Links With Your Coffee - Thursday

Posted Aug. 13, 2009 at 12:42 PM

http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2009/08/links_with_your_1090.html

• DIRECT Ezine for Democrats

A weekly must read

• BBC - Newsnight: From the web team: What have the noughties done for God?

tip to pedansareus

• Ron Paul: Quackery enabler, part II : Respectful Insolence

• Atlantic Wire: Stephen Hawking Still Alive

The British are rising to defend their health-care system, which has recently been subject to attack by the anti-Obamacare crowd. The line that finally stung them enough to respond was the following comment, first published in an Investor's Business Daily editorial on July 31:

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People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Over a week passed before this caught the attention of the leading left-leaning bloggers on Monday, when AJC's Jay Bookman, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, The Washington Post's Ezra Klein and The New Republic's Jason Zengerle picked it up in quick succession.

IBD Lied, declared Klein, pointing out, as everyone had begun to do, that Stephen Hawking has lived and continues to live in England.

No, They're Just Stupid, Zengerle suggested. "This actually raises a bit of a philosophical conundrum. If the IBD writer believed Hawking was American, [...] can the writer be accused of lying when he/she writes that Hawking would have been left to die by the National Health Service?"

• The Mooney/Kirshenbaum crusade flops again : Pharyngula