A former wealthy Obama donor has gone tea party. It will be interesting to see how effective the ad is. And whether or not he becomes New Hampshire’s next Senator.
A Good Venn Diagram
…of “the news” and the news. I agree with commenter McGehee, though, the intersection is too large.
Credit Where It’s Due
If the Obama administration really is firing and picking generals based on performance, rather than a rotation schedule, that is an improvement over the previous administration.
Change!
Apparently the Obama administration is pro torture. All the complaints about torture aren’t now, and never were, about torture. It was pure Bush derangement. Now that The One has ascended, no problem.
Britain Turns Ever More Orwellian
A woman has been prohibited from, and arrested for, “noisy s3x.”
As I noted a few days ago, modern “liberals” are the ideological descendants of the Puritans. Except usually it isn’t about sex. In this case, it is.
“Limits To Growth”
A critique. With a lot of ignorant (and often ad hominem) comments in the comments section.
Rebuilding Joints
I suspect that this, not crude surgery, is the wave of the future:
The scaffold has two layers, one that mimics bone and one that mimics cartilage. When implanted into a joint, the scaffold can stimulate mesenchymal stem cells in the bone marrow to produce new bone and cartilage. The technology is currently limited to small defects, using scaffolds roughly 8 mm in diameter.
Bring it on. It’s only going to get better.
You’ll Be As Shocked As I Was
…to learn that the president has no class:
Wanda Sykes isn’t of any interest to me. The fact that the American president was five feet away from her and had to laugh about her joke was of interest. A comedian wishes a citizen dead and the president laughs?
I can’t imagine such a “joke” being told about (say) Michael Moore during a Bush WHCD. I thought that the idea of the WHCD was supposed to be a “roast,” with those being lampooned in attendance, not a vicious attack on the president’s absent political enemies. And had such a thing had occurred, I can’t imagine the former president laughing at it. But with this president, we don’t have to imagine it. In many ways, it’s a return to the juvenile antics of the White House during the Clinton years. But it apparently gave Chris Matthews an extended leg tingle (shameful that, too, because Rush used to let him guest host for him back in the nineties), so I guess that’s all right.
Obamacare
And your doctor:
Doctors will consolidate into larger practices to spread overhead costs, and they’ll cram more patients into tight schedules to make up in volume what’s lost in margin. Visits will be shortened and new appointments harder to secure. It already takes on average 18 days to get an initial appointment with an internist, according to the American Medical Association, and as many as 30 days for specialists like obstetricians and neurologists.
Right or wrong, more doctors will close their practices to new patients, especially patients carrying lower paying insurance such as Medicaid. Some doctors will opt out of the system entirely, going “cash only.” If too many doctors take this route the government could step in — as in Canada, for example — to effectively outlaw private-only medical practice.
These changes are superimposed on a payment system where compensation often bears no connection to clinical outcomes. Medicare provides all the wrong incentives. Its charge-based system pays doctors more for delivering more care, meaning incomes rise as medical problems persist and decline when illness resolves.
So let’s expand Medicare to everybody. Great.
Obviously, The Answer Is “No”
Madam Speaker, have you no decency?
It’s kind of hard to run a witch hunt when you’re the lead witch.
[Tuesday morning update]
Some questions for the Speaker:
You said that you concurred with the letter written by Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) that raised concerns about waterboarding. Is there any documentation to back that up? Did you sign the Harman letter? Were you aware of it in real time, or only later, when it was declassified? Did you send your own letter? Did you ever express your concerns with President Bush during any of your meetings with him between 2002 and 2008?
As I say in comments, I’m all for a truth commission, as long as it’s a whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth commission. Bring it on.
[Bumped]