IN THE MAIL: From Sean Stephenson, Get Off Your “But”: How to End Self-Sabotage and Stand Up for Yourself.

SHANNON LOVE: Swine Flu Shows How We Live in Good Times: “Being able to fret about just one serious communicable disease is a luxury beyond price.”

DODD, MURTHA, RANGEL, VISCLOSKY, AND MORE: A Scandal Scorecard.

CHANGE: “When campaigning, Obama said he’d not rush to sign any bills. He’d put them online for five days, review, and make them open to the public. So far, he’s 1 for 11 on that promise.”

MORE ON PEREZ HILTON’S OBAMA/PREJEAN gay marriage hypocrisy. As I noted a while back, some people are more interested in the pleasures of calling other people bigots than in actually advancing the cause of gay marriage.

NEWSPAPER CIRCULATION crumbles.

WALTER SHAPIRO IMAGINES John McCain’s First Hundred Days.

HEY, I’VE GOT AN IDEA: Make the practice of medicine more rewarding! Shortage of Doctors Proves Obstacle to Obama Goals. Naah. That approach would make too much sense.

But when Obama says “We’re not producing enough primary care physicians,” he’s making a mistake. We don’t produce doctors. They’re not widgets. People choose to become doctors — or something else — based on their analysis of what will produce the best life. Medicine has gotten less pleasant, and less financially rewarding, really, over the past several decades as it’s become more bureaucratized and subject to the whims of third-party payors. So will Obama’s plan fix that? Seems doubtful. Will he recognize that you don’t produce doctors the way you produce, say, cars? That’s doubtful, too.

UPDATE: James Joyner emails:

While the things you cite may be causing more physicians to retire early we’re not having trouble attracting people to the profession. The problem is that the AMA has created a cartel with the medical schools, creating severe barriers to entry. The number of slots has remained essentially static despite a population that has nearly doubled in forty years. We’re having to import docs from abroad just to keep up.

That’s a fair point, and there’s no good justification for those limits. On the other hand, as the article linked above notes, poor working conditions and insufficient pay are pushing people out, and steering them to specialties other than the internist/family practice primary care doctors that we need the most.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader James Ellison writes:

As a physician in practice for over 25 years, I must comment.

Medical schools are actually having trouble filling the available slots they have so more schools won’t necessarily make for better care.
Much of “primary care” could be handled by nurse practitioners but patients would need to get used to not seeing “the doctor.”
Last time I checked, there were surveys that reported about 2/3 of physicians actively discouraged their children from going into medicine.

Yeah, I wouldn’t encourage the Insta-Daughter to go to med school.

ASK DR. HELEN: Suicide, Men, and Money Problems.

CELLS MADE PLURIPOTENT, with injected proteins.

ADVICE ON risk communication during an epidemic. “A final error that underlies official fear of fear is the notion that when you make people more afraid of bird flu, you are making them more fearful people. That is flat-out not true. You are as fearful as you are. You get slowly more fearful as you get older. Remember your teenage years if you doubt this. But your fearfulness changes over the decades, not over the days and weeks and months. For the most part, we are who we are. In a crisis we become very temporarily more fearful — that’s the adjustment reaction — but we quickly settle into the New Normal.”

SWINE FLU: Nothing new. “The fact of the matter is, swine flu has been hopping from pigs to humans for decades, sometimes causing disease, sometimes not. . . . But I don’t think we need to worry about this pandemic too much, because there’s one thing to keep in mind when news of a unique flu strain breaks: perspective. As of this writing, 80 people in Mexico have succumbed to swine flu. By comparison, the CDC estimates that 36,000 people in the United States die each year of influenza-related illnesses. And in spite of this, we in the medical community still have a hard time convincing people to get their flu shots.”

NOW IT’S DEMOCRATS CALLING FOR a tougher line on Iran.

POLITICO: As Flu Hits, Holes in White House Health Team. “The Obama administration declared a ‘public health emergency’ Sunday to confront the swine flu — but is heading into its first medical outbreak without a secretary of Health and Human Services or appointees in any of the department’s 19 key posts.”

THIS IS SWEET: A mother/daughter bodybuilding duo.

SWINE FLU: What it is, how to fight it.

One way I’d be cautious about is something I’ve seen pushed on some survival websites: an elderberry extract called Sambucol. Does it work against flu? Well, this report says maybe yes, and that it increases the production of inflammatory cytokines. Problem is, in the case of particularly deadly flus like bird flu, a too-strong immune response, called a “cytokine storm,” may be what accounts for increased deadliness. Things that promote stronger cytokine production might make things worse. Or not — we don’t really know, which is why I’d favor actual, tested medicines over dubious herbal remedies myself. More on the “cytokine storm” angle here.

POLITICO: Pelosi Bungles Torture Debate.

RYAN SAGER: Swine Flu Coverage: Is Matt Drudge a National Hero?

THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER busts loose.

SO WE’VE REPLACED AFFLUENZA with Influenza. And this is an improvement?

FLU SURVIVAL TIPS.

BOSTON GLOBE: Homeland Security Misfires:

PARTISAN turmoil that lingered after this month’s tea party protests reignited recently, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report to federal and local law enforcement officials on right-wing extremism. The report detailed current economic and political factors that could enhance recruitment for extremist groups. Yet the report defined extremism in a way that implicates a huge portion of the political spectrum. Conservatives are right to be angry. . . . Of course, Homeland Security has a responsibility to keep law enforcement officials aware of potential threats. But it must not tie their hands by making them look like the arm of a political machine.

Read the whole thing.

UH OH: China Buys Gold On Dollar Fears. It’s like they don’t have confidence in our fiscal prudence.

SCIENCE RACES to parse new virus.