Ted Kennedy's life was, at its core, a lesson in how important a single person's actions can be, how much one person--believing in and fighting for what's right--can achieve. And that one person can make a difference, and live life with a second chance.
Photo: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
As a person of faith, I don't find it odd that Michele Bachmann would turn to prayer for an outcome she favors, just not sure why she would pray for the continued death of 20,000 uninsured Americans every year. To each their own I suppose. I just happen to see this as yet another hypocritical, self-serving use of faith that just pushes more and more away from seeking solace
in it.
Christy Hardin Smith reported in an April post that "20,000 Americans Die Each Year Due To Lack Of Healthcare." She pointed to the PBS Frontline documentary "Sick Around America" (please watch!) with this fact:
"According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, around 20,000 Americans die each year because they can't get the healthcare they need."
A report by Families USA, the national organization for health care consumers, documents that 8 people die each day in California because they don't have health insurance. They also report that each week 4 people die in West Virginia and 2 people in Ohio die because they lack health insurance.
In addition to saving thousands of lives each year, health insurance reform is about making millions of people's lives better and more productive. The American College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine (ACP-ASIM) has been studying the impact of the lack of health insurance on people's lives. As early as 2000, they reported that "people without health insurance tend to live sicker and die younger than people with insurance."
"Two-thirds of the long-term uninsured who described their own health as "poor" and half of those who described their health as only "fair" said they had not sought medical care that they needed."
Yeah, you pray for that Rep. Bachmann and show us those wonderful Christian values of devaluing life, hate, anger, fear and lies. Good luck with that.
Noting the correlation found between increases in the threat level and the president’s approval rating, Mr. Ridge writes, “I wondered, ‘Is this about security or politics?'"
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The Daily Show at its best.
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We are called to work for justice and to be agents of peace in a broken world. Whether situations of conflict and confusion be personal, national, or global - within the church or beyond it - we are called to be agents of the same healing and love we have received from God.A great link for info.
Wow! Dolly’s gone all hard-core!
This is much different than the sweet “yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.” nugget she laid on baby bro 15 years months … uhm, days ago. Fun fact this, according to Wikipedia:
if a film uses ‘one of the harsher sexually derived words’ (such as ‘f#%k’) one to four times, it is routine today for the film to receive a PG-13 rating, provided that the word is used as an expletive.
Wow! Well, Dolly, go ahead and drop that F-bomb on your little brother, then toddle over and go tell Snuffy Smith and Beetle Bailey off too. Kthanx.
Until or unless there is a provable case that Glen Beck’s hate speech over the media may be causing concrete harms, he has myself and the First Amendment behind him. But do the corporations who sponsor his show want to become the face of hate and intolerance? I doubt it.
Lots of talk after Meeting for Worship this morning of how, to a person we felt Heatlhcare, if not a human right, then in our hearts, something that followers of Christ should be standing foresquare for. A lot of prayerful thoughts, kind words and holding in the light went out for folks during silent worship for those who are spreading fear and lies and for those who are frightened by them.
We discussed three fundamental moral issues that the faith community can focus on and call our political leaders back to, lest they forget. They are: the truth, full access, and cost.
There are a myriad of special interests groups who are promoting their own self-interests during this process. The faith community has the opportunity to step in and speak for the interests of the common good and those who would not otherwise have a voice. I am sure that every one of the 18,000 preventable deaths that will happen this year from a lack of basic health insurance breaks the heart of God. And, it should break ours too, because healing is at the very heart of the Christian vocation.
Peace.
Hey, what if we were governed by a sinister foreigner masquerading as a native born American, a real life Manchurian Candidate advancing a perverse plan to cull the population of the elderly? That’s either a plot for a bad Hollywood thriller, or this week in the wingnut o sphere.
This is a podcast from last week, but is still Zeitgeist worthy.
8 min, 49 sec.
Director John Hughes suffered a heart attack today while taking a morning walk during a trip to New York City with family.
Hughes was best known for writing and directing some of my favorite films from the 1980’s - National Lampoon’s Vacation, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, European Vacation, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes Trains & Automobiles, Uncle Buck, Christmas Vacation, and Home Alone. He will be missed. I feel a little piece of my teen-hood died.
What was your favorite John Hughes film? My sentimental favorite is The Breakfast Club, but a tie for #1 would be Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Uncle Buck
They tracked down my Kenyan birth certificate too.
[Click to Embiggen]
They found @sssemester’s too!
Neuroscientists using neuroaesthetics, a new scientific field, are attempting to unravel why a Picasso appeals to the human brain. “The job of an artist,” Jonah Lehrer writes for Psychology Today, “is to take mundane forms of reality—whether a facial expression or a bowl of fruit—and make those forms irresistible to the human brain.” Lehrer draws off research by V.S. Ramachandran who found that artists employ “deliberate hyperbole” that makes it easier for people’s minds to decipher what an image really is. "A Martian who came to earth would be very curious about why all these people go to museums and look at 2D representations," Ramachandran says. "Why does art work? That's the question we're trying to answer."
Source: Psychology Today
