Update: Booyah. Read this superb post by Avedon Carol on this subject. I think she needs to be put on the rolodex for one of these media panels, stat.
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The Big Baby
Tom Delay breaks down and has a good old fashioned cry:
One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America,” Mr. DeLay told a conference organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. A recording of the event was provided by the advocacy organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
“This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others,” Mr. DeLay said.
Mr. DeLay complained that “the other side” had figured out how “to defeat the conservative movement,” by waging personal attacks, linking with liberal organizations and persuading the national news media to report the story. He charged that “the whole syndicate” was “a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in.”
Oh, boo fucking hoo. He’s crawled into bed with a severely disabled woman for the sole purpose of soaking up some of the sympathy people naturally feel toward her. In fact, her whole purpose in this is to show how the liberals are trying to destroy Tom Delay.
These radical Republicans are the tough guys who are the only ones with the guts to protect our country from the bad guys? People like this whining little baby of a man who is openly using a braindead woman as cover for his massive corruption and misdeeds? Gawd help us.
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Judgment Day
What must underlie petitioners’ entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today’s decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.
From Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissent in Bush v Gore
That paragraph was often cited in the wake of Bush v Gore as criticism of the Supreme Court for ruling as it did. It was, but if you read it carefully you see that he was also saying that the petitioners were perpetuating the belief that the Florida state judges could not be impartial. (This despite the fact that the Florida courts had ruled in favor of Bush in the procedings a number of times.) This bothered Stevens because it undermined the nation’s faith in the justice system everywhere, particularly the belief that judges would uphold the rule of law as impartially as possible.
Here’s William Schneider on CNN:
PHILLIPS: All right. Bill, you’ve come out, you’ve told me, look, this is all political. Everything that we’re observing here is political. You brought up a very interesting point, and that is the continuation of these grievances against judges. How does that play into this?
SCHNEIDER: Well, we saw signs last night in Florida among the people who were supporting the congressional action. They said stop renegade judges. They said starve the judicial system. This case, which was a case of a state court ordering that the federal — the feeding tube be removed, this is the latest in a long series of grievances that go back more than 30 years, to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 allowing abortion rights, giving them constitutional protection.
Religious conservatives and other conservatives have protested judicial activism for all these decades on what issues? Abortion, school prayer, sex education, pornography, same-sex marriage, the mandated teaching of evolution, and now, of course, the issue of end of life decisions and assisted suicide. Again and again and again, they see the judiciary as power-grabbing activists, and most importantly, violating their own personal religious liberties. And this is the latest in that — in those grievances that have been brewing for decades.
Nice frame old Bill gives the Republicans there.
Clearly, this entire line of argument is just trash. There could have been no more of an “activist” judicial act than the Supreme Court intervening in a presidential election. There can be nothing more activist than members of congress violating the separation of powers as they did this past week-end. Courts are called activist when they hand down decisions that the wingnuts don’t like. States rights are a principle that the wingnuts hold dear when they don’t hold federal power. Now they are holding midnight sessions of congress to overturn 19 state judges and interfere in people’s most personal decisions. Please.
Sam Rosenfeld explains:
…the liberal critique of how Republicans have handled this issue has less to do with “federalism” than it does with the separation of powers and the rule of law. The sustained ideological assault against an independent judiciary — components of which include this weekend’s shenanigans and the current congressional majority’s zealous efforts to strip the courts of jurisdiction over any number of partisan agenda items — is itself only one facet of a pervasive tendency of modern Republicans to disregard wholesale the integrity of codified processes and the autonomy of institutions, to change the rules and to politicize all conflict in the service of totally unprincipled and narrow political objectives.
[…]
As far as I can tell, conservative advocates in this fight haven’t even bothered to engage these kinds of questions — they just don’t care. An individual woman in Florida must be “saved” by any means necessary and that’s all there is to say about the matter. Thus legislation is passed that doesn’t even bother to offer a forward-looking rule change in the process by which these kinds of decisions can be adjudicated in the future. (Instead, the action should be considered non-binding and narrowly targeted at the specific case in question — sound familiar?)
We’re a law-based society. Rules matter. Precedents matter. Separation of powers and institutional autonomy matter. To the Republicans in power and the conservative intelligentsia lending legitimacy to their governance, apparently, such things don’t matter at all. Congressional Republicans capped a week during which they definitively demonstrated that small-government fiscal conservatism as a guiding legislative principle is completely dead by whipping up this grotesque circus of ill-informed hysteria and rampant trampling of rules and procedural limits. There’s nothing “hypocritical” in pointing out the apparently direct relationship between the ideological bankruptcy of Republican governance and their inability to recognize any limits on their actions.
I wonder if judges throughout the country realize that they must now be whores for the right wing or they will be slandered for being unpardonably biased any time they rule against the interests of radical Republicans? Do they know that any judgment that differs from Randall Terry’s or Tom DeLay’s is no longer attributable to a difference in legal opinion but is instead considered a reflection of their dishonesty and corruption? Perhaps many of them don’t mind being a rubber stamp for Grover Norquist and Jerry Falwell. It certainly makes the job easier.
I would imagine that some judges, however, might just think that they represent one of the branches of government and have a duty to uphold the rule of law even when Steve Forbes doesn’t like the result. (It isn’t just the religious freaks who want their way with this.) You would certainly think that conservatives would think it’s a good idea for the nation to have some faith in the judicial system and not assume that every judge who rules in ways that certain people don’t agree with is a hack for a political agenda. Sometime soon Republican legal scholors and judges may come to rue the day they let a radical vocal minority have this kind of power over their party. They gave away their own in the process.
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Check Their Affiliations
I’ve been thinking that I’m going to have to ask whether a doctor is a Republican or a Democrat before I trust my health to him or her from now on. Doctors who vote for Republicans obviously have no fealty to science or reason or they wouldn’t vote for them. Some, like Bill Frist blatantly violate medical ethics for political reasons:
Congressional intervention in Michael and Terri Schiavo’s personal medical tragedy is unprecedented and dangerous. But Frist’s comments are especially shocking. As a surprised and concerned Laurie Zoloth, director of bioethics for the Center for Genetic Medicine at Northwestern University, noted of Doctor Frist’s statements, “It is extremely unusual — and by a non-neurologist, I might add. There should be no confusion about the medical data, and that’s what was so surprising to me about Dr. Frist disagreeing about her medical status.”
This is not Frist’s first abuse of his medical background for partisan political leverage. In December, the Senator tried to defend a federally-funded abstinence program which claimed that HIV/AIDS could be contracted through tears and sweat. Pressed by ABC News host George Stephanopoulos, Frist was forced to recant. “It would be very hard,” he said.
Dr Dave Weldon (R-Florida) said last night (video from Crooks and Liars):
“By my medical definition, she was not in a persistenct vegitative state based on my review of the videos, my tlaking to the family and my discussing the case with one of the neurologists who examined her.”
This may explain why the Republican party is so anxious to eliminate medical malpractice laws. Republican doctors seem to flout science and medical ethics quite regularly. Caveat Emptor.
This is where we are today. Republican doctors are willing to say and do anything to protect their political power, including enabling pre-modern, unscientific superstition in medical matters. Tomorrow, we will see this:
washingtonpost.com
Battle on Teaching Evolution SharpensPropelled by a polished strategy crafted by activists on America’s political right, a battle is intensifying across the nation over how students are taught about the origins of life. Policymakers in 19 states are weighing proposals that question the science of evolution.
The proposals typically stop short of overturning evolution or introducing biblical accounts. Instead, they are calculated pleas to teach what advocates consider gaps in long-accepted Darwinian theory, with many relying on the idea of intelligent design, which posits the central role of a creator.
The growing trend has alarmed scientists and educators who consider it a masked effort to replace science with theology. But 80 years after the Scopes “monkey” trial — in which a Tennessee man was prosecuted for violating state law by teaching evolution — it is the anti-evolutionary scientists and Christian activists who say they are the ones being persecuted, by a liberal establishment.
[…]
Some evolution opponents are trying to use Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, saying it creates an opening for states to set new teaching standards. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a Christian who draws on Discovery Institute material, drafted language accompanying the law that said students should be exposed to “the full range of scientific views that exist.”
“Anyone who expresses anything other than the dominant worldview is shunned and booted from the academy,” Santorum said in an interview. “My reading of the science is there’s a legitimate debate. My feeling is let the debate be had.”
Although the new strategy speaks of “teaching the controversy” over evolution, opponents insist the controversy is not scientific, but political. They paint the approach as a disarming subterfuge designed to undermine solid evidence that all living things share a common ancestry.
[…]
The efforts are not limited to schools. From offices overlooking Puget Sound, Meyer is waging a careful campaign to change the way Americans think about the natural world. The Discovery Institute devotes about 85 percent of its budget to funding scientists, with other money going to public action campaigns.
Discovery Institute raised money for “Unlocking the Mystery of Life,” a DVD produced by Illustra Media and shown on PBS stations in major markets. The institute has sponsored opinion polls and underwrites research for books sold in secular and Christian bookstores. Its newest project is to establish a science laboratory.
Meyer said the institute accepts money from such wealthy conservatives as Howard Ahmanson Jr., who once said his goal is “the total integration of biblical law into our lives,” and the Maclellan Foundation, which commits itself to “the infallibility of the Scripture.”
“We’ll take money from anyone who wants to give it to us,” Meyer said. “Everyone has motives. Let’s acknowledge that and get on with the interesting part.”
Meyer said he and Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman devised the compromise strategy in March 2002 when they realized a dispute over intelligent design was complicating efforts to challenge evolution in the classroom. They settled on the current approach that stresses open debate and evolution’s ostensible weakness, but does not require students to study design.
The idea was to sow doubt about Darwin and buy time for the 40-plus scientists affiliated with the institute to perfect the theory, Meyer said. Also, by deferring a debate about whether God was the intelligent designer, the strategy avoids the defeats suffered by creationists who tried to oust evolution from the classroom and ran afoul of the Constitution.
“Our goal is to not remove evolution. Good lord, it’s incredible how much this is misunderstood,” said William Harris, a professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City medical school. “Kids need to understand it, but they need to know the strengths and weaknesses of the data, how much of it is a guess, how much of it is extrapolation.”
Schiavo, abortion, “the culture of life” and this teaching of creationism is all of a piece. And Republican scientists, doctors and intellectuals are enabling this for reasons that are very difficult to understand in any way but a lust for personal gain.
I will not be patronizing any Republicans who need to rely on science to do their job. Clearly, they are aligning themselves with the forces of superstition over reason and can no longer be trusted. Why would you ever put your life into the hands of someone who would sell out their professional ethics and their intellectual integrity for the sole purpose of appeasing a bunch of religious zealots?
Update: Sam Rosenfeld on TAPPED links to Amy Sullivan’s terrific piece on this subject. Read both links. Republican doctors are dangerous to your health.
Dr Weldon’s name corrected.
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