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Saturday, March 31, 2007 - 18:49:39
Shall we?
Invite all comments?Recent trip to the Far East?
From the Wall Street Journal:
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson faces a sartorial problem partly due to his ever-fluctuating weight. He insists on buttoning his suit jacket, which often looks like it's about to burst open. "It's pretty obvious we don't have an image consultant," says spokesman Guillermo Meneses.Republican hopeful Mike Huckabee had to replace his entire wardrobe after being diagnosed with diabetes in 2003 and shedding more than 100 pounds.
He now favors two handmade suits he purchased on a recent trip to the Far East. "Oh, maybe I wasn't supposed to say that,'' says spokeswoman Alice Stewart. "Buy American, you know.''
I hope this doesn't mean he's traveling with that strange Indian evangelist K.A. Paul again.
Rats leave the sinking ship
Bush insider, Matthew Dowd, belated discovers the emperor has no clothes.
Looking back, Mr. Dowd now says his faith in Mr. Bush was misplaced.
In a wide-ranging interview here, Mr. Dowd called for a withdrawal from Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s leadership.
He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached governing with a “my way or the highway” mentality reinforced by a shrinking circle of trusted aides.
There used to be a crude saying in my high school in response to blasts of insight such as this. No s***, Sherlock.
It's integrity, stupid
Bud Cummins, writing in Salon, says the Bush Justice Department has blown it.
You only get one chance to hold on to your credibility. My team, which holds temporary custody of the Department of Justice, has blown it in this case.
Rumor and innuendo -- UPDATE
A couple of unrelated, wholly unsubstantiated bits of rumor going around so widely that I thought I'd ask what others had heard.
1) Former legislator Joyce Elliott is in line to head the state Health Department after Gov. Mike Beebe exercises his option to split it off from Human Services.
2) The special Little Rock School Board meeting last week was fraught with significance. It was cancelled because two members were unavailable to meet. Unhappiness with Superintendent Roy Brooks may be coming to a head. It would take four votes to fire him or come up with a buyout offer. Such an action would bring the grief of important business people, such as the daily newspaper publisher, down on the head of the district, with probably damaging public relations consequences. On the other hand, the story also goes that some of those same influential people are working to make friends of members they've opposed previously.
UPDATE: A health professional I respect offers the following thoughts on the Health Department:
Public health is a professional discipline, not a bureaucratic function. Ark funds a fraction of what other states provide per capita to run the Health Department, and the agency stretches Centers for Disease Control and other dollars to provide what should be state core functions. Halverson (currently leading the Health division of DHHS) wrote THE book for the American Public Health Association on state and local public health, and has Steve Bodigheimer from CDC in admin-- good guys.
Traumatized
A doctor who backs legislation to raise insurance taxes to pay for a statewide trauma system writes a letter to me and others about the failure, so far, to get this legislation passed. The problem has been the money source -- the insurance industry doesn't want a tax increase; a court system where court costs are already overburdened with all kinds of special fees didn't want payment done that way. A fair question is why a session with $900 million in surplus, and a 10 percent general budget increase even after cutting a quarter-of-a-billion in sales taxes and corporate welfare out the wazoo, including for low-wage manufacturing plants, can't provide this money without a tax/fee increase.
Dr. Joseph Jensen's letter and a hospital association note on the jump. (One clarification: though UAMS is not currently accredited as a trauma center, he has previously assured me that it would be if it applied for accreditation.)
It might be worth noting that UAMS seems to have placed a higher priority on its cancer research center expansion than on this project, if success in the search for money is any measure.