Cynical Nation

Couldn't the same point have been made by bringing the responders to Canada? Was there a reason for Cuba other than Canada?

>Couldn't the same point have been made by bringing the responders to Canada?

One would think.

It's a "gotcha" moment, K.

Canada is too vanilla.

BTW, weren't Fidel's specialists imported from Spain?

The Post reports that those 9/11 responders who made the trip were happy as clams - they "got the Elvis treatment."

Cuba happens to specialize in lungs and cancer and is a obviously a much more graphic reminder of the failures of a free-market health system. When a poor 3rd world socialist country like Cuba can provide 100% free, quality health care (and outlive us), something is wrong.

And no Mal, Fidel was treated by Cubans. A Spaniard world specialist friend of Fidel did fly in for 2 days, but he reported Fidel in good hands.

Leftside,
Do you think everyone in Cuba gets top notch healthcare? Do you think that all of us should go to Cuba for medical care? Perhaps we should just make the U.S. a Communist country and we could live in the same peoples paradise as the Cubans. I don't know what is sadder; this silly stunt by Fat Boy Moore or the fact that there are plenty of fools who buy into it.

I believe John the Marine is 100% right, especially given some of the photos listed here;

http://www.babalublog.com/archives/001470.html

From the U.S. State Dept;

"The health care system is often touted by many analysts as one of the Castro government’s greatest achievements. What this analysis ignores is that the revolutionary government inherited an already-advanced health sector when it took power in 1959.

"Cuba’s infant mortality rate of 32 per 1,000 live births in 1957 was the lowest in Latin America and the 13th lowest in the world, according to UN data. Cuba ranked ahead of France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, and Spain, all of which would eventually pass Cuba in this indicator during the following decades.

"Cuba’s comparative world ranking according to data in Table 1 has fallen from 13th to last out of the 25 countries examined. Also missing from the conventional analysis of Cuba’s infant mortality rates is its staggering abortion rate of 77.7 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44 in 1996[8] — which, because of selective termination of “high-risk” pregnancies, yields lower numbers for infant mortality. Cuba’s abortion rate was the 3rd highest out of the 60 countries studied."


Socialism/Communism (the eradication of private property hasn't worked anywhere on earth.

Sweden?

They don't have a single government owned company, not Saab, not Ericsson.

That's because private enterprise works and government command economies don't.

leftside: "When a poor 3rd world socialist country like Cuba can provide 100% free, quality health care (and outlive us), something is wrong."

Life expectancy in Cuba (77.41 years) is actually slightly lower than the U.S. (77.85 years).

JMK likes to say that the "State" can't run anything -- except for the military of course, and the Department of Homeland Defense enforcing the unconstitutional (un)Patriot(ic) Act, the FBI, CIA, and a couple dozen other unconstitutional secret organizations that illegally spy on and even murder American citizens who appear threatening to those in power.

But in a way, JMK is consistent: he would prefer everything be given to huge mulinational corporations like Halliburton, that are headquartered outside the United States to evade taxation while still gorging on American taxpayer dollars and enjoying American military escorts at taxpayer expense wherever they go to do business.

Hell, I'm sure that Big Tobacco could take over national health care and do a heckuva job, don't you JMK?

I mean, you can see how under Oilmen Bush and Cheney our energy bills have plummeted! They are experts. They know how to deliver the best product and the least expense, right?

Actually, we're going to get National Health Care BH.

Corporate America wants out from under the burden of insuring 85% of Americans on their dime (of course those costs are passed along in the form of higher prices, but that's not the point)...GM, Ford, the airlines and most of the Fortune 500 want that burden off their backs.

I've always felt it was unfair that workers weren't taxed on the value of all those "benefits" most of us receive.

I doubt we're going to like the look and function of such a program - almost certainly to have rationing (like all such programs do), restrictions on the number of visits allowed each year and age limits on various procedures, etc., but so long as people are free to buy their own supplemental insurance, a bare bones health system would (1) make U.S. companies much more competitive globally and (2) and shift the burden of healthcare to the taxpayer and away from the corporate sector.

Again, and hopefully for the very last time, the Patriot Act has not been abused, to date.

Even the ACLU has documented only two cases it calls "abusive;"

"According to reports, the Patriot Act has been used to:

"Secretly searching the home of Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim attorney whom the government wrongly suspected, accused and detained as a perpetrator of the recent train bombing in Madrid."

AND

"Charge, detain, and prosecute a Muslim student in Idaho, Sami al-Hussayen, for providing "material support" to terrorists because he posted to an Internet website links to objectionable materials, even though such links were available on the websites of a major news outlet and of the government's own expert witness in the case."

OK, I confess that I have no sympathy for either Brandon Mayfield, nor Sami al-Hussayen.

I certainly cry no tears for Abdullah al-Mujahir (a/k/a Jose Padilla) whom you seem to think has suffered Patriot Act related abuses.

Police powers are mandated by the Constitution, as is the government's commitment to the military.

Domestic police powers could easily be ramped up further without any violation of Constitutional rights.

No one has the "right," for instance, to download kiddie porn, or solicit sex from the underaged online...when people do that, they DO have the right to be turned over to law enforcement by groups like Perverted Justice and prosecuted for those crimes.

There is no "privacy right" that makes such "online stings" and the subsequent busts "unconstitutional."

JMK, just stop being a dumbass and admit that the founding fathers DID hold that a man's home was involatile unless a court issued a search warrant based on probable cause.

The Patriot Act utterly dispenses with this concept, which was quite sacred to the founding fathers, who did not approve of the English routinely ransacking the homes of purely political enemies.

The Patriot Act allows this, and so much more, and all in secret, with no oversight. It might as well be called The Hitler Act.

First, the Patriot Act DID NOT allow for the NSA warrantless wiretaps....the FISA court, and three other federal courts did that, when they allowed for the warrantless wiretapping of calls/emails FROM "suspect foreign portals" INTO the U.S. back in the 1980s.

The Bush administration merely expanded this to include calls/emails TO "suspect foreign portals" FROM the U.S.

Again, the Patriot Act had NOTHING to do with that decision.

Neither did the Patriot Act have anything to do with the numerous online "pedophile stings" that have been used to "smoke out abd bring to justice, many, many perverts," and in the process making America a better and safer place for children. BTW - the current Miss America has worked with a group conducting an online pedophile sting, posing as a fourteen y/o girl....how can this be wrong if Miss America approves?!

In fact, the Patriot Act didn't even allow for the holding of "enemy combatants" indefinitely and without the right to counsel - the Geneva Accords did that, by delineating "enemy combatants" (those who fight without a uniform, etc) as having none of the rights that POWs have.

In fact, the courts have recently upheld the use of Military Tribunals and NOT U.S. courts to try terrorist related charges.

I'll take a backseat to no one when it comes to being vigilant over the potential abuses of the Patriot Act, but right now, it's been used effectively in the WoT and has not been misused, nor even applied outside of that context.