ANOTHER GRIM MILESTONE.
Archive for 2007
August 7, 2007
GALLUP: “We’re seeing some slight hints of positive news for the Bush administration. For one thing, Bush’s job approval rating has stopped its downward trajectory. Bush hit bottom with his administration low point of 29% in early July (based on our USA Today/Gallup poll readings). Now – in the data just about to be released from our weekend poll – Bush’s approval rating has recovered slightly to 34%. That’s not a big jump, but it is the second consecutive poll in which the president’s numbers have been higher rather than lower.”
Will Congress go up next?
UPDATE: Maybe not. At least this argument seems persuasive to me, though not terribly flattering to Bush: “I think it’s a natural consequence of having the attention focused on Congress. By comparison, he looks pretty good.”
A LOOK AT the politicization of science in recent years.
ACE: “If it is now the Washington Post’s explicit style guidance that a man merely serving during a war is in fact a veteran of that war, then I expect them, in accordance with this odd new ruling, to begin referring to President Bush as a ‘Vietnam veteran.'”
ANOTHER DEBATE? Stephen Green is liveblogging it.
UPDATE: Hillary channels Rick Santorum?
WHO KILLED THE AMERICAN CAR? Nobody, says Jim Dunne.
Plus, car owners on why people don’t buy American.
The Edwards campaign called. They are in a tizzy over a quote from my article, which is being sensationalized at this moment on Drudge: “Elizabeth Edwards on campaign’s troubles: ‘We can’t make John black, we can’t make him a woman’…”
The campaign staff didn’t even know I had spoken to Elizabeth Edwards [clarification: some staffers knew because I told them after the fact, but I didn’t go thru official channels to reach her]. That is how she rolls. The staffer wanted to know when I talked to her, and what she said. CNN just asked me the same thing.
Follow the link for the full story.
UPDATE: More on Elizabeth Edwards from Marc Ambinder.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Advertising Age isn’t impressed: “This comment from Elizabeth Edwards might cut through the clutter, but perhaps in ways not expected.”
THE NEW REPUBLIC UPDATES, but doesn’t know much. Bob Owens comments.
UPDATE: The Weekly Standard responds: “They neglected to report that the Army has concluded its investigation and found Beauchamp’s stories to be false. . . . We have full confidence in our reporting that Pvt Beauchamp recanted under oath in the course of the investigation. Is the New Republic claiming that Pvt Beauchamp made no such admission to Army investigators? Is Beauchamp?” More at the link.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Stephen Spruiell calls it a “non-rebuttal rebuttal.”
MORE: Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder?
STILL MORE: I linked it before but this bit is worth quoting: “There’s this notion that war makes the soldiers crazy. Journalists love it. Beauchamp reinforced it. It appears that war makes journalists crazy.”
And editors. [And publishers].
MORE STILL: Phil Carter: “Every soldier has a story. Some are even true.”
JOHN FUND: “But if pork remains part of the GOP governing model, it’s one that voters are starting to reject. In exit polls last year, those who actually showed up to vote reported that political corruption was a more important issue than the war in Iraq. In Alaska, where they have seen incumbent Republican arrogance up close, voters last year sent GOP Gov. Frank Murkowski packing. Upstart Sarah Palin defeated him in a primary by a wide margin and then won in the fall. Her approval ratings now top 90%. Her secret is that she won over voters by campaigning against corruption within her own party–much as Nicolas Sarkozy was able to do in France.” The GOP leadership, however, doesn’t seem bright enough to take advantage of this. But maybe more challengers will.
I’VE HEARD THIS SONG BEFORE: A “bogus study” from the Violence Policy Center.
THOUGHTS ON THE SURGE, from INDCJournal.
ASSOCIATED PRESS: Military making gains in Iraq.
LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND EMINENT DOMAIN: This land is their land.
GETTING IT WRONG about the Lebanese elections.
DAVID BERNSTEIN NOTES A remarkable decline in housing prices in the D.C. area.
A HUGE BEAUCHAMP / NEW REPUBLIC ROUNDUP.
UPDATE: More from Capt. Ed. And an aside from Tom Maguire. Still nothing on the TNR website, though.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Much more from Don Surber.
MORE: Missing links at The New Republic.
ELECTION 2008: The Internet campaign.
MICHAEL TOTTEN: An Iraqi interpreter’s story.
A ROUNDUP OF RECENT MEDIA FABRICATIONS from John Wixted. There’s a discernible theme. . . .
UPDATE: Somewhat related item, here.
MOVIE RIGHTS TO THE DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS go for big bucks:
After heavy bidding among multiple suitors, Disney and Scott Rudin have nabbed the screen rights to “The Dangerous Book for Boys” in a deal worth mid-six against seven figures.
Penned by British siblings Conn and Hal Iggulden, “Dangerous” was a smash bestseller when published by HarperCollins in the U.K. last year, and a version slightly altered for American readers bowed in May. Several studios stepped up to bid for the film rights, even though the book is written like a how-to manual without a traditional narrative structure. Rudin swooped to take the book of the table through his producing pact with Disney.
Full story here. I think this is a big deal. Our podcast interview with Conn Iggulden is here.
IT’S AN UPHILL BATTLE FOR THE EDWARDS CAMPAIGN, according to Elizabeth Edwards: “We can’t make John black, we can’t make him a woman.”
Actually, if you hire someone from The New Republic, it’s not out of the question . . . .
JOURNALISM IN AMERICA: “No one needs to be an accomplice to the meltdown, but shrugging shoulders and averting eyes and keyboards from the train wreck is not a neutral act.”
UPDATE: Related thoughts here: “If the perspective in the Western media were not totally skewed the other way, perhaps we’d see our aspiring writers rushing to Iraq to make up stories about Al-Qaeda brutality. Then again, one hardly lacks real examples.”
ARNOLD KLING ON HEALTH CARE REFORM:
The main proponents of “universal coverage” want to throw more money at the current health care system, which strikes me as unwise. I believe that the “universal coverage” mantra is dysfunctional for the same reason that “more money for public schools” is a dysfunctional mantra for education. When your current approach is digging you into a hole, the sensible thing to do is not to dig faster. It is to stop digging.
He also offers this troublingly accurate quote from John Graham: “Nobody is talking about a free-market approach in health care. The spectrum today is between fascism and Communism.” But actually, a few people are talking about free markets — Kling does. And check out our podcast interview with David Gratzer, author of The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care.
GRAND CENTRAL STATION: Quieter than a hospital bed:
On the busiest day at Grand Central, I might visit the bakery and newsstand, buy a train ticket, drop into the bookstore and drugstore before picking up some flowers and maybe buy a coffee for the ride home. That’s about seven transactions, all brief, that I choose to initiate when I have time and energy.
Contrast this with my recent stay in a 235-bed suburban nonprofit hospital where I faced at least 34 separate interactions, most of them convenient for everyone but the patient.
I’ve written on this kind of thing myself.
Sleep interruptions are one problem. The floor below my wife’s housed the sleep-disorder clinic, where they monitor people and try to help them overcome various problems, like sleep apnea, so that they can achieve an uninterrupted night’s sleep. Ironically, it’s probably the only place in the hospital where they let you sleep all night long if you want. My wife was interrupted, on average, about every 90 minutes or so all night long: To have blood drawn, to have vital signs checked, to have her temperature taken, to be given medications (“wake up, it’s time for your sleeping pill” isn’t just a hospital joke) and, most irritatingly, to be weighed.
Now, there are good reasons for a lot of this stuff. Medications have to be given at certain times, temperatures have to be monitored, and so on. Even the weight is important, especially for cardiac patients where fluid balance often matters a lot. (Though not in my wife’s case, as her problems were different.)
But the end result of all of this stuff, especially when it’s spread over the evening, is a huge amount of stress on somebody who’s already under stress from illness.
I still want to do an experiment where you take healthy 20-somethings and put them in a hospital for a couple of weeks, then evaluate their condition upon release. I think we’d be appalled at the change.
There’s a new hospital in Knoxville that seems to be taking some of the advice I gave a couple of years ago — comfy chairs, wireless Internet, meals available on a room-service basis, etc. That’s all great. But I’ll bet they still wake people up all the time.
UPDATE: Physician reader Brent Michael Krupp emails:
Re: your comment about “still want[ing] to do an experiment where you take healthy 20-somethings and put them in a hospital for a couple of weeks, then evaluate their condition upon release.”
In medical school, I learned of at least one experiment that did exactly this — confined healthy young subjects to bed rest for a week or two. Apparently they met diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia afterwards — i.e. total body aches and pains and fatigue. And this was just bed rest — I don’t think they also messed up their sleep.
When I worked in hospitals as a resident, I *hated* how much we screwed up patient sleep. I need earplugs at home to sleep and it’s not even noisy here! I always wished we stocked them on the wards so we could give them to our patients. *Some* patients really did need the constant monitoring, but lots of them were losing sleep purely for nursing (and doctor) convenience.
There are so many reasons to get patients out of hospitals ASAP or keep them out in the first place. This is just one more.
Yes. And another reader emails: “Fifteen years ago my father was in the hospital dying of scleroderma. They were waking him up every 90 minutes or so. I told the doctor that even an Olympic athlete would deteriorate with that treatment. He just looked at me like I was nuts.”