Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith call upon the Florida Courts and Governor Jeb Bush to take any legal action available to let Terri Schiavo live.

[ . . . ]

The federal and state governments are spending billions on what we are told will become miracle medical cures for people with all sorts of degenerative conditions, including brain damage. If this is so, why not permit Terri’s parents to care for her in the hope that such cures are derived.

Benefits of doubts should be given to life, not hastened death. This case is rife with doubt. Justice demands that Terri be permitted to live.

Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith call upon the Florida Courts and Governor Jeb Bush to take any legal action available to let Terri Schiavo live.

[ . . . ]

The federal and state governments are spending billions on what we are told will become miracle medical cures for people with all sorts of degenerative conditions, including brain damage. If this is so, why not permit Terri’s parents to care for her in the hope that such cures are derived.

Benefits of doubts should be given to life, not hastened death. This case is rife with doubt. Justice demands that Terri be permitted to live.

[ . . . ] I love how in these articles, the [hugely expensive, constantly malfunctioning missile defense] system is always quoted as designed to protect us " ... from rogue states such as North Korea ...". No. No, there are no rogue states "such as" North Korea. It's North Korea, guys. That's it. The only fighter in this weight class. China? They're our biggest foreign asset holder, please. Iran? Jerusalem should worry. The US, not so much . Russian loose nukes? More likely to be broken down for parts for a Van-Based Delivery System (TM) than not -- and year's worth of what we spend on missile defense would be a %2000 increase on what we spend on locking down loose nuclear materials now.

What, are the Phillipines suddenly gonna get all cranked up on non-drowsy cough medicine and decide to go postal on us with their shoddily-made fusion-bomb dancing dashboard figurines? No, when we say " ... rogue states such as North Korea", we mean North Korea. And that means Kim Jong-il. One guy. Simple, fifth-grade logic inexorably draws us to the conclusion that we are spending $200 billion dollars to protect ourselves from one guy.

I'll even SPOT you the argument that we should spend $200 billion on protecting ourselves from one guy. He is, after all, nuts. Probably not so nuts that he'd tip off his super-secret invasion of the southern half of his peninsula by nuking and therefore SUPREMELY pissing off the world's only remaining superpower before he got the tanks rolling, but fine. Nuts. Are you telling me there's no better way to spend $200 billion to stop one guy? What'd it cost the mob to whack Kennedy? $50,000 plus hotel? Even with cost-of-living increase, we can get a better deal here.

If there were a rash of break-ins ... no scratch that. Say there's a violent murder in your neighborhood. A really brutal slayfest. Blood on the walls, body parts on the lawn.

Your neigbor decides to take precautions. He leaves his doors and windows unlocked. He sits on the roof, armed with a SpongeBob SquarePants air-rifle, just in case the killers return and attack the house by hang-glider this time. And the air rifle doesn't work. And he spent EVERY DIME HE HAD on the air rifle.

You would of course, say your neighbor was insane. Or supremely stupid.

You do the rest.

My original point was -- Republicans used to be the guys who put the brakes on this shit. A sad chuckle, a little head shake. "Who's going to pay for this?" they'd say, frowning over national budgets. "Where are the facts? The research?" They'd take out their little red pens and buzzkill our little dreams of nationalized health care or solar-powered windmills or maglev trains, and then go back to banning pornography while secretly screwing around on their wives. But you know what? A lot of times, they were right.

We needed those guys. They were a dull but crucial part of the national dialogue. (And they knew their scotches. ) Now ... a void. Simply put, if you are voting for these guys who call themselves Republicans, then you are voting for crazy air-rifle guy. You just walked up, nodded, and said: "Wow, I gotta get me a ladder."

Please. Please. Bring back the real Republicans. Bring back the science guys. I miss you.

In a Republican world, Schiavo, whose medical care is being paid for by a medical malpractice case, would have likely run out of money long ago. In a Republican world, after that money ran out, Schiavo's medical care would likely have gone unpaid-for, as there would have been no allowable declaration of bankruptcy. Schiavo's case wouldn't have been picked up by the Christian right, as the operative line would have been concerned with her trying to get malpractice awards for a self-inflicted state, she and her husband would have been shoved together as unscrupulous exploiters of the med mal state, and she would have been dead before the Republican Revolution ever began. This isn't even discussing the fact that Medicare would have been slashed to the point that any award Schiavo got would have been likely the sole fund for her medical support.

I would like to ask Klein what it is exactly about Social Security that makes it appropriate to the industrial age but not the information age. If it is phased out in the next few years that would be one objective sign that it couldn't withstand the politics of this new economic era. But that would be a circular argument.

If anything I would think there's a much stronger argument that Social Security with its guaranteed benefits is more suited to this age than the last one, given how the increasingly transitory nature of work and the pressures of globalization are undermining the basis of defined benefit private sector pensions.

The real point, though, is that when you set aside all the practical matters of debt and transition costs, this is an ideological debate -- or to put it less antiseptically, a debate over different sets of values. The idea behind private accounts is that people should rely on themselves alone and bear the consequences of their successes and their failures and random chance on their own shoulders. If things don't pan out for you in retirement, that's something to take up with your children.

The concept behind Social Security is fundamentally different. The first premise is that if you put in a lifetime's work there is simply a level of destitution below which society will not let you fall. Maybe you made so little during your working years that there wasn't enough to save. Or maybe you just didn't plan ahead well enough. Or maybe you suffered some misfortune. Whatever. If you worked you won't be destitute when you retire. People who made big bucks through their lives don't get a particularly good 'deal' from Social Security, if you insist on seeing it in investment terms. But that's a distorting prism, sort of like thinking you got a rotten deal on your medical insurance if you never have a catastrophic illness.

I like to think of this as the moral equality of work. In our society, we allow the market to assign all manner of different cash values to different sorts of work or even the same sorts of work under different circumstances. And by and large, within some very small limitations like the minimum wage or certain non-discrimination laws, most of us think this is how it should be. I certainly do. (In this sense, I think collective bargaining amounts to another competitive arrangement within a market economy -- though doctrinaire free market folks have always seen it in contrary terms.)

But the cash value of work isn't the same as its moral value. And if you look at the values imbedded in all those Social Security actuarial tables, you see this principle: whether you were a janitor or a fast-food worker or a doctor or a tycoon, if you worked during your working years you shouldn't be left destitute when your working years are over (retirement) or when, through no fault of your own, you can't work anymore (disability). No matter what. The common denominator is a life of work -- skilled or unskilled, impressive or unimpressive, remembered or forgotten. It doesn't matter.

In any case, that's only one way to look at it. More prosaically, you might just say that there are certain risks we choose to share across society. And this is one of them.