Yes you are.
A convicted rapist, repeatedly convicted fraud, and admitted child abuser worshiper. You drank the flavorade years ago and it caused brain death. You are in the child sex cult, buddy, not me.
I guess you need more evidence.

126 KY GOP state legislator Dan Johnson accused of sexual assault of 17-year-old. Killed himself

127 OR GOP state senator, Jeff Kruse, subjected two women senators to unwanted sexual touching

128 Pennsylvania Republican state rep Nick Miccarelli - domestic violence

129 Republican CO state senator Randy Baumgardner - sexual harassment,

130 OH state representative, Republican Wes Goodman — inappropriate behavior

He was also accused of fondling an underage boy

131 MN state rep Tony Cornish - sexual harassment

132 AZ state rep Don Shooter - sexual harassment

133 FL state senator Jack Latvala - sexual harassment, assault

134 KY state rep Jeff Hoover — sexual harassment

135 Idaho GOP state rep Brandon Hixon - child molestation, committed suicide

136 Republican Ohio state senator Cliff Hite — sexual harassment

137 Cumberland County Commissioner Bruce Barclay is not included because he hired male and female prostitutes every week. He’s included because he taped them without their knowledge.

138 GOP Congressional candidate Derek Walker - broke into ex’s house to tape her having sex

139 Franklin Graham, partisan religious leader, uses his family name & father’s credibility to protect child molesters and sexual predators, including Trump, Roy Moore, and Kavanaugh

140 Republican Judge Alex Kozinski, Brett Kavanaugh’s mentor: sexual harassment

141 Trump Deputy Chief of Staff for Communication Bill Shine - an expert at protecting and covering up sexual harassment and abuse.

142 How did I forget GOP Sen. Bob Packwood - serial sexual misconduct

143 Republican Columbus Mayor Dana Rinehart was never indicted for molesting 13-year-old babysitter, but years later it was discovered cop spied on her and family and worked to protect him from an indictment

144 Samuel Barstow Kent Republican Judge - sexual assault. By the way, he thinks prison is unfair

145 MO Gov Eric Greitens - consensual affair, BUT he took nude photos and threatened to publicize them. Yes, charges dropped, but only because the prosecutor was also a witness which is not allowed. Also, stealing from charity Additionally, His ex-wife accuses him of domestic violence toward her and their son

146 Montgomery Co GOP Chair Robert Kerns - rape pled to indecent sexual assault

147 Edison Misla Aldarondo, Republican Speaker of the House in Puerto Rico, rape of 17-year-old girl, molesting stepdaughter, plus corruption

148 Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas - sexual harassment. He lied to the Senate. Senate Judiciary did not allow other accusers to testify.

149 GOP Candidate for ME House, James
indicted for rape in Rhode Island, stayed in the race, won the primary, lost general, pled no contest and got probation.

150 Alabama RW religious leader - Ralph Lee Aaron - child molesting Consecutive life

No sir. I don’t even live in a city…but fools like you are absolutely the reason red states are shithole states, with much worse statistics than cities, (which are nearly all Democratically led so the ploy to say “Democrat led cities are “x”” is transparent), and Republican led cities are usually worse per capita by most measures….just smaller.. Per capita, red states are worse for crime both with and without guns than cities. What is it about Republican leadership that causes such high crime?
For instance, Ohio state, with Republican governor, sec of state, AG, house and senate and Gym Jordan looking out for it has MUCH HIGHER violent crime rates than NYC or NYState with Democratic led governments and diverse populations….but Gym went to NYC to investigate crime, fuck Ohio.
“ Ohio's statewide homicide rate is 49% higher than New York City's overall rate of 5.8 homicide deaths per 100,000 residents, Ohio's homicide rate is also 87% higher than New York's statewide rate of 4.6 homicides per 100,000 residents.”

Er mer gerd….lack of morality? Name the Democrat led city that is trying to make sex with 12 year olds legal. Republicans are.

Only in your delusional little brainwashed mind is it worse today than in the early 90’s. Crime statistics ( https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm ), economic statistics, the only thing getting worse is life expectancy thanks to Trumps total failure to address Covid and a million dead before their time, but it’s going back up under Biden. I know…but daddy Trump said crime is at an all time high…and you just keep on believing his lies instead of checking obvious statistics even you could understand. Crime rates are 1/2 - 1/4 what it was in 1990.

Democrats are for every citizen’s equality under the law, not “for the black man”. I understand that concept is so foreign to you that you can’t grasp it at all. I believe minorities would disagree with you about being better under Democrats and voting statistics bear that out conclusively. Funny enough, the blatant racist right continues to tell minorities “you’re just too stupid to understand you should vote with us so you shouldn’t get to vote at all”….then can’t fathom why minorities think you don’t respect or care about them or their rights. 🤦‍♂️

Biden has done amazing so far, positive gdp, single digit unemployment, covid under control, deficit significantly down, and wow…2 full years without an impeachment or 3 dozen cabinet members in prison. How did he do that?!? Without even his own “Pravda” to tell his cultists what to believe…holy shit!
He’s not even my choice of Democrats, but he’s done fine….even you admit everything’s going well, you just insist tomorrow it will turn to shit…always a day away but never here.
Why couldn’t those behind Trump prop him up and run the country? He gave them trillions while claiming poverty when it came to helping starving children or destitute families or infrastructure, but they couldn’t help HIM run the country!?! WTF!?!
His entire presidency was demented racist grandpa and his drunk buddies seeing what they could get away with…and it’s coming home to roost. Enjoy.

Ivermectin is dewormer/anti parasitic. Covid is not a worm or other parasite. The human version (used for head lice) sold out immediately after some fuckwit claimed it worked on a virus, it doesn’t, not even a little. Your ilk said ivermectin for humans is the same as horse dewormer, it’s fine to just use that….and you morons did even though it has zero effect on covid and serious side effects and some died. Same for hydroxychloroquine, zero benefit major side effects including death. You said “it’s good medicine, use that not evil Democrat vaccination”. Derp.

You fuckwit. That’s the opposite of reality. Countries that locked down like Taiwan and New Zealand had exponentially fewer cases and reopened much sooner so less economic damage too. You just HAVE to be wrong on every point, why is that?

Lol….you moron. I guess you forgot you eventually admitted to SELLING all your Tesla…or claimed you had sold it all to avoid ridicule for losing your shirt. During the time you would have sold out if you did, you were still telling others to buy all in, every penny, and don’t worry that it drops another 50%, just hold it forever like ENRON and it will all be roses. It clearly was an AWFUL time to buy Tesla, even you knew it would fall much farther, and it continues to get worse. You can’t keep your lies straight….is it always a great buy, or did you sell all yours? Can’t have both.

Lol. Yes you did, repeated it for months, tried to point to one individual who had once reported on BLM as a leader orchestrating it until his true politics became public, then you slunk off to your cave to await the next nonsense lie.
Now you glommed onto this nonsense that some singular proud boy is really, secretly, off all books and with no immunity or protection, an FBI agent (with no evidence) and he, alone, caused thousands of totally peaceful non insurrectionist Trumpists to storm the capitol against their will and better judgement, and those weapons just materialized in their hands using secret CIA transporters, the gallows they brought was a hologram, and the “where’s Nancy. Hang Mike Pence” chanting was edited in after the fact by lefties. 🤦‍♂️
So far to date there have according to you been 50 such accusations by insurrectionist defendants (I’ve only heard the one, but you know your MO- say ANYTHING and see what isn’t immediately debunked then go with that), but zero evidence of a single government infiltrator egging anyone into violence or criminal acts. This “we now know” preface doesn’t mean they know anything, it means they hope one of 12 is ignorant enough to believe the fantasy and deadlock.
If there was a scintilla of evidence that 50 FBI agents were in the capitol instigating the riotous coup that would be such news they would interrupt regular programming on every channel for it, but it’s not even reported outside fantasy land because it’s absolutely ridiculous and there’s zero evidence, just pure fantastical supposition as a Hail Mary defense by those already convicted and their cohorts about to be…but you don’t worry about that, someone blamed “not MAGA” so you’re just going with that as fact, but absolutely won’t be looking into the truthfulness of these defendants (some of which pleaded guilty to insurrection). You think this kind of information is an exclusive by this no name internet troll? Why isn’t it everywhere? I’ll tell you, because it’s ridiculous nonsense made up by failing defendants to excuse their violent failed coup.
At best you have some overwhelmed police that instead of taking on a violent crowd at 40-1 odds stood back and let the insurrectionists that had already violently forced their way into the building severely injuring many officers walk by. That’s not instigating. The lie about the FBI being involved is just that, another lie you’ll deny saying in two weeks like your original “it’s BLM and ANTIFA pretending to be Trumpists”.…or more likely just go silent on and refuse to address it like the subhuman Traitor Ashley Babbitt that got what you all deserve. If there were agents instigating, do you really believe that footage wouldn’t have been the first footage Carlson presented? 🤦‍♂️

Ashley Babbitt wasn’t a person. I’ve seen her. If demons are real, she’s example #1. That troglodyte and the rest of us are better off with her dead. I only lament that 2000 of her subhuman cohorts didn’t get some cold hard reciprocity themselves.

5 police died from injuries sustained that day, not died ON that day. 160 were hospitalized, many long term. Hundreds quit afterwards.

I once went to a wedding that took place during the Ohio State v. Michigan football game. Most of the men showed up for the reception.

Yeah, saw this ages ago... and there is clearly an Ohio State banner behind her, so the Knicks and Wizards had nothing to do with it, but that is what a recent Reddit thread said... she may have been at the Knicks/Wizard game, but this was from when she was at Ohio State...
*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/The-Red-Panda-Acrobat-Flips-5-Bowls-on-to-Her-Head-1080p

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20pacemaker-t.html?pagewanted=all

One October afternoon three years ago while I was visiting my parents, my mother made a request I dreaded and longed to fulfill. She had just poured me a cup of Earl Grey from her Japanese iron teapot, shaped like a little pumpkin; outside, two cardinals splashed in the birdbath in the weak Connecticut sunlight. Her white hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, and her voice was low. “Please help me get Jeff’s pacemaker turned off,” she said, using my father’s first name. I nodded, and my heart knocked.
Related

Upstairs, my 85-year-old father, Jeffrey, a retired Wesleyan University professor who suffered from dementia, lay napping in what was once their shared bedroom. Sewn into a hump of skin and muscle below his right clavicle was the pacemaker that helped his heart outlive his brain. The size of a pocket watch, it had kept his heart beating rhythmically for nearly five years. Its battery was expected to last five more.

After tea, I knew, my mother would help him from his narrow bed with its mattress encased in waterproof plastic. She would take him to the toilet, change his diaper and lead him tottering to the couch, where he would sit mutely for hours, pretending to read Joyce Carol Oates, the book falling in his lap as he stared out the window.

I don’t like describing what dementia did to my father — and indirectly to my mother — without telling you first that my parents loved each other, and I loved them. That my mother, Valerie, could stain a deck and sew an evening dress from a photo in Vogue and thought of my father as her best friend. That my father had never given up easily on anything.

Born in South Africa, he lost his left arm in World War II, but built floor-to-ceiling bookcases for our living room; earned a Ph.D. from Oxford; coached rugby; and with my two brothers as crew, sailed his beloved Rhodes 19 on Long Island Sound. When I was a child, he woke me, chortling, with his gloss on a verse from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”: “Awake, my little one! Before life’s liquor in its cup be dry!” At bedtime he tucked me in, quoting “Hamlet” : “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”

Now I would look at him and think of Anton Chekhov, who died of tuberculosis in 1904. “Whenever there is someone in a family who has long been ill, and hopelessly ill,” he wrote, “there come painful moments when all timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death.” A century later, my mother and I had come to long for the machine in my father’s chest to fail.

Until 2001, my two brothers and I — all living in California — assumed that our parents would enjoy long, robust old ages capped by some brief, undefined final illness. Thanks to their own healthful habits and a panoply of medical advances — vaccines, antibiotics, airport defibrillators, 911 networks and the like — they weren’t likely to die prematurely of the pneumonias, influenzas and heart attacks that decimated previous generations. They walked every day. My mother practiced yoga. My father was writing a history of his birthplace, a small South African town.

In short, they were seemingly among the lucky ones for whom the American medical system, despite its fragmentation, inequity and waste, works quite well. Medicare and supplemental insurance paid for their specialists and their trusted Middletown internist, the lean, bespectacled Robert Fales, who, like them, was skeptical of medical overdoing. “I bonded with your parents, and you don’t bond with everybody,” he once told me. “It’s easier to understand someone if they just tell it like it is from their heart and their soul.”

They were also stoics and religious agnostics. They signed living wills and durable power-of-attorney documents for health care. My mother, who watched friends die slowly of cancer, had an underlined copy of the Hemlock Society’s “Final Exit” in her bookcase. Even so, I watched them lose control of their lives to a set of perverse financial incentives — for cardiologists, hospitals and especially the manufacturers of advanced medical devices — skewed to promote maximum treatment. At a point hard to precisely define, they stopped being beneficiaries of the war on sudden death and became its victims.

Things took their first unexpected turn on Nov. 13, 2001, when my father — then 79, pacemakerless and seemingly healthy — collapsed on my parents’ kitchen floor in Middletown, making burbling sounds. He had suffered a stroke.

He came home six weeks later permanently incapable of completing a sentence. But as I’ve said, he didn’t give up easily, and he doggedly learned again how to fasten his belt; to peck out sentences on his computer; to walk alone, one foot dragging, to the university pool for water aerobics. He never again put on a shirt without help or looked at the book he had been writing. One day he haltingly told my mother, “I don’t know who I am anymore.”

His stroke devastated two lives. The day before, my mother was an upper-middle-class housewife who practiced calligraphy in her spare time. Afterward, she was one of tens of millions of people in America, most of them women, who help care for an older family member.

Their numbers grow each day. Thanks to advanced medical technologies, elderly people now survive repeated health crises that once killed them, and so the “oldest old” have become the nation’s most rapidly growing age group. Nearly a third of Americans over 85 have dementia (a condition whose prevalence rises in direct relationship to longevity). Half need help with at least one practical, life-sustaining activity, like getting dressed or making breakfast. Even though a capable woman was hired to give my dad showers, my 77-year-old mother found herself on duty more than 80 hours a week. Her blood pressure rose and her weight fell. On a routine visit to Dr. Fales, she burst into tears. She was put on sleeping pills and antidepressants.

My father said he came to believe that she would have been better off if he had died. “She’d have weeped the weep of a widow,” he told me in his garbled, poststroke speech, on a walk we took together in the fall of 2002. “And then she would have been all right.” It was hard to tell which of them was suffering more.

As we shuffled through the fallen leaves that day, I thought of my father’s father, Ernest Butler. He was 79 when he died in 1965, before pacemakers, implanted cardiac defibrillators, stents and replacement heart valves routinely staved off death among the very old. After completing some long-unfinished chairs, he cleaned his woodshop, had a heart attack and died two days later in a plain hospital bed. As I held my dad’s soft, mottled hand, I vainly wished him a similar merciful death.

A few days before Christmas that year, after a vigorous session of water exercises, my father developed a painful inguinal (intestinal) hernia. My mother took him to Fales, who sent them to a local surgeon, who sent them to a cardiologist for a preoperative clearance. After an electrocardiogram recorded my father’s slow heartbeat — a longstanding and symptomless condition not uncommon in the very old — the cardiologist, John Rogan, refused to clear my dad for surgery unless he received a pacemaker.

Without the device, Dr. Rogan told me later, my father could have died from cardiac arrest during surgery or perhaps within a few months. It was the second time Rogan had seen my father. The first time, about a year before, he recommended the device for the same slow heartbeat. That time, my then-competent and prestroke father expressed extreme reluctance, on the advice of Fales, who considered it overtreatment.

My father’s medical conservatism, I have since learned, is not unusual. According to an analysis by the Dartmouth Atlas medical-research group, patients are far more likely than their doctors to reject aggressive treatments when fully informed of pros, cons and alternatives — information, one study suggests, that nearly half of patients say they don’t get. And although many doctors assume that people want to extend their lives, many do not. In a 1997 study in The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 30 percent of seriously ill people surveyed in a hospital said they would “rather die” than live permanently in a nursing home. In a 2008 study in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 28 percent of patients with advanced heart failure said they would trade one day of excellent health for another two years in their current state.

When Rogan suggested the pacemaker for the second time, my father was too stroke-damaged to discuss, and perhaps even to weigh, his trade­offs. The decision fell to my mother — anxious to relieve my father’s pain, exhausted with caregiving, deferential to doctors and no expert on high-tech medicine. She said yes. One of the most important medical decisions of my father’s life was over in minutes. Dr. Fales was notified by fax.

Fales loved my parents, knew their suffering close at hand, continued to oppose a pacemaker and wasn’t alarmed by death. If he had had the chance to sit down with my parents, he could have explained that the pacemaker’s battery would last 10 years and asked whether my father wanted to live to be 89 in his nearly mute and dependent state. He could have discussed the option of using a temporary external pacemaker that, I later learned, could have seen my dad safely through surgery. But my mother never consulted Fales. And the system would have effectively penalized him if she had. Medicare would have paid him a standard office-visit rate of $54 for what would undoubtedly have been a long meeting — and nothing for phone calls to work out a plan with Rogan and the surgeon.

Medicare has made minor improvements since then, and in the House version of the health care reform bill debated last year, much better payments for such conversations were included. But after the provision was distorted as reimbursement for “death panels,” it was dropped. In my father’s case, there was only a brief informed-consent process, covering the boilerplate risks of minor surgery, handled by the general surgeon.

I believe that my father’s doctors did their best within a compartmentalized and time-pressured medical system. But in the absence of any other guiding hand, there is no doubt that economics helped shape the wider context in which doctors made decisions. Had we been at the Mayo Clinic — where doctors are salaried, medical records are electronically organized and care is coordinated by a single doctor — things might have turned out differently. But Middletown is part of the fee-for-service medical economy. Doctors peddle their wares on a piecework basis; communication among them is haphazard; thinking is often short term; nobody makes money when medical interventions are declined; and nobody is in charge except the marketplace.

And so on Jan. 2, 2003, at Middlesex Hospital, the surgeon implanted my father’s pacemaker using local anesthetic. Medicare paid him $461 and the hospital a flat fee of about $12,000, of which an estimated $7,500 went to St. Jude Medical, the maker of the device. The hernia was fixed a few days later.

It was a case study in what primary-care doctors have long bemoaned: that Medicare rewards doctors far better for doing procedures than for assessing whether they should be done at all. The incentives for overtreatment continue, said Dr. Ted Epperly, the board chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians, because those who profit from them — specialists, hospitals, drug companies and the medical-device manufacturers — spend money lobbying Congress and the public to keep it that way.

Last year, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, medical-equipment manufacturers and other medical professionals spent $545 million on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. This may help explain why researchers estimate that 20 to 30 percent of Medicare’s $510 billion budget goes for unnecessary tests and treatment. Why cost-containment received short shrift in health care reform. Why physicians like Fales net an average of $173,000 a year, while noninvasive cardiologists like Rogan net about $419,000.

The system rewarded nobody for saying “no” or even “wait” — not even my frugal, intelligent, Consumer-Reports-reading mother. Medicare and supplemental insurance covered almost every penny of my father’s pacemaker. My mother was given more government-mandated consumer information when she bought a new Camry a year later.

And so my father’s electronically managed heart — now requiring frequent monitoring, paid by Medicare — became part of the $24 billion worldwide cardiac-device industry and an indirect subsidizer of the fiscal health of American hospitals. The profit margins that manufacturers earn on cardiac devices is close to 30 percent. Cardiac procedures and diagnostics generate about 20 percent of hospital revenues and 30 percent of profits.

Shortly after New Year’s 2003, my mother belatedly called and told me about the operations, which went off without a hitch. She didn’t call earlier, she said, because she didn’t want to worry me. My heart sank, but I said nothing. It is one thing to silently hope that your beloved father’s heart might fail. It is another to actively abet his death.

The pacemaker bought my parents two years of limbo, two of purgatory and two of hell. At first they soldiered on, with my father no better and no worse. My mother reread Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Full Catastrophe Living,” bought a self-help book on patience and rose each morning to meditate.

In 2005, the age-related degeneration that had slowed my father’s heart attacked his eyes, lungs, bladder and bowels. Clots as narrow as a single human hair lodged in tiny blood vessels in his brain, killing clusters of neurons by depriving them of oxygen. Long partly deaf, he began losing his sight to wet macular degeneration, requiring ocular injections that cost nearly $2,000 each. A few months later, he forgot his way home from the university pool. He grew incontinent. He was collapsing physically, like an ancient, shored-up house.

In the summer of 2006, he fell in the driveway and suffered a brain hemorrhage. Not long afterward, he spent a full weekend compulsively brushing and rebrushing his teeth. “The Jeff I married . . . is no longer the same person,” my mother wrote in the journal a social worker had suggested she keep. “My life is in ruins. This is horrible, and I have lasted for five years.” His pacemaker kept on ticking.

When bioethicists debate life-extending technologies, the effects on people like my mother rarely enter the calculus. But a 2007 Ohio State University study of the DNA of family caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease showed that the ends of their chromosomes, called telomeres, had degraded enough to reflect a four-to-eight-year shortening of lifespan. By that reckoning, every year that the pacemaker gave my irreparably damaged father took from my then-vigorous mother an equal year.

When my mother was upset, she meditated or cleaned house. When I was upset, I Googled. In 2006, I discovered that pacemakers could be deactivated without surgery. Nurses, doctors and even device salesmen had done so, usually at deathbeds. A white ceramic device, like a TV remote and shaped like the wands that children use to blow bubbles, could be placed around the hump on my father’s chest. Press a few buttons and the electrical pulses that ran down the leads to his heart would slow until they were no longer effective. My father’s heart, I learned, would probably not stop. It would just return to its old, slow rhythm. If he was lucky, he might suffer cardiac arrest and die within weeks, perhaps in his sleep. If he was unlucky, he might linger painfully for months while his lagging heart failed to suffuse his vital organs with sufficient oxygenated blood.

If we did nothing, his pacemaker would not stop for years. Like the tireless charmed brooms in Disney’s “Fantasia,” it would prompt my father’s heart to beat after he became too demented to speak, sit up or eat. It would keep his heart pulsing after he drew his last breath. If he was buried, it would send signals to his dead heart in the coffin. If he was cremated, it would have to be cut from his chest first, to prevent it from exploding and damaging the walls or hurting an attendant.

On the Internet, I discovered that the pacemaker — somewhat like the ventilator, defibrillator and feeding tube — was first an exotic, stopgap device, used to carry a handful of patients through a brief medical crisis. Then it morphed into a battery-powered, implantable and routine treatment. When Medicare approved the pacemaker for reimbursement in 1966, the market exploded. Today pacemakers are implanted annually in more than 400,000 Americans, about 80 percent of whom are over 65. According to calculations by the Dartmouth Atlas research group using Medicare data, nearly a fifth of new recipients who receive pacemakers annually — 76,000 — are over 80. The typical patient with a cardiac device today is an elderly person suffering from at least one other severe chronic illness.

Over the years, as technology has improved, the battery life of these devices lengthened. The list of heart conditions for which they are recommended has grown. In 1984, the treatment guidelines from the American College of Cardiology declared that pacemakers were strongly recommended as “indicated” or mildly approved as “reasonable” for 56 heart conditions and “not indicated” for 31 more. By 2008, the list for which they were strongly or mildly recommended expanded to 88, with most of the increase in the lukewarm “reasonable” category.

The research backing the expansion of diagnoses was weak. Over all, only 5 percent of the positive recommendations were supported by research from multiple double-blind randomized studies, the gold standard of evidence-based medicine. And 58 percent were based on no studies at all, only a “consensus of expert opinion.” Of the 17 cardiologists who wrote the 2008 guidelines, 11 received financing from cardiac-device makers or worked at institutions receiving it. Seven, due to the extent of their financial connections, were recused from voting on the guidelines they helped write.

This pattern — a paucity of scientific support and a plethora of industry connections — holds across almost all cardiac treatments, according to the cardiologist Pierluigi Tricoci of Duke University’s Clinical Research Institute. Last year in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Tricoci and his co-authors wrote that only 11 percent of 2,700 widely used cardiac-treatment guidelines were based on that gold standard. Most were based only on expert opinion.

Experts are as vulnerable to conflicts of interest as researchers are, the authors warned, because “expert clinicians are also those who are likely to receive honoraria, speakers bureau [fees], consulting fees or research support from industry.” They called the current cardiac-research agenda “strongly influenced by industry’s natural desire to introduce new products.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that I also discovered others puzzling over cardiologists who recommended pacemakers for relatives with advanced dementia. “78-year-old mother-in-law has dementia; severe short-term memory issues,” read an Internet post by “soninlaw” on Elderhope.com, a caregivers’ site, in 2007. “On a routine trip to her cardiologist, doctor decides she needs a pacemaker. . . . Anyone have a similar encounter?”

By the summer of 2007, my dad had forgotten the purpose of a dinner napkin and had to be coached to remove his slippers before he tried to put on his shoes. After a lifetime of promoting my father’s health, my mother reversed course. On a routine visit, she asked Rogan to deactivate the pacemaker. “It was hard,” she later told me. “I was doing for Jeff what I would have wanted Jeff to do for me.” Rogan soon made it clear he was morally opposed. “It would have been like putting a pillow over your father’s head,” he later told me.

Not long afterward, my mother declined additional medical tests and refused to put my father on a new anti-dementia drug and a blood thinner with troublesome side effects. “I take responsibility for whatever,” she wrote in her journal that summer. “Enough of all this overkill! It’s killing me! Talk about quality of life — what about mine?”

Then came the autumn day when she asked for my help, and I said yes. I told myself that we were simply trying to undo a terrible medical mistake. I reminded myself that my dad had rejected a pacemaker when his faculties were intact. I imagined, as a bioethicist had suggested, having a 15-minute conversation with my independent, predementia father in which I saw him shaking his head in horror over any further extension of what was not a “life,” but a prolonged and attenuated dying. None of it helped. I knew that once he died, I would dream of him and miss his mute, loving smiles. I wanted to melt into the arms of the father I once had and ask him to handle this. Instead, I felt as if I were signing on as his executioner and that I had no choice.

Over the next five months, my mother and I learned many things. We were told, by the Hemlock Society’s successor, Compassion and Choices, that as my father’s medical proxy, my mother had the legal right to ask for the withdrawal of any treatment and that the pacemaker was, in theory at least, a form of medical treatment. We learned that although my father’s living will requested no life support if he were comatose or dying, it said nothing about dementia and did not define a pacemaker as life support. We learned that if we called 911, emergency medical technicians would not honor my father’s do-not-resuscitate order unless he wore a state-issued orange hospital bracelet. We also learned that no cardiology association had given its members clear guidance on when, or whether, deactivating pacemakers was ethical.

(Last month that changed. The Heart Rhythm Society and the American Heart Association issued guidelines declaring that patients or their legal surrogates have the moral and legal right to request the withdrawal of any medical treatment, including an implanted cardiac device. It said that deactivating a pacemaker was neither euthanasia nor assisted suicide, and that a doctor could not be compelled to do so in violation of his moral values. In such cases, it continued, doctors “cannot abandon the patient but should involve a colleague who is willing to carry out the procedure.” This came, of course, too late for us.)

In the spring of 2008, things got even worse. My father took to roaring like a lion at his caregivers. At home in California, I searched the Internet for a sympathetic cardiologist and a caregiver to put my Dad to bed at night. My frayed mother began to shout at him, and their nighttime scenes were heartbreaking and frightening. An Alzheimer’s Association support-group leader suggested that my brothers and I fly out together and institutionalize my father. This leader did not know my mother’s formidable will and had never heard her speak about her wedding vows or her love.

Meanwhile my father drifted into what nurses call “the dwindles”: not sick enough to qualify for hospice care, but sick enough to never get better. He fell repeatedly at night and my mother could not pick him up. Finally, he was weak enough to qualify for palliative care, and a team of nurses and social workers visited the house. His chest grew wheezy. My mother did not request antibiotics. In mid-April 2008, he was taken by ambulance to Middlesex Hospital’s hospice wing, suffering from pneumonia.

Pneumonia was once called “the old man’s friend” for its promise of an easy death. That’s not what I saw when I flew in. On morphine, unreachable, his eyes shut, my beloved father was breathing as hard and regularly as a machine.

My mother sat holding his hand, weeping and begging for forgiveness for her impatience. She sat by him in agony. She beseeched his doctors and nurses to increase his morphine dose and to turn off the pacemaker. It was a weekend, and the doctor on call at Rogan’s cardiology practice refused authorization, saying that my father “might die immediately.” And so came five days of hard labor. My mother and I stayed by him in shifts, while his breathing became increasingly ragged and his feet slowly started to turn blue. I began drafting an appeal to the hospital ethics committee. My brothers flew in.

On a Tuesday afternoon, with my mother at his side, my father stopped breathing. A hospice nurse hung a blue light on the outside of his hospital door. Inside his chest, his pacemaker was still quietly pulsing.

After his memorial service in the Wesleyan University chapel, I carried a box from the crematory into the woods of an old convent where he and I often walked. It was late April, overcast and cold. By the side of a stream, I opened the box, scooped out a handful of ashes and threw them into the swirling water. There were some curious spiraled metal wires, perhaps the leads of his pacemaker, mixed with the white dust and pieces of bone.

A year later, I took my mother to meet a heart surgeon in a windowless treatment room at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She was 84, with two leaking heart valves. Her cardiologist had recommended open-heart surgery, and I was hoping to find a less invasive approach. When the surgeon asked us why we were there, my mother said, “To ask questions.” She was no longer a trusting and deferential patient. Like me, she no longer saw doctors — perhaps with the exception of Fales — as healers or her fiduciaries. They were now skilled technicians with their own agendas. But I couldn’t help feeling that something precious — our old faith in a doctor’s calling, perhaps, or in a healing that is more than a financial transaction or a reflexive fixing of broken parts — had been lost.

The surgeon was forthright: without open-heart surgery, there was a 50-50 chance my mother would die within two years. If she survived the operation, she would probably live to be 90. And the risks? He shrugged. Months of recovery. A 5 percent chance of stroke. Some possibility, he acknowledged at my prompting, of postoperative cognitive decline. (More than half of heart-bypass patients suffer at least a 20 percent reduction in mental function.) My mother lifted her trouser leg to reveal an anklet of orange plastic: her do-not-resuscitate bracelet. The doctor recoiled. No, he would not operate with that bracelet in place. It would not be fair to his team. She would be revived if she collapsed. “If I have a stroke,” my mother said, nearly in tears, “I want you to let me go.” What about a minor stroke, he said — a little weakness on one side?

I kept my mouth shut. I was there to get her the information she needed and to support whatever decision she made. If she emerged from surgery intellectually damaged, I would bring her to a nursing home in California and try to care for her the way she had cared for my father at such cost to her own health. The thought terrified me.

The doctor sent her up a floor for an echocardiogram. A half-hour later, my mother came back to the waiting room and put on her black coat. “No,” she said brightly, with the clarity of purpose she had shown when she asked me to have the pacemaker deactivated. “I will not do it.”

She spent the spring and summer arranging house repairs, thinning out my father’s bookcases and throwing out the files he collected so lovingly for the book he never finished writing. She told someone that she didn’t want to leave a mess for her kids. Her chest pain worsened, and her breathlessness grew severe. “I’m aching to garden,” she wrote in her journal. “But so it goes. ACCEPT ACCEPT ACCEPT.”

Last August, she had a heart attack and returned home under hospice care. One evening a month later, another heart attack. One of my brothers followed her ambulance to the hospice wing where we had sat for days by my father’s bed. The next morning, she took off her silver earrings and told the nurses she wanted to stop eating and drinking, that she wanted to die and never go home. Death came to her an hour later, while my brother was on the phone to me in California — almost as mercifully as it had come to my paternal grandfather. She was continent and lucid to her end.

A week later, at the same crematory near Long Island Sound, my brothers and I watched through a plate-glass window as a cardboard box containing her body, dressed in a scarlet silk ao dai she had sewn herself, slid into the flames. The next day, the undertaker delivered a plastic box to the house where, for 45 of their 61 years together, my parents had loved and looked after each other, humanly and imperfectly. There were no bits of metal mixed with the fine white powder and the small pieces of her bones.

Katy Butler lives in Mill Valley, Calif., and teaches memoir writing at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.

Dude, stimulus does not immediately kick in. It takes time to take effect. And considering the economic data that suggests that this was the worst economic downturn in since the Great Depression, where unemployment reached 25%, how is it "balderdash" unemployment would have climbed into the teens?

You also failed in your economic analysis. To say that the stimulus jobs created 1 job for every $200,000 is the most absurd thing I've ever read. First off, it assumes that the only jobs created are the jobs of people it directly contributed to hiring without taking into account the residual effects of said hiring, or the results of whatever goods and services produced from the work they did. How many jobs are created or preserved by building infrastructure? How many jobs were created or preserved by providing all workers hired through stimulus programs, which in turn spent that income on goods and services produced by private sector workers? What about workers producing goods and services necessary for these programs that wouldn't immediately show up?

"...the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a report in August that said the stimulus bill has '[l]owered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points' and '[i]ncreased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million.'"

http://www.factcheck.org/2010/09/did-the-stimulus-create-jobs/

The economy is cyclical in nature. Stopping the bleeding is a big deal. And most economists believe the stimulus bill wasn't as successful as it should have been is because it wasn't big enough, not because it was too big or was done at all.

Again, I challenge you to show me a recession in modern times that was not ended after a period of deficit spending. You can't name one, can you?

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/include/us_deficit_100.png

So there's completely DUH obvious undeniable, there's no other way to explain it, basic US historical fact that we've ALWAYS ended recessions with deficit spending. How can you possibly argue that "when government steps into the market, it creates an artificial bubble that PROLONGS an economic downturn." So what was WWII?! What were the 1980's?! You have no factual claims to stand on! Explain how in the world deficits prolonged the Great Depression! We deficit spent quite a bit leading up to WWII, still didn't get out of the Great Depression, massive record deficit spent, THEN got out of the Depression. It is undeniable that's what did the trick.

I don't for the life of me understand why people like you will literally argue the sky isn't blue if it fits your ideological narrative.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

You can't say it didn't work before because unemployment was skyrocketing and then stopped when the stimulus kicked in.
The facts...
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000
Unemployment started going up a bit in May of 2008 (5.4%). By February of 2009 (Stimulus bill passes) the rate was 8.2%. By October of 2009, unemployment was 10.1%. +2%. After. The. Stimulus. Unemployment hit 9%+ in May of 2009 and has stayed in that zone ever since.
Unemployment did spike a total of +4% between May of 2008 and May of 2009. 60% of that spike took place before the stimulus, and 40% of the spike took place AFTER the stimulus. In order for anyone to claim that the stimulus 'stopped' unemployement from rising, they would have to conclusively prove that unemployment WOULD HAVE RISEN to 13.4% by May of 2010, then to 17.4% by May of this year without the passage of the stimulus. Balderdash. Unemployment hit a natural free market peak in late 2009, and it was going to do that with our without the stimulus.
Let's assume the stimulus DID 'create jobs'. Is that backed up by facts?
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/13/us-usa-campa
ign-stimulus-idUSTRE78C08R20110913
http://web.econ.ohio-state.edu/dupor/arra10_may11.pdf
Economic data is open to debate. On the one side here we have the CBO which gave the stimulus a very generous amount of credit (based on some very questionable interpretations of job 'creation') for 'creating or preserving' 3 million jobs. Then we have an OSU study which uses statistics to prove the stimulus 'created' 450,000 government jobs and KILLED a million private sector jobs.
I personally I think the OSU study hits the nail on the head. "ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than directly boost private sector employment." That is a statement that reflects reality. The stimulus mostly plugged up budgeting gaps that had nothing to do with employment. In fact, the CBO itself freely admitted, "it is impossible to determine how many of the reported jobs would have existed in the absence of the stimulus package.” QUOTE!
But let's be really nice and use the CBO's figures - even though they are highly questionable. 3 million jobs were 'created or preserved' by the stimulus bill. Even in this very rosy scenario, the stimulus made 1 job for every $200,000 dollars. It can be credibly argued that doing NOTHING would have generated a better result in an overall analysis compared to spending $200K for 1 job.
But for the sake of discussion let's take a good hard look at the jobs that were 'created'. After all, 200K a job might make sense if they were GOOD jobs...
http://reason.com/archives/2009/12/11/did-the-stimulus-create-jobs
They weren't. Most of the jobs were government jobs. And most of them were temporary construction jobs or other seasonal gigs for make-work projects scheduled to complete in a year or less (at which point they are fired). The private sector - where jobs are needed most - got virtually NO boost from the stimulus.
I could keep on going for hours, but suffice it to say that the stimulus didn't 'stop' unemployment. There is solid, real, credible evidence that the government's interference in the free market did far more harm than good. That's what happens. When government steps into the market, it creates an artificial bubble that PROLONGS an economic downturn.

You can't say it didn't work before because unemployment was skyrocketing and then stopped when the stimulus kicked in.

The facts...

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

Unemployment started going up a bit in May of 2008 (5.4%). By February of 2009 (Stimulus bill passes) the rate was 8.2%. By October of 2009, unemployment was 10.1%. +2%. After. The. Stimulus. Unemployment hit 9%+ in May of 2009 and has stayed in that zone ever since.

Unemployment did spike a total of +4% between May of 2008 and May of 2009. 60% of that spike took place before the stimulus, and 40% of the spike took place AFTER the stimulus. In order for anyone to claim that the stimulus 'stopped' unemployement from rising, they would have to conclusively prove that unemployment WOULD HAVE RISEN to 13.4% by May of 2010, then to 17.4% by May of this year without the passage of the stimulus. Balderdash. Unemployment hit a natural free market peak in late 2009, and it was going to do that with our without the stimulus.

Let's assume the stimulus DID 'create jobs'. Is that backed up by facts?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/13/us-usa-campaign-stimulus-idUSTRE78C08R20110913

http://web.econ.ohio-state.edu/dupor/arra10_may11.pdf

Economic data is open to debate. On the one side here we have the CBO which gave the stimulus a very generous amount of credit (based on some very questionable interpretations of job 'creation') for 'creating or preserving' 3 million jobs. Then we have an OSU study which uses statistics to prove the stimulus 'created' 450,000 government jobs and KILLED a million private sector jobs.

I personally I think the OSU study hits the nail on the head. "ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than directly boost private sector employment." That is a statement that reflects reality. The stimulus mostly plugged up budgeting gaps that had nothing to do with employment. In fact, the CBO itself freely admitted, "it is impossible to determine how many of the reported jobs would have existed in the absence of the stimulus package.” QUOTE!

But let's be really nice and use the CBO's figures - even though they are highly questionable. 3 million jobs were 'created or preserved' by the stimulus bill. Even in this very rosy scenario, the stimulus made 1 job for every $200,000 dollars. It can be credibly argued that doing NOTHING would have generated a better result in an overall analysis compared to spending $200K for 1 job.

But for the sake of discussion let's take a good hard look at the jobs that were 'created'. After all, 200K a job might make sense if they were GOOD jobs...

http://reason.com/archives/2009/12/11/did-the-stimulus-create-jobs

They weren't. Most of the jobs were government jobs. And most of them were temporary construction jobs or other seasonal gigs for make-work projects scheduled to complete in a year or less (at which point they are fired). The private sector - where jobs are needed most - got virtually NO boost from the stimulus.

I could keep on going for hours, but suffice it to say that the stimulus didn't 'stop' unemployment. There is solid, real, credible evidence that the government's interference in the free market did far more harm than good. That's what happens. When government steps into the market, it creates an artificial bubble that PROLONGS an economic downturn.

From yt:

A stalemate between owners and players that threatens the upcoming NFL season and the widening scandal that forced beloved Ohio State University coach Jim Tressel to resign in disgrace are only the most recent reminders that football has always provoked a huge amount of controversy.

In the early 20th century, football was a literal bloodsport, writes John J. Miller in his new book The Big Scrum. After a series of game-related deaths, President Teddy Roosevelt called together the presidents of the three biggest football colleges (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton - yes, a very different America) and jawboned them into cleaning up the game to stave off legislative attempts to ban it outright.

The result, says Miller, was the creation of the distinctively American game football featuring forward passes, quarterbacks, spread offenses, and more.

The author of several books including the historical novel The First Assassin, Miller writes for National Review and is the new director of the journalism program at Hillsdale College. For more information about Miller, including links to his popular podcast series, go here (http://www.heymiller.com/).

Miller sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to talk about The Big Scrum, the scandal-ridden history of college football, and exactly what budding journalists need to learn in college (hint: it's not journalism).

About 6.31 minutes.

Shot by Jim Epstein, Meredith Bragg, and Josh Swain, who edited the piece.

My favorite was "...the tragic loss of a football icon. <beat> OHIO STATE!!"
Had not seen that... perfect.

Ohio State sux, only slightly less than Notre Dame and Nebraska.

I live in Columbus OH... I FUCKING HATE THESE OHIO STATE FANS.

Every mother-fucking saturday a trillion people all wearing ohio state act like fucking retarded monkeys hooping and hollering around. These people aren't even in the stadium, THEY ARE IN MOTHER FUCKING TARGET!

Tags for this video have been changed from 'ohio state, michigan, death, news, uncool' to 'ohio state, michigan, death, news, uncool, bo schembechler, football, college' - edited by kronosposeidon

The Sift is tough but fair on people who abuse it.

There's no need for a "with us or against us" "BAN HIM" type reaction.

Damn, finding that Commodus pic (first link) was hard.

Anyway, my train of thought was derailed looking for that first picture, but it sums up my attitude - if you're going to do a Gladiatorial-style ban-execution, you want it to be based on more than the "good suspicion" of the angry mob, but something more concrete as Lucky wrote about extensively above.

Lucky's comments were really thorough and to the point so I'm not going to town on that.

Oh I'm tired, time to finish watching this political Basketball vid and then go to sleep.

"'ann arbor is a whore' -> Greatest tag in sift history?"

Only Ohio State fans would think that's funny. Hey, huh huh...their town's got a girl's name in it...huh huh....

That's a fairly sensationalist article, making sweeping claims without providing justification. For instance this part

"If, for any reason, the dollar lost its oil backing, the American Empire would cease to exist."

The world's second largest economy -- Japan relies on yen, which isn't backed by gold, oil, etc, yet it functions just fine. In fact, most of the world's currencies aren't backed by anything.

If the world switches to another currency for international transactions, that will probably make the dollar weaker. However, there are indications that current dollar is too strong, so it needs to be weaker.

Weaker dollar makes American products more competitive abroad, hence giving a boost to domestic industry. So weaker dollar might cure current trade deficit that America is facing -- since weaker dollar means US will be exporting more and importing less.

I've read the other essay by that guy, and despite claiming a PhD from Ohio State, he shows a lack of understanding how US monetary policy works. For instance in his inflation article he promises more US inflation ahead and writes

"As a result, the government will aggressively pursue inflationary monetary policy because it clearly stands to benefit from it"

However, monetary policy is not controlled directly by the government, but is controlled by the Fed. In fact, in the past it happened that the government was telling the Fed to relax monetary policy, and the Fed refused (in 1982 the Congress tried to convince the Fed to lower it's rates)