Tuesday, Mar 16th 2010
US President, Barack Obama, has identified the cost of health care as the number one threat to the American economy. In a 55-minute speech to the American Medical Association earlier this month, in which he articulated a thorough understanding of the main issues, Obama outlined his proposals for a public health insurance option that would [...]
During the unkind years of the neo-liberal consensus, which were dominated by the free-market/small-government/low-tax/eat-what-you-kill/greed-is-good mentality that pretty well everyone now recognises to have been a failure, it was exceptionally difficult for the Labour party in Ireland to promote itself as anything more than ever-so-slightly left-of-centre without fear of electoral annihilation. Though it battled away manfully, [...]
This week, indignant old men and women have led a wave of unprecedented social protest in the national media. Next week, the same old men and women will take their protest to the streets. The government may fall.
The primary issue may be medical cards but the core value at the heart of the [...]
“If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.”
- Kathleen Parker, a National Review online columnist and a former Sarah Palin supporter.
Bullshit is big at the moment. And the ubiquity and effects of this anti-science and anti-logic form of fallacious rhetoric or argumentum verbosium (proof by verbosity) are beginning to be taken [...]
Do the findings of the TASC survey, The Solidarity Factor - Public Perceptions of Unequal Ireland, published this week, represent a paradigm shift to the left among Irish adults, particularly among wealthier people?
According to the survey of 1000 adults interviewed in April this year, 70% believe wealth distribution in Ireland is unfair and 80% are concerned [...]
The state of the Ireland’s maternity services is deeply unsatisfactory. In August of last year, in considerable frustration and anger at the lack of any cohesive action to make improvements, I wrote to the Irish Times (letter) to describe the situation. By budget time, it was already known that several large maternity hospitals had had [...]
The simplistic idea behind co-location - to create extra space for public patients in public hospitals by transferring the care of private patients currently occupying beds in those hospital to new private hospitals on the same campus, with the private sector encouraged to pay for these new hospitals through tax-based incentives - is deeply flawed. [...]