Saturday, August 29, 2009

GOP: Incentive to Kill

No Friend of the Elderly
Savannah, GA Health Rationing. Euthanasia. Death Panels. "Pull the plug on grandma." It's no wonder the Republicans get so frothy at the mouth over the current debate on Health care reform: they've already enacted into law motivation to kill seniors.

According to Newsweek writer Jacob Weisberg it's "been the Republican policy for years."

No less a Senator than Captain Chickensh*t himself, Charles Ernest ("Chuck") Grassley (R) of Iowa devised the death stimulus in the GOP 2001 tax cut. As Weisberg writes:

The estate-tax revision he championed will reduce the estate tax to zero next year. But when it expires at year's end, the tax will jump back up to its previous level of 55 percent. Grassley's exploding tax break has an entirely foreseeable, if unintended, consequence: it incentivizes ailing, elderly rich people to end their lives—paging Dr. Kevorkian—before midnight on Dec. 31, 2010. It also gives their children an incentive to sign DNR orders and switch off respirators in time for the deadline. This would be a great plot for a P. D. James novel if it weren't an actual piece of legislation.

With friends like these...

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Birthers: F**k Off

Conspiracy Wingnuttery
Savannah, GA. In the so-called Birthers' Cloud Cuckoo land of perfectly sealed birth certificates, everyone has a copy of, or access to, their "original sealed birth certificate." To those who are Adoptees--either by one or both parents--know this is not the case. They have amended certificates. Amended certificates listing the adoptive parent(s) at the top of the "Certificate of Live Birth", not their birthparent(s). In fact, the birthparent(s) has/have been eliminated from the document.

Example: In Washington State, if a step-father adopts a child in their early teens, the new Certificate of Live Birth issued will list the step-father as simply the "father" and show the date of his marriage to the birthmother. As there may be a number of years between the child's birth and the birthmother's subsequent marriage to the step-father, the child has the onus of officially becoming an illegitimate birth in the eyes of the State, until such time of the new marriage. This could be a period of several years. This official, State-issued document is now blatantly inaccurate, insulting, and embarrassing.

My question to the conspiracy fetishists known as 'Birthers' is this: Are these individuals fully-fledged citizens? Are they some kind of demi-American because their birth certificate has been altered by the State?

If Birthers--and their GOP handlers--want to accomplish something good out of all this, press for the truth on ALL birth certificates, help the cause of ALL adoptees to finally, at last, be provided with verity, accuracy, and fact-based information about the most important day of their lives: The Day They Were Born.