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History will be made Wednesday. Approximately 50 of the most prominent national health-care, religious and legal associations and organizations, as well as countless others, will participate in the inaugural National Health Care Decisions Day. The goal of this nationwide initiative is to ensure that American adults have both the information and the opportunity to communicate and document their future health-care decisions.
While making health-care decisions is often difficult in the best of circumstances, making decisions for others is even more complicated. As Terri Schiavo’s situation vividly revealed, having an advance directive can be valuable for all adults, regardless of current age or health status. Yet, fewer than 25 percent of all Americans have one. For an action that can be done without a lawyer, for free, and relatively easily, this figure is astonishingly low............
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A view from different prism makes these ramblings a bit comical. Here you have good ole Bucks County in Pennsylvania registering a whole bunch of new Democrats in time for the primaries. Explanation has nothing to do with Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos which goes unmentioned as a factor, but tells us conservative Republicans are fed up with that limp wristed weak kneed swamp of GOP known as RINOS as just to "conservative". Huh? Yep. Naturally, they have the factors separating the lefties from the right, and part of that big five is, yes, we guessed it, Terri's Legacy.
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It's not that the party isn't conservative enough to win the suburbs; it is that the party is too conservative and has lost touch with a suburban constituency.
Fault for that lies in the party's national image. Impressions of political parties are established nationally. People don't usually join a political organization based on their sense of the county commissioners, the competence of the row officers, or the performance of the borough council. They choose the party whose platform, they believe, most closely resembles their general views. And those platforms flow from the federal level. They are personified by national players.
In Washington, the GOP has been on the wrong side of many hot-button issues. As these issues have unfolded - the war in Iraq, Terri Schiavo, global warming, stem-cell research, and the ever-present issue of reproductive choice - the Democratic Party has made strides in the suburbs. Instead of listening to its more-moderate voices, the GOP has instead concentrated on stoking its hard-core base - a minority of Americans - by taking time out of the legislative schedule to posture on issues such as same-sex relationships...............
Head Strong: Why the GOP lost its grip on Phila. suburbs
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