- Guests:
- Dan Gainor, Vice President & T. Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow at the Business and Media Institute.
- John West, attorney, author of THE LAST GOODNIGHTS: Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides, a memoir of love, courage, and honor.
- Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania; author/editor of twenty-five books including "The Penn Guide to Bioethics".
- Topics:
- Were we and the Bush Administration no different than the contestants turned torturers in the French tv experiment?
- "Health Care Sequel...The Empire Strikes Back?!"
- When does assisted suicide cross the line and turn into murder?
- Bumper Music:
- The Bug, Dire Straits (video).
- Things Have Changed, Bob Dylan.
- I'm Shipping Up to Boston, Dropkick Murphys.
- You can leave your hat on, Randy Newman.
- Chicago, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (video).
- Dignity, Bob Dylan (video).
- Me And My Gang, Rascal Flatts.
- I'm free, The Who.
- Grand Canyon, Dmitriy Lukyanov (you need to search for it) (with additional sounds by Jacob).
- Democracy, Leonard Cohen.
- Today's newsletter has details of today's guests and links to the major stories and alerts that Thom covered in the show, plus lots more. If you haven't signed up for the free newsletter yet, please do. If you missed today's newsletter, it is in the archive.
- Quote: "Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." -- John F. Kennedy.
- Article: Why I'm Voting 'Yes' by Dennis Kucinich.
I still have doubts about the bill. I do not think it is a first step toward anything I have supported in the past. This is not the bill I wanted to support, even as I continue efforts until the last minute to modify the bill.
However after careful discussions with the President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Elizabeth my wife and close friends, I have decided to cast a vote in favor of the legislation. If my vote is to be counted, let it now count for passage of the bill, hopefully in the direction of comprehensive health care reform.
- Thom:
All the deeming thing is, is where they basically say, you know, we've got this amendment, this change in the Senate bill that the Senate is going to have to pass. They're going to have to pass it with 51 votes with democracy, with majority rule, with what the parliamentarian refers to as reconciliation. But it's majority vote, an up or down vote. The Senate's going to have to pass that. We're going to attach that to the main bill that the Senate has already approved, and we're going to say that if the Senate passes that 51 vote change, then we deem our vote, then we're saying in advance that we've already voted. We agree that we have all voted for the main bill. And it's really a way of making sure that things get done the way that the House wants them done. It's actually an assertion of power by the House, it's not a wimping out.
