Looks like someone else picked up on the prostate overtreatment issue:
A kind of odd piece of conventional wisdom has hardened that it’s dishonest of Barack Obama or Matt Yglesias or anyone else to suggest that there are some free lunches to be had in the realm of health reform. I think it’s clear that you can’t do public policy on a major issue entirely with free lunches, but realistically the policy realm is full of low-hanging fruit and free lunches. The only reason to think it wouldn’t be would be an odd assumption that we reached near-optimal policy on all topics sometime around 2007.
In the health care domain, in particular, a mix of weak science, bad economic incentives, and poor mathematical understanding leads to a fair amount of over-treatment. And over-treatment for cancer isn’t just an issue of spending money that didn’t need to be spent—treatment for prostate cancer normally has very unpleasant side effects and it’s really cruel to inflict it on men who don’t actually need the treatment. And as far as cancers go, that’s totally typical. Reducing over-screening and over-treatment would probably save money (though it’s always hard to know what the long-term impact will be since everyone eventually gets sick and dies) and will definitely spare patients a lot of pain and suffering. (bolding mine)
What is really difficult to deal with is the anger one faces when they suggest that a procedure may be too much, or that the science behind a procedure is not completely sound.
The free lunch crowd seems to have decided that medical procedures don’t have trade-offs both in terms of costs and health outcomes so any suggestion that a procedure is not needed will usually be met with anger. Think back to when a few groups were suggesting that people could skip a few mammograms. As long as we continue to view health care as a commodity that should be consumed like any other commodity, that is to consume as much as possible, the U.S will have problems with our health-care system.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 5:06 PM GMT+4
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I would love to talk more about this but this weekend is shaping up to be awfully busy but if you are a guy reading this might save you years of incontinence and impotence.
EACH year some 30 million American men undergo testing for prostate-specific antigen, an enzyme made by the prostate. Approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1994, the P.S.A. test is the most commonly used tool for detecting prostate cancer.
The test’s popularity has led to a hugely expensive public health disaster. It’s an issue I am painfully familiar with — I discovered P.S.A. in 1970. As Congress searches for ways to cut costs in our health care system, a significant savings could come from changing the way the antigen is used to screen for prostate cancer.
This op-ed has a little more credibility than some given the author helped think up this test he has no incentive to lie about it.
Prostate cancer may get a lot of press, but consider the numbers: American men have a 16 percent lifetime chance of receiving a diagnosis of prostate cancer, but only a 3 percent chance of dying from it. That’s because the majority of prostate cancers grow slowly. In other words, men lucky enough to reach old age are much more likely to die with prostate cancer than to die of it.
Even then, the test is hardly more effective than a coin toss. As I’ve been trying to make clear for many years now, P.S.A. testing can’t detect prostate cancer and, more important, it can’t distinguish between the two types of prostate cancer — the one that will kill you and the one that won’t.
The entire op-ed is worth reading just for the way it outlines how hard it is to stop doctors from prescribing a medical procedure even when it is shown to be innefective and in some cases dangerous.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:10 AM GMT+4
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From Oprah.com:
You don’t need NFL training to hurl a pizza across a New York City apartment. I found this out as I ducked to avoid my husband’s dinner (he didn’t fling it at me, he claims). “They folded the slices,” he bellowed. “Ruined.” I bit my tongue hard — but not, unfortunately, before “Did you lose your nappies?” slipped out (nappies being what they call diapers in England, which is where he’s from and where, at this point, I was wishing he had stayed). Big mistake. He went off like a car alarm, the honk-honk-beeeep-honk of his tirade so familiar, I’d long since learned to tune it out by doing guided imagery
What is guided imagery?
Freedom beckons intoxicatingly, but then I wonder if my expectations aren’t unrealistic — whether I’ve got the makings of a good marriage but am foolishly holding out for perfect. Paul Amato, Ph.D., professor of sociology, demography, and family studies at Penn State, conducted a 20-year study on 2,000 subjects who started off married, and says 55 to 60 percent of divorcing couples discard unions with real potential.
At the point when someone is throwing a pizza around the house, possibly at you, I think you can safely say the marriage is broken. One of the many issues that got lost in the Tiger Woods saga was the domestic violence, if you have ever been with someone that would come after you with a golf-club(which I have) the the temptation to cheat just to be around someody normal is pretty high; and normal can just mean somebody who isn’t violent.
The obsession with staying in bad marriages seems to be an outgrowth of our child worshipping culture where couples think they should stay together for the children. I doubt keeping children in a situation where they get to observe adults acting in a violent or childish manner all their lives is good for them, and it certainly isn’t good for the adults in the family either.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:42 AM GMT+4
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Republicans are trying to goad Democrats into making a big mistake and really that has been the Republican strategy from the beginning, keep Democrats from enacting a very popular peice of legislationa and then run on the idea that Democrats can’t get anything done.
The only drama left in the health-care debate is whether or not Democrats will fall for it or not.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:29 AM GMT+4
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The New York Times profiles one of the tea bag leaders and she seems a little unsure of what needs to be done.
Ms. Carender is less certain when it comes to explaining, for instance, how to cut the deficit without cutting Medicaid and Medicare.
“Well,” she said, thinking for a long time and then sighing. “Let’s see. Some days I’m very Randian. I feel like there shouldn’t be any of those programs, that it should all be charitable organizations. Sometimes I think, well, maybe it really should be just state, and there should be no federal part in it at all. I bounce around in my solutions to the problem.”
The tea bag movement seems to be filled with people that don’t want to pay taxes but they don’t want to cut services either; in their most ignorant form the tea baggers believe that if we just give enough to the mighty corporations they will take care of the people.
Given that the movement is based on fictional books it is not surprising that they are incredibly unrealistic and really don’t have anything to offer to the discussion but a few racist rants and threats of terrorism.
HAT TIP pandagon
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:47 AM GMT+4
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The family of Bin Laden wannabe Joe Stack speaks, and they are pretty disgusting.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 12:46 PM GMT+4
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FOX news sort of gets something right:
This week, a couple of conservative hosts on the Fox Business Channel seemed deeply concerned about premium rate hikes from California’s Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. They weren’t troubled by what the increases would mean for consumers — they were concerned that the increased burden on Americans might make health care reform more likely to happen.
I can’t decide if insurance companies are just that arrogant to think no one would notice a huge rate increase after a year of record profits; or if they really want some pieces of reform to pass. Hopefully this will lead to a robust public option but I am somewhat skeptical.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 4:58 PM GMT+4
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Every time I try to watch the Olympics it is either Curling, or Hockey, which is really just Curling with pads. What happened to ski-racing and snowboarding? You know real sports.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 8:35 PM GMT+4
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Over the past few years, I would say one of the few good decisions I have made was to buy a home, but it would seem I am in the minority. It would be great to see some of the failed suburbs and exurbs returned to agricultural uses, it might even help reverse climate change.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 1:38 AM GMT+4
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A Utah legislature wants to eliminate the twelth grade to save money:
The sudden buzz over the relative value of senior year stems from a recent proposal by state Sen. Chris Buttars that Utah make a dent in its budget gap by eliminating the 12th grade.
The notion quickly gained some traction among supporters who agreed with the Republican’s assessment that many seniors frittered away their final year of high school, but faced vehement opposition from other quarters, including in his hometown of West Jordan.
I give this guy some credit for being willing to get specific about budget cuts, which is more than most conservatives ever do, but this seems like a really assinine idea.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 5:40 PM GMT+4
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Megan McCardle is a little clueless when it comes to finances:
But do I think I would be noticeably more likely to die if I did give up my policy? Certainly not for the next twenty years, because I am unlikely to get cancer much before 65, and everything else that might kill me would be treated on an emergent basis, where insurance probably wouldn’t affect my outcomes nearly as much as the fact that I am an upper middle class professional with a (soon to be) husband who writes about health care policy for a living and a father who used to work for the New York City health and hospitals corporation, both of whom will no doubt be sitting on top of the doctors and the hospital bureaucracy to make sure I get excellent care. At 65 I qualify for Medicare, if it hasn’t bankrupted the government.
Morbidity? Maybe. But we’re more likely to take out a second mortgage to cover physical therapy than we are to go without.
(Bolding mine)
She seems to forget that someone has to be willing to give you a second mortgage and without equity that might be a problem plus you still have to pay that loan back, and without income that might also be a problem. I feel sorry for the guy she is about to marry as she seems to assume that he is going to take care of her, no matter what stupid thing she does. I hope she is hot because she sure isn’t smart.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:49 AM GMT+4
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I am starting to agree with stuff like this:
Republicans, to their credit, tend to prioritize their vision of the national interests over issues of process and ego. Democrats, by contrast, seem to have mostly gotten into politics in order to bolster their own sense of self-righteousness and aren’t especially concerned with whether or not their conduct in office is efficacious.
When I worked at an animal shelter I would have said the same thing about many of my co-workers, good intentions don’t matter unless you act on them.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 4:05 PM GMT+4
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I wish I could write this good:
Bankers are not the cause of the global economic crisis, according to the president of the Institute for the Works of Religion. Rather, the cause is ordinary people who do not “believe in the future” and have few or no children.
“The true cause of the crisis is the decline in the birth rate,” Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, said in an interview on Vatican Television’s “Octava Dies.”
Blah, blah, we’ve heard this song and dance before—the way to improve the economy is drastically expand the number of people using the limited resources of the planet. The reason this will work is because Jesus hates independent women so much that he will reward us for depriving women of the right to birth control with more resources, a la the loaves and fishes story. He’ll also stop heating up the planet slowly if you women stop with the thinking of yourself as human beings who have more than one purpose (baby factory) in life. Oh, you thought global warming was the result of a dramatic increase in greenhouse gases that are released by human beings—which means the more of them to create those gases, the worse it gets—but you were wrong. Global warming is magic punishment for ladies thinking they should get to do things besides pump out babies and pray a lot. Look, god sent us out of Eden because some bitch thought she had a right to know things. And he’ll send the entire planet into flaming global warming hell if women today don’t learn their lesson already. That is, if global warming is real. There’s some confusion on this issue
Posted by John Rove as Words at 12:51 AM GMT+4
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Tim Tebow is really creepy:
Given that the Focus on the Family ad which appeared during the Super Bowl was so bland, vague and disconnected to any actual point (except that tackling your mom in an incredibly Oedipal gesture is totally cool)
And contrary to what many of the anouncers said during the game, New Orleans winning does not make everything all right:
The good news is that the Saints really pulled it out. That was awesome and exhilarating. No, it’s not going to solve New Orleans’ continuing post-Katrina problems, but I think it’s okay to be happy for them. All the shots of people partying in the streets in the Quarter—plus all the jokes about boozing it up, taking it off, and eating Cajun food that dominated the sports news and overall news cycle—probably will end up being good for tourism, which is the sort of thing that will help get them back on their feet.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 3:13 PM GMT+4
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An ad may be the closest Tim Tebow ever gets to the Superbowl. I hope the major sports realize that christianity is about to do to them, what it did to the Republican party.
Update. I wrote this before I knew about Tebow’s Senior Bowl performance, two fumbles and fifty yards passing, maybe he should have been learning to play football rather than making anti-women ads. I was picking Tebow to be the next Ryan Leaf, but after his game performance he may not get drafted high enough to be considered a bust, which moves Colt McCoy in to the lead as the next Ryan Leaf; although from what I have heard McCoy is more like Micheal Vick but without the talent.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 2:00 AM GMT+4
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Republicans have taken obstructionism to whole new levels and they are not done yet:
….at this point, Republicans realize that they’re taking obstructionism to levels unprecedented in American history, and they realize that the public may disapprove, but they’re willing to take the risk.
Indeed, this week should have made this abundantly clear — Republican obstructionism has reached the level at which they oppose ideas they support.
Conservatives are like spoiled little kids that can’t get what they want so they are throwing a hissy fit about everything. The problem is, conservativism doesn’t work and no amount of foot stamping is ever going to change that, hopefully at some point conservatives will join the rest of us in reality until then look for a lot of temper tantrums from them and very little constructive discourse.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:56 AM GMT+4
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I really don’t think Micheal Schumaker is the the Stig, but you got to admire Schumaker for driving a Fiat 500 and unless you watch Top Gear that comment makes no sense, but if you are not watching Top Gear you are missing one of the funniest shows ever.
And Damages looks like it might be good this season, although it might be that I have a crush on Rose Byrne and Caprica has a lot of potential, I especially like the way the machines get religion.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 12:29 AM GMT+4
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The state of the Union speech seems to have been very popular. I didn’t get to see much of it but I get the impression that Obama is being the anti-Reagan, where Reagan empasized magical solution, like tax cuts will pay for themsleves, or the free market will magicaly take care of us; Obama is saying if we want a great country we are going to have to work at it, it isn’t going to be easy, and their are no magic solutions to the economic problems facing America.
The 2012 election will be a good indicater of how much the country has matured since Reagan.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:12 AM GMT+4
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This seems likely. If Democrats hope to avoid a complete electoral bloodbath in this years elections they better have some sort of decent health-care reform, with a provision for pre-existing conditions for everybody.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 2:20 PM GMT+4
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From TPM:
Like everyone I have a sob-story to tell about health care. After telling it to countless liberals who oppose the Senate’s health-care reform bill, I still haven’t heard a good answer from them about why they can’t support the Senate bill. They usually stop talking, or try to change the subject.
Maybe Raul Grijalva or Barney Frank or Anthony Weiner or Jerry Nadler have wrestled with this problem and I haven’t seen it. Have you seen anything from them about this?
My story: My father is dying of Huntington’s disease. Before he dies in 8 to 10 years, he will need anti-depressants, anti-psychotics and drugs that fight dementia and his tremors and convulsions. He’ll need multiple brain scans and physical therapy sessions.
Current medical treatments can’t save him, but they will give him a few more years before the slow death strips him of his memories, personality and control of his body.
There’s a 50 percent chance the same slow motion death awaits me and each of my three siblings. If I ever lose my job I’ll become uninsurable, permanently. My sister already lost her insurance.
That means whatever treatment is developed for Huntington’s will be unavailable to us. There’s simply no way we could afford it. Not only high tech gene therapies or other interventions, but the medications and treatments that exist now that would buy us enough time to see our kids’ graduations or weddings, and would give them hope of not suffering their grandfather’s fate.
There’s a bill that would mean we’d never be rejected for health insurance or have it canceled. Health insurance that could ease our final years, or maybe even save us.
But liberals are refusing to support it. I know there are principles and politics at stake. I know people are tired of being told to shut up and take what’s given to them. But in the end, there a thousands of people with Huntington’s and millions of people with other serious or terminal illnesses who will never benefit from treatment because they are uninsured. Millions more who are otherwise healthy will die premature or unnecessary deaths because basic health care isn’t affordable.
What do liberal leaders say to them? What do those liberals tell people like my dad, a die-hard activist Democrat, a UAW member who worked his way through college to become a teacher?
I’m used to Republicans and conservatives not giving a damn about people like us, or mocking us for asking questions like this. That’s why my father spent so much of his life fighting to keep Democrats in power. But to be abandoned by people my father worked with and supported his entire life? What in the bill is so terrible to justify that?
This isn’t about betrayal, or a slap in the face, or an insult. It isn’t about strategies to keep seats, or grand theories of justice. Democrats in Congress have the chance to cast a single vote that will make the lives of tens of millions of Americans less wrenching, our demises less brutal. That’s what this is about.
I’d like to hear Reps. Grijalva, Frank, Weiner or Nadler tell us why they can’t cast that vote.
If you’re still with me, thanks for reading and all the hard work you do, and keep fighting the good fight.
At this point I hope the house passes the Senate bill, it wasn’t like they were going to get many changes to the bill any ways given every Senator has veto power over the final bill anyway. The bill isn’t perfect but that is how evolution works the parts that don’t work can be changed later and the parts that do work will thrive and become very popular.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 1:42 PM GMT+4
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I don’t think this problem gets enough consideration:
All throughout the health care process progressives have found ourselves frustrated by the extent to which senior citizens—the beneficiaries of a liberal-style single-payer system—seem to have the most reactionary views on health reform. And now the voters of Massachusetts have thrown a major wrench into the works by electing a Senator who says not that health care should be left up to the tender mercies of the free market, but rather that since Massachusetts already has a universal health care system he doesn’t care about anyone else.
People tend to think if something is good for someone else it must be bad for them, maybe politicians need to do a better job of explaining why health reform would lower everyones cost and lead to better health for everyone.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 4:38 PM GMT+4
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This post from Washingtonmonthly.com seems to summarize it really well:
LESSONS LEARNED…. Given that the results in Massachusetts were not quite what the political world was expecting as of, say, two weeks ago, there will be plenty of “what just happened?” questions over the next several days. We’re already hearing ample talk about what lessons Democrats should have learned from this painful defeat.
I think it’s probably a mistake to overstate the larger significance of a special election 10 months before the midterms, but it’d be foolish to pretend Scott Brown’s victory was some random fluke, never to be repeated again.
With that in mind, here are my Top 5 lessons to be learned from the Mess in Massachusetts.
1. Successful candidates hit the campaign trail. Candidates seeking office should probably campaign while voters are making up their minds. It’s old-fashioned thinking, I know, but winning a primary and then dropping out of sight — while your opponent is working hard to reach out to voters — tends to be a bad idea.
For much of the post-primary period, the campaign calendar on the Coakley website was blank. Dave Weigel noted yesterday, “From the primary through last Sunday, Scott Brown held 66 events of varying size. Coakley held 19.” Part of this is because Brown had to introduce himself to voters who had no idea who he was, while Coakley was already well known. But 19 events in 40 days is evidence of a Senate candidate who was taking victory for granted — and in the process, throwing victory away.
2. Voters like likeable candidates. Some voters care more about policy and substance than which candidate they most want to have a beer with, but these voters tend to be outnumbered. We’ve all seen races in which the thoughtful, hard-working, experienced candidate who emphasizes substantive issues loses out to the fun, likable opponent (see 2000, presidential election of).
The Massachusetts race fits this model nicely. Chris Good noted this week, “[W]hile Coakley focused on the issues in this race, Brown can credit his lead in multiple polls to his own personality and personal image, which he crafted with a series of successful ads portraying him as an average, likable guy.” It’s tempting to think voters in a mature democracy, especially in a state like Massachusetts, would prioritize policy over personality, and appreciate the candidate who “focused on the issues.” But yesterday was the latest in a series of reminders that personal qualities often trump everything else.
3. Saying dumb things will undermine public support. When the pressure was on, Coakley insulted Red Sox fans — twice. She kinda sorta said there are “no terrorists in Afghanistan,” and that “devout Catholics” may not want to work in emergency rooms. When the Democratic campaign realized it was in deep trouble, and readied an effort to turn things around, it had trouble overcoming the distractions caused by the candidate’s public remarks.
Maybe, if the campaign had been in gear throughout the post-primary process, Coakley would have been sharper on the stump, had more message discipline, and been less likely to make these costly, distracting errors.
4. Learn something about your opponent. Because the Democratic campaign assumed it would win, it didn’t invest much energy in understanding its opponent (who, incidentally, won). They didn’t identify Brown’s weak points, and seemed to know practically nothing about his background. When the race grew competitive, nearly all of the damaging stories about the Republican candidate came from well-researched blog posts, not the campaign’s opposition research team. “Get to know your opponent” is one of those lessons taught on the first day of Campaign 101, and campaigns that forget it are going to struggle.
5. Enthusiasm matters. No matter how confused and uninformed Brown’s supporters seemed, they were also motivated. Dems liked Coakley, but they weren’t, to borrow a phrase, fired up and ready to go.
Looking ahead, chances are pretty good that organized right-wing voters will be mobilized and itching to vote in November. They certainly were yesterday. Democrats can’t expect to do well with an unmotivated, listless party base.
The only thing I would add is that it might have been a different race if Democrats had already passed a comprehensive health reform bill with a robust public option that was going to lower costs in a state like MA with mandatory insurance laws. or perhaps if people could really see how the stimulus funds are benefitting them. Needless to say tat is not what has happened and probably will not happen in 2010. And 2010 will probably be brutal to Dems because of it.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 12:14 PM GMT+4
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If Kennedy’s senate seat goes to a republican some one will have some splainin to do:
I don’t mean to get ahead of things. But I cannot help noting one blazingly obvious fact. If Michael Capuano had been the Democratic nominee, there’s simply no way we’d have gotten to this point (I used to live in his district). No way. Absolutely, no way. That is not simply to say that Coakley has run a bad campaign. That seems obvious; but I’m always a bit dubious of evaluations of a campaign (obvious as it may seem in the moment) because it’s very hard to view as a struggling campaign as a well run one. And I’m not saying Capuano is the second coming. But Coakley is just culturally and temperamentally not suited to the politics of 2009/2010.
She did win a primary. So it’s not like party bosses forced the choice, at least not in the narrow sense. But there’s got to be some reckoning and thought as to why the Dems ended up with this nominee. I don’t think the answer will be a pleasing one.
–Josh Marshall
Here in Colorado we seem to have the same thing going where Micheal Bennet was appointed to Ken Salazar’s Senate seat, when Salazar joined Obama’s cabinet. Bennett had never held an elected office and does not seem interested in campaigning. Democrats need to realize that being right on the issues isn’t always enough you also need good candidates to implement those issues.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 1:28 PM GMT+4
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Via Caveatbettor:
When rats are fed GMO food, do they show signs of organ damage? You get your treatment group, your control group, your outcome measures, and you do an unpaired t-test between the two. These guys use “nonparametric methods,” “Principle Component Analysis,” and a bunch of other unnecessarily advanced statistics. Basically, they tried doing it the right way, failed to find what they were looking for, and pulled out the fancy (wrong) techniques to get the result they wanted.
First, you need the fancy smancy statistics to control for differences in gender and amounts of corn that the rats were fed; in addition the rat experiment only lasted ninety days so trends would have to be examined to get any useful information from this experimant.
The bigger issue here is the limits of animal testing, most of us will eat corn for longer than ninety days and even if you fed rats this corn for their entire lifespan, that lifespan is only about three-years, probably much shorter on a diet of this corn, but not even close to the seventy years that most of us hope to live.
Plus, people don’t consume that much plain corn, we consume it in soft-drinks, we consume animals that have eaten corn, almost every processed food product contains corn in some form and we have no idea how the act of processing corn effects the chemicals in corn.
None of these issues are dealt with in a a simplistic experiment and it appears that the results are easily manipulated anyway, perhaps it is time to re-think how we test food safety.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 4:59 PM GMT+4
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This book looks great although it might make me even more cynical.
In an interview on last night’s Colbert Report, ‘Game Change’ co-author John Heilemann stressed that his new book is “as factually accurate as you can imagine.”
“I like this book because, as I said, it’s not bogged down with sources or attributions,” Colbert teased Heilemann. “But you live in that journalism world. How do you defend that to the people who say, ‘come on, you’re making this stuff up’?”
“We wanted to get to the high human drama of this historic campaign,” said Heilemann. “We ended up here with a picture that we are totally, totally happy with and totally confident is right on the money and is as factually accurate as you can imagine.”
I have a feeling that when it is done you come away with a feeling that our politicians are human just like the rest of us, which I guess in some ways should be reassuring.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 1:31 PM GMT+4
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This was presented as advice to law school grads but it might be good advice for just about any graduate, high school or college:
Law schools have a responsibility to teach students how to be emotionally resilient and fiscally sensible at a time when high-paying jobs are hard to come by and student-loan debts are mounting, several speakers asserted at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, which began here on Thursday.
Students who have spent summers working for law firms only to have job offers from those firms rescinded or delayed often become disillusioned or angry.
“By emotionally preparing our students for failure as well as preparing them for success,” she said, “we will give them important life skills they will need to handle adversity in the job market,” [said Pam Occhipinti, director of career services at Loyola University New Orleans’s College of Law].
Posted by John Rove as Words at 1:02 AM GMT+4
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Tax cuts pay for themselves and if you have seen one Redwood Tree you have seen them all. looks like people are starting to notice Reagan’s magical thinking doesn’t work:
How on earth Will can write a column about the problems in California without even mentioning Proposition 13–the 1978 ballot measure that severely limited local property taxes–is beyond me. Prop 13 has distorted revenue gathering, severely limiting the amounts that localities can pay for schools and other public services, forcing the state to take on an increased burden. In the end, California is a Exhibit A of a public pathology that we’ve inherited from the Reagan Era: the public wants a modified welfare state, excellent schools, a clean environment, low college tuitions…but it’s not willing to pay for them. Over the past 30 years, Republicans fed the delusions that you can have low taxes and world-class public services, and Democrats acquiesced in it. It would be nice if we had an honest national conversation about revenues–and the sun-setting of many of the Bush tax cuts this year provides the perfect arena for it–but don’t count on that taking place.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 8:10 PM GMT+4
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Looks like many chemicals are kept secret:
Of some 84,000 chemicals being used commercially in the United States, some 20 percent — or 17,000 — are kept secret not only from the public, but from medical professionals, state regulators and even emergency responders, according to a report at the Washington Post.
And the reason for this potentially harmful lack of openness? Profit.
A 1976 law, the Toxic Substances Control Act, mandates that manufacturers report to the Environmental Protection Agency any new chemicals they intend to market, but manufacturers can request that a chemical be kept secret if disclosure “could harm their bottom line
For me this is the problem with the free market worshippers, they assume perfect information when corporate America does everything possible to keep information away from the consumer.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 6:40 PM GMT+4
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