Showing posts with label assisted suicide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label assisted suicide. Show all posts

It Shouldn't Be Legal

Assisted suicide, apart from being flat-out unethical and very vulnerable to abuse, ain't all what it's cracked up to be.

We have Oregon as an example.

Supporters of assisted suicide often cite pain as a primary reason why people should have the legal right to die. But the state's report showed that people's concerns tended toward loss of autonomy (91 per cent), loss of dignity (71 per cent) or being a burden on their family (40 per cent). Coleman is particularly concerned that people are choosing assisted suicide because they feel they are a burden. "To me that feels more like a duty to die than a choice to die," she says.

It shouldn't be allowed because doctors can't be trusted, and most of all, those "loved ones" can't be trusted.

Especially if there is an inheritance involved.

Unbelievable "Assisted Suicide" is Covered by Insurance

where this bullshit is legal:

Assisted suicide ultimately affects everyone's health care. In Oregon, where assisted suicide is legal and where Maynard moved to be prescribed the lethal dose, patients have been harmed.

In 2008, cancer patient Barbara Wagner was prescribed a chemotherapy treatment by her doctor, but Oregon's state-run health plan sent a letter which denied coverage of this chemo, yet offered to cover other "treatments," including assisted suicide.

The same scenario happened to another Oregon resident, Randy Stroup. The Oregon assisted suicide reports tell us that over 95% of those who supposedly received lethal prescriptions in Oregon had insurance, but how many got a denial like the one sent to Wagner and Stroup?

When assisted suicide is encouraged, it becomes a covered "treatment" and ultimately removes choices from patients.

It's not "freedom" at all but coercion and not acceptable as a medical treatment. It should be banned nationwide.

Why "Assisted Suicide" is a HORRIBLE Idea

People peddle the libertarian crap and promote a heartrending case without regard to the major issues that make this idea completely and totally unacceptable.

I used to support it, but now I am completely against it, especially now with the trends among politicians and health care "experts" saying we need to limit health care access to the poor and the middle class. Obamacare was one avenue, but there are many other ways this is being done.

Obamacare may be better than nothing, but if people can't the hell afford the premiums or the deductables, what the hell good is it, especially when people may have had employer-paid programs where they paid little or nothing for the coverage? These people wind up just like those on Medicaid who may have "free" insurance but can't find doctors to treat them. They have "coverage," but in reality they can't use it.

The disability rights people have ALWAYS been right about "assisted suicide"--legalized murder. After all, it isn't the terminally ill or mentally ill person who dishes out the poison or prescribes it--it's somebody else who is doing the dirty deed.

This has nothing to do with "left-right" politics and has everything to do with the human rights issue of not killing people because they are perceived as a "burden" to others.

The legalization of assisted suicide always appears acceptable when the focus is solely on an individual. But it is important to remember that doing so would have repercussions across all of society, and would put many people at risk of immense harm. After all, not every terminal prognosis is correct, and not everyone has a loving husband, family or support system.

As an advocate working on behalf of disability rights for 37 years, and as someone who uses a wheelchair, I am all too familiar with the explicit and implicit pressures faced by people living with chronic or serious disability or disease. But the reality is that legalizing assisted suicide is a deadly mix with the broken, profit-driven health care system we have in the United States.

At less than $300, assisted suicide is, to put it bluntly, the cheapest treatment for a terminal illness. This means that in places where assisted suicide is legal, coercion is not even necessary. If life-sustaining expensive treatment is denied or even merely delayed, patients will be steered toward assisted suicide, where it is legal.


Policymakers can't be trusted. HMOs can't be trusted. For-profit hospitals can't be trusted. Even doctors can't be trusted. Certainly relatives can't be trusted--especially if there is a hefty life insurance policy or an inheritance involved.

It's not acceptable, folks. I for one am sick of utilitarian nutjobs, who have no desire to revisit the old eugenics and the horrors of the twentieth century as to why "assisted suicide" and euthanasia aren't acceptable for people, peddling their filth.

Obituaries, News, and Whatever Else

Obituary: RFK press aide, one-time NPR president, and journalist Frank Mankiewicz, 90, died on Thursday.

The cause was heart failure.

Yes, he was a family member of "THE" Mankiewiczes of Hollywood fame. His father was Herman J. Mankiewicz, who with Orson Welles co-wrote the celebrated 1941 movie Citizen Kane. His uncle was a famed Hollywood director, Joseph Mankiewicz, best remembered for his work on the equally acerbic film All About Eve. Frank's son Ben is a host of Turner Classic Movies. His brother Donald is a novelist and screenwriter. Another son, Joshua, works as a journalist for NBC.

After all, the last name isn't that common, so of course people are going to think there had to be a connection between Frank and the others.

Frank, though, was very famous in his own right:

He became a journalist and lawyer and, inspired by the Kennedys, went to Washington at the dawn of the New Frontier and took an executive position at the Peace Corps, full of idealistic hopes. What he encountered were assassinations, the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandals.

His face became familiar to the nation in 1968 as a spokesman for Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign for the White House, conveying the euphoria over the senator’s triumph in the California Democratic primary and then, within hours, grimly announcing Mr. Kennedy’s death by an assassin’s bullets in Los Angeles.

Four years later, joining a ragtag crew of eager young faces from Massachusetts and South Dakota, Mr. Mankiewicz coordinated Mr. McGovern’s all-but-hopeless presidential campaign, laced with moral outrage against the war, undermined by the selection of a running mate with a history of nervous disorders, and ultimately flattened under President Richard M. Nixon’s re-election steamroller.
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The Time piece on Vergara doesn't go far enough to condemn the forces trying to take over public education and destroy what few protections teachers have.

The cover doesn't help the magazine's credibility, let me tell you. What the cover should have labeled it, based on the article, is the "War on Teachers by Billionaires." That would be more accurate.

Just where the hell do these filthy rich people get the idea they have the right to gut the public sector when they themselves are not accountable to the voting public?

As noted by the blogger, the reporter didn't question those "statistics" supporting the plaintiffs. When it comes to "firing" teachers, school districts pull all kinds of semantic games in order to claim they "fire" "few" teachers when in fact teachers are dumped and forced out all the time.

The fact is "school CEOs" already have total control of their workforces to the point of abusing the law in order to ruin workers' lives.
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Oregon should repeal that utterly wrongheaded "assisted suicide" law naively approved by voters.

It's yet another case of "libertarianism" that doesn't think through the implications of using third parties to actually murder patients or be accessories to murder and how easily that can be abused. All these people care about is the "right" for a patient to die, to hell with using third parties to do the dirty work the patient is too chickenshit to do himself or herself.

The disability community isn't persuaded, let me tell you, that "assisted suicide" is anything benign.

It is NOT ethical whatsoever to have the medical profession killing patients, either directly or indirectly.
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MIscellaneous

All in the family.

Real chickenshit for her to make these claims long after her dad is dead and can't defend himself.

This tells me more about her than it ever did about him.
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Some knuckleheads still can't get it in their heads why the disability community is opposed to "assisted suicide."

I don't think these people will EVER "get it."

Miscellaneous

Trying to blame his sister for conning him into committing the killings won't help Billy Gilley one bit, despite the tape.

I suppose you have to do what you have to do in court to help your case, but this isn't going to work.
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Today is Fire a Gay day, as a few dumb activists think they are going to get anywhere but out the door by staying home.
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Some sick bastards over in England are going to televise the snuff movie--oh, excuse me, assisted suicide--of a patient who died in 2006.

Sick, sick, sick.
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Those of us of a certain age remember well the atrocious CBS gimmick program from the 1964-1965 season, My Living Doll, which starred Julie Newmar and Robert Cummings. Newmar played a robot with perfect female features and was shacked up with Cummings, an Air Force-based psychiatrist, before Cummings walked off the set for good and before the season ended because he and Newmar did not get along. Well, My Living Doll has been made a reality or some damned thing as some weirdo has invented a robot named Aiko for his own personal use or whatever. Unlike Cummings and Newmar, there is no chance the robot and "her" weirdo shack-up will split.

Unlike Newmar's character, Rhoda, Aiko can't play the piano, either (yes, Newmar did actually play it on this show):


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Miscellaneous News.

It's nice to know you don't even have to be terminally ill to get somebody to help you with "assisted suicide"; you merely need to be depressed to get it.
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Top sire Sadlers Wells has been pensioned from stud duty. He is 27 years old.
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Nevada State Senator Dina Titus has made it official she will run for the 3rd congressional district seat currently held by Republican Jon Porter.

I think she has a good shot at getting the seat.
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Jill Derby is going to take another shot at Nevada's district 2.

It will be harder for her this time because Heller is an incumbent. Despite his mediocre record, he's probably odds-on for re-election. Remember, this district voted for dipshit Gibbons time and again.
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The Rezko case has finally gone to the jury.
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Actor Jimmy Stewart celebrates his 100th birthday this year, but he isn't around to mark the occasion.

I liked him okay; he wasn't my favorite actor but I liked him. My dad, though, couldn't stand him. He was right down there with Fred Astaire and Gene Autry on my dad's list of Hollywood celebrities he couldn't stand.
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Miscellaneous.

This award is more symbolic than anything.

Charla Mack's daughter will never see a penny of this, of course. Her dad has been sentenced to 36 years in prison for the murder of his mother and the attempted murder of a judge.
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PETA's Ingrid Newkirk ought to hire this animal control officer.
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As far as I'm concerned, it's 341 people too many.

The problem with assisted suicide is that it is nothing more than murder. Doctors should not be involved in killing patients, whether directly or indirectly.
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In a stunning admission NCLB is a failure, the feds have decided to relax some provisions of the law to a number of states regarding schools "in need of improvement."
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I thought I'd pass along this blogs and politics survey for interested readers.
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As the World Turns.

The union caves to Chrysler's demands, at least as I interpret the report.
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Floyd Landis simply won't give up.
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The doctor responsible for stunting the child known as "Ashley X" committed suicide.

Dr. Daniel F. Gunther died from toxic asphyxia from inhaling car exhaust, said Greg Hewett of the King County Medical Examiner's Office. His time of death was listed as 9:30 p.m. on Sept. 30. The 49-year-old was a pediatric endocrinologist at Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington.

In 2004, Gunther and his colleague Dr. Douglas S. Diekema performed a hysterectomy, removed the breast tissue and started hormone treatment to permanently halt the growth of a 6-year-old disabled girl so her parents could continue to care for her at home. The doctors wrote about the procedure, which was performed at Children's Hospital, in the October 2006 issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.


I can't say I feel that sorry for him. After all, what he did to that child was illegal to say nothing of unethical.
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Snowball, the celebrated Oregon doe, will spend the rest of her life in captivity, though she will not be living with the family who raised her for six years.

Her offspring, Bucky, was released into the wild.
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Luckily for the vulnerable, "assisted suicide" has failed to catch fire anyplace outside of Oregon.
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"Assisted Suicide,"

or legalized murder, isn't a matter of "choice." It's a matter of power and who has it.

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Crater Lake National Park Photos 1

 Here are a few pictures I took at Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon today, including a couple of them from the historic lodge: