Heavenly Fodder

Heavenly Fodder

There’s a whole industry based on books where people “die” and then come back to life with firsthand accounts about what it’s like in heaven and what a really nice guy Jesus is. To American Christians, this is like deep-fried foods – they just eat it up, no questions asked. Because it verifies what they already believe, but can’t prove.

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Confederate Flag Hags

Confederate Flag Hags

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear arguments on gay marriage was such big news you probably missed some of the other cases they decided to consider. Such as Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans. Like many states, Texas offers specialty license plates and the Texas branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans sought to create a plate featuring their group’s logo and a Confederate flag. Texas denied the request after hundreds of complaints. The Supreme Court will decide whether specialty license plates are private speech or government speech. Thus begging the question: Again with the Confederate flag? When are these Confederate flag-hags going to give it up?

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Hey Republicans, Your Opportunism is Showing

Lindsey Graham is eyeing a presidential run. On Sunday he doubled down on his claim that President Obama's foreign policies "are getting a lot of people killed.” He said that Obama's effort to fulfill "campaign promises" (God forbid) like closing Guantanamo and ending the war in Iraq were "coming home to haunt us.” He also mentioned that some 300,000 Syrians had died, apparently something Obama should have stopped with another war. Which doesn’t get a lot of people killed.

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France Should Learn From Our Mistakes

Our French brothers, who we suddenly adore, are passing through the mourning stage and moving on to theanger stage, both of which Americans know all too well. We call them the “Never Forget” stage and the “We’ll Put a Boot in Your Ass” stage. Yes, after 9/11, we did a few days of weeping and grieving and then we went into “Let’s roll!” mode. We wanted to kick somebody’s ass. Suddenly all that money we’d given to General Dynamics over the years didn’t bother us a bit.

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Guest List: January 16, 2015

Atul Gawande is a doctor and health care researcher. He is the author of Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, a contributor to The New Yorker, and a surgeon specializing in endocrinology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Gawande appears in the PBS documentary film version of Being Mortal, which airs February 10th on FRONTLINE. 

Twitter: @atulgawande

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