The Rent Is Too Damn High Party is a political (?) party running in the upcoming General Election for the City of New York and County of New York. Hands down, it's the most awful website in the history of websites. It was made by a time-traveller from 1996, complete with bursting firework gifs. Precious.
391: More Is Less is an episode of This American Life. It's a two-parter, this week and next week, on the current health care crisis/reform. Kind of dry, kind of awesome.
Also the medscape news alert tells me that, "The Senate Finance Committee today passed a massive healthcare reform bill — mostly along partisan lines — that would eventually reduce the ranks of the uninsured by more than half." Whee!
Edited for accurate links.
(From my iPod subscription)"Al Franken successfully introduced legislation that denies federal contracts to companies that have policies -- anywhere in the world -- that punish employees for complaining about rape or discrimination on the job. This is in response to a KBR/Halliburton employee in Iraq who was drugged and gang-raped by co-workers and denied justice or even medical treatment, then locked in a storage container for 24 hours and told that she'd lose her job if she left the country to get medical help. She was also prohibited from suing or seeking criminal justice because her Halliburton contract forbade seeking any justice apart from private arbitration.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) tried to block the amendment, saying that it was a 'a political attack directed at Halliburton.' Franken replied, 'This amendment does not single out a single contractor. This amendment would defund any contractor that refuses to give a victim of rape their day in court.' "
It features Will Ferrell, Jon Hamm, Olivia Wilde, Thomas Lennon, Robert Ben Garant, Masi Oka, Jordana Spiro, Linda Cardellini, and Donald Faison. Pretty heavy-handed, pretty awesome.
(From Chels)
Palin’s Resignation: The Edited Version is a Vanity Fair piece where the magazine's editors wield their mighty pens in efforts to salvage the mess that was Palin's resignation speech."Just how poorly constructed was the governor’s holiday-weekend address? We asked V.F.’s red-pencil-wielding executive literary editor, Wayne Lawson, together with representatives from the research and copy departments, to whip it into publishable shape. Here is the colorful result."
"So, in what some could consider a passive aggressive attack, Vanity Fair has edited Sarah Palin's most recent speech. While the grammar and style corrections may seem humorous, the gregarious factual errors are simply shocking.Word.
Moreover, it seems that Palin--or whatever ho-dunk kid with a working computer and printer wrote this speech--never learned the basic principles of good writing: be concise."
Margaret and Helen is a personal/political blog by some very old ladies, that have been friends for a very long time. In their own words: "My name is Helen Philpot. I am 82 years old. My grandson taught me how to do this so that I could “blog” with my best friend Margaret Schmechtman who I met in college almost 60 years ago. I have three children with my husband Harold. Margaret has three dogs with her husband Howard. I live in Texas and Margaret lives in Maine.
Are you for real?
Why is that so hard to believe? Now I know what Santa Claus must feel like.
Have you really been friends for 60 years?
Some friendships last a lifetime. We just seem to be living a hell of a long time.
Why doesn’t Margaret write more?
She prefers to pick up the phone and call. I guess I am more the writer, but she is a wonderful artist. I have some of her paintings in my house. My grandchildren set me up on this computer, but Margaret always has problems getting on the Internet and says it is too slow. Maybe it is a Maine thing. She reads all of the comments and calls me when she sees a comment that she wants to talk about. Sometimes she offers witty lines that I add to my stories."
The Cost Conundrum is a New Yorker piece by Dr. Atul Gawande published at the beginning of this month. It's a good article. The piece, which has been covered on Fresh Air this week, has purportedly become mandatory reading for White House staffers. In it, Dr. Gawande discusses the peculiarities of our health care system, contrasting areas with high cost, poor-quality health care (such McAllen, TX) versus areas that have low cost, high quality care (Mayo, Grand Junction). The difference is in part cultural, and in part that there is someone at the helm working toward that goal. What's interesting about the article is that so far, the debate has largely been about single-payer insurance versus multiple, private versus government--but Atul states these arguments are neglecting the most important point--we need a contractor, a person actively working to lower costs while increasing quality:
"Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.The way I read this article, Atul seems to be asking for a Health Care Czar, a contractor in charge of lowering costs, increasing quality, and managing the totality of health care for the country:This last point is vital. Activists and policymakers spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about whether the solution to high medical costs is to have government or private insurance companies write the checks. Here’s how this whole debate goes. Advocates of a public option say government financing would save the most money by having leaner administrative costs and forcing doctors and hospitals to take lower payments than they get from private insurance. Opponents say doctors would skimp, quit, or game the system, and make us wait in line for our care; they maintain that private insurers are better at policing doctors. No, the skeptics say: all insurance companies do is reject applicants who need health care and stall on paying their bills. Then we have the economists who say that the people who should pay the doctors are the ones who use them. Have consumers pay with their own dollars, make sure that they have some “skin in the game,” and then they’ll get the care they deserve. These arguments miss the main issue. When it comes to making care better and cheaper, changing who pays the doctor will make no more difference than changing who pays the electrician. The lesson of the high-quality, low-cost communities is that someone has to be accountable for the totality of care. Otherwise, you get a system that has no brakes. You get McAllen."
...
"Dramatic improvements and savings will take at least a decade. But a choice must be made. Whom do we want in charge of managing the full complexity of medical care? We can turn to insurers (whether public or private), which have proved repeatedly that they can’t do it. Or we can turn to the local medical communities, which have proved that they can. But we have to choose someone—because, in much of the country, no one is in charge. And the result is the most wasteful and the least sustainable health-care system in the world."
"As America struggles to extend health-care coverage while curbing health-care costs, we face a decision that is more important than whether we have a public-insurance option, more important than whether we will have a single-payer system in the long run or a mixture of public and private insurance, as we do now. The decision is whether we are going to reward the leaders who are trying to build a new generation of Mayos and Grand Junctions. If we don’t, McAllen won’t be an outlier. It will be our future."
PS: I like that little nod to Malcolm Gladwell at the end. And that diaeresis over the ö in coordination tickles me... it's just New Yorker whimsical.
PPS: Kottke points to a follow-up from Atul's address to the University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Medicine.
At first I was disappointed that the video wasn't about fashion or one of my favorite British-safari-look clothing retailers (though they do allude to it). But then I wasn't. It's a delight! (Save that nasty reality part.)
Mancow Waterboarded (VIDEO): Conservative Radio Host Say It's Torture is an article on the Huffington Post about Erich 'Mancow' Muller, a Chicago-based conservative radio host and his views on waterboarding.
"He recently decided to silence critics of waterboarding once and for all. He would undergo the procedure himself, and then he would be able to confidently convince others that it is not, in fact, torture.
Or so he thought."
Here is a video of him changing his mind:
Click through to the article to read more or see the prior video of the procedure.
First there was this crazy NOM ad:
And then, there was this Rimsjob.org convoluted parody:
The production values are good, but the message is all confusing-like.
Joe Biden's Teeth is a silly website by 8 bit studios, whose purported aim is to "reduce our dependency on porcelain and metal fillings through the investment in clean and renewable enamel."
The disclaimer states that "Joe Biden is not affiliated with joebidensteeth.com, but we bet his teeth love it."
So it appears to be a mildly confusing publicity stunt by Trident... but then again, who knows. If you send in a picture of yourself smiling, Trident sends you a free pack.
The site is focused exclusively on Joe Biden's teeth. The tooth chronicles are especially cute, and have that mock-serious tone to it. You can play picture games guessing which set of teeth are Biden's. Or you can not bother. Whatever floats your boat.
(From David B.)FEY AS PALIN: "Like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this. We're saying, 'Hey, why bail out Fanny and Freddie and not me?' But ultimately what the bailout does is, help those that are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy to help...uh...it's gotta be all about job creation, too. Also, too, shoring up our economy and putting Fannie and Freddy back on the right track and so healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reigning in spending...'cause Barack Obama, y'know...has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans, also, having a dollar value meal at restaurants. That's gonna help. But one in five jobs being created today under the umbrella of job creation. That, you know...Also..."Tina is pretty spot-on. Typical. (From the Huffington Post)
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