MALE PATTERN FITNESS: Politics Archives

March 22, 2007

Thursday Blog Meat: Satan, P&G Had no Operational Relationship; U.S. Defends Decision to Invade Anyway

As Rannoch Donald said when he sent this link, "unfuckingbelievable":

The Devil is not in league with global consumer brand Procter & Gamble, a U.S. court has ruled. P&G won a $19 million lawsuit against four distributors of rival Amway over rumors tying it to Satanism.

The court concluded a 12-year lawsuit in P&G's favour, after it ruled that the four had spread a false accusation that P&G subsidised Satanic cults. The case is one of several unfair competition suits P&G has brought refuting the Satanism slurs.

According to P&G, the four distributors had passed on to customers the notion that its logo -- featuring a bearded man looking over a field of 13 stars -- was a symbol of Satan.

According to Snopes.com, the bearded-guy logo was trademarked in 1851, and the 13 stars represented the country's original 13 colonies. I found that in five seconds. So why did it take a court 12 years to sort it out?

How much wood would a right-handed pitcher chop ...

This story about ballplayers' unusual off-season training programs is a fun read.

I got that link from Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus, who in the same entry linked to this, a loving compendium of HBWs: hot baseball wives.

If you can't do the time, you'd better hope you're attractive enough to sway the jury against sentencing you to do time

This isn't much of a surprise:

Juries trying criminal cases are likely to be more lenient when the person in the dock is physically attractive, psychologists say.
Scientists gave a fictitious transcript of a mugging to 96 volunteers, along with a photograph of the defendant.

The York and Bath Spa universities team found the jurors were less likely to find attractive defendants guilty. ... Unattractive black defendants were given the harshest sentences, irrespective of the ethnicity of the "juror."

So if you're an unattractive black guy, try to stay out of trouble. Or play in the NBA.

Global warming? Yeah, that sounds scary. But what about Al Gore's waistline?

I understand that people want to speculate on whether or not Al Gore's going to run for the presidency. And I understand that someone connected to Hillary Clinton said they'd start worrying about him if it looked like he was losing weight. And I fully understand that right-wing hacks like Glenn Beck are going to take their shots at the guy no matter what he does.

What amazes me, though, is how many fat guys -- including the megachinned Beck -- are yukking it up over Gore's waistline. Even on the relatively liberal MSNBC, Chris Matthews and David Shuster took their shots.

Shuster looks to me as if he's gained 10 pounds in his face alone since I've been watching Hardball. Check out his bio picture, then look at this recent clip. Even on the tiny screen, you can see his surplus chin flesh bobbing along like a milk jug on the ocean.

So why are all these guys spending so much time talking about Al Gore's weight? Especially when Gore isn't even pretending to be running for office, and in fact lays out such stringent anti-global-warming measures that he couldn't possibly by elected?

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:30 AM | Comments (1)

March 07, 2007

Tom Cruise Is Trying to Bring Down the Republic

Has anyone else noticed that Tom Cruise is linked to just about every major political scandal of the past three years?

This morning I was reading a recap of the Scooter Libby trial, written by one of the jurors, when I saw this reference:

Cruise's upcoming visit to the Office of the VP to discuss Scientologists in Germany was one of the 27 items in the June 14, 2003 briefing [Craig] Schmall gave to Libby. The more important item was a note on that day's table of contents. "The Amb told this was a VP office question?" "Joe Wilson" "Valerie Wilson." The note was written by Schmall, who said his practice was to make note of topics introduced by Libby for possible follow up at the CIA. That testimony would indicate Libby was aware of Valerie Wilson nearly a month before he claims to have first heard her name from Tim Russert.

Inconsistencies: A few of us bring up Schmall's January 8, 2004 FBI interview. At that time he said he first discussed the matter of Mrs. Wilson only after Robert Novak's July 14 article.

Schmall amended that after finding the table of contents from the earlier briefing with the "Joe Wilson" "Valerie Wilson" note. That, and the Tom Cruise item, refreshed his memory. "Mr. Libby was a little excited. I was excited."

If all that seems like gibberish to you, remember this key point: Scooter Libby and a career CIA employee named Craig Schmall were excited about meeting Tom Cruise, and their excitement over meeting him becomes a point of reference in the most important criminal trial in Washington since Iran-Contra.

So that's scandal #1.

Scandal #2 is the fiasco over the eight U.S. attorneys who were fired for what appears, in some cases, to be their reluctance to use their offices for purely partisan purposes.

Most prominent among the fired attorneys is David Iglesias, a former Navy lawyer who was one of the models for Tom Cruise's character in A Few Good Men.

Scandal #3 involves another character Cruise played, the hot-shot fighter pilot in Top Gun. I've read and heard over the years that the character, Maverick, was based on real-life fighter pilot Duke Cunningham, who's better known today as the most corrupt congressman in U.S. history.

Alas, that story isn't true.

Cunningham was indeed a cocky asshole, but the specific cocky asshole in Top Gun wasn't based on him. Hard as it is to believe, a Hollywood screenwriter came up with the idea of making the lead character in a major movie a cocky asshole without having to base him on any real-life cocky asshole.

But it does make me wonder what role Cruise might've played in other scandals, or might play in future ones.

Maybe the bartender in Cocktail was based on a real-life mixologist who got all the Watergate conspirators drunk the night of the break-in, causing them to botch it and bring down a president.

Maybe the kid in Risky Business was based on Brett Wilkes, a defense contractor who provided Duke Cunningham (remember, he's the guy who wasn't the inspiration for Maverick) with hookers.

And, what the hell, maybe Charlie Babbitt, the unscrupulous businessman Cruise played in Rain Man, was based on Scooter Libby himself. Makes as much sense as anything.

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:29 AM | Comments (3)

February 28, 2007

The Juice is Goosed

I'm on deadline and had no plans to blog today, but the headlines are just too good.

You probably know about the big steroid/growth hormone bust in Florida.

Two specific names have been linked to the raid: Gary Matthews Jr., who had a career year for Texas in 2006 and signed a $50 million contract with the Angels this offseason; and a team physician for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

But what really caught my eye is the new paperback version of Game of Shadows, the book that showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Barry Bonds hadn't just used steroids, he'd used them in massive doses.

Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci offers some of the fresh dirt in the new version:

My favorite fact: the authors detail in their afterword the freakish growth of Bonds' body parts in his years with the Giants: from size 42 to a size 52 jersey; from size 10 1/2 to size 13 cleats; and from a size 7 1/8 to size 7 1/4 cap, even though he had taken to shaving his head.

"The changes in his foot and head size," they write, "were of special interest: medical experts said overuse of human growth hormone could cause an adult's extremities to begin growing, aping the symptoms of the glandular disorder acromegaly."

I'm a sucker for a good acromegaly reference. Photos here.

Wonderful you

In related news, a new study says that college students are more vain than in previous generations:

Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," "I think I am a special person" and "I can live my life any way I want to."

The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students' NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.

This is my favorite part:

The study asserts that narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors."

Twenge, the author of Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable Than Ever Before, said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favor self-promotion over helping others.

Now, I don't mind if a researcher publishes a major study with the goal of validating a conclusion she's already reached in a book she's already published. But I wonder if she's pointing her accusing finger in the right directions.

For example, she blames the "self-esteem movement" of the 1980s as being responsible for this epidemic of narcissism, along with more permissive parenting. So, clearly, it's the fault of the hippies and parents, especially, I assume, hippies who then became parents.

But couldn't someone argue that powerful forces in society are more responsible than a bunch of pacifist utopians whom none of us paid much attention to in the first place?

For example, could the fact that good-looking people make more money play into an increase in self-consciousness about one's looks?

Could the fact that even relatively prosperous people feel increasing anxiety about their economic security have an effect on their kids, making them focus more on wealth and fame than on goals that might contribute something useful to society?

No, no, talking about that stuff would cause too many of us to question our assumptions about the direction our country has taken in the past quarter-century. It makes us wonder if perhaps we've placed too much emphasis on wealth and status and not enough on what used to be called the common good. It makes us reassess our worship of presidents like Reagan and Clinton, who were celebrated for unleashing the forces of prosperity, and makes us wonder why in the world our celebrity journalists poked such vicious fun at Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, the only two political leaders in a generation who stood for anything besides unmitigated greed and personal power.

No, we can't think along those lines. We can't stop and wonder who decided it was so important to focus on Al Gore's wardrobe and waistline in the 2000 election campaign, rather than on what he might actually do for the country as its chief executive. Or on what his opponent might not do (pay attention to warnings about imminent terrorist attacks, for example).

It's a lot easier to just blame the hippies. They're too busy tending to their patchouli to even notice.

Posted by LouSchuler at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)

February 01, 2007

Karma

When you meet someone new, one of the most important steps in the mating ritual is learning the new person's stories. With my wife and me, the exchange of stories was especially crucial, since we had so much in common. We were attending the same creative-writing program, we were both Midwesterners who had graduated from journalism schools in adjacent states, and we were both coming out of relationships that had taught us exactly what we didn't want from future partners.

The foundation stories are about family, of course. The next tier of stories is about past relationships. But because of our similar backgrounds, the work-related stories were some of the most important in establishing how we'd gotten to the place where we met.

She was impressed by fact that I was the bad guy in one of my own stories, about how I got fired from my part-time sportswriting job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

I was covering high school sports, and I just wasn't any good at it. I discovered the hard way that there's a world of difference between being someone who's a sports buff and former participant, and someone who can go into the locker room and interview coaches and athletes after a game and write a story that captures the action and emotion of the contest without making the losers of that contest look like ... well, losers.

It was a story that didn't make me look good in any way, except for the fact that I came out it understanding I was ill-suited for that type of reporting. She found my lack of victimhood refreshing.

Some of her work stories -- by no means the most important, just ones she threw out there -- were about her career as a reporter at the Los Angeles Daily News, which struck me as a comically dysfunctional place to work. A few of those stories included an editor named Doug Dowie, a pure nightmare of a boss. He was a former marine who just didn't get that reporters don't respond well to bullying and humiliation.

Here's why I bring all that up:

Kimberly got a phone call yesterday from a former colleague who told her that Dowie had been sentenced to 42 months behind bars because of his role in defrauding the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power out of a half-million dollars in bogus billing fees.

The details aren't particularly important, unless you live in L.A. and are sick of politicians and other con artists treating your city as an ATM. (And of course you get find the details by clicking on the link above or this one.)

The key piece of the backstory is that Dowie had become a public-relations executive and Big Swinging Dick in L.A. politics after he left the Daily News. That's how he was in a position to defraud the city.

This is the part that Kimberly pointed out to me, with some sense of payback:

Feess [the judge who sentenced him] singled out Dowie for relentlessly pushing subordinates ... until they committed crimes while he insulated himself by not looking at the bills they fraudulently inflated.

The judge said Dowie, a self-styled tough ex-Marine, used intimidation, ridicule and humiliation when he needed to satisfy corporate demands on the L.A. public-relations office.

"Mr. Dowie was going to use those techniques if that was what was needed to hit those numbers. He talks about battlefield honor ... but loyalty is a two-way street from commander to grunt, and from grunt to commander," said Feess, whose father was a Marine.

Feess said Dowie has failed to come to grips with his actions and has displayed a "degree of cynicism" that Feess has seldom encountered.

It's also worth noting that this story appeared in Dowie's former paper, and was written by one of his former employees.

Sometimes the worst people you encounter really do get their comeuppance.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:09 AM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2006

A Dispatch from the Trans-Cupcake Wars

Some days I question my competence as a blogger. I call MPF "the official weblog of the American obesity epidemic," but when a story comes along that's right in my wheelhouse -- like the trans-fat ban in New York City -- I can't work up the energy to care about it.

I'm not in favor of trans fats, but I do cringe when governments get involved in nutrition debates. Historically, they tend to jump in on the wrong side. Look at the original Food Guide Pyramid, for example. It was a virtual prescription for diabetes, and yet the U.S. Department of Agriculture continued to promote it long after we knew about the dangers of large quantities of refined carbohydrates.

The only good thing you can say about the pyramid is that the government never forced anyone to follow it.

Don't get me wrong; I don't think any harm will come from banning trans fats. But it's worth noting how we ended up with so many trans fats in our foods in the first place.

Here's one example: Companies like McDonald's used to cook French fries in beef tallow. But, because of the fear of animal fats in general and saturated fats in particular, they were pressured to switch to vegetable oil. The type they chose was partially hydrogenated soybean oil, which includes a trans fat called elaidic acid, and what looked like a win for nutritional virtue turned into a major loss. (And that was before McDonald's started supersizing.)

As Mike Roussell points out in this T-nation column, some trans fats occur naturally in beef, and are actually good for us. Our bodies convert these fats to CLA, which is currently thought to reduce body fat. So the debate isn't as simple as it looks.

My other concern about banning trans fats in our nation's media capital is that it gives ammunition to all the people who don't want anything to be regulated. (Trust me, they'll use this mostly symbolic trans-fat ban to drum up fear of universal health care, which will be a major issue in the 2008 elections and beyond.)

I don't mind setting those people off if we're talking about a legitimate public-health issue, like smoking in public buildings. But it's hard for me to imagine how my health is improved by the fact the guy next to me in a New York City restaurant can no longer order foods fried in partially hydrogenated soybean oil.

But there is a current nutrition debate that hits closer to home:

Once a cupcake wasn't something to think about. It was just what your mom brought to school for your birthday. But this year, as schools across the country begin enforcing new federally mandated "wellness policies," many are banning the little treats. And parents are fighting back.

When the principal at George Mason Elementary School in Alexandria explained to the PTA earlier this year that cupcakes were out, a furor erupted.

"A lot of people are really angry," said Karen Epperson, a George Mason parent. "They think this is really stupid."

What the Washington Post story doesn't say is that cupcakes are only a small part of the problem in today's schools. If your kid is in a classroom with 25 other kids, she's not only getting birthday cupcakes a couple dozen times each school year, she's also getting treats to celebrate every freakin' holiday imaginable. Even on Halloween, when the kids are just hours away from storming the streets and coming back with pumpkin-loads of candy, they get bags of it at school. Valentine's Day is an orgy of hardened, blood-red globs of pure sugar. I'm waiting for them to come home with candy pitchforks because someone wanted to celebrate Bastille Day.

(Okay, that wouldn't happen, since Bastille Day is July 14, when kids are home for the summer, whining about having nothing to do, which is how they prepare for the 9-month school year, when they whine about having too much to do. And, okay, there isn't much call for acknowledging French holidays in the U.S. these days. But if it were in March instead of July, I'll bet some kid would bring in something baked or sugar-coated to celebrate it.)

The upshot of all this is described by a commenter on Kevin Drum's blog:

You try to raise a non-obese, relatively healthy kid and you do okay until they hit kindergarten. Between the cupcake days, the party days, and the "specials" (teacher's day, Arbor Day, whatever), there's hardly a day that isn't loaded with extra artificial food coloring, high fructose corn syrup and fat. And then we wonder why the kids all misbehave. Blue, tattooed "froot" leather does not occur anywhere in nature! But try to tell that to most parents.

Seriously, parents will get near violent with you when you suggest at an average suburban school that maybe we should just have one cupcake/candy/sweet-treats day a month, or otherwise limit sweets. So, you can tell your kid that she can sit in the corner and eat her grapes and carrots while her friend passes out the Sponge Bob froot snacks. You can harp on the teacher. Or you can take it to the [PTA] where they will roll their eyes at you.

That's pretty accurate. But there's yet another level of absurdity here: At the same time the parents are fighting to keep cupcakes in the schools, the schools are wringing their hands over childhood obesity.

It's like complaining that children are illiterate, but then refusing to put books into classrooms.

Seriously, it's that absurd.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:56 AM | Comments (4)

December 10, 2006

The Consonant Gardener

I've been reading a lot lately about this guy Obama, as has everyone interested in politics. And even if you don't care about politics, you can't escape the constant recitation of his name and speculation about his presumed presidential intentions.

As you might expect, I like him a lot. (Sue me, I'm a liberal.) And I don't have any big opinions or insights into his personality or prospects. But I did have this weird thought the other day:

Guess how many U.S. presidents' last names have ended in a pronounceable vowell? (Told you it was a weird thought.)

The answer is one: John F. Kennedy, who also, I think it's safe to say, is the closest we've had to an "ethnic" president. (He was Irish-Catholic, and felt compelled to give a speech promising that he wouldn't take his marching orders from the Vatican.)

If the criterion broadens to include presidents whose last names ended in a vowell sound, we have three: James Monroe, William McKinley, and JFK.

Even if you include all the presidents whose last names ended in a vowell, pronounced or not, the list is still sparse: Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce make it a party of five.

The list of "final-vowell-sound last names" gets a little longer, and slightly more interesting, if you add in vice-presidents who didn't later become presidents: Now you have Elbridge Gerry (the second of James Madison's two veeps), Alben Barkley (Harry Truman's guy), Hubert Humphrey (who lost a brutally close race to Richard Nixon in 1968), Spiro Agnew (Nixon's veep, whose sole cultural contribution was adding the phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism," a line written by future New York Times columnist William Safire, to our national discourse), and of course Dick Cheney.

Of all these presidents and vice presidents, only Agnew (a son of Greek immigrants) and Kennedy qualify as "ethnic."

We've had gifted non-WASPs rise through our political system, of course. Mario Cuomo was regarded as the Democratic frontrunner in 1992, before Clinton emerged. John Kerry got more than 60 million votes in 2004, although some of the attacks on him ("he looks French") seemed to be based on the idea that the current president is "one of us" while the Catholic (and ethnically part-Jewish) Kerry is "one of them."

I can't tell you what any of this means, other than to suggest that Obama's assumed candidacy is one of the longest of long shots in all American political history. Not only is his skin dark, but his first name rhymes with the country we've been to war with twice; his last name sounds like that of Public Enemy Number One; and his middle name, Hussein, is Arabic for "all the bad things that keep you awake at night."

But 2008 might be the most anomalous presidential campaign in U.S. history. Obama and Hillary Clinton (first woman!) are assumed to lead the pack on the Democratic side. And Republican front-runners include Rudy Giuliani (Catholic, vowell sound in the final syllable, three marriages), John McCain (Irish last name, divorced, member of the Keating Five), and Mitt Romney (Irish last name, Mormon).

Out of all those, McCain is the most traditional choice. So even though he's not my guy, if I were a betting man, I'd say the early money should be on him. Even if there were nothing else to recommend him, his does have the benefit of being a white male whose last name ends in a consonant.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:01 AM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2006

Blasts From the Past

Silicone breast implants.

O.J. Simpson.

A CIA conspiracy to kill Bobby Kennedy.

Lyndon Johnson accusing New York Times reporters of being a "bunch of commies."

This is news?

I guess this is the best we can do before a holiday. And catching up on old stories can help us understand why some things are the way they are today. Today's media is tougher on Democrats than Republicans, in part because of the old belief that the media was biased against conservatives. Reporters seem to go out of their way to expose the most minor of scandals within the Democratic Party, while studiously ignoring stories that matter.

Why is that?

Partly, I think, it's because of the echo-chamber effect. If a paper does a story that reflects badly on the Democratic Party, it will get major play on right-wing blogs, talk radio, and eventually cable TV shows like Hardball. If a serious magazine like the New Yorker does a serious story about ongoing plans to attack Iran, it falls into a silent void. No one wants to talk about it, because it's too scary to contemplate.

And humans, according to this, are really good at ignoring warnings about scary things:

[W]hen a warning is repeated over and over -- and then nothing bad happens -- the human brain is designed to discount the warning. From an evolutionary perspective, attention is a precious commodity, not to be wasted on threats that do not carry immediate consequences.

This also helps explain why it's so hard to get traction on fighting problems like global warming. And if politicians are particularly clever, they can train the media, and by extension the public, to focus on minutia instead of the things that matter:

"Our minds are always learning the relevant statistics of what is and is not important," agreed Brian Scholl, a Yale University psychologist who studies attention and vigilance. He has explored a phenomenon known as "inattentional blindness," in which people fail to see things right in front of their noses because they are intensely focused on something else. "Attending to things is not without cost," Scholl said. "The whole lesson of inattentional blindness is you can't attend to everything."

Scholl said that each year he shows a class of 300 students a video created in the 1970s by Cornell University psychologist Ulric Neisser. A group of people are rapidly passing basketballs between one another and the students are asked to count the passes. Later, when the students are asked whether they saw anything unusual, at least 100 students every year say they did not notice that a woman with an open umbrella passed across the middle of the screen.

Psychologist Daniel Simmons has created an even more dramatic video -- he showed that when people are very focused on a task, they can fail to see an actor dressed in a gorilla suit who enters the picture and thumps on his chest.

While it sounds crazy to say people can miss seeing a guy in a gorilla suit thumping on his chest, anyone who has attended a magic show knows that vigilant people can miss things right in front of them. It isn't that the audience isn't paying attention; the magician tricks you into paying attention to the wrong thing.

And you know the best way to distract people? Big boobs. Wouldn't that be the ultimate conspiracy theory? The FDA makes it easier for women to get bigger breasts, which distracts all of us from whatever nefarious things the government is doing, which ...

Well, fill in your own ending there. Bonus points if it involves O.J. Simpson.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:30 AM | Comments (0)

November 08, 2006

Don't Bother Us with Facts

Continuing with today's theme that voters chose moderation over extremism, and echoing last week's post about the numbskulls in our government who think it's their place to preach abstinence to unmarried American adults, there's this:

Most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, favor comprehensive sex education in schools over abstinence-only programs, researchers reported Monday.

Currently, the federal government champions the abstinence-only approach, giving around $170 million each year to states and community groups to teach just-say-no sex education. This funding precludes mention of birth control and condoms, unless it's to emphasize their failure rates.

However, critics point out that studies have failed to show that abstinence-only education delays sex or lowers rates of teen pregnancy.

This latest study, according to the authors, suggests that the federal government is out of step not only with research, but also with public opinion.

Of the nearly 1,110 U.S. adults they surveyed, 82 percent supported programs that discuss abstinence as well as other methods for preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Half were in outright opposition to abstinence-only education.

Even among self-described conservatives, 70 percent supported comprehensive sex ed., while 40 percent opposed the abstinence-only strategy.

The findings "highlight a gap between policy, and science and public opinion," said Dr. Amy Bleakley of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and lead author of the new study.

So our government spends $170 million a year promoting abstinence-only sex ed, but four-fifths of Americans -- i.e., the people the government ostensibly serves -- want comprehensive sex education.

Is it any wonder that the opposition party, the Democrats, didn't cough up a single seat in the House or Senate, or a single governorship, in yesterday's midterm elections? Is it any wonder that a religious-right extremist like Rick Santorum lost by 18 points here in Pennsylvania?

It's one thing to have deep religious faith and strong convictions. I think most of us, no matter our political leanings, respect that. But it's another to try to cram your religious beliefs down the throats of the rest of us.

The strongest political conviction I have is probably this: The government works for us. When I cast a vote, it's because I'm trying to hire that person to work for me, with his salary and expenses coming out of my tax dollars.

I've had that feeling my entire life, going back to college. I never skipped class because, in my view, I was paying that professor or graduate assistant to teach me. I paid most of my own tuition and expenses, and I just couldn't justify throwing that money away. If I paid him or her to teach and then didn't show up to be taught, it was no different in my mind than buying a plane ticket and then not showing up for the flight.

My tax dollars don't discriminate between Republicans and Democrats. Whoever wins the election gets my money. I understand that if the guys I voted against win, they'll make decisions that will better reflect the views of the people who voted for them, rather than mine. That's why I vote. If my money is going to pay these people anyway, I'd rather they be the people I chose for the job.

So I never expected a guy like Rick Santorum to see things my way in office. But when he and people like him support extremely unpopular policies, whether it's abstinence-only sex ed or a minimum wage that's too low in the eyes of Americans, they deserve to lose, and lose big.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:52 AM | Comments (0)

November 04, 2006

Why Electoral Politics Is Like Plumbing

If you've ever looked for a plumber in the Yellow Pages, you notice a disproportionate number of them begin with the letter A. And not just A, but AA: Aabco, Aakbar, Aardvark ... The poor plumber who was actually born with the surname Aaron must be furious at all these phony AA-ers taking his rightful spot at the head of the listings.

Unfortunately, we pick our electoral officials the same way we pick the guy who unclogs our drains, according to Stanford political science professor Jon Krosnick:

Candidates listed first on the ballot get about two percentage points more votes on average than they would have if they had been listed later (flipping a 49 to 51 defeat into a 51 to 49 victory). In fact, in about half the races I have studied, the advantage of first place is even bigger -- certainly big enough to win some elections these days.

When do voters gravitate to the first name they see? Based on the more than 100 elections in Ohio that a colleague and I studied, it’s when voters know little or nothing about the candidates, or when the candidates’ party affiliations are not listed on the ballot, or when the incumbent (whom voters typically know at least somewhat) is not running for re-election. Thus, some voters apparently feel an obligation or desire to vote even when they have no basis for choosing a candidate and are drawn to the first name they read.

But Dr. Krosnick shows it doesn't just happen in downstream races for dogcatcher or G-string inspector. When our entire nation's future is on the line, people still go for Door #1, without even considering what might be in Carol Merrill's box:

In California’s 80 Assembly districts, candidate name order is randomly assigned. In 1996, Bill Clinton’s vote tally was 4 percentage points higher in the Assembly districts where he was listed first than in the ones where he was listed last -- a difference that persisted even after we took into account pre-existing Democratic registration levels in the districts.

In 2000, George W. Bush’s vote tally was 9 percentage points higher in the districts where he was listed first than in the districts where he was listed last -- again, persisting with registration taken into account.

So the order in which candidates are listed becomes an intensely partisan issue. If you list by political party in alphabetical order, then Democrats always have an unfair advantage. (And we now understand why the Whig Party didn't last.) Anything other than a random ordering system gives the first-listed candidate a lead before the first votes have been cast.

But I'll tell you what: If I were going to form a new political party, I'd make sure it started with the letter A. Or, better yet, AA. And my first candidate would be a plumber: "Elect Andrew Aaron of the All-American Party. He'll get things moving again."

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:52 AM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2006

Someone Had to Say It

I've been holding fire on the situation facing the authors of Game of Shadows, the book that blew away any lingering doubts about whether or not Barry Bonds used steroids. The book's authors, San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, broke no laws in publishing information from grand jury testimony that showed Bonds not only admitted using steroids, but almost certainly perjured himself in claiming he didn't know what they were.

But, because the government wants to find out who gave them the grand jury transcripts, the reporters may end up in jail. I haven't followed every legal maneuver in the saga, but it seems like the reporters have been on the verge of incarceration for weeks.

From the beginning, I've thought about the irony here: Barry Bonds continues his climb toward Hank Aaron's career home-run record, but the reporters who exposed the drugs he took to develop his late-career power surge are headed for the hoosegow.

But once you get beyond the irony, you see some flat-out hypocrisy, which sportswriter Mike Lupica exposes here:

The government of George Bush, which will leak the name of a CIA operative named Valerie Plame when it suits its purposes, now wants Fainaru-Wada and Williams in jail because they won't reveal the names of the person or persons the government says leaked them grand jury testimony. It is always worth pointing out that if you ran the country the way Bush and his people do, you wouldn't want to encourage whistleblowers, either.

Once George Bush told baseball to get rid of steroids in a State of the Union address. Fainaru-Wada and Williams, through their reporting and later their book Game of Shadows, did their part. They took the President at his word, obviously unaware that this President will say anything in a State of the Union, about weapons of mass destruction or anything else.

Something else worth considering: According to Game of Shadows, the entire reason this steroid case became such a major federal priority is because high-powered federal officials like Bush and former attorney general John Ashcroft are baseball fans. Bush is former owner of the Texas Rangers. One of his longtime business associates, Bill DeWitt, is a current owner of the St. Louis Cardinals. Ashcroft is a lifelong Cardinals fan. Mark Corallo, Ashcroft's chief media spokesman, is a hard-core Yankees fan.

Here's a paragraph that appears on page 211 of Game of Shadows:

"This really wasn't about BALCO," Corallo said. "In the end, it had nothing to do with Victor Conte and Greg Anderson and their activity. It had to do with the guys who had been cheating Stan Musial and Mickey Mantle and Lou Gehrig and Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, that's what this was about. That's who they're cheating, they're cheating the baseball immortals and they're cheating the fans. And it means something."

So these guys were on a personal mission to save the integrity of baseball's record book. And how are they doing it? By letting Barry Bonds continue his assault on that record book, while harassing the reporters who exposed the source of Bonds' unprecedented power.

That's our federal government in action.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:20 AM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2006

Memo to America: It Ain't Working

The research company Mintel sent me a press release yesterday, detailing its latest study of American dieting.

The big finding:

According to a recent Mintel report, more that 80 percent of respondents utilize eating plans they have devised themselves based upon their needs. In contrast, only 6 percent say that they use a commercial diet plan such as Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig.

"Although there are numerous plans and options, consumers are looking for a diet they feel will work for them, and are developing their own strategies for coping with dieting," said Marcia Mogelonsky, senior analyst for Mintel. "According to our research, only 1 percent of the 13 percent who tried Atkins are still on the diet. Consumers cycle through diet plans with great speed because they are looking for results. If they feel a diet is not working for them, they tend to
look for another alternative. For many dieters, the most successful plan is one that combines dieting methods."

The same report notes that more than two-thirds of Americans consider themselves overweight, which must be great news for the media, which has done a bang-up job of telling people they're fat. (Yeah, I know. I'm part of the problem.) Turns out, the fat people are listening.

But get this: According to Mintel, just 6 percent of people "agreed that they like to try new diet plans." About 30 percent of the people surveyed are "very satisfied" with the plan they're on, and 70 percent told Mintel they have no interest in celebrity diet plans.

I really like that last bit. When I was at Men's Health, all our survey data from readers indicated they couldn't care less about the workouts of the rich and famous, whether we're talking about athletes or entertainers or anybody else who's better known than you and me. The only celebrities whose workouts garnered any reader-driven interest at all were Brad Pitt and Tiger Woods, and those two aren't talking. (Although, when I was at Men's Fitness, I did get the strength coach at Stanford to give us the workout plan Tiger used when he was in college. I only bring it up because I like to celebrate my victories, no matter how small and insignificant.) It's nice to see that the public is no more interested in celebrities' diet advice than in their workouts.

My second-favorite data point: 13 percent of the people surveyed have tried Atkins. Damn! I have no idea how big a slice of America was surveyed -- a representative sample of all adults? middle-class adults? people who previously expressed some kind of interest in a diet-related subject? -- but it's still a huge number. It doesn't matter so much that only 1 percent of those people are still on it. (I think that means that just 0.08 percent of the surveyed population is still on the diet.) Considering it's the most vilified diet of our time, I'm amazed that so many people have given it a shot.

In other news ...

Were you aware that liberalism causes obesity? Anyone relying on logic and data would find it hard to make that argument. Even if you, like so many Americans today, think that logic and data are for pussies, it's hard to drum up many anecdotal examples of fat liberals who aren't Michael Moore. Even Al Sharpton is relatively svelte these days. And if you wanted to pick two poster boys for humorless, ideologically rigid liberalism, you'd be hard-pressed to find any better examples than Ralph Nader and Michael Jacobsen, the latter being the anti-fat crusader who founded and leads the Center for Science in the Public Interest. If anyone on earth deserves to be called a Food Nazi, it's Jacobson.

What do the two have in common, aside from their fanatical desire to impose their fun-free world view on anyone they can reach?

If you said "so skinny you could count their ribs from outer space," then you see what I see.

But none of that stopped Rush Limbaugh, that lifelong conjurer of a fact-free world, from saying this:

This is what happens when you let the left run things. We've been beat about the head. There are hungry people everywhere. UNICEF got it all started. We've seen the babies with the extended tummies, the walking skeletons, told that kids can't learn unless they're fed. We've been guilted into pouring resources on the problem. And now, now, the latest crisis is that there is obesity among those who are impoverished. Because we are sympathetic, we are compassionate people, we have responded by letting our government literally feed these people to the point of obesity. At least here in America, didn't teach them how to fish, we gave them the fish. Didn't teach them how to butcher a -- slaughter a cow to get the butter, we gave them the butter. The real bloat here, as we know, is in -- is in government.

And to think I was nice enough to avoid mentioning a fairly obvious fact when I wrote about the latest data: The highest rates of obesity are found in states that voted overwhelmingly for the current president and his minions.

That's what I get for being polite -- an overweight drug addict who knows full well what it's like to be poor and living on unemployment insurance accuses me and my fellow travelers of causing the problem that I've been trying to prevent.

Good thing it's a holiday weekend, so I have some time to get over it.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:52 AM | Comments (1)

July 06, 2006

Lay's Chips: Nobody Can Cheat Just One

If you read this blog regularly, you know how I feel about Ken Lay and Enron. The fact he's dead ... well, my condolences to the people who will miss him.

His death does bring up an interesting health question -- was it a coincidence that his heart gave out when he did, or was it brought on by stress over his impending incarceration?

This story in Salon tries to answer that question:

There are statistics on how many prisoners die in prison, but none on how many defendants die before they get there. "It's nobody's job to count them," says Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project. "I'd be shocked if anybody kept those records."

Mauer also says, however, that he wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty of stories about defendants developing serious health problems as sentencing and incarceration approach. "I would imagine that would be more so for somebody who never thought they'd go to prison."

The kind of people who never imagined they'd go to prison have spawned a cottage industry of consultants. For a high price, they coach white-collar criminals like Martha Stewart on how to do their time. A quick survey of these consultants reveals no trend of corporate felons dropping dead as prison beckons. "It happens," asserts Ed Bales, chief strategist at Federal Prison Consultants Inc., "but not to the extent you think it does."

As Mauer guessed, however, there are plenty of other stories to be told about ill health. The consultants confirm that it can be very stressful for well-heeled defendants to admit they're no longer in control of events, and the anxiety takes it toll on their health.

"The stress of a federal prosecution is a killer," reports David Novak, a federal white-collar prisoner turned prison consultant. He describes a series of peaks and valleys, with the anxiety building and climaxing three separate times -- first with conviction, then with sentencing, and finally with incarceration. The ride can be especially hard to navigate for former corporate executives. Their need to control the narrative can be so pressing that they take the witness stand in their own defense, as Lay did, so they can try to sway the jury, though defense attorneys would almost always prefer that their charges keep quiet.

The Salon story reveals another odd factoid:

Lay is also no longer a criminal. It is a little known quirk of the law that a defendant who dies between conviction and sentencing is no longer guilty, at least on paper. "You're not technically convicted till after you're sentenced," explains Danny Onorato, former federal prosecutor and partner in the D.C. criminal defense firm of Schertler & Onorato. "So although he was convicted by a jury, he technically has no criminal record."

The New York Times raises a much bigger question: What happens to Lay's assets?

[T]he sudden death of Kenneth L. Lay on Wednesday may have spared his survivors financial ruin. Mr. Lay's death effectively voids the guilty verdict against him, temporarily thwarting the federal government's efforts to seize his remaining real estate and financial assets, legal experts say.

"The death of Mr. Lay in all likelihood will render the government's hard-fought victory null," said Christopher Bebel, a former federal prosecutor based here who specializes in securities fraud.

Although Lay claimed he was impoverished by his trial, he seems to have died with some net worth:

According to legal documents filed at the federal courthouse here Friday, Mr. Lay had holdings in an investment account at Goldman Sachs valued at $6.3 million.

In addition, prosecutors said that Mr. Lay's full-floor luxury apartment in [Houston's] River Oaks district had at least $1.5 million in value that could be forfeited to the United States.

So can anyone actually collect?

A person involved in the government's action against Mr. Lay, who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the case, said that Mr. Lay's death did not necessarily rule out proceeding with forfeiture actions, explaining, "The family at the end of the day cannot sit on the fruits of the fraud." ...

The civil lawsuits against Mr. Lay may continue with efforts to seize his remaining assets, but even those moves may be complicated by his death since technically there was no conviction of Mr. Lay in the criminal case to rely upon as proof.

But even as Lay enjoys his final blackout, let's not forget who he was, or what he wrought. Here's a Frank Rich column in the Times, published in March 2005, that aptly illustrates the Enron legacy:

The enduring legacy of Enron can be summed up in one word: propaganda. Here was a corporate house of cards whose business few could explain and whose source of profits was an utter mystery -- and yet it thrived, unquestioned, for years. How? As the narrator says in The Smartest Guys in the Room, Enron "was fixated on its public relations campaigns." It churned out slick PR videos as if it were a Hollywood studio. It browbeat the press (until a young Fortune reporter, Bethany McLean, asked one question too many).

In a typical ruse in 1998, a gaggle of employees was rushed onto an empty trading floor at the company's Houston headquarters to put on a fictional show of busy trading for visiting Wall Street analysts being escorted by Mr. Lay. "We brought some of our personal stuff, like pictures, to make it look like the area was lived in," a laid-off Enron employee told The Wall Street Journal in 2002. "We had to make believe we were on the phone buying and selling" even though "some of the computers didn't even work."

I knew one guy, a local businessman, who had personal dealings with Enron, which wanted to do a deal with my acquaintance's company some time before all the bad stuff came to light. Back then, Enron was still the most exciting company in America, and my acquaintance's colleagues were smitten. They couldn't wait to sign on.

I'm working off deep memory of the conversation I had with the local businessman, but to the best of my recollection he described the proposed deal something like this: "It made no sense to me. It was as if I put my house on the market, and then sold it over and over again to different people. Yeah, I'd make a lot more money by selling it to more than one person, but at the end of the day, I still only had one house to sell."

That was Enron, and that was Lay. It didn't matter how they made the money, or even if they made the money. It was all about the illusion of making money.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:23 AM | Comments (1)

May 26, 2006

A New Hope

This could be irrational exuberance on my part, but the Enron verdicts yesterday give me hope that maybe, just maybe, we're seeing the end of an era of breathtaking and perhaps even unprecedented corruption.

I don't think for a second that we've caught all the crooks -- Slate's Dan Gross offers such a long list of corporate dirty dealings that have recently come to light that you have to think there are many more yet to be caught -- but the fact we're at least acknowledging the problem and punishing some of the big boys responsible seems like a breakthrough to me.

At the same time, the feds seem to be doing a credible job of rooting out some of the most egregious political corruption. They caught Democrat William Jefferson cold, and they appear to be working their way up the ladder from Republican Jack Abramoff to the people who were taking his dirty money.

There also seems to be some understanding at the federal level of how corrupt our elections have become, even if Republicans are still supporting and cheering on convicted election fraudsters.

There's a lot more work to do: We haven't really begun to look at how much money was swindled, squandered, and flat-out stolen in Iraq. We're probably going to need a new party controlling Congress before anyone dares to ask for the receipts.

Years down the road, I have to think that all of us who care will see that these issues aren't isolated or coincidental. I think we'll discover -- to the shock of some and the "I told you so!" chest-thumping of others -- that everything was connected.

It's no accident that Enron was President Bush's earliest and most significant corporate patron. (They had a business relationship in the 1980s.) It's no accident that the Republican Party is paying the legal expenses of the bastards who tried to win elections in New Hampshire in 2002 by jamming phone lines at Democratic Party headquarters. Hell, Jack Abramoff's Indian clients helped fund the damned operation in the first place.

This isn't just people like Bush and Cheney and DeLay getting into power and going a little overboard. What we're seeing here, I believe, is the end of a system that was built from the ground up on corruption. All of it -- Enron, the K Street Project, election fraud, Iraq -- was briefly integrated into one big Republican machine. It was sold and sustained on greed and patriotism and religion -- if the tax cuts didn't pull you in, then God and country did -- but what it was, at its core, was a philosophy that rules are for suckers.

I'm one of those suckers. I know I won't ever get my money back; what's stolen will stay stolen. But I at least want my country back from the people who see me and my fellow Americans as easy marks.

On days like today, I feel a vague flutter of hope that it just might happen.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:59 AM | Comments (0)

May 25, 2006

If You Can't Kill the Messenger, Steal the Message

This is the weirdest story about the media, politics, and election fraud that I can recall reading:

The election took place in Ellensburg. On the campus of Central Washington University. For student-body president.

The story began May 15 when the college newspaper, The Observer, got a tip about one of the two candidates, Ash Gilmore: Last September, a jury acquitted Gilmore, now 23, of second-degree manslaughter in connection with the 2004 death of Joseph Tibbs.

At the time of Tibbs' death, Tibbs and Gilmore were roommates attending Washington State University. According to a February 2004 Pullman police report, Gilmore, who had been drinking, told officers he kicked a gun from Tibbs' hand in horseplay. When the gun hit the floor, it fired a bullet into Tibbs' chest.

Rachel Guillermo, 24, The Observer's editor in chief and a print-journalism major, said the weekly paper interviewed Gilmore about his past and his election bid. The staff decided to run a story detailing both in the May 18 edition, which happened to be Election Day.

Everything so far makes sense, right? The would-be student-body president, Gilmore, gave the interview, talking about the tragic accident in which his roommate died, and the paper rolled off the presses, as planned. That's when it got weird:

Observer production manager Michael Bennett, 23, also a print-journalism major, said he and some friends picked up about 7,000 copies of the newspaper from the printers the night of May 17. They began delivering them by van to about 25 locations on campus when they noticed a man watching them from near the science building.

"My girlfriend looked over and said, 'Isn't that the guy from the front page of the paper?'" Bennett said. "We went to four more buildings, and every time we'd stop, he'd sit there on his cellphone. He was smiling and waving to the people in the van, which was a little bit creepy since he was following us around all night."

The next morning, most of the newspapers delivered to campus had vanished.

Guess where they turned up?

The papers were in the garage at Gilmore's apartment and could be seen from the alley. Bennett and a couple of reporters raced over and began taking photographs from the alley before someone closed the garage door. They also called campus police, who arrived soon after.

Even without the inconvenient press report about his involvement in a student's death on another campus, Gilmore managed to lose: He got 43 percent of the votes to his opponent's 57 percent. The one break he got from stealing the papers is low turnout -- just 11 percent of the students voted in the election.

All of which makes me wonder if he wouldn't have been better off embracing the story of his manslaughter charge. Maybe positioning himself as the "edgy" candidate would've sparked enough interest in the race to get more people to come out.

Case in point: When I was in college, a comedian ran for student-body president on a promise that he would flood the football stadium for "mock naval battles" and change the name of the school to the University of Rhode Island, on the theory that it would look better on a Midwestern kid's resume to give the appearance of having attended college on the East Coast.

But the last laugh was on the comedian: He won, and had to be student-body president for a year.

The comparison isn't perfect. For one thing, the paper thief wanted to be president, and the comedian didn't. But still, there is some precedent for the idea that kids will sometimes place entertainment value above all else.

And if Gilmore wants to get into real politics, I have to think he'll fit right in.

Posted by LouSchuler at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)

May 19, 2006

Will Had Grace

Friday afternoon, bored and Googling around, I came across this collection of Will Rogers quotes. The man was the Jon Stewart of his time. Hell, he could be the Jon Stewart of our time.

I mean, which of these jokes wouldn't be just as funny today as they were in his time?

A fool and his money are soon elected.

About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation.

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what's going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?

Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.

I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.

I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him "father."

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

I'm not a real movie star. I've still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago.

If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?

It's easy being a humorist when you've got the whole government working for you.

Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

The more you read and observe about this politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

Things ain't what they used to be and never were.

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business?

You can't say civilization don't advance. In every war they kill you in a new way.

One more great line, which is relevant to the current immigration debate. Rogers was part-Cherokee on both sides of his family, and made this joke about his heritage:

"My ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat."

Posted by LouSchuler at 04:21 PM | Comments (1)

May 17, 2006

Reality Is Optional

I'm going on a wandering rant here, and I hope by the end it makes some sense:

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I've been on a bit of a reality kick lately. In consecutive days, I've talked about teen sexuality and teen drug use, in both cases arguing that "just say no" doesn't work. It denies the twin realities of biology (kids are hormonally compelled to have sex -- lots and lots and lots of sex) and personal experience (kids can see through the official demonization of recreational drug use).

Being a reality-based individual, I'm capable of considering two very different thoughts about all this:

On the one hand, there's something uniquely American about this idea that we can create a better reality for ourselves, even if it means overcoming our own biology.

But, conversely, I know that no good ever comes from denying the reality that's in front of us. Whether we're talking about my areas of expertise -- exercise and weight control -- or things I should probably avoid talking about as much as I do -- religion and politics -- there's no upside to pretending that up is down or day is night. The key is to help people reach their goals by teaching them to do things better. But it always starts with what people can do in the first place, not what we wish they could do.

Here's where I start to wander around:

One of the things that continually bugs me about modern politics is the way issues are dumbed down until they can fit on a bumper sticker. I've talked to very smart guys who tell me their entire political point of view can be summed up in two words: "cut taxes." They vote for politicians who'll cut their taxes. They vote against politicians who might raise them.

At which point I want to drink myself into a stupor, although I don't think there's enough Jack Daniel's in the world to make me see the logic of perpetual tax cuts. We know they don't work for their stated purpose, which is shrinking the size of the government. The opposite happens: If you make government look cheaper, everyone wants more of it. The way to cut the size of government is to raise taxes, making people pay full price.

And the idea that tax cuts stimulate the economy while tax hikes stall it is utter horseshit; we had the best economy in our country's history after Bush's father and Bill Clinton raised taxes.

All tax cuts actually do is make the very rich very much richer. They don't help the country, and they don't help people like me, who aren't very rich.

The denial of reality, however, doesn't always lead to staggering budget deficits or higher rates of teen pregnancy. Sometimes it helps to sell shitloads of books. That's the case with Dan Brown, who took a bunch of made-up nonsense about Jesus and Mary Magdalene and used it to sell more than 40 million copies of The Da Vinci Code, which not only spawned an entire publishing genre of debunkers and re-bunkers, but actually inspired diet and workout books.

No one's hurt by Brown's storytelling, even if the Catholic Church is pissed about the portrayal of Opus Dei, Christians in general don't like the challenge to their core beliefs, and albinos seem to have a legitimate gripe about a pale guy being cast as the hatchet man.

And sometimes reality-deniers can be worked with, as this kind of surreal story about one drug's path to FDA approval shows:

Merck is eagerly awaiting news from the Food and Drug Administration, which is due to make a decision on two key experimental vaccines in the next few weeks. One of those is Gardasil, a controversial vaccine for the prevention of cervical cancer.

If approved Gardasil could be a multi-billion blockbuster for Merck. However the vaccine is used to inoculate young girls from contracting a sexually transmitted cancer virus later in life. Conservative religious groups worry that use of the vaccine may send the wrong message about premarital sex.

Through a carefully orchestrated "informational" campaign, Merck has managed to overcome that resistance. ...

Gardasil is most effective, as a preventative, when used in children. The vaccine has been tested in boys and girls as young as 10, with the intention of inoculating them years before they become sexually active.

The data from Gardasil late-stage studies has been strong. Gardasil has shown 100 percent efficacy in preventing the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, which causes 70 percent of cervical cancer cases, according to Merck. This type of cancer kills nearly 4,000 women in the U.S. annually and nearly 300,000 worldwide, according to the National Cervical Cancer Coalition.

And now, believe it or not, the big issue is whether the FDA will approve the drug, or bow down to those on the religious right who still aren't convinced that it's a good idea to inoculate children against a potentially fatal disease:

[T]he FDA will be closely watched to make sure it doesn't reject Gardasil based on morality instead of science, as the agency is accused of doing in its failure to approve birth control pill Plan B for over-the-counter availability. The FDA said it did not approve Plan B for OTC use because there was not enough data involving girls under the age of 16, even though its advisory committee had recommended approval.

"I think the FDA's failure to approve Plan B [as an over-the-counter drug] despite the FDA advisory committee's support on this probably backfired on them," said Rubin.

Funtleyder of Miller Tabak said that Gardasil won't be as politically difficult to get past the FDA as Plan B, because Plan B is a birth control drug and Gardasil is not.

What jumps out at me about this, and uncountable other controversies that have arisen since the religious right got involved in electoral politics, is how one group's fears and prejudices should affect public policy for the rest of us. You don't want your children to get a vaccination against genital warts, or to have access to birth control? Fine -- don't let them have access to those things. It's your version of reality, and you're welcome to live in it.

Getting back to where I started with this rant:

I can deal with sex-ed programs that emphasize abstinence or anti-drug campaigns that deny nuance by talking frankly with my kids and offering them whatever guidance they'll accept. (Although I'll concede that, since my kids aren't yet at those ages, I may be kidding myself if I think they'll be willing to listen.)

I can deal with the political fantasies of our time by voting against the nimrods who can't grasp the simple concept of cause-and-effect -- no matter what you think should happen when you give tax cuts to rich people, what actually happens is the oppposite -- by voting against them every chance I get.

But why does someone else's belief system have to dictate what medicines my children can have?

If we're going to "just say no" to anything, shouldn't we smack down this kind of idiocy?

(Thanks to Rob Duffield for the Gardasil link.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:14 AM | Comments (2)

April 25, 2006

Who's the Dope?

As I wrote here, I have no confidence in the FDA's recent pronouncement that marijuana has no therapeutic benefit that outweigh its risks.

Slate got an actual physician, Sydney Spiesel, to take the FDA to the woodshed:

The FDA's statement implies that the agency reached its conclusion about marijuana after conducting a new serious analysis of the existing scientific literature on the drug. But of course no such analysis was reported in the medical literature and, in fact, no identifiable official at the FDA took responsibility for last week's advisory. It was just put out there as a statement of fact.

But it's not. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine, the medical arm of the National Academy of Sciences (an organization chartered by Congress to provide independent, nonpartisan scientific and technological advice) examined this same question in considerable depth and published a 288-page report of its findings. Put together by 11 distinguished scientists and physicians, the IOM report examined the known and potential harms of marijuana use and the known and potential medical benefits.

The report is broad in its vision and thoughtful and cautious in its interpretations and recommendations. Its authors acknowledged that the medical uses of marijuana entail some risk of harm -- for instance, it's pretty clear that inhaling marijuana smoke can't be good for the lungs, and who knows if there are significant psychological side effects for some users.

But the authors concluded that these risks were not terribly high. They also found that other putative risks often attached to this drug -- the potential for addiction, for instance, or for marijuana serving as a "gateway" to further drug abuse -- were much overstated. The report urged further study to determine the real level of risk.

In examining the potential medical benefits of medical marijuana, the IOM report was equally cautious. It described relief from nausea associated with cancer chemotherapy, appetite stimulation for cancer and HIV patients, and treatment of muscle spasticity for patients with multiple sclerosis or spinal cord injury. Though these benefits seem real, the authors of the IOM report point out that we really don't know yet if they are significant or valuable enough to warrant the use of medical marijuana. Again, the report urged further study to determine the real level of benefit.

Dr. Spiesel goes on to say that we have no new information to work with regarding medical marijuana, since no new government studies have been approved by the highly politicized Bush administration. And without government-funded studies, what are we left with? It's not like the pot growers are going to act like Gatorade or the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and sponsor their own research.

That leads Dr. Spiesel to this conclusion:

I need to be able to trust government-sponsored research (especially because, goodness knows, I have learned not to trust manufacturer-sponsored research). I need to know that the advice I glean from government-sponsored agency Web sites will lead to the best care for my patients.

Marijuana as a medicine -- whatever its risk and benefits are eventually determined to be -- may turn out to be much less important than the question of whether we can count on agencies like the FDA to be honest in their dealings.

What are the odds that any branch of our federal government will be described as "honest in their dealings" anytime soon?

UPDATE: THE CHONG SHOW

Tommy Chong spoke at the NORML conference last Friday:

Chong took the stage to a standing ovation.

"I would like to thank what's his name," Chong joked.

He began by talking about his time in prison, saying the rumors about prison are wrong.

"It doesn't hurt," Chong said. "But it does hurt when the government is doing it to you."

He talked about politics, too.

"I know Dick Cheney's Secret Service guys smoke pot," Chong said. "The reason I know that is I sold them bongs."

He insinuated that President Bush was on methamphetamines.

"The dangerous thing about tweakers is they can take things apart but they can't put them back together again," Chong said. "That's what George Bush has done to this country."

Chong described when law enforcement officials raided his home as part of Operation Pipe Dreams.

"When they raided my home they asked me, 'Do you have any drugs in here?'" Chong said. "Of course I do."

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:13 AM | Comments (2)

April 18, 2006

National Health Care: The Simplest Solution?

When the national health-care plan proposed by Bill and Hillary Clinton in his first term failed, it produced repercussions that we still feel today. Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, took over the House of Representatives in 1994, and many of the politicians responsible for the current state of affairs in our country won landmark elections that year, including George W. Bush as governor of Texas.

Without that failed health-care plan, we probably wouldn't have the K Street Project and total Republican control of all branches of the U.S. government.

Meanwhile, the state of U.S. health care has gotten progressively worse. Some of us are lucky to have great health-insurance plans, but too many people don't. A World Health Organization survey released in 2000 put the U.S. 24th in the world in terms of healthy life expectancy; one of the principal reasons for the low rank was the fact that people in America's inner cities live a Third World-type existence, without access to good or consistent health care.

Our mismatched collection of health-care systems -- Medicare, Medicaid, and hundreds of private insurers -- creates a cost structure that's out of control and surreal in its complexity. We spend about 15 percent of our GDP in the U.S. on health care, about twice as much per person as the rest of the industrialized world, and get much less out of it.

Most surprising, to me, is how much of that spending goes to administration -- about 10 percent of every dollar paid in to a health insurance plan goes to pay for a bureaucracy that mostly exists to prevent covering the most expensive medications and procedures. Compare that to Medicare, which burns just 2 percent on administrative costs.

All that is a lead-in to this Wall Street Journal column by a physician who's sick of the current system:

It took me a while to conclude that a single-payer health system was the best approach. My fear had been that government would screw up medicine to the detriment of my patients and my practice. If done poorly, the result might be worse than what I'm dealing with now.

But increasingly I've come to believe that if done right, health care in America could be dramatically better with true single-payer coverage; not just another layer -- a part D on top of a part B on top of a part A, but a simplified, single payer that would cover all Americans, including those who could afford the best right now. Representatives and senators in Washington should have to use the same system my patients and I do were they to vote it in.

Doctors in private practice fear a loss of autonomy with a single-payer system. After being in the private practice of family medicine for 8 1/2 years, I see that autonomy is largely an illusion. Through Medicare and Medicaid, the government is already writing its own rules for 45 percent of the patients I see.

The rest are privately insured under 301 different insurance products (my staff and I counted). The companies set the fees and the contracts are largely non-negotiable by individual doctors.

The amount of time, staff costs and IT overhead associated with keeping track of all those plans eats up most of the money we make above Medicare rates. As it is now, I see patients and wait between 30 and 90 days to get paid. My practice requires two full-time staff members for billing. My two secretaries spend about half their time collecting insurance information. Plus, there's $9,000 in computer expenses yearly to handle the insurance information and billing follow up. I suspect I could go from four people in the paper chase to one with a single-payer system.

It would be simpler and better for the patient, and for me, if the patient could choose a doctor, bring their ID card with them, swipe it in a card reader at the time of service and have the doctor get paid on the spot with electronic funds transfer.

Instead, patients have to negotiate a maze of deductibles, provider networks, out-of-network costs, exclusions, policy riders, ER surcharges, etc. Wouldn't a card swipe be simpler? No preexisting conditions to worry about. No indecipherable hospital bills. One formulary to deal with and one set of administrative rules to learn instead of 300.

With a single-payer system, there are concerns about waiting times for procedures and not getting access to the "best doctors." These are real issues, but not unsolvable ones. We have these disparities now. Fact is, they are mostly a matter of geography, insurance status and personal wealth.

Read the whole thing, and file the information away for the the 2008 election, when this is sure to be a hotly debated issue.

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:04 AM | Comments (4)

February 06, 2006

Drop-Kicked Through the Goalposts of Life

In this weekend's New York Times, columnist David Brooks processed this paean to rigid and uncompromising authority figures. He starts off by noting the many sports films that all have the exact same arc -- tough coach forces kids to work harder and achieve more than anyone thought possible. Then he says this:

Thirty years ago, young people were told to question authority. But the heroes of these movies are coaches who are unabashed authority figures. Preferring success to affection, they instill fear and sometimes hatred in their players. They insist on being called "sir" and impose dominating discipline. "This is no democracy," Denzel Washington's character says in Remember the Titans. "It is a dictatorship. I am the law."

Thirty years ago, there was a revolt against traditional manliness, but these coaches are stereotypical manly men. Even in the movies where the athletes are women, like Million Dollar Baby or A League of Their Own, the coaches are flinty, uncommunicative men. They may be scarred inside, but they project confidence and command.

Thirty years ago, students were warned of the dangers of conformity, of the crushing banality of the Organization Man. But in this world success comes only when individuals subordinate themselves to the team. "The name on the front" of the USA jersey "is a hell of a lot more important than the name on the back," Herb Brooks roars in Miracle.

Nearly 30 years ago, Christopher Lasch wrote a book called The Culture of Narcissism. In these movies the antidote to the culture of narcissism is a civilian Marine Corps.

These coaches' self-assigned task is to take young people reared in what Michael Barone calls Soft America, and toughen them for the adult rigors of Hard America. Rejecting the therapeutic ethic, they blast through the central form of dishonesty that surrounds American young people which is everybody telling them how great they are.

That would be interesting if his analogy were remotely appropriate. It's not. In most sports movies, no one tells the hero how great he is. They tell him he's a low-life piece of shit, and he rebels by achieving excellence under the guidance of a coach who knows exactly how to push his buttons and get him to will himself to the next level.

And in Breaking Away, one of the greatest sports movies ever, the kids who won the bike race didn't even have a coach. It's telling that it was released in 1979, within three years of Brooks' "30 years ago," that horrible time when no one respected authority anymore.

In Rocky, released in 1976 ("30 years ago," give or take a few months), the fighter and the trainer have a complex relationship, with Mickey kicking Rocky out of his gym, and then begging him to come back. For all the talk about eating lightning and crapping thunder, their relationship is based on mutual need, not dictatorship.

By choosing 1975 -- the year I graduated high school, FYI -- as the low point in America's relationship with authority, Brooks invokes a time shortly after the president of the United States resigned because of his inability to follow the Constitution he'd sworn to uphold. It was the year in which our failure to win an ill-conceived war was symbolized by this image of the last Americans leaving Saigon.

If he'd spent less time watching movies and more time thinking about his premise, Brooks would've concluded that there were damned good reasons to reject authority 30 years ago. Authority sent more than 50,000 young men to die in Vietnam. Authority gave us Watergate. It wasn't that young people rejected all authority -- especially those of us who volunteered to play football. (I'm not sure if Brooks understands that sports are extracurricular activities.) It was that so many authority figures of the time simply didn't deserve to be followed.

All that said, my real point here has nothing to do with Brooks. It's to share something funny my brother John, a teacher, sent via email:

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND: The Football Version

1. ALL teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable.

If after two years they have not won the championship their footballs and equipment will be taken away UNTIL they do win the championship.

2. ALL kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents.

ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL!

3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own, without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren’t interested in football, have limited athletic ability, or whose parents don’t like football.

4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th game.

This will create a New Age of Sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals.

No child gets ahead, so no child is left behind.

If parents do not like this new law they are encouraged to vote for vouchers and to support private schools that can screen out the non-athletes and prevent their children from having to go to school with bad football players.

I especially like the part about using vouchers to allow more kids to attend private schools.

Posted by LouSchuler at 11:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 27, 2006

HSAs: WTF?

I came down with a nasty cold a little more than a week ago. Really knocked me out. For four days, I was moving at about half-speed. I felt strong again by the fifth day, but by then I had a cough and sinus congestion that made it difficult to sleep at night. So yesterday, the eighth day with symptoms, I went to see a doctor.

I've been going to this practice for eight years, and rarely see the same doctor twice in a row. But that's fine. They're all personable, and they all take the time to ask the right questions and discuss treatment options.

Yesterday was no exception. I'd never seen this doctor before, but he took a minute to get acquainted, checked what needed to be checked, and then talked through my options for medications to help control the symptoms. What he suggested seems to be working so far.

This, I think, is about as good as health care gets, and I consider myself very lucky to have it. When I left my last employer almost two years ago, my biggest fear was that I wouldn't be able to get the same quality of coverage that I'd had while employed. I went with COBRA for a year, and then went to an insurance broker to find something permanent.

I'd been curious about health savings accounts -- HSAs -- and asked him if that would work. The idea behind HSAs was intriguing to me: You put a bunch of money into your HSA -- an IRA, basically -- and then pay a small annual premium for a catastrophic-coverage policy. You pay out of the HSA for whatever health expenses you have throughout the year, and then whatever you have left in the HSA at the end of the year is yours to keep in the interest-earning account. If you have a major medical problem, you have the insurance policy as backup.

The broker ran some numbers for me, and told me the premium would for the HSA policy would be a little over $600. A year? No, that was the monthly premium. I couldn't believe it. Why would I pay $600 a month to an insurance company when I had already deposited thousands of dollars into an HSA, and when the money from the HSA would pay all my family's medical expenses? The reason was simple: The company didn't want people like me -- or families like mine -- in the plan.

We ended up in a PPO. I joined a trade association for small-business owners ($260 a year), and got my family into a group plan with a monthly premium just under $800. It's higher now, but it's still a much, much better deal than the HSA -- cheaper, even, than the COBRA plan, while providing more or less the same coverage.

So why is everybody talking about HSAs all of a sudden? If they're completely impractical for families like mine, who are they for, and how could they possibly improve our nation's dysfunctional health-care system?

The beautiful American

Turns out, HSAs are a terrific option if you're young, affluent, single, and in perfect health. Here's an account by a young doctor who meets all those criteria and has had an HSA for the past two years:

My deductible, $3,500 per year, goes into my health savings account (a money market account that earns about 3 percent, compounded quarterly, no fees), and I pay my routine expenses from debit withdrawals from that account. As a 33-year-old single woman, my expenses consist almost completely of dental checkups and birth control -- about $500 per year.

The required premium for my high-deductible insurance policy, a required companion to a health savings account, is about $50 a month, or $600 per year. Entering my third year of this kind of account, the accumulated interest alone is more than my routine health-care expenses. By the end of year five, at which time I'll be 36 years old, the accumulated interest will be more than my insurance premiums, too. And finally, by the time I'm 40, the accumulated interest will be more than my annual deductible.

The worst that can happen in any given year is that I'll have to spend my deductible -- but whatever has accumulated in the account is free for me to spend on any medical stuff I like (with a few exceptions, such as cosmetic surgery).

Finally, there's a here-and-now tax advantage -- every time I make that $3,500 annual deposit, I get a tax break worth, to me, about $1,200. With annual health care expenses (insurance premiums and routine costs) of about $1,100, thanks to Mr. Bush, I made money on my health care in year one -- about a hundred bucks of tax advantage over what I paid out, plus another hundred bucks or so of interest.

Sounds great, doesn't it? But the doctor knows she's in a unique situation:

[M]ost health-care consumers are not like me. They have children, or untended-to problems, or aren't 33 years old, or need to lose a few pounds, or whatever. They have chronic issues related to age or infirmity or bad teeth or diet. They have real lives and real concerns that mean that time and money to go see the doctor whenever the feel like it is not easy. They're us. They're Americans.

Follow the money

I'm going to step out onto a limb here and say that, as an American, I think I'm doing things the right way. I'm married to and living with my baby-mommy, and we're raising our three children to be responsible and health-conscious citizens. We pay our taxes. We vote. We recycle. We participate. So I have to ask: If people like us are unwanted in the brave new world of HSAs, then why would anyone think these are something our government should be out there promoting?

Wouldn't you know ...

Bank of America, J. P. Morgan Chase, Fidelity Investments and hundreds of others are hoping to capitalize on the latest wrinkle in medical care paid by consumers: health savings accounts, which have been around since 2003 but are moving to the fore of the national agenda in anticipation of the State of the Union address on Tuesday. ...

The average individual's account balance, it projects, will grow from $1,500 today to about $3,500 in 2010. Even if people pull out some or all of their money to pay their medical bills, the ballooning balances may mean that $75 billion or so in new money to manage will soon be at stake.

Banks and others are drawn by the promise of lucrative fees they can generate by offering consumers mutual funds and other investment vehicles as their account balances grow. Most also charge $50 to $75 to set up a health savings account, and they collect perhaps $40 or more each year in maintenance charges and service fees.

Not since the creation of the individual retirement account in the mid-1970's has such a potentially huge mountain of money landed in the lap of the financial services industry.

"Billions of dollars that used to be written in the form of checks with insurance companies' names on them would instead go to credit unions, banks, and long-term investment houses," said Dan Perrin, the publisher of H.S.A. Insider and executive director of the H.S.A. Coalition, a lobbying group backed by 70 small-business and medical industry groups as well as the American Bankers Association. "You know America: you see a financial opportunity and it sets off a gold rush."

If all that sounds familiar ...

Health savings accounts are akin to the private accounts that were proposed to help overhaul Social Security. Much of Wall Street liked private retirement accounts, but their support was guarded because they feared a potential negative reaction.

Banking lobbyists have met with White House officials at least three times over the last year to discuss the rules governing health savings vehicles. But until recently, most have been shy about their interest in such plans. Now, they have established a lobbying group, the H.S.A. Council, and are spending millions of dollars to roll the plans out.

Isn't it a relief to know that lobbyists from the banking industry are now driving our nation's health-care priorities? I feel better already!

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:26 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 26, 2006

The Smartest Crooks in the Room

If you haven't seen Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, go out and rent it as soon as you can. The documentary gives you a terrific overview of the company that became the greatest train wreck in corporate history.

It's especially important to see it now, as the trial of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling begins in Houston.

Lots of people connected to the Enron fraud have already been convicted, and former CFO Andy Fastow has pleaded guilty and is actively cooperating with the government.

The documentary makes the case that Lay and Skilling set up Fastow as their designated fall guy from the beginning. Fastow was clearly a crook, but it seems impossible to believe that Lay and Skilling weren't aware of his proclivities from the beginning, and actively encouraging his fraudulent business deals to keep their stock price rising.

But no matter how the trial of Lay and Skilling turns out, there's no undoing the damage done. California is still out billions of dollars from the phony energy crisis of 2000 and 2001. Governor Gray Davis' political career was derailed, and Californians elected a cartoon character to take his place.

And we may never know the full extent of the role that Enron played in many of the key political events of the past five years. First, of course, is the fall of Davis and the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger in California politics. Until we know more about the meeting between Lay and Schwarzenegger in 2001, we'll never know how intimately they're connected.

We know that Enron was the biggest contributor to the president's 2000 campaign, that Enron was right in the middle of the Florida recount debacle in 2000, and that Florida's state employee pension fund lost more than $300 million on Enron stock -- a curious investing decision on the part of a fund overseen by a committee chaired by Florida governor Jeb Bush. It seems the fund was buying Enron stock when Enron insiders were selling. The Florida loss was almost three times as much as that of the next-unluckiest state.

But perhaps the most important piece of the Enron puzzle is still missing. We know that Enron executives met with the vice president in 2001. What were they talking about? Did it have anything to do with Afghanistan? Iraq?

The trial will be interesting, but the biggest questions still need answers.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:50 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 24, 2006

Why You Should Never Listen to a Political Partisan (Even If It's Me)

Partisanship is a sign of a malfunctioning brain:

Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain's pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.

"Everything we know about cognition suggests that, when faced with a contradiction, we use the rational regions of our brain to think about it, but that was not the case here," said Dr. Drew Westen, a psychologist at Emory and lead author of the study, to be presented Saturday at meetings of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Palm Springs, Calif.

The methodology was interesting, and the results show that partisans on both sides are equally off-kilter:

[T]he researchers recruited 30 adult men who described themselves as committed Republicans or Democrats. The men, half of them supporters of President Bush and the other half backers of Senator John Kerry, earned $50 to sit in an M.R.I. machine and consider several statements in quick succession.

The first was a quote attributed to one of the two candidates: either a remark by Mr. Bush in support of Kenneth L. Lay, the former Enron chief, before he was indicted, or a statement by Mr. Kerry that Social Security should be overhauled. Moments later, the participants read a remark that showed the candidate reversing his position. The quotes were doctored for maximum effect but presented as factual.

The Republicans in the study judged Mr. Kerry as harshly as the Democrats judged Mr. Bush. But each group let its own candidate off the hook.

After the participants read the contradictory comment, the researchers measured increased activity in several areas of the brain. They included a region involved in regulating negative emotions and another called the cingulate, which activates when the brain makes judgments about forgiveness, among other things. Also, a spike appeared in several areas known to be active when people feel relieved or rewarded. The "cold reasoning" regions of the cortex were relatively quiet.

The partisan in me suspects that the researchers had to doctor Kerry's quotes more than they changed Bush's to get the reaction they wanted. But never mind that. Here's what the researchers learned about political partisans:

* They take pleasure in rejecting negative information about their candidate;

* They're incapable of thinking rationally about that negative information.

It certainly explains a lot. But it also raises a new question: Does anybody think rationally about any subject if they care deeply about it to begin with?

Suppose the ancient Roman gods popped up in the Fox News studios this evening and explained why pagans had it right all along. Would anyone in the audience stop being Christian, Muslim, or Jewish? Even if Jupiter struck down Bill O'Reilly with a thunderbolt to prove his point, would any monotheist acknowledge the existence of multiple deities?

Another thought: The Republicans control all three branches of government (all four, if you count cable news), despite the fact Americans don't really like Republican policies. The war is unpopular, people aren't happy with the president's economic priorities, and Americans want better healthcare, environmental protection, and continued legal access to abortion.

So why do Republicans control everything? It seems to me they're far better than Democrats at putting their policies into an emotional framework, mainlining their message into partisans' veins by tappin