No Mercy In Canada
 The utterly heartless and arbitrary rationing of health care in Canada produces many horror stories. As I have written before, a particularly cruel rationing method limits the number of surgeries of a given type at a given hospital. Once the allotted number of surgeries have been performed for the fiscal year, no more operations are allowed.
A current textbook example is provided by the intense suffering of an Ontario man:
A mentally disabled Elliot Lake man will have to live with a painful stomach condition for a few more months because Sudbury Regional Hospital (SRH) has a limit on the surgery he needs.
The middle-aged man, who was born with his stomach in the wrong place, suffers from severe and painful dry heaves. His condition can be cured by a procedure called laparoscopic anti-reflux surgery, which would change the position of his stomach.
However, the hospital has limited Sudbury's two thoracic surgeons to doing just 25 of these surgeries in a fiscal year, and they have already surpassed their limit.
The man was originally scheduled for surgery at Sudbury Regional Hospital in December, but the procedure was cancelled twice, says Heather Tasse, a home support worker for Community Living Algoma who helps to care for the man.
The man's surgeon, who has asked not to be named, told Tasse the hospital isn't allowing him to perform any laparoscopic anti-reflux surgeries from the beginning of February until the end of March, when the fiscal year ends.
Demand for his services has been increasing over the past few years. He is one of only a few doctors in the province able to perform anti-reflux surgery in a minimally invasive fashion.
Tasse says her client is near the top of the surgeon's 14-month waiting list, because he is in so much pain.
 In a similar vein, a Quebec hospital has just halted all hip and knee operations until April when a new fiscal year begins ...
Ethan Lichtblau, chief of orthopedics at Santa Cabrini Hospital in Rosemont, said he quit doing hip and knee surgeries this week after a Health Department directive to stop operating because the hospital has blown its prosthesis budget this year.
... with all the ensuing human costs:
Incapacitated by joint damage, Joan and Don Brigden have squeezed their lives into two rooms by installing their bed and a shower downstairs.
She is 70 and was slated for hip replacement since May; he is 68 and was to get a new knee in September.
[...]
The couple from Bowman, 70 kilometres north of Ottawa, had to start from scratch, facing an eight-month wait for a consultation.
"She's gone from using a cane to a walker to a wheelchair in four months," Don Brigden said of his wife.
"We are literally living in two rooms. It's terrible. We shouldn't have to suffer this way."
[...]
The Brigdens had expected their suffering would end shortly. They were looking forward to doing their grocery shopping together once again.
But this week, they found themselves on yet another waiting list.
... Santa Cabrini, has shut its operating room to knee and hip replacements because of budget restrictions.
[...]
"We paid taxes all our lives for this and now they tell us they don't have the money to do it right away."
[...]
The Brigdens are going to wait until Santa Cabrini opens again to knee and hip surgeries in April.
"It's just a shame we have to wait that long. She should be walking around being functional," Don Brigden said of his wife.
"It's just not right."
Posted by Stuart Browning
28 Feb 2006 @ 5:58am
Compassionate Socialism
 It was reported last week that Sheryl Crow had surgery for breast cancer and would now have radiation therapy. Like most American women in the same situation, Ms. Crow will not wait for radiation therapy to begin.
Unfortunately, breast cancer patients in the U.K. needing radiation therapy after surgery are not so lucky:
More than half of cancer patients who need radiotherapy have to wait longer for their treatment than the recommended maximum of four weeks, according to the Royal College of Radiologists.
There is evidence, says the latest report, "that these delays reduce the chance of cure and worsen outcomes in some patients."
[...]
Of patients whose primary cancer treatment was radiotherapy, 53% had waited more than four weeks. The college says it is "good practice" to see patients within two weeks, and they should not wait beyond four. A slightly greater proportion - 57% - of those undergoing adjuvant radiotherapy following surgery waited more than four weeks. A third of patients waited more than the maximum two weeks for palliative radiotherapy, to reduce the symptoms of their cancer.
[...]
Breakthrough Breast Cancer, the patient support group, said it regularly hears from women with breast cancer who are worried about delays in obtaining radiotherapy. "We have heard of women having to wait four months for their radiotherapy when ideally it should follow hard on the heels of surgery to remove breast cancer,"
Posted by Stuart Browning
27 Feb 2006 @ 12:48pm
From Taliban to Yale
 One of the difficulties of being a member of a deposed terrorist regime is, what's next for your career? Well, it turns out that if you're a former spokesman for the Taliban, the brutal government that harbored al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, there's a natural place for you. From John Fund in The Wall Street Journal:
Never has an article made me blink with astonishment as much as when I read in yesterday's New York Times magazine that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former ambassador-at-large for the Taliban, is now studying at Yale on a U.S. student visa. This is taking the obsession that U.S. universities have with promoting diversity a bit too far.
Something is very wrong at our elite universities. Last week Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard when it became clear he would lose a no-confidence vote held by politically correct faculty members furious at his efforts to allow ROTC on campus, his opposition to a drive to have Harvard divest itself of corporate investments in Israel, and his efforts to make professors work harder. Now Yale is giving a first-class education to an erstwhile high official in one of the most evil regimes of the latter half of the 20th century--the government that harbored the terrorists who attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001.
"In some ways," Mr. Rahmatullah told the New York Times. "I'm the luckiest person in the world. I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale." One of the courses he has taken is called Terrorism-Past, Present and Future.
Many foreign readers of the Times will no doubt snicker at the revelation that naive Yale administrators scrambled to admit Mr. Rahmatullah. The Times reported that Yale "had another foreigner of Rahmatullah's caliber apply for special-student status." Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions, told the Times that "we lost him to Harvard," and "I didn't want that to happen again."
[...]
I don't believe Mr. Rahmatullah had direct knowledge of the 9/11 plot, and I don't think he has ever killed anyone. I can appreciate that he is trying to rebuild his life. But he willingly and cheerfully served an evil regime in a manner that would have made Goebbels proud. That he was 22 at the time is little of an excuse. There are many poor, bright students--American and foreign alike--who would jump at the opportunity to attend Yale. Why should Mr. Rahmatullah go to the line ahead of all of them? That's a question Yale alumni should ask when their alma mater comes looking for contributions.
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
27 Feb 2006 @ 11:17am
An Entrepreneur And Freedom Fighter
 Dr. Brian Day, who is featured in our film Dead Meat, is profiled in this morning's New York Times:
The Cambie Surgery Center, Canada's most prominent private hospital, may be considered a rogue enterprise.
Accepting money from patients for operations they would otherwise receive free of charge in a public hospital is technically prohibited in this country, even in cases where patients would wait months or even years in discomfort before receiving treatment.
But no one is about to arrest Dr. Brian Day, who is president and medical director of the center, or any of the 120 doctors who work there. Public hospitals are sending him growing numbers of patients they are too busy to treat, and his center is advertising that patients do not have to wait to replace their aching knees.
The country's publicly financed health insurance system - frequently described as the third rail of its political system and a core value of its national identity - is gradually breaking down. Private clinics are opening around the country by an estimated one a week, and private insurance companies are about to find a gold mine.
Dr. Day, for instance, is planning to open more private hospitals, first in Toronto and Ottawa, then in Montreal, Calgary and Edmonton. Ontario provincial officials are already threatening stiff fines. Dr. Day says he is eager to see them in court.
"We've taken the position that the law is illegal," Dr. Day, 59, says. "This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years."
[...]
Now Dr. Day says he is considering building a full-service private hospital somewhere in Canada with a private medical school attached to it.
"In a free and democratic society where you can spend money on gambling and alcohol and tobacco," Dr. Day said, "the state has no business preventing you and me from spending our own money on health care."
Posted by Stuart Browning
26 Feb 2006 @ 8:41am
Great Moments in Socialized Medicine (Continued)
 A U.K. grandmother has been waiting 13 years for a hip replacement:
The family of a Gower gran who has been waiting 13 years for a new hip are furious she has apparently been forgotten about.
Sylvia Lott, aged 72, was first referred by her GP to Morriston Hospital in 1993. But after a series of delays because she was not considered fit enough for surgery, she was apparently taken off the waiting list in 2004.
Mrs Lott is virtually wheelchair bound and can only walk a few yards at a time with the help of a frame. But despite desperately hoping for a replacement hip, she has almost given up hope of ever getting one.
Her son, Gordon Austin, said: "My mother has been on the waiting list since she was 60 and is getting very frustrated with all these delays.
Also from the U.K. - a 4-year-old girl with several absessed teeth has been waiting in agony over a month for "urgent" dental care:
Little Nikita Smith has four rotten teeth which have caused huge abscesses in her mouth. Mum Jane says the youngster lies awake in "dreadful pain" and has not been to school since the condition started.
But despite Jane's best efforts, Nikita is still waiting for NHS treatment for a condition which dentists themselves have described as "urgent".
Jane said: "It's awful to see your daughter in so much pain and not be able to do anything about it. No one listens, however loud you shout. NHS dentistry is just a very bad joke."
Single mum Jane, from Bramley, Leeds, first noticed Nikita was in pain in mid January but since then says she has had to battle even to get her daughter seen by a dentist.
First, she tried to get an urgent appointment at her local surgery but was told because Nikita is not registered she could not be seen.
Jane claims her daughter has been on the waiting list to register since she was born.
Posted by Stuart Browning
23 Feb 2006 @ 9:50am
Politics in Geography Class
An interesting choice in course material for a geography class:
Imagine my surprise when, as a freshman at Morehead State University in Kentucky, I walked into an Introduction to Geography course and had to sit through a video called "The Myth of the Liberal Media." One day we were talking about the earth's weather patterns and the next, that the media is really conservative. Any taxpayer should take note.
"The Myth of the Liberal Media" is produced by the Media Education Foundation, and as the title implies, sets out to "prove" that conservatives are off their heads when talking about how liberal the media has become. In the film left-wing icons, Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, and John Lewis were interviewed to explain how.
It would almost be funny if this sort of thing weren't so common.
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
23 Feb 2006 @ 9:42am
Vote For Professor Baraka!
 For readers of David Horowitz's new book, 'The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America', Front Page Magazine offers an opportunity to vote for the worst professor in America. We see, by looking at the current voting results page, that one of our favorites, Professor Amiri Baraka of Rutgers and Stony Brook, is trailing badly in the polls as the 27th worst professor in America.
Readers should consider these representative quotes from Mr. Baraka's writings so as to make an informed voting choice:
"Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers. Cut the mothers' throats."
"We [blacks] must eliminate the white man before we can draw a free breath on this planet."
And this from Mr. Horowitz's book:
When a young woman asked Baraka what whites could do to help the black cause, he replied, "You can help by dying. You are a cancer. You can help the world's people with your death."
Update: It looks like the get-out-the-vote effort is helping. Professor Baraka has moved up to #15 in the polls. Here's a little more of the poetry of Amiri Baraka from his "Somebody Blew Up America":
Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for
Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza
Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro
[...]
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day
Posted by Stuart Browning
22 Feb 2006 @ 11:17am
Un-PC Harvard President Resigns
Larry Summers, the president of Harvard University has resigned in what Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz calls "an academic coup d'etat". Mr. Summers's crime? Not being politically correct enough.
Dershowitz comments:
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which forced Summers's resignation by voting a lack of confidence in him last March and threatening to do so again on Feb. 28, is only one component of Harvard University and is hardly representative of widespread attitudes on the campus toward Summers. The graduate faculties, the students, and the alumni generally supported Summers for his many accomplishments. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences includes, in general, some of the most radical, hard-left elements within Harvard's diverse constituencies. And let there be no mistake about the origin of Summers's problem with that particular faculty: It started as a hard left-center conflict. Summers committed the cardinal sin against the academic hard left: He expressed politically incorrect views regarding gender, race, religion, sexual preference, and the military.
[...]
In the minds of at least some vocal members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, expressing such politically incorrect views is the academic equivalent of provoking Islamic extremists by depicting Prophet Mohammed in a political cartoon. Radical academics do not, of course, burn down buildings, at least not since the 1970s. Instead they introduce motions of no confidence and demand resignations of those who offend their sensibilities (while insisting on complete freedom of speech for those with whom they agree -- free speech for me but not for thee!).
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
22 Feb 2006 @ 11:10am
Socialized Medicine in Maine
 In a replay of TennCare, Tennessee's expanded Medicaid program, Maine Governor John Baldacci's Dirigo Health program has succeeded in shifting thousands of previously insured individuals onto the state's welfare rolls - and as last week's OpinionJournal noted, the promised savings have turned into a tax increase:
Welcome to the Pine Tree state, where a program that the governor claims has saved the state millions of dollars means that your taxes go ... up. Maine is the home of Democratic Gov. John Baldacci's Dirigo Health, which regulates the state's health-care system and includes a subsidized health-insurance program. (Dirigo is the state's motto, Latin for "I lead.") When the law creating Dirigo Health was signed, proponents said it would reduce cost-shifting and health-system costs and ultimately cover all 130,000 uninsured Mainers within five years, including 31,000 uninsured in year one.
It hasn't worked out that way. Through the first nine months only 1,600 previously uninsured individuals enrolled in Dirigo Health's insurance product, called DirigoChoice. The other 6,000 who enrolled simply traded their private health insurance for taxpayer-subsidized DirigoChoice. The program continues to spend millions subsidizing insurance for those already insured.
Posted by Stuart Browning
21 Feb 2006 @ 8:51am
Great Moments in Socialized Medicine (Continued)
 More desperation in England:
A DESPERATE cancer patient is planning to fly across Europe for surgery after waiting four months for treatment in Leeds.
Phil Murdoch was diagnosed with an "aggressive" form of prostate cancer in early October and has still not been treated.
He is worried the long wait will kill him - so worried, the 60-year-old is thinking of flying to Cyprus and paying for surgery.
He said: "I can't waait much longer. What else can I do? I'm not going to die. "My brother-in-law lives in northern Cyprus and he has found a Turkish surgeon who is prepared to do it.
[...]
On October 11 he saw a consultant at St James's Hospital. "He told me I had an aggressive form of prostate cancer and ignoring it wasn't an option."
Scans and appointments followed and he next saw his consultant on November 18, when he was given treatment options - surgery or radiotherapy. He opted for surgery but was told he must speak to a radiography consultant before deciding.
When he returned to the original consultant on December 13 and repeated his surgery request he was put on a list and told to call if he had not heard anything by mid January.
On January 27 - more than three months after he was diagnosed, he was told he was "on the list but not in the diary".
Posted by Stuart Browning
17 Feb 2006 @ 8:52am
A Modicum of Health Care Freedom in Quebec
 The government of Quebec is now allowing the private sector to provide some health care services, a tacit admission of the failure of government-run, rationed medicine to provide timely care for its citizens:
The Quebec government Thursday heralded a "new era" in health care in the province, vowing a strong public system while opening the door to the private-sector for procedures including hip and knee replacements and cataract surgery.
Posted by Stuart Browning
17 Feb 2006 @ 6:01am
Vive La Revolucion!
  We're happy to announce that the web site of Professor Peter McLaren is no longer password protected and is back online in all its revolutionary glory. We encourage prospective UCLA students and their parents to pay a visit.
Along with the revolving red communist star, lots of Che Guevara-worship and some snappy new music, he's got a link to the lyrics of The Internationale and a statement of purpose in which he makes no bones about his advocacy of a totalitarian state:
This website is developed as a resource for students of critical pedagogy. The critical pedagogy which I support and practice advocates non-violent dissent, the development of a philosophy of praxis guided by a Marxist humanism, the study of revolutionary social movements and thought, and the struggle for socialist democracy. It is opposed to liberal democracy, which only serves to facilitate the reproduction of capital.
Posted by Stuart Browning
16 Feb 2006 @ 11:23am
Holocaust Denial at Northwestern
 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is finding at least one holocaust-denying ally in academia: Professor Arthur Butz of Northwestern University. The Chicago Tribune reports:
Butz, a tenured Northwestern professor since 1974, is known for denying that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews during World War II. He promotes his views through his Northwestern-affiliated Web site, including a link to his 1976 book, "The Hoax of the 20th Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry."
Butz told the Tribune last week that he e-mailed comments to the Mehr News Agency after he was approached by an Iranian journalist.
Butz wrote that the Holocaust didn't happen, that it is a "deliberately contrived falsehood" and that its promulgation was motivated by the desire to create a Jewish state in the Middle East. About Ahmadinejad, he wrote: "I congratulate him on becoming the first head of state to speak out clearly on these issues and regret only that it was not a Western head of state."
Professor Butz's comments have been getting traction in Iran:
Iran's semi-official Mehr News Agency and the English-language Tehran Times have published Butz's comments, promoting the Northwestern professor as one of the world scholars who support the Iranian president. Ahmadinejad, who also has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map," recently ordered the restart of uranium enrichment, raising fears that Tehran could try to build a nuclear weapon.
Butz's comments did not address the Iranian president's statements about present-day Israel or nuclear issues.
No need to comment on those sticky issues, Professor Butz. It's best to focus on the positive, like congratulating Ahmadinejad for his fine scholarship on the holocaust.
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
16 Feb 2006 @ 11:20am
UNC Students Challenge Free Speech Restrictions
Students at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro are protesting the fact that free speech is only allowed in two small "free speech zones." The school, which has been given a "red light" rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for its onerous restrictions on free speech, had attempted to punish the students for their protest. However, negative publicity forced the school to back off. (UNC Greensboro, being a public university, is bound by law to observe the First Amendment.)
One of the things that may have helped the students is that they shot video of their protest and captured the administration's attempt to shut them down.
Hopefully, the trend of students documenting the abuses of basic rights on campus will continue. In many cases, administrators are aware that their actions won't be viewed favorably outside the walls of their respective institutions, but they bank on the fact that the general public won't find out. Thanks to technology, though, students are able to fight back in ways they couldn't before. The balance of power is changing...
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
15 Feb 2006 @ 1:37pm
Health Policy "Experts" vs. Common Sense
 Self-styled health policy expert and defender of the Canadian health care rationing system Matthew Holt is now making excuses for the long waits for MRI appointments in Canada by lauding a report purportedly showing that the use of MRI machines is "more efficient" in Canada than in the U.S. as measured by MRI scans per scanner.
With the severe shortage of diagnostic machines there, its no surprise that they are more heavily used. However, by Mr. Holt's logic, Canada could further increase "efficiency" by actually reducing the number of available MRI scanners. In fact, a single MRI scanner for the entire country would be the most "efficient".
Canadians endure long waits for diagnostic tests that Americans would not tolerate. My blog entry from last week about a teenager waiting for knee surgery is typical. His parents ended up paying $550 for an MRI "after waiting six months to no avail in the public system". Rick Baker of Timely Medical Alternatives, a Vancouver-based organization which takes waiting Canadians across the border for health care, told me a couple of weeks ago that he is encountering desperate people from Manitoba willing to fly more than a thousand miles to get an ultrasound! However, the real cruelty of the Canadian health care rationing system becomes apparent when considering people who suspect that they may have cancer. As I noted in my recent commentary:
In Canada, the longer a person waits for a diagnostic test that enables a doctor to definitively diagnose cancer - the longer that person is kept off the politically-sensitive waiting list for cancer treatment - and the better their decrepit and inhumane system looks.
While he's on the topic of the efficiencies of the Canadian system, perhaps Mr. Holt could explore the efficiency of the Burnaby Hospital in British Columbia where the aforementioned teenager is still waiting to have his knee surgery:
... there are over 19 thousand people waiting for orthopedic surgery in British Columbia alone - yet surgeons are limited to one day a week in the OR, the OR is shut down to "elective" surgery at 3:30 in the afternoon and one OR at the hospital mentioned is used for storage!
Posted by Stuart Browning
14 Feb 2006 @ 9:59am
U.S. Socialists: "Just Don't Call it Rationing"
 We've previously noted here the opinions of health care rationing champion Henry Aaron of The Brookings Institute.
"Single-Payer" health care advocate and defender of the Canadian health care system Don McCanne of Physicians for a National Health Program concurs with Aaron's idea of coercive government control of medicine, however, he just doesn't like the word 'rationing':
We cannot allow Aaron's use of the term "rationing" to be used by the opponents of single payer to attack our model. It has been demonstrated repeatedly that improving use of health care resources prevents excessive queues.
Perhaps Mr. Canne could point to a single country where his "single-payer model" has been implemented without rationing and waiting lists. Certainly, he can't be talking about Canada (see here, here, here, here, or here) or the U.K. (see here, here, here, here, here, or here).
Posted by Stuart Browning
9 Feb 2006 @ 5:50am
Waiting Too Long = Death
It's not just "elective" procedures like orthopedic surgery that Canadians wait for - as the defenders of the government-run system like to say - but critical, life-or-death treatment for cancer: Bladder surgery wait time unsafe
Quebec bladder cancer patients are dying unnecessarily because of increasing delays in treatment, a leading urologist said yesterday.
The death rate among patients stuck waiting 12 weeks or longer for surgery jumped by 20 per cent from 1990 to 2002, said Armen Aprikian, chief urologist of the McGill University Health Centre.
"A 20-per-cent increase in the death rate is huge," said Aprikian, whose Quebec-wide study on bladder cancer is published in this month's Journal of Urology.
"It's clear some patients are waiting beyond the safety margin."
Posted by Stuart Browning
8 Feb 2006 @ 1:46pm
Get In Line, You're Number 19,023!
 If you didn't know anything about the horror that is the government-run health care system in Canada, this story about waiting lists for orthopedic surgery in British Columbia would serve as a good primer. It's all here: shortages of diagnostic machines, long waits for MRI tests, rationing of operating room hours for "elective surgery", long waits for treatment and the complete inability and unwillingness of government to meet demand with an adequate supply - which is something that free markets do every hour of every day:
In a minor league game more than a year ago, 17-year-old Maple Ridge hockey player Don Dowhaniuk took a hit and tore a ligament in his left knee.
He's still waiting for surgery, one of 19,023 B.C. residents waiting for orthopedic operations, according to the government's data.
Professional hockey players and amateurs with affluent parents can afford to pay for such operations at private clinics. It's not an option for members of the Dowhaniuk family, although they did pay $550 for an MRI after waiting six months to no avail for one in the public system. But finding $5,000 to $6,000 for surgery in the private system is out of the question for Jackie, a school accountant, and Jamie Dowhaniuk, a construction framer.
[...]
Dr. Paul Wright, the surgeon Dowhaniuk waited until last July to see, and who will eventually do the operation -- now estimated to take place in the summer, 18 months after the injury -- said he has 150 patients booked for surgery and 300 others waiting for a surgical date.
"I'm embarrassed to be a Canadian orthopedic surgeon in these circumstances. But I get only one day a week of operating room at Burnaby Hospital and that means I can only clear about five cases off per week," said Wright, who specializes in the kind of surgery Dowhaniuk needs ...
"If you were building widgets in a factory and had a backlog of orders you would add more shifts, but that is not the way it is working here. The last case in the OR finishes at 3:30 p.m. and then it's used for emergency surgery," said Wright.
There are nine operating rooms in use at Burnaby Hospital; one other is used for storage.
According to the article, there are over 19 thousand people waiting for orthopedic surgery in British Columbia alone - yet surgeons are limited to one day a week in the OR, the OR is shut down to "elective" surgery at 3:30 in the afternoon and one OR at the hospital mentioned is used for storage!
Also, keep in mind that the family mentioned in the article may be unable to afford the surgery because they have already paid for "national health insurance" through high taxes - and that private insurance for covered services is outlawed (and therefore a market does not exist).
Finally, I've also been told by orthopedic surgeons in Canada that these types of injuries in teenagers often go untreated for such long periods of time that young people permanently injure their joints, develop a lifelong limp and require joint replacement operations in middle age.
Posted by Stuart Browning
8 Feb 2006 @ 10:21am
David Horowitz's New Book
 David Horowitz has just released a new book: The Professors - The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. I haven't read it yet (mine is on order) - so I can't vouch for it. However, considering some of the people that Evan Maloney and I have interviewed for our upcoming movie Indoctrinate U, the current state of academia, the rich field of far-out professors to choose from and Mr. Horowitz's past work, I expect it to be a truthful, informative and important work.
From the inside flap:
Horowitz exposes 101 academics - representative of thousands of radicals who teach our young people - who also happen to be alleged ex-terrorists, racists, murderers, sexual deviants, anti-Semites, and al-Qaeda supporters. Horowitz blows the cover on academics who: - Say they want to kill white people. - Promote the views of the Iranian mullahs. - Support Osama bin Laden. - Lament the demise of the Soviet Union. - Defend pedophilia. - Advocate the killing of ordinary Americans.
David Horowitz's riveting expose is essential reading for parents, students, college alums, taxpayers, and patriotic Americans who don't think college students should be indoctrinated by sympathizers of Joseph Stalin and Osama bin Laden.
There's already a left-wingnut-book-review-swarm over at Amazon.com by people who obviously have not read the book yet.
Update: Here's one of my favorites:
A reactionary piece of garbage, February 4, 2006
Reviewer: okiguessso "okiguessso"
A book that attempts to resurrect McCarthyism (Joe, not Gene) by making vicious attacks on progressive professors teaching at various U.S. universities. If it were possible to give this one minus 1,000 stars, I would do so. A bunch of vicious hate directed at any one who opposes the current war for empire by the Bush regime against the people of the world. Horowitz is the would-be Goebbels of the Fourth Reich.
I wonder if he got extra academic credit for writing that.
Posted by Stuart Browning
7 Feb 2006 @ 10:09am
Four Month Wait for Colon Cancer Treatment
 Unfortunately, U.K. colon cancer patients have lots of time to worry about their health:
"Patients with colorectal cancer wait far too long for their treatment." That is the judgment of Bob Diament, lead clinician in the field for the west of Scotland.
[...]
... patients at Wishaw General in Lanarkshire waited for more than 130 days to receive surgery or start therapy.
Posted by Stuart Browning
7 Feb 2006 @ 9:20am
Leftist Ideologues Advocate a Perverse Health Care System
 New York Times columnist Paul Krugman knows what's good for you. He recommends that the U.S adopt a Canadian-style health care system where medical care is sensibly rationed by all-knowing, all-caring health care bureaucrats. While Krugman glosses over the undeniable wait lists, sick and worried Canadians languish in long lines for diagnostic tests and "elective" surgery due to arbitrary global hospital budgets and severe shortages of technology.
However, a certain perverse logic explains some of the rationing decisions made by health care bureaucrats north of the 49th parallel.
In Canada, the longer a person waits for a diagnostic test that enables a doctor to definitively diagnose cancer - the longer that person is kept off the politically-sensitive waiting list for cancer treatment - and the better their decrepit and inhumane system looks.
Continued ...
Posted by Stuart Browning
4 Feb 2006 @ 7:39am
DePaul: Wrong Political Views == Harassment
At DePaul University, if you don't hold the "correct" political views, you'd better keep that fact to yourself. Otherwise, you might find yourself facing harassment charges:
Earlier this month, DePaul University shut down an "affirmative action bake sale" protest, and is now investigating a student organizer for "harassment." DePaul's latest offense against liberty follows its 2005 dismissal of a professor for arguing with pro-Palestinian students and its censorship of students' peaceful protest of controversial professor Ward Churchill. With this incident, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is intervening at DePaul for the third time in less than a year.
"DePaul cannot seem to resist punishing its students and professors for expressing their political viewpoints," stated Greg Lukianoff, FIRE's interim president. "Fighting repression at DePaul is becoming a full-time job."
DePaul's latest foray into censorship began on January 17, when the DePaul Conservative Alliance (DCA) held an "affirmative action bake sale" at a table in the student center. Affirmative action bake sales are a widely used form of satirical protest against affirmative action. Organizers display a menu on which black and Hispanic students are charged lower prices than Asian and white students for the same items. The bake sales are intended to spark debate about affirmative action policies, not to raise revenue. At DePaul, the protest did just that, drawing a crowd of people who argued about the issue vehemently but peacefully.
Less than an hour into the sale, DePaul's dean of students ordered the DCA to shut down the protest. University spokeswoman Denise Mattson told the student newspaper that the location of the protest was inappropriate, even though the university allowed a PETA table protesting the use of fur to be set up in exactly the same place a week later. On January 20, undergraduate Michael O'Shea, who led the protest, was informed that he was under "investigation" for violating DePaul's "discriminatory harassment" policy. O'Shea met with administrative investigator Cynthia Summers on January 24. In a chilling e-mail exchange, Summers answered O'Shea's question of exactly why the bake sale was being investigated by saying, "[t]here is no 'because' for the investigation that is pre-determined."
Thankfully for the students, FIRE has a history of getting results.
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
2 Feb 2006 @ 7:29pm
15 Months For a Hearing Test in the U.K.
We're hearing lots of calls these days for the rationing of health care in the U.S. Here's another example of how it works in Britain:
HEALTH bosses told a North Wales gran she might have to wait until May 2007 for a hearing test.
Retired Caerwys social worker Alice Price asked Ysbyty Glan Clwyd for an ear test after growing concerned about her hearing.
But the grandma-of-eight was shocked to learn she may have to wait a full 15 months before even being seen at the Bodelwyddan hospital.
[...]
A letter sent by the Conwy & Denbighshire NHS Trust to 71-year-old Mrs Price this week read: "The current waiting list for this kind of appointment is 15 months."
Mum-of-four Mrs Price said: "I rang them up and told them this must be a joke. The woman on the other end said, very po-faced, 'We don't do jokes'.
Posted by Stuart Browning
2 Feb 2006 @ 6:46pm
Four Month Wait For Treatment After a Heart Attack
 Even high-risk, drop-dead-any-day patients like Shaun Halfpenny, have to wait months to get urgent heart treatment under Britain's fully socialized health care system:
ONE of Cumbria's best known headteachers is waiting for a heart bypass operation.
Shaun Halfpenny, headteacher of Cummersdale School, said: "Having been told by the doctor I could drop dead I'm not very happy about it but I just want it over and done with."
[...]
Mr Halfpenny is now on a cancellations list.
He said: "I've been told I'm a very high risk patient."
The teacher had to wait four months to see a heart specialist in the UK after suffering a heart attack in Canada while on a family holiday last August.
[...]
He said: "I'm very angry. They missed me off the list. I should have known this last September."
Posted by Stuart Browning
2 Feb 2006 @ 6:22am
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