Charity is the foundation of our health system.

Right now we are living beyond our means in a bankrupt state, raising taxes won't resolve the problem, we will default when the political will in Europe is found. Further, there is a fundamental problem for people employed by the state, they have no market feedback mechanisms to tell them if they are providing a good service, they have substituted economic means for political means, the practical implementation of this is "No one can be slave to two masters; for he will either hate the first and love the second, or scorn the second and be loyal to the first." Who is the hospital administrators primary customer, is it the sick patient, is it the politician or the health insurance company? The sick patient on the trolley in the Irish hospital system is not the primary customer, he is just a means to an end. If he has insurance, he is given priority and the consultants and administrators start racking up the fees. If he has no insurance then he goes on a waiting list, if he is politically favoured (old people) he may get priority, if there is no money to be made out of him (homeless person) he gets released as soon as possible.

I'll sum it up for ya. The State doesn't do Love.

In 2008, the campaign of Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, presciently tapped into evangelicals’ apocalyptic fears by producing an ad, “The One,” that sarcastically heralded Mr. Obama as a messiah. Mr. McCain was onto something. Not since Roosevelt have we had a president of charisma and global popularity, who so perfectly fits the evangelicals’ Antichrist mold.

While Depression-era fundamentalists represented only a small voice among the anti-Roosevelt forces of the 1930s, evangelicals have grown ever savvier and now constitute one of the largest interest groups in the Republican Party. In the past, relatively responsible leaders like Mr. Graham, who worked with Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, and even Mr. Falwell, who reined in evangelical excess in exchange for access to the Reagan White House, channeled their evangelical energy.

Not now. A leadership vacuum exists on the evangelical right that some Republicans — Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and even Ron Paul — are exploiting. How tightly their strident anti-statism will connect with evangelical apocalypticism remains to be seen.

Progressives find hope—in Ron Paul.

Looking ahead to the 2012 presidential race, one might assume that Nader has little to be cheerful about.

Yet he says there is one candidate who sticks out—who even gives him hope: Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.

That might sound counterintuitive. Nader, of course, is known as a stalwart of the independent left, having first gained notoriety for his 1960s campaign to impose greater regulatory requirements on automakers—a policy act that would seem to contravene the libertarian understanding of justified governmental power. So I had to ask: how could he profess hope in Ron Paul, who almost certainly would have opposed the very regulations on which Nader built his career?

“Look at the latitude,” Nader says, referring to the potential for cooperation between libertarians and the left. “Military budget, foreign wars, empire, Patriot Act, corporate welfare—for starters. When you add those all up, that’s a foundational convergence. Progressives should do so good.”

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Ron Paul is far from perfect, but I’ll say this much for the Texas congressman: He has never authorized a drone strike in Pakistan. He has never authorized the killing of dozens of women and children in Yemen. He hasn’t protected torturers from prosecution and he hasn’t overseen the torturous treatment of a 23-year-old young man for the “crime” of revealing the government’s criminal behavior.

Can the same be said for Barack Obama?

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And the bit that even comedy central wouldn't dare broadcast on TV, you can listen to the omitted clip -> http://343.nashownotes.com/assets/rpJonStweart

I can't get this link to work:

Its hard to tell from a highlights clip but that struck me a Ron's best performance so far.

He looked like he was begining to enjoy it again.

Yet it’s also about what they’re selling, and I’m not just talking about the advertisements. Remember, these are for-profit enterprises, not political entities; and they’re media companies, which means their product is a narrative, a story they’re telling their audience, which is hopefully buying into it and tuning in for more.

In the old days, when there were just the networks, the studied centrism that permeated news and opinion shows was the result of a lack of competition: there was only so much space on the airwaves, and it was ladled out jealously and reluctantly by federal overseers in Washington. Those were the days when, say, CBS’s Daniel Schorr could smear a presidential candidate beyond redemption and cost him plenty in the polls. Yet like all monopolies, this one was fated to go the way of the dinosaurs.

The advent of cable television destroyed the networks’ monopoly, and the media mandarins were forced to adapt to the new technology – while still maintaining a modicum of control over the national discourse. The old narrative of “left” and “right” – mediated by a “sensible” centrism – was in danger of losing its hegemony: suddenly there was room for a whole panoply of viewpoints, including those that challenged the old ideological assumptions and premises of this left/right-blue state/red state narrative.

The solution was to divvy up the media landscape, with Fox News leading the way and staking its claim to the “red state” franchise, and NBC following up with the marketing of MSNBC as the Anti-Fox “blue state” network. This arrangement kept the old “left-right” paradigm intact, while allowing for two competing variations on the same narrative to emerge.

In the era of network domination the left-right narrative was strictly enforced, especially when it came to foreign policy. Conservatives were interventionists, liberals were less inclined to go to war, and that was the end of it. This stereotype was inherited by the new media moguls and persisted until the wheel of technology turned once again.

The rise of the Internet as the primary means of information consumption posed a new challenge to the left-right paradigm by giving voice to ideas that didn’t fit in neatly with the intellectual package deals we were used to. It’s no accident that Paul’s campaign is Internet-driven: his supporters, who make up a good proportion (although not the majority) of our audience, are used to getting their information off the net, rather than having it filtered by self-appointed gatekeepers.

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