Death On Demand Is Not Death With Dignity
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on October 13th, 2014 11:08 pm by HL
Death On Demand Is Not Death With Dignity
Debra Saunders, RealClearPolitics
I’d like to think that if I got the bad news that Brittany Maynard received — terminal cancer with a prognosis of less than six months left to live — I’d be like her. I’d like to be stoic and brave. I’d like to take charge of the rest of my cruelly abbreviated life. If I were facing death at age 29, I would want to find meaning in an end come too soon. Maynard has done just that. She moved from California to Oregon, where assisted suicide is legal. She has become the face of Compassion & Choices, which wants to legalize assisted suicide in California. “It’s crazy to me that other patients…
Lame Duck Sessions Reveal What Members of Congress Really Want
Matthew Mitchell & Emily Washington, RealClearPolitics
What does your member of Congress really want? It can be hard to know because typical legislators are under extraordinary pressure to do what other people want. For one, she must cater to home-district special interests because the ability to organize can make or break a political career. She must also accommodate the wishes of donors, for it’s nearly impossible to win reelection without a sizeable war chest. Then there are congressional colleagues. Your member must indulge their often-parochial interests because she needs their support for her own priorities. And, finally, there are…
New Republic Falls Short of the True Liberalism It Champions
Peter Berkowitz, RealClearPolitics
Liberalism, most people would agree, stands for the state’s responsibility to actively improve the social, economic, and political quality of citizens’ lives. In a more fundamental sense liberalism also denotes certain qualities of mind and character, among them tolerance, generosity, the capacity to engage civilly competing opinions, and a determination to base politics on reason rather than physical force or arbitrary authority. On the occasion of The New Republic’s 100th anniversary, Franklin Foer, a proud liberal serving his second tour of duty as TNR editor, has brought out…
Local or National Elections?
Thomas Sowell, RealClearPolitics
Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once said, “All politics is local.” That may have been true in Tip O’Neill’s day, but some elections are decisively on national issues — and the Congressional elections this year are overwhelmingly national, just as the elections of 1860 were dominated by one national issue, namely slavery. In 1860, some abolitionists split the anti-slavery vote by running their own candidate — who had no chance of winning — instead of supporting Abraham Lincoln, who was not pure enough for some abolitionists. Lincoln got just 40 percent of the vote, though that turned out…