Stupid person 1: Josh Marshall quotes an inadvertently amusing letter from Harry T., a winger opposed to Social Security (or 'Socialist Insecurity', as he puts it.) In his screed, Harry T. asks: "It wouldn't be anyone who supports mandatory Socialist Insecurity, but do you know of anyone who celebrated Bill of Rights Day, on Wednesday?' As it happens, I can answer Harry T's question: I celebrate Bill of Rights Day every year, along with Constitution Ratification Day, 13th Amendment Day (which is tomorrow), Nineteenth Amendment Day, Emancipation Proclamation Day, and various other personal holidays. And, strange to say, I support Social Security too.
Stupid person 2: It's not clear from this article whether Dr. Willie C. Blair lacks a conscience or an understanding of the phrase "under oath", but I personally plan to avoid using him either as a doctor or as an expert witness for the rest of my natural life. Via bioethics.net:
"The chief of medical staff for Prince George's Hospital Center has said under sworn testimony that he has tried to ignite a surgical preparation solution on unwitting patients, court records show.
Testifying as an expert witness in a lawsuit in April, Dr. Willie C. Blair said he had tried to "set people on fire" in a deposition for a lawsuit stemming from an accident in which a female patient was burned in an operating room at the Washington Hospital Center in 2002, according to court records and transcripts of his deposition.
"I've been trying to set people on fire for the last three months and can't do it," Dr. Blair said in his April 30 deposition.
"How did you go about trying to set people on fire?" said plaintiff's attorney Robert R. Michael.
"I mean, I put the prep on and wait, and put the prep on and go early; do a lot of using the Bovie [an electric surgical device], but I haven't been able to ignite anybody," Dr. Blair said. (...)
Yesterday, Dr. Blair said he made the statements but described them as "tongue-in-cheek."
"I didn't do it, and it didn't happen," he said yesterday. "What I was saying was for the lawyers' consumption."
"I said it, but it didn't happen," he said of his testimony about trying to set patients on fire.
Dr. Blair said he did experiment with trying to ignite a preparation solution, but said no patients were involved. He said he tried to ignite an applicator for the prep solution in a corner of an operating room after surgical procedures had been completed."
It seems to me that it's pretty obvious why people at the hospital where Dr. Brown works are concerned about his sworn statement that he tried to set his patients on fire. But not to Dr. Blair: "Dr. Blair suggested that the document is being used by lawyers to silence him because he has become an outspoken advocate for tort reform." Right.
Naturally, the paper had to ask bioethicists about the morality of all this, since it's a complicated question that only those who have spent years studying abstruse philosophical texts and wrestling with thorny problems in metaethics are equipped to answer:
""I still can't imagine how someone could justify intentionally trying to set patients on fire," said Robert M. Veatch, professor of medical ethics at Georgetown University and former director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown.
"I can't imagine any possible defense. I suppose he could claim he had reason to believe that he couldn't hurt people by trying this and was trying to prove his point," Mr. Veatch said.
"I saw nothing in the transcript of the deposition that could justify attempts to intentionally cause a fire," he said.
George Annas, a medical ethicist and chairman of the Department of Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights at Boston University, said no patients would agree to participate in such an experiment.
"I don't know what was on this guy's mind," Mr. Annas said. "There is no patient who would say, 'Sure, you can light me on fire.' " "
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