Ace brings us audio of Martha Coakley suggesting that Catholics perhaps shouldn’t be working in emergency rooms. The question was should health care personnel have the right to be “conscientious objectors” to procedures that conflict with their religious beliefs. Coakely also said that  people can’t decide not to provide services required “under the law and under Roe v Wade”… Note to Martha: Roe v Wade does not require that abortions be provided. It just says it’s legal to provide one.

Via Althouse a list of 40 quotes exemplifying ‘liberalism’ at Right Wing News that she feels “illustrate a theme among today’s liberals that can and should be abandoned.”

Also at Althouse: Dems are trying to equate Coakley with Creigh Deeds. Her loss (if she loses) won’t be a reflection of Barack Obama or the Democrat Party policies and strategies.

The Anchoress has updated her Haiti post yet again. Lots there. Go read.

Charles Krauthammer’s column today.

As Walter Olson puts it: “Actual Funny Lawyer TV Ad”

This morning Patterico informs us Poll: Brown Up by 15 Points

No need to rub your eyes; you read that right.

From an article in the Sunday London Times about the northern hemisphere’s cold winter:

A period of humility and even silence would be particularly welcome from the Met Office, our leading institutional advocate of the perils of man-made global warming, which had promised a “barbecue summer” in 2009 and one of the “warmest winters on record”. In fact, the Met still asserts we are in the midst of an unusually warm winter — as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week: “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has [sic] already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”

So to prove that this is “an unusually warm winter” the British Meteorological Office will take the 15 warmest days from November through April and average those figures to prove the “warmest winter in living memory”.

That doesn’t even give you an average high temperature for the period. You would get that with taking every day’s high temperature and averaging those data. You could do the same to get the average low for the period – take the low temperature for each day and average those data. Your average temperature for the period would be to take the average temperature per day and average those data.

Remember the sentence from the above quote:

This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has [sic] already been recorded.

I have put a [sic] after “has” in the above sentence because the word data is plural. The singular form is datum. Data are; data have. Datum is; datum has…

h/t Instapundit

Right Pundits is having a vote to determine the Conservative of the Year for 2009.

They have seven nominees.

Whichever nominee has the most votes as of January 15th at midnight will be named Conservative of the Year and a $100 prize will be donated to Soldiers’ Angels.

Go here to vote.

Vote in comments. Right Pundits donates 2 cents to Soldiers’ Angels for every comment made as well.

In the past week or so I heard someone on one of those talking heads show state that insurance companies and medical providers should be happy with the government’s health care bill because they’ll all get more customers and that means more money.

Mayo Clinic in Glendale, Arizona is going to stop taking Medicare patients because the government pays too little. This will be a two year pilot project that may or may not have implications for the rest of the Mayo system.

Through the government, Medicare and Medicaid pay a certain amount to doctors. The amount the government pays has no direct correlation to what it costs to provide the product or service. The government can’t cut the costs to the provider simply by paying said provider less.

I’d sure like to be able to do that. Mortgage payment too high? Why just pay a lower amount to the bank. The only costs that are cut are your own (and probably only temporarily at that – until the bank forecloses).

If it costs me, let’s say, $30.00 to provide a particular product or service (including all overhead, wholesale, etc) and the government only wants to pay me $17 for it, I lose money. One hundred customers for that product or service equals $1,300* loss.

More customers won’t necessarily reduce the cost. Sure, fixed costs are the same no matter how many customers one has, and the more customers, the less per customer the fixed costs are. So let’s assume that what costs me $30 with 100 customers may cost $28 with 200 customers. But the government is still only paying me $17. So now I’m losing $2,200* on 200 customers rather than losing $1,300* on 100 customers.

The government in its infinite wisdom wants to cut Medicare by half a trillion dollars. That means they’ll pay me even less than they are now for the same services. So let’s say there’re 200 customers for a product or service that costs me $28 to provide, but the government will now pay only $14. Oh, and they’ll send me 200 more customers. So even though, because of fixed costs, my costs goes down a dollar, but Big Government drops its payment to me by $3. So I’m getting $5,600 for something that costs me $11,200. Now, instead of losing $13 per customer with 100 customers, I’m losing $14 per customer with 400 customers.

You know what? I think I’ll just stop losing money on these customers. Why should I be paying even the $13 per customer with 100 customers (less work) let alone pay $14 per customer (much more work). Me paying for them to get my product or service. Not worth it.

I think I’ll do what Mayo Glendale is doing. I’ll stop taking those customers.

Update: Dr. C.L. Gray writes similarly from a physician’s point of view at Big Government.

Update 2: Ed Morrissey has more on the closing of the Glendale Mayo Clinic.

*amounts changed because math was previously wrong, thanks Jeanette!

For the geek in all of us.

Today is one of 01001 (9) binary dates this year:

010110  (01/01/10)

011010 (01/10/10)

011110 (01/11/10)

100110 (10/01/10)

101010 (10/10/10)

101110 (10/11/10)

110110 (11/01/10)

111010 (11/10/10)

111110 (11/11/10)