Michel.Evanchik.Net

A Los Angeles hospital feels it necessary to share private patient information for purposes of “protective services for the President and others“. A full copy of the privacy policy is available here. The full explanation is that they “may disclose medical information about you to authorized federal officials so they may provide protection to the President, other authorized persons, or foreign heads of state or to conduct special investigations”. The fact that the provision is explicitly spelled out strongly suggests that the disclosure of information has already been made in the past. Is this a matter of a hospital being co-opted into an increasingly totalitarian state, or merely Liberal hysteria about legitimate law-enforcement activities? A close reading of the document suggest reasons for alarm from any person concerned about their privacy and civil liberty.

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Phaemon the philosopher had a little dog whom he had trained to go to the butcher every bring back a lump of meat in a basket. This virtuous creature, who would never dare to touch a scrap until Phaemon gave it permission, was one day set upon by a pack of mongrels who snatched the basket from its mouth and began to tear the meat to pieces and bolt it greedily down. Phaemon, watching from an upper window, saw the dog deliberate for a moment just what to do. It was clearly no use trying to rescue the meat from the other dogs: they wouild kill it for its pains. So it rushed in among them and itself ate as much of the meat as it could get hold of. In fact it ate more than any of the other dogs, because it was both braver and cleverer.

– from Claudius the God, by Robert Graves, 1935

Such is the cruel fate of the virtuous when faced with suffuse and irradicable corruption.

Watch this video of Senator Robert Byrd denouncing dogfighting. Is he upset and angry, or just plain drunk on some corn mash? Oh, the humanity!

Johann Hari, a columnist for Great Britain’s Independent newspaper has written a devastatingly frank memoir of his recent trip on one of the National Review’s ocean cruises, intermittently held political-rallies-cum-vacations for readers of the conservative magazine with lots of discretionary income to blow on an overpriced voyage.

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With the commutation of the prison sentence of Irv Lewis Libby, President George Walker Bush has sent the country into a constitutional crisis. The President now presents a far graver threat to the constitution of the United States of America than the phantom menaces of Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. This constitutional crisis, a final symptom of a Presidency arrogant of power and disdainful of democratic rule and republican government, can only be a assuaged by formal trials of impeachment.

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