We have only minutes left to sign up for the bradwarthen.com Walk for Life team!
Please join us, or at least contribute, and help us fight breast cancer in the Midlands!
Click here to sign up! The deadline is at 11:59 a.m. today.
(I think you can still contribute past the deadline, but let’s not take chances, OK?)
Thanks,
Brad
That championship team of 2013 — their names are legend.
OK, yeah, I know. With the Walk less than three weeks off, this is ridiculously late to get started.
But I’m giving it a try anyway, because it’s never too late to get together to fight breast Cancer in the Midlands.
So come on and join us as we prepare to walk on Oct. 17. Or rather, join me, since I’m the only one to sign up for the blog team so far. With my contribution, we’re at 3 percent of our goal of $1,000.
Even this late, that’s a reachable goal. Remember that in 2013, we broke the Top Ten, coming in at No. 9 with a grand total of $3,651.44. We did that, if you’ll recall, due to the above-and-beyond efforts of Bryan Caskey and Doug Ross. I’ll hope they’ll join us again this year, but hey — it’s high time that the rest of us take up some of the slack.
So click here to get started. NOW!
For my part, I’m going to send out a fund-raising note to some of my contacts as soon as I get done typing this. Perhaps some of y’all could do the same. If you want to see a way to do it that works, check out Bryan’s legendary missive of 2013.
And please, accept my apologies for getting started so late. I know it’s inexcusable. But I’m trying to do some good even at this late hour, so help me out.
My lateness is particularly embarrassing since once again, I am one of the Pinkadors — that is to say, the social media brand ambassadors for the Walk. Way last month, a lovely gift package was dropped off at the ADCO offices to remind me of that fact. There it is below.
So watch this space, and my Twitter feed for more about the Walk as these last few days stream past…
OK, first, I know I shouldn’t be drinking a jumbo (why do they have to call it “jumbo?” I ask for a large; they repeat it back to me as “jumbo”) sweet tea, in light of my current dietary goals.
But set that aside, and allow me to give some props to the Lizard’s Thicket on Elmwood, for going above and beyond.
I didn’t used to drink much sweet tea, because it was frankly too sweet for me. Then I discovered a couple of years back that I could tolerate any amount of sugar as long as there was enough lemon in it. And that, in fact, super-sweet tea with plenty of lemon was really good stuff.
So — and yes, this is how bad habits start — I started ordering sweet tea “with extra lemon” instead of my usual water or unsweetened tea.
But some restaurants have an odd idea of “extra lemon.” Sometimes I’ll get only a couple of slices — whereas “extra” is at least three, right? That’s how many I get when it’s self-serve — I don’t want to be greedy; I just want to offset the sweetness.
But today, the Lizard’s Thicket on Elmwood gave me tea with seven slices of lemon in it! More than twice as many as I would dare to grab for myself!
Now that’s what I call service. And since I didn’t realize it until after I got back to the office and therefore didn’t get to thank them, I’m posting this…
The Engine 2 guy, doing his version of the “I want to pump YOU up” routine.
OK, so that’s not strictly true, since the Engine 2 diet was started by a fireman, who going by his pictures may be considered by some to be even more of a macho guy than I am (he’s also named “Rip”), even though he has been photographed wearing this.
But let’s just say he’s definitely a guy, and he invented Engine 2, and is therefore a traitor to his gender, and just leave it at that. Let’s set it aside, because I don’t want any actual facts interfering with my over-broad generalizations.
So, back to my point: Men are from paleo, women are from Engine 2. At least, it works that way in my house.
Several months ago, my wife and my daughter who works at Whole Foods started attending some cult meetings at that fine establishment, because they had decided to take the Engine 2 28-challenge, which describes itself this way:
The guiding principle is simple: Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds give your body the fuel it needs to function at its best. When you fill your belly with these whole, minimally processed plant-based foods, you take charge of your health and become plant-strong®.
Although, of course, it’s really about what you do without:
- Zero animal products
- No added oils
- 100% whole grains
- Minimal added sugar, if at all
- Less than 25% total calories from fat
- 1:1 ratio of milligrams of sodium to calories, with the exception of condiments
You lost me at “zero animal products.”
This was all very well and good for 28 days — as long as it’s someone other than me doing it — but subsequently, my wife has continued to live this way. And she likes it.
Meanwhile, I have decided, since my pants are all too tight, to go back to my strict paleolithic diet — which means meat, as much as you can hunt down and kill (or purchase at the grocery, and then cook yourself since you’re the one who eats it). It also means you don’t eat any grains, or any peas or beans — which are where the plant-strong® crowd get most of their protein.
I felt great and went out and bought some skinnier pants last year when I was doing paleo pretty strictly and working out every day, and I want to get back to where I can wear some of those pants. Not to mention the new blue blazer that I had taken in at the time.
So basically, my wife and I a complementary pair, like Jack Spratt and wife, although we do overlap on some cruciferous vegetables and sweet potatoes.
So as I hunt and she gathers, more or less, our brains get retuned so that we notice different things. For instance this morning I noticed, was inspired by, and reached out to share with my spouse this important breaking story in The Washington Post:
Why salad is so overrated
…There’s one food, though, that has almost nothing going for it. It occupies precious crop acreage, requires fossil fuels to be shipped, refrigerated, around the world, and adds nothing but crunch to the plate.
It’s salad, and here are three main reasons why we need to rethink it.
Salad vegetables are pitifully low in nutrition. The biggest thing wrong with salads is lettuce, and the biggest thing wrong with lettuce is that it’s a leafy-green waste of resources….
It’s not just lettuce. Cucumbers, radishes, lettuce and celery are essentially just water, too. They are things that go crunch and fool people into thinking they are eating and not drinking.
My favorite line in the piece:
Lettuce is a vehicle to transport refrigerated water from farm to table….
Good one, huh? Well my wife read that, acknowledged that yes, lettuce is worthless (and it is to be noted that the salads she makes these days are made from more solid stuff), but then told me to take a gander at this:
Beef: The ”King” of the Big Water Footprints
When a Prince talks farming, you listen. This is nothing new for the GRACE food program folks, but as the “water guy,” that’s all I could think about shortly after reading Chris Hunt’s roundup (or “knowledge dump“) of the speakers and themes from May’s Future of Food conference. The “Prince” in question is sadly not his Purple Majesty but rather, Charles, the Prince of Wales, who issued a stern warning –and in the process stirred up a long simmering debate among Americans – that resonated with me because of its virtual water conservation message: Beef production and consumption are water intensive and a drain on our world water supplies.
According to His Royal Highness:
In a country like the United States, a fifth of all your grain production is dependent upon irrigation. For every pound of beef produced in the industrial system, it takes two thousand gallons of water. That is a lot of water and there is plenty of evidence that the Earth cannot keep up with the demand.
Quite resounding, old chap! While it’s a well-established fact that meat production requires more water than fruits, vegetables or grains, an average water footprint of 2,000 gallons per pound of beef is enormous indeed. You might be wondering how the water footprint of meat – using Prince Charles’s statistic – compares to the water footprints of other agricultural products…
I think she chose HRH as an authority because of my well-documented Anglophilia. (Right after 9/11, I put an American flag out by our front door, and I wanted to add a Union Jack, but she forebade it, on account of being Irish.)
But obviously, based on some of the choices he’s made in the past, the prince is not an infallible source.
That’s all I’ll say about that for now.
This release from SC Democrats reminded me of the Jeb Bush event I attended Monday evening:
SC Dems: “Jeb Bush’s Plan to Privatize Veterans Health Care Services Would Be a Disaster”Columbia, SC—The South Carolina Democratic Party released a statement from Beaufort County Democratic Party Chair and retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Blaine Lotz regarding former Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush campaigning in the Palmetto State today.“Jeb Bush’s plan to privatize veterans’ health care services would be a disaster for South Carolina veterans. As Governor of Florida, Bush proposed a similar plan that was so disastrous, it was replaced shortly after he left office. Jeb Bush continues to support outdated policies that prove as President, he would look out for his wealthy donors and special interests over our veterans and military families.”
###
What are they talking about?
Well, Bush had released several proposals with regard to veterans’ benefits on Monday, in advance of the Concerned Veterans for America event I attended over at Seawell’s. (I went basically to take my Dad there, who as a veteran was invited. We didn’t stay for all of it, which is one reason I didn’t write about it before now.) Here’s how Military Times described the proposals, in part:
Bush’s VA reform plan, to be unveiled later today in advance of an appearance with Concerned Veterans for America in South Carolina tonight, includes expanding “choice” options for care outside the department without cutting funding for VA hospitals and medical staff.
Instead, he promises that extra funds can be found through “cutting excess administrators (not caregivers)” and eliminating “billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse.” That includes more competitive bidding for department contracts and firing poorly performing employees.
“Ample resources exist within the VA budget to improve the quality and scope of care,” Bush’s policy paper states. “In other government agencies, common-sense reforms have saved billions. The VA must get its house in order and send savings into improving veteran choice and veteran care.”
He’s also promising better online health care access systems for veterans, calling existing offerings too cumbersome and outdated….
The video clip above shows him talking about his proposals — not in any detail. I just share it to give you some flavor of the event…
Bush speaking to veterans. For those of you who notice such things, Sen. John Courson is in the Marine Corps red shirt on the left-hand side of the image; Lt. Gov. Henry McMaster is seen at the extreme right. McMaster is backing Lindsey Graham; I don’t know where Courson stands.
I really haven’t had much time to pay attention to this today, but I thought I’d better put up a post for those of you who would like to comment on this major piece of good news (good news for the whole country, including the GOP, although they won’t admit it):
Affordable Care Act survives Supreme Court challenge
The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a key provision of the Affordable Care Act and in a broadly written opinion agreed with the Obama administration that government subsidies that make health insurance affordable for millions of Americans should be available to all who qualify.
By a 6-to-3 vote, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. reaffirmed the foundation of President Obama’s landmark domestic achievement and seemed to take the starch out of legal efforts to undermine the basic structure of the law. The ruling endorsed the administration’s view that subsidies should be available for all low- and moderate-income Americans wherever they live, not just in states that have set up their own health insurance exchanges.
The decision was broad enough that Obama claimed in a Rose Garden speech: “The Affordable Care Act is here to stay.”…
I saw this ad, being blasted on both sides of the Atlantic for its body-shaming message, and it reminded me: I weighed myself over the weekend, and it’s time to go back to the full paleo diet.
It’s not that I looked at this ad and decided I need to do something because I don’t look like the person in the picture. If I DID look like the person in the picture, I’d have a whole other set of problems — such as standing in front of a mirror looking at myself all day, which would hurt my productivity.
No, I was concerned about this before the picture. This just reminds me.
I’d been feeling like the waistbands of all my pants had shrunk for a couple of weeks now. After gorging myself on ribs Saturday night, I tried the scale at my parent’s house (we don’t have one at home), and it was as I suspected: 181.6 pounds.
That doesn’t sound like much for a guy who’s a fraction under six feet, does it? But it is, particularly if you’ve always had a skinny frame. A guy with a skinny frame doesn’t look good with a gut. And a guy with a skinny frame who weighs more than 180 has a gut.
I looked it up. This chart says that if I have a “light” frame, I should weigh 146-157. If I have a “medium” frame, it’s 154-166. I don’t know what’s perfect for me, but the last time I had really been working out heavily for awhile and felt in super-good shape, I was somewhere in the 160s. You know, in the range for wrestling Shute.
A year ago, I was around 170, maybe a trifle under if I took off my shoes. I was working out every morning, a hard 40 minutes on the elliptical (“The West Wing” on Netflix was helping with that”). I was eating strictly paleo — no grains of any kind, no potatoes, no legumes, just meat, fruit and non-legume vegetables. It’s not the most in-shape I’ve ever been, but it felt good.
I need to get back there.
I don’t know why I’m telling all of y’all this, except that if I say it out loud and have witnesses, maybe I’ll actually do it.
My friend Clare Morris was engaged at the very last moment to help promote this event, and asked me to give it a mention on my blog. So here goes:
On Thursday, April 30, 2015, participating restaurants will donate a portion of their sales to the S.C. HIV AIDS Council. The proceeds will benefit our educational outreach efforts in the Midlands. We hope you are very hungry!
Grab your family and friends and make plans to “dine out” for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and “fight AIDS” on Thursday, April 30th!
For more information about the S.C. HIV AIDS Council visitwww.schivaidscouncil.org.
Here’s a list of participating restaurants.
Here’s hoping Mayor Bob gets better quickly:
Doctors are performing tests, including a catheterization, to check for heart blockages after former Columbia Mayor Bob Cable was rushed to a local hospital Wednesday afternoon.
Coble was alert and in good spirits, with family and friends by his side, about 4:30 p.m., said Kevin Floyd, communications manager with the Nexsen Pruet law firm, where Coble works.
John Sowards, the firm’s chairman, said Coble was “feeling poorly in the morning at some committee hearings and that did not get better.” As the day went on, he checked in with State House healthcare staff and, as a precaution, they summoned an ambulance.
That was about 2 p.m.
Well, I went to give platelets at the Red Cross yesterday, and I answered “yes” to the question about whether I’d been out of the country in the past three years, and that led to a long discussion about just where I had been.
Turns out, it wasn’t a problem that I was in Thailand per se. The Red Cross breaks it down much more locally than that, and the problem was that one of the many places we visited in Thailand was listed as posing a risk of malaria.
That was Kanchanaburi. Those of you who were following me on social media may have already seen the above picture of me taken in that town. I’m standing in front of “the” Bridge On the River Kwai, which while it’s not the one from the movie (the movie was fictional, based on a novel inspired by the real-life Death Railway), actually is where the still-active rail line first laid by slave labor (Allied POWs and civilians) under the Japanese crosses the Kwai.
As you can see, I’m looking pretty grubby. If the Red Cross knew everything I’d done that day, they really would have worried. I had spent most of the day with elephants — feeding them by hand, bathing them in the river, and riding them. Taking a midday break from elephant care, we had floated down the Kwai, way out in the country, for 40 minutes, without a boat. Just life vests. Very refreshing.
(We were at this really neat place a few miles out of town that rescues elephants from the logging industry and from begging in the streets, and enlists tourists to help in their daily care. This was the thing my daughter had most wanted to do while we were with her in Thailand, and it did not disappoint.)
Then, on the way back to the resort in Kanchanaburi, I realized we were passing close to the Bridge, which I had only seen in the dark, the night before. So I asked someone to rap on the back of the cab of the songthaew we were riding in, and hopped off alone to go check out the bridge.
I ran into three American veterans from Bangkok who were painting the base of a memorial to the Americans who had died building the railway. The wife of one of them took the above picture.
But I digress. The point is, I can’t give for a year. So some of y’all will have to take up the slack…
Here I’m feeding bananas to a rather elderly elephant named Wasana. She’s about 65 years old and a fairly slow eater for an elephant — so it took a little patience.
Right now, it’s leading most national and international news reports:
Which got me to thinking….
In our society, we make quite a fetish of medical privacy. Which makes me wonder — if we were all more open about our health conditions, including our psychological conditions, and didn’t have a legal climate that made disclosing patient information a cardinal sin for providers, might it prevent tragedies such as this one?
I’m not saying I have any idea how to bring that about — it’s so ingrained in us as a significant value. And true, it’s not every day that a pilot deliberately flies a plane full of people into a mountain.
It’s just an idle thought, and probably a complete non sequitur…
That’s what I thought of when I saw these competing comments as I was cleaning out email from when I was gone.
First, from Lindsey Graham:
Obamacare’s Five-Year Anniversary
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) today issued the following statement on Obamacare five years after it was signed into law.
“Obamacare isn’t getting better with age.
“Five years after it became law, we’ve seen millions of Americans lose the health care coverage they were promised they could keep, while many other Americans have had their work hours and incomes reduced because of Obamacare. I’ve opposed Obamacare from Day One and oppose it still today. I believe we should ‘Repeal and Replace’ or allow Americans to ‘Opt-Out’ of Obamacare as I fear the worst is still to come.”
#####
Then, from Jim Clyburn:
CLYBURN STATEMENT ON 5TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT
WASHINGTON – U.S. House Assistant Democratic Leader James E. Clyburn delivered the following statement today on the Capitol steps about the fifth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act:
“Speaking at an international health care conference in 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” I profoundly agree with that view. Affordable access to quality health care should not depend on the circumstances of one’s birth.
“More than five years ago, during House debate on the Affordable Care Act, I labeled it “the Civil Rights Act of the 21st Century,” and I am pleased and very proud that the law is living up to that moniker.
“Under the ACA, insurance companies can no longer discriminate against the 129 million Americans who have pre-existing conditions. 105 million Americans no longer have a lifetime limit on their health coverage. No longer can women be penalized by insurance companies simply for being women. Thanks to the ACA, 16 million Americans who were previously uninsured finally have the security of health insurance for their families.
“Despite repeated Republican claims that the ACA would kill jobs, our economy is creating jobs at the fastest rate since the 1990s. So, as we gather to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, I’ve got a message to our Republican friends: The Affordable Care Act is the law of the land. Let’s work together to make it better.”’
– 30 –
Kinda hard to believe they’re looking at the same animal, isn’t it?
Just want to make sure you don’t miss Cindi Scoppe’s column today. The headline in the paper was “The anti-Medicaid argument unmasked.” It’s a bit more descriptive online: “What does it mean that SC Gov Nikki Haley’s chief anti-Medicaid lobbyist has changed his tune to match his new job?” (Which, of course, would not have fit in the paper.)
An excerpt:
THE POST and Courier had an article the other day about the conversion of Tony Keck, who served as Gov. Nikki Haley’s chief Medicaid-expansion opponent before he left last year to take a job with a Tennessee hospital system that, like pretty much any hospital system in the country, supports the Medicaid expansion that he worked so hard to block on this side of the border.
Under the headline “Former Haley health care adviser says Medicaid expansion might work elsewhere,” the article noted that Mr. Keck’s new employer supported the recent attempt to expand the program in Tennessee, and it quoted Mr. Keck as saying that expanding Medicaid to cover more people under Obamacare “might be the best choice for some states, and it might not be in other states.”
And you could just feel Medicaid supporters in our state rising up in smug unison to cry out “Hypocrite!” Sort of like they did when he first landed his new gig, only louder…
You have to understand that Keck was important to selling the completely bankrupt notion that South Carolina shouldn’t expand Medicaid, and get a huge windfall from the feds to provide medical care to South Carolinians — not to mention providing a lot of good jobs at hospitals.
Keck was portrayed as this whiz kid who could back up the Tea Party article of blind faith (and blind hostility to anything branded “Obama”) with what sounded to a lot of people like compelling fact.
But now that his bread is buttered on the other side, he has discovered that Medicaid expansion is a good thing for “some states.” Such as the one where he’s working now.
Yep, it’s a good thing for “some states,” all right. Such as South Carolina, and the other 49. And it always was.
“Some states” and not others? Really? What a bunch of hooey. Another excerpt:
… Mr. Keck was the respectable face of Gov. Nikki Haley’s purely partisan, and tea-partian, opposition to a program that, by any honest analysis, would be good for our state. Maybe not for our nation — and maybe that’s how we ought to look at it — but clearly good for our state, which is how our legislators normally look at such things.
Mr. Keck was the outside expert, the wunderkind our governor wooed away from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration, who understood public health and public-health finances. The person who could make a respectable argument that didn’t sound like warmed-over talking points from the National Republican Committee or FOX News. Certainly that’s why I always liked and respected him, even though I disagreed with him.
But it turns out that for all of his expertise, he was, first and foremost, a hired hand. The guy hawking Big Macs not because he liked them best but because he worked for McDonalds. The guy waving the pom-poms for Medicaid rejection not because that was what was best for our state — or at least not primarily because of that — but because that’s what the boss was selling….
But that’s not the bad part. You know what the bad part is? That now that there is no pretense about the fact that the anti-Medicaid emperor never had on a stitch of clothing, we are still stuck with no Medicaid expansion.
Why? Because Nikki Haley, and too many of her allies, don’t care what the facts are. They don’t want South Carolinians receiving this benefit, and that’s that.
We seldom find startling state political news in the paper on a Monday, because things don’t work that way in South Carolina. (Actually, not all that much happens on Sundays in Washington, either, although the Sunday talking-head shows sometimes create an illusion of activity.)
So it was a pleasant surprise to see this on the front page of The State today:
Eleanor Kitzman withdraws her name as DHEC agency head candidate
sfretwell@thestate.comFebruary 22, 2015 Updated 14 hours ago
The search for a new S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control director will be reopened now that Eleanor Kitzman has chosen not to seek the position.
Kitzman withdrew her name Sunday from consideration as DHEC director, just three days after being grilled by Democratic state senators about her lack of experience and conflicting statements they said she had made….
Actually, in a sense, the search won’t be “reopened.” It will begin for the first time, since the DHEC board conducted no search — it simply went with the governor’s pal without seeking other resumes.
It will be interesting to see whether the board does its job this time. And of course, I’m defining “do its job” as something other than saying “how high?” when the governor says “Jump!”
Oh, and I’m also anxious to find out the answer to this lingering question:
It was not clear Sunday night whether Kitzman would keep a temporary $74-per-hour job given to her by the agency’s acting director until the confirmation process was completed…
There were a number of weird things about this situation, and that was one of the weirdest. Or “is” one of the weirdest, if she doesn’t quit that job…
And, if so, is that a bad thing?
To see what I’m talking about, you’ll have to follow the link; I couldn’t find an embed code.
I thought about posting about this over the weekend, but didn’t. My mind was brought back to it by this piece in The Wall Street Journal this morning.
Bret Stephens harrumphed as follows:
George Washington did not shake hands as president and would grip the hilt of his sword to avoid having his flesh pressed. The founding father understood that leadership in a republic demanded a careful balance between low populism and aristocratic lordliness. Personal comportment, the choice of clothes and carriage, modes of address: these things mattered. And so we have “Mr. President” as opposed to “His Highness.” Or “George.”
With Barack Obama —you won’t mind, Señor Presidente, if we call you Barry?—it’s another story. Dignity of office? How quaint. In this most self-infatuated of presidencies, the D-word is at best an accessory and more often an impediment to everything Barry has ever wanted to be: Cool. Chill. Connected.
So it was that, hours after the U.S. confirmed the murder of Kayla Jean Mueller at the hands of Islamic State, Mr. Obama filmed a short video for BuzzFeed, striking poses in a mirror, donning aviator shades, filming himself with a selfie stick and otherwise inhabiting a role that a chaster version of Miley Cyrus might have played had Hannah Montana been stuck in the White House after a sleepover with the Obama girls.
Ostensibly, the point of the video was to alert BuzzFeed’s audience to the Feb. 15 deadline for ObamaCare enrollment. If communicating with 20-somethings as if they are 11-year-olds is a way to get them to behave like grown-ups, then maybe the White House has at last found a way to make good on its make-believe enrollment numbers….
Now, you know, I’m normally not one to be out-harrumphed. I can be as stuffy as the next guy; probably more so if he’s not quite the thing. Today at the board of governors meeting at my club we had a stimulating conversation about the dress code, and while I didn’t actually join in, it’s because I was too busy holding myself back from saying “Quite right!” and “Capital!” at all the more Tory comments from others.
But I don’t know about this. While I quite take Mr. Stephens’ point that it’s absurd to communicate “with 20-somethings as if they are 11-year-olds,” I also applaud pragmatism in a leader. And if this is the way you have to communicate with them — well, one does what one must.
Thoughts?
I want to thank the newbie senator from North Carolina for taking some of the heat off South Carolina:
Apparently, making restaurant workers wash their hands before exiting the bathroom is a sign of regulation gone overboard.
At least that’s what Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina suggested on Monday during a discussion at the Bipartisan Policy Center. When discussing onerous regulations on business, Tillis brought up hand-washing rules at eateries to illustrate his point.
“I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy,” Tillis said, “as long as they post a sign that says, ‘We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom.’ The market will take care of that.”
“That’s probably one where every business that did that would go out of business,” he noted. “But I think it’s good to illustrate the point that that’s the sort of mentality that we need to have to reduce the regulatory burden on this country.”…
Which caused the audience to laugh, but the senator wasn’t kidding. (To his credit, he did laugh when the moderator closed by saying, “I’m not sure I want to shake your hand…”)
Yes, I know that some of my good friends here also hold libertarian views, but even they should be able to recognize the illogic in what the senator is saying.
Maybe I’m not fully following this, but the senator doesn’t want the nanny government to infringe upon restaurant owners’ freedom to the point of requiring them to require their employees to wash their hands. But he would require (at least, he implies that he would require it) the businesses that opt out of such a requirement to post a sign that, in his own judgment, would ruin those businesses.
Also note that this extreme example of how to do without onerous regulation was not forced upon him. He brought it up as a case that was “good to illustrate the point” he was trying to make.
I also thought it was interesting that he thinks ours is “one of the most regulated nations in the history of the planet.” I didn’t realize that the E.U. was not located on the planet Earth, although sometimes it might seem like it.
All of this said, the senator seems like an affable sort of guy who wants to be reasonable and sound reasonable, but his ideology gets in the way.
Oh, as for Jon Stewart, here’s what he did say about “Mr. Ayn Rand 2015″…
OK, we already knew that Eleanor Kitzman’s main qualification for the job of DHEC director was that she’s a passionately loyal Nikki Haley supporter.
And we’ve seen her be handed another job at the agency so she doesn’t have to wait around on Senate confirmation to start collecting a paycheck. (Admittedly, it’s as a mere hourly employee — one who makes $74 an hour, that is.)
And now there’s this:
The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control board did not seek applications from anyone to fill the agency director’s job before voting to hire former state insurance chief Eleanor Kitzman, a campaign contributor to Republican Gov. Nikki Haley.
In response to an open records request from The State newspaper, DHEC said Thursday that while the board talked about several potential candidates, “no applications were requested or submitted.” The department thought Kitzman was the best person for the position, an agency statement said.
The State newspaper’s request, filed under the Freedom of Information Act, sought copies of job applications for the post vacated Jan. 8 by Catherine Templeton.
But agency spokeswoman Cassandra Harris and Freedom of Information Office director Karla York said they did not have any to provide. Only Kitzman’s resume was provided to the newspaper….
How many more ways can this nomination get weird?
I got a bit of whiplash reading the opinion section on my Washington Post app over the weekend.
I saw this headline, “End Obamacare, and people could die. That’s okay.” Beyond that, all I could see without clicking on the link was part of this opening sentence: “Say conservatives have their way with Obamacare, and the Supreme Courtdeals it a death blow or a Republican president repeals it in 2017.”
And I thought, Oh boy, some liberal is engaging in standard partisan hyperbole, trying to make us think that those horrible Republicans think it’s OK that people would die if Obamacare were repealed. Sheesh.
And then, I clicked on the link, and the first thing I saw was that the author of the column, Michael R. Strain, “is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.” And I thought, Wow, that’s counterintuitive, for someone from AEI to be castigating Republicans for wanting to end Obamacare. AEI must represent a broader spectrum of viewpoints than I had thought. I wonder if this guy gets ostracized by the OTHER “resident scholars,” or do they respect his take on things? If such a piece is coming from AEI, it must really be interesting…
And then, I started reading. And quickly realized there was no irony or hyperbole involved here. This guy was serious. He really was saying that people will die if Obamacare goes away, and that that’s OK. What’s left of Jonathan Swift must be rolling over about now.
Here is the operative passage:
During the health-care debates of 2009, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) brought a poster on the House floor: “The Republican Health Care Plan: Die Quickly.” In the summer of 2012, when Obamacare was threatened by a presidential election, writer Jonathan Alter argued that “repeal equals death. People will die in the United States if Obamacare is repealed.” Columnist Jonathan Chait wrote recently that those who may die are victims of ideology — “collateral damage” incurred in conservatives’ pursuit “of a larger goal.” If these are the stakes, many liberals argue, then ending Obamacare is immoral.
Except, it’s not.
In a world of scarce resources, a slightly higher mortality rate is an acceptable price to pay for certain goals — including more cash for other programs, such as those that help the poor; less government coercion and more individual liberty; more health-care choice for consumers, allowing them to find plans that better fit their needs; more money for taxpayers to spend themselves; and less federal health-care spending. This opinion is not immoral. Such choices are inevitable. They are made all the time.
He goes on, of course, to explain that what he means is that we make decisions that result in people dying all the time. For instance, if we really didn’t want anyone to die in a traffic accident, speed limits would be set at 10 mph. But we make a tradeoff.
And of course, our healthcare payment system makes decisions not to pay for potentially life-saving care all the time. That was what was so ridiculous about the overheated rhetoric from the right about “death panels” — did Sarah Palin et al. not see that insurance companies, in their bids to hold down costs, have long acted as “death panels”?
But still, I was startled. One seldom sees the case for death made so openly…
Palmetto Health Foundation calls our attention to this WIS story:
COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) – Palmetto Health Richland has a new weapon in the fight against breast cancer and it’s the first in the state to have such a device.
The tool, an Automated Whole Breast Ultrasound, can help detect more cancers that are sometimes missed when patients get mammograms.
The device was made possible due to the Midlands community who annually raises awareness of the disease…. The $200,000 cost of the ultrasound machine was paid for with funds from the Palmetto Health Foundation and Walk for Life/Race for Life….
So thanks again to all of y’all who contributed to the blog Walk for Life team!
I don’t normally celebrate family birthdays here on the blog, but since my youngest is so far away, in Thailand, and I don’t even get to see her on her birthday, I feel the need to do something out of the ordinary.
So here’s an update on her sojourn in the Far East, in celebration of her birthday today — which is already yesterday where she is. I understand that she spent part of her birthday teaching a classroom full of kids how to tell time. I asked whether she tried to explain time zones. She said no, they’re having enough trouble with a.m. and p.m.
Above, you see her and a fellow Peace Corps volunteer at a World AIDS Day conference in Bangkok. Now I ask you: Who could be opposed to a government so small and friendly and pleasant as this? At another point in this same day, the young ladies were handing out free condoms in the street (at right). Something which caused me some anxiety. “Handing out condoms to strangers on a street in Bangkok” doesn’t exactly top the list of things we Dads recommend as approved activities for our young daughters. But it was a good cause and all, and it went OK, and I didn’t find out about it until after the fact…
Another favorite recent photo is below, which she captioned thusly: “They finally dressed me up like the Thai princess that I am on the inside!”
