Michelle, We Hardly Knew Ye

Michelle Bachmann first came to our attention about six years ago when, at the conclusion of GWB's State of the Union Address, she grabbed him and wouldn't let go.



Since then she's set a new standard for loopiness, been a major face of the New Republican Party, and embarrassed Minnesota to heck and back.

Now, she's gone – or at least, leaving.



What's with the background music on that?

Anyway, it's got to be good for America.

Update: Gail Collins surveys Michelle's loopiness.  The Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act! Thank you, Michelle, for guarding our freedoms.

Something Completely Different

I just loved this guy's video.

Richard Wagner

Today is Wagner's 200th birthday. Not something I celebrate, I assure you.

This post isn't about him, but about Anna Russell's wonderful satire of his Ring Cycle. I'd heard it from time to time on the radio, but today discovered there's actually a YouTube video of it.

If you don't have 20 hours over 4 evenings "at those prices" to see "The Ring," (or the inclination to do so) you might enjoy 30 minutes of Anna Russell telling you the story.

The Age of Miracles and Wonders

The Oklahoma tornado is still terrifying the next day. Climate-change denier Senator James Inhofe says it's "hard to explain." He's apparently going to make sure Oklahoma gets disaster assistance from the federal government, even though he voted against disaster assistance for states hit by Hurricane Sandy. Of course they'll get it (and should).

I'm disgusted with myself for getting political about this, but politics is not just a distasteful parlor game. Lives are lost or wasted when we make bad policy decisions, we've been making terrible ones for 33 years, our survival depends on turning that around, and the chances of doing that look very bleak.

But just to prove I'm human, let me share some joy amid the sorrow:

The Amazing Human Brain

Well, mine isn't, but this guy's is, anyway. It's in German, but you'll have no problem figuring out what's going on.



Via Americablog.

Health Care American Style

In the United States we have some of the best doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals in the world.

Unfortunately, we probably have the worst health care system in the First World. Some day I'm going to do a long post about this (I've been telling myself for at least two years), but for now let me just refer you to this New York Times article about the prices different hospitals charge to treat the same illness.

To quote from the article:

A hospital in Livingston, N.J., charged $70,712 on average to implant a pacemaker, while a hospital in nearby Rahway, N.J., charged $101,945.

In Saint Augustine, Fla., one hospital typically billed nearly $40,000 to remove a gallbladder using minimally invasive surgery, while one in Orange Park, Fla., charged $91,000.

In one hospital in Dallas, the average bill for treating simple pneumonia was $14,610, while another there charged over $38,000. 

Data being released for the first time by the government on Wednesday shows that hospitals charge Medicare wildly differing amounts — sometimes 10 to 20 times what Medicare typically reimburses — for the same procedure, raising questions about how hospitals determine prices and why they differ so widely.

The data for 3,300 hospitals, released by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, shows wide variations not only regionally but among hospitals in the same area or city.

The article says, "Government officials said that some of the variation might reflect the fact that some patients were sicker or required longer hospitalization." Yeah, I guess they might. But on the other hand, we're talking about average bills here, not individual bills.

Find your area hospitals on this interactive map. Do they charge more, less, or about average? This is a Must Visit web site.

The Mayo Clinic charges less than the U.S. average. The Cleveland Clinic charges 1 to 2 times the U.S. average.

The Kaiser Foundation Hospital in San Diego is the only area hospital that charges less than the national average.  All the rest charge 1 to 2 times the national average, except Sharp Chula Vista, which bills more than 2 times the national average.

Department of "Why Bother? We're Doomed!"

Via Andrew Tobias:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The New Spock and the Real Spock

Here's today's laugh – an Audi commercial:

Same Batch of Wackadoodles

Jon Stewart on the freak show known as the NRA National Convention:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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A Recipe for Disaster

A "fusion paranoiac" plans an armed march on Washington D.C.

What could go wrong?

Talking Treason

Ed Kilgore at Political Animal talks about James Porter, the new president of the extremist National Rifle Association:

... Porter seems to be highly representative of the amazingly common type of contemporary “conservatives” who combine extremist language about their political opponents with violent language about their political options—who in effect point their guns at “liberals” while making it known they and they alone will decide what “liberties” to surrender, democracy or laws be damned.

It makes it worse that Porter is one of the old boys who thinks it ha-larious to refer to the American Civil War as the “war of northern aggression” (as “we” put it “down south,” he said to a New York crowd recently). Since that war, whatever else it represented, was without question an armed revolution against the government of the United States, you have to wonder if the Confederacy—or as it was commonly referred to in the north for many decades, “the Rebellion”—is Porter’s model for defense of oneself against “tyranny” (you may recall that John Wilkes Booth shouted “Sic semper tyrannus“—“thus always to tyrants”) after shooting Lincoln.

Am I perhaps being unfair to these people in suggesting that they are behaving like America-haters and are flirting with treason? I don’t think so. Porter and those like him could dispel this sort of suspicion instantly, any time they wanted, by just saying: “Let’s be clear: the kind of ‘tyranny’ we are arming ourselves to forestall is something entirely different from anything Americans have experienced since we won our independence—a regime engaged in the active suppression of any sort of dissent, and the closure of any peaceful means for the redress of grievances. We’re not talking about the current administration, or either major political party, as presently representing a threat of tyranny.”

I’m not holding my breath for any statements like that to emerge from the NRA, or indeed, from the contemporary conservative movement. It’s ironic that people who almost certainly think of themselves as patriots—perhaps as super-patriots—are deliberately courting the impression that loyalty to their country is strictly contingent on the maintenance of laws and policies they favor, to be achieved if not by ballots then by bullets. Republican politicians should be repudiating such people instead of celebrating them, accepting their money and support, and even adopting their seditious rhetoric. [My emphasis.]

Did You Hear about This?

You sure would have if the guy was a Muslim.

Two Middletown police officers attempted to enforce the Obama police state by stopping a guy for running a stop sign. Not to be cowed by the oppressors, he came out shooting. One police officer lost a finger, the other had minor thigh wounds. The police cruiser's dash-cam caught it all.

There are some real twisted characters out there – with 40 round magazines.

Others are sitting in Congress.

Too Late Now, Sad to Say

Sandra Day O'Connor thinks maybe the Supreme Court should not have heard Bush v Gore.

Or maybe they should have decided that votes determine the winners elections.

The result, she allowed, “stirred up the public” and “gave the court a less than perfect reputation.”

After nearly 13 years, the stench is just as strong.

But, as Pope Antonin I says, "Get over it."

A Train Passes Through a Bangkok Slum

Via Americablog, which advises "Wait for it."

By which he means "Watch it to the end (41 seconds, total), and you'll have a new understanding."

What the Heck's the Matter with Kids Today?

Is it nature or nurture that creates kids like this? Both, probably. Despite the snickering of one of these guys about his biology teacher, I have no doubt that there were some great teachers in their lives.

Fascinating talks from teenagers.

A safer, cheaper nuclear reactor:



This kid won a science fair by developing a 100% accurate, 3-cent test for pancreatic cancer. I was going to enter my model of an erupting volcano, but wanted to give him a chance.



If you have a teenager yourself, here are nine impressive TED Talks by kids that might inspire them.

These kids are bright, but something or somebody inspired them to take themselves and their passions seriously.

Update: Sorry, the earlier version of this post did not include the video of Jack Andraka's talk about how he developed a test for pancreatic, ovarian, and lung cancer.

Laughing at Fox News

Jon Stewart does it again.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Lindsey Graham

From David A. Graham at The Atlantic:

Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, sent these two fascinating tweets this afternoon:

If captured, I hope Administration will at least consider holding the Boston suspect as enemy combatant for intelligence gathering purposes.
— Lindsey Graham (@GrahamBlog) April 19, 2013

The last thing we may want to do is read Boston suspect Miranda Rights telling him to "remain silent."
— Lindsey Graham (@GrahamBlog) April 19, 2013

This is pretty breathtaking. Graham (no relation) is suggesting that an American citizen, captured on American soil, should be deprived of basic constitutional rights

Keep in mind that Graham isn't just an angry citizen; he's not even just a U.S. senator. He is also a trained lawyer, a colonel in Air Force Reserve, and a member of the Judge Advocate General's Corps, the legal arm of the Air Force.

In fairness, the senator is consistent. "It has been the law of the United States for decades that an American citizen on our soil who collaborates with the enemy has committed an act of war and will be held under the law of war, not domestic criminal law," he said in 2011. But that was in the context of Americans collaborating with al-Qaeda, a link that hasn't been drawn here. 

Crooks & Liars reports a later tweet:

The Obama Administration needs to be contemplating these issues and should not rush into a bad decision.
— Lindsey Graham (@GrahamBlog) April 19, 2013

Is he seriously suggesting that the Administration should be spending time contemplating whether to micromanage the police on the scene concerning Miranda rights?

A later tweety reponse to Graham:

Graham says bombing suspect should be held as enemy combatant, not read his rights, but asking him to pass a background check? TYRANNY.
— Jim Fowler (@Jim_Fowler1) April 19, 2013

Personally, I can think of no bigger F-up that the police could do than fail to "Mirandize" the "second bomber." Luckily for us all, the Watertown and Boston Police and the FBI are professionals and – unlike Lindsey Graham – know what they're doing. I'd be shocked if the guy was out of the boat before he got his rights read to him.

Lindsey Graham is considered a Very Serious Person by the Meet the Press crowd.

Update:

Okay, so I'm a dumb-ass. I've never claimed differently. From the Friday night NY Times:

A federal law enforcement official said he would not be read his Miranda rights, because the authorities would be invoking the public safety exception in order to question him extensively about other potential explosive devices or accomplices and to try to gain intelligence.

I'm so embarrassed.

Pope Francis: More of the Same

Tom Kingston in the LATimes, in an article headlined Pope Francis reaffirms crackdown on U.S. nuns:

The Vatican said in a statement Monday that Francis had reaffirmed the doctrinal evaluation and criticism of U.S. nuns made last year by the Holy See under his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. The assessment accused the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization that represents most U.S. female Catholic orders, of promoting “radical feminist themes” and ignoring the Vatican’s hard line on same-sex marriage and abortion.

At the time, the Vatican dispatched an archbishop to rewrite the group’s statutes and set up reeducation programs to bring nuns back into line, alleging that leaders of U.S. orders had challenged the church’s teachings on women’s ordination and ministry to homosexuals.

The move was denounced by Pat Farrell, then the head of the organization, as creating “pain and scandal.” Protest vigils were held outside churches, and a petition attacking the Vatican’s decision attracted 50,000 signatures.

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious represents about 57,000 sisters, or 80% of U.S. nuns.

Ed Kilgore has it right:

There’s no reason for anyone to attack Francis for “backsliding” or “hypocrisy.” Behaving more like a servant than a monarch during the early stages of his reign, and even taking seriously challenges like Vatican reform or the child abuse scandal, never for a moment meant this Pope was going to abandon teachings and disciplinary actions systematically entrenched by his two predecessors over decades. Had that been a real possibility, he would have never been elected in the first place.

It was fun for a couple of weeks, though, to think maybe, just maybe ....

Recommended Reading

Two very interesting articles in tomorrow's NY Times:

• Pat Summerall's Obituary

Some bits:

On a December afternoon in 1958, Summerall kicked a 49-yard field goal in a snowstorm at Yankee Stadium to give the Giants a 13-10 victory over the Cleveland Browns and send the teams to a playoff for the Eastern Conference title. The Giants beat the Browns again the next Sunday, then played in the first of three National Football League championship games in Summerall’s years with them.

[snip]

He was born with a right leg twisted backward. A doctor, trying a novel procedure, fractured the leg, turned it around and then reset it when he was an infant. The doctor thought the child might always walk with a limp and doubted he could play sports.

Summerall’s parents had separated before he was born. When he was 3, his mother no longer wished to care for him, and he was raised by an aunt, an uncle and a grandmother, who inspired him to pursue sports.

 • InsideClimate News won the Pulitzer Prize for national journalism.

But they don't have an office. Or, for that matter, a publication. They have a web site, which has been added to Sempringham's daily reads.

Musical Interlude - Duck and Goose

Duck and Goose is a local Chicago group – if two people can make a group. I did some photos at one of their performances a few years ago, and was really impressed with them. This is a new song (to me, at least) called Mother Mary.

I guess I need to warn you: it is of a genre which I suppose might be called Christian folk. Not something I listen to a lot, but me like pretty music wherever it is. So if you're constitutionally unable to enjoy modern "Christian" music, move on along.