The Atheist Communist Caliphate Made Flesh, Spread the Clusterfuck Around Thread

[Jon]

I'm getting paid?

For the record, I found Sanford smarmy way back when he ran for state senate.

[Tank]

http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/06/23/sanford-disappears-to-hike-appalachian-trail-on-naked-hiking-day/

We're not suggesting that the formerly missing Governor of South Carolina specifically ditched his family and security detail to go hiking on Naked Hiking Day. It's just that one of the days he hit the trail also happened to be the aforementioned holiday. [Editor's note: This paragraph was changed to make clear that the governor's timing was a coincidence.]

...

But many wondered aloud how this traditional, family-loving, Republican governor of a southern state could miss Fathers Day. After all he's got four children! Was something sinister in the air?

Then it took a Farrelly brothers screenplay type of twist. Sanford had not disappeared. According to his spokesman, he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail. Coincidentally, on Naked Hiking Day.

It's a big tradition. Many hikers celebrate the summer solstice by hiking au naturel. It just so happened the solstice occurred on Fathers Day — one of the days Sanford was hiking.

Late last night his spokesman, Joel Sawyer expressed remorse for not divulging details earlier.

"The governor is hiking along the Appalachian Trail," Sawyer said. "I apologize for taking so long to send this update, and was waiting to see if a more definitive idea of what part of the Trail he was on before we did so."

If he did participate in the summer solstice celebration (which we acknowledge is not likely), he could get into some real trouble. Rangers and police warn that people caught outdoors in the altogether could be charged with indecent exposure. Managers of the Appalachian Trail, where the tradition is sometimes observed by those trekking from Georgia to Maine, also discourage nudity.

[Tank]

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/23/car-believed-to-be-sanfords-found-at-south-carolina-airport/

[Waco Kid]

http://www.thestate.com/local/story/838823.html

Gov. Mark Sanford arrived in the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport this morning, having wrapped up a seven-day visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, he said. Sanford said he had not been hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff said in a Tuesday statement to the media.

Sanford must have found a better male prostitute orgy in Argentina.

[Quality Start Machine]

http://www.thestate.com/local/story/838823.html

Gov. Mark Sanford arrived in the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport this morning, having wrapped up a seven-day visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, he said. Sanford said he had not been hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff said in a Tuesday statement to the media.

Sanford must have found a better male prostitute orgy in Argentina.

So you can scrub this guy from the Presidential contenenders' list then?

[Tank]

http://www.thestate.com/local/story/838823.html

Gov. Mark Sanford arrived in the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport this morning, having wrapped up a seven-day visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, he said. Sanford said he had not been hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff said in a Tuesday statement to the media.

Sanford must have found a better male prostitute orgy in Argentina.

Or a better family to spend his Father's Day with.

Maybe he just wanted to destroy any potential 2012 presidential bid early and in style.

[Tank]

http://www.thestate.com/local/story/838823.html

Gov. Mark Sanford arrived in the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport this morning, having wrapped up a seven-day visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, he said. Sanford said he had not been hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff said in a Tuesday statement to the media.

Sanford must have found a better male prostitute orgy in Argentina.

So you can scrub this guy from the Presidential contenenders' list then?

Abruptly left his family behind over Father's Day, incommunicado in an undisclosed South American location for a week, to get away from the pressures of running the government of the nation's 24th largest state?

Yeah... Pretty sure you can cross him off.

[Waco Kid]

http://www.thestate.com/local/story/838823.html

Gov. Mark Sanford arrived in the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport this morning, having wrapped up a seven-day visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, he said. Sanford said he had not been hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff said in a Tuesday statement to the media.

Sanford must have found a better male prostitute orgy in Argentina.

So you can scrub this guy from the Presidential contenenders' list then?

Nice.

[Quality Start Machine]

http://www.thestate.com/local/story/838823.html

Gov. Mark Sanford arrived in the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport this morning, having wrapped up a seven-day visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, he said. Sanford said he had not been hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff said in a Tuesday statement to the media.

Sanford must have found a better male prostitute orgy in Argentina.

So you can scrub this guy from the Presidential contenenders' list then?

Nice.

It's not all Borscht Belt around here, you know...

[morpheus]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/roughsketch/2009/06/the_president_packs_the_press.html

[RV]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/roughsketch/2009/06/the_president_packs_the_press.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/media-playground-obama-ca_b_219863.html

Arianna is a douche, but she's right. Milbank spends half his post complaining about this break in sacred press conference protocol before noting

The Huffington Post writer's question -- "under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad?" -- was a perfectly legitimate one

I think this is a pissy White House press corps issue more than a ZOMG! HUFFPOST LIBRUL PLANT! issue.

[Chuck to Chuck]

The Huffington Post writer's question -- "under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad?" -- was a perfectly legitimate one

[/quote]
Not the point.  Bush scripted his press conferences (he even said so during one "This is scripted" he slipped out) and that was seen as done as a way to get a guy uncomfortable with talking off the cuff through a presser.  If you do that, it becomes less a press conference and more of a campaign event.

Obama should be better than this.

[morpheus]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/roughsketch/2009/06/the_president_packs_the_press.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/media-playground-obama-ca_b_219863.html

Arianna is a douche, but she's right. Milbank spends half his post complaining about this break in sacred press conference protocol before noting

The Huffington Post writer's question -- "under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad?" -- was a perfectly legitimate one

I think this is a pissy White House press corps issue more than a ZOMG! HUFFPOST LIBRUL PLANT! issue.

Maybe.  From the original post I put up:

UPDATE, 8:48 p.m.: Nico Pitney e-mailed to say that it was the White House that approached him with a request to ask an Iran question, not vice versa. On Huffington Post, he wrote today: "Last night, after emailing with a few people about Obama's press conference and what he might say, I decided to throw it open to our readers. I received a call from White House staff saying they had seen what I'd written and thought the President might be interested in receiving a question directly from an Iranian."

White House spokesman Bill Burton, asked to comment, offered this: "He wasn't planted nor was the question pre-planned. He happened to ask the best question on the issue of Iran, and it isn't one that we knew in advance nor that we asked him to pose." Further, Burton added: "There was no agreement to call on him if he asked about Iran." Finally, he posited: "This is just silly -- did you really think that we needed to pre-arrange questions about Iran in order to get them?"

No, the White House didn't need to. But according to an e-mail Pitney sent to his Huffington Post colleagues Monday night, that's just what the White House did. "The White House called earlier this evening and asked if I could ask a question of President Obama at his press conference tomorrow on behalf of an Iranian," he wrote. "I'm about to post a solicitation to the blog/Facebook/Twitter, etc. It seems fairly likely that this will happen but as they told me, 'it's not 100 percent until he calls your name.'"

And

Still, the private agreement -- to call on a questioner under condition that he ask his question on a particular topic in a particular way -- is very close to what the left justifiably deplored when there were accusations (denied by the media) that the White House was pre-screening reporters and their questions before news conferences.

And Pitney was not the only "plant" at yesterday's news conference. Later, Obama passed over the usual suspects to call on Macarena Vidal of the Spanish-language E.F.E. news agency. The White House called Vidal in advance to see if she was coming and arranged for her to sit in a seat usually assigned to a financial trade publication. "Okay, Macarena Vidal," Obama called out, as the regulars adopted baffled expressions. She asked about Chile and Colombia.

A couple more questions and Obama called it a day. "Mr. President!" yelled Mike Allen of Politico. "May I ask about Afghanistan?" Obama kept going. "No questions about Iraq or Afghanistan?"

Sorry, those weren't pre-arranged.

I just read Chuck's reply, and as is much more likely on non-baseball-related topics, he is right.

[Tank]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/roughsketch/2009/06/the_president_packs_the_press.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/media-playground-obama-ca_b_219863.html

Arianna is a douche, but she's right. Milbank spends half his post complaining about this break in sacred press conference protocol before noting

The Huffington Post writer's question -- "under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad?" -- was a perfectly legitimate one

I think this is a pissy White House press corps issue more than a ZOMG! HUFFPOST LIBRUL PLANT! issue.

This is kind of a special case, considering Pitney has been actively soliciting emails directly from ordinary Iranians and was positioned better than other reporters in the room to ask a question on their behalf. Obama acknowledged as much before calling on him:

"Nico, I know that you and all across the Internet, we've been seeing a lot of reports coming directly out of Iran," the president went on. "I know that there may actually be questions from people in Iran who are communicating through the Internet. Do you have a question?"

Pitney recognized his prompt. "Yes," Pitney said, standing in the aisle and wearing a temporary White House press pass. "I wanted to use this opportunity to ask you a question directly from an Iranian."

I suppose there's a bit of PR stage management involved in the White House's desire to field a question "from an Iranian" in the first place, but that doesn't take much away from the fact that the question was a tough and direct one (and not, apparently, itself arranged or scripted beforehand):

Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there isn't that a betrayal of what the demonstrators there are working for?

As for the Spanish-language reporter... is that all that unusual or conscience-shocking considering the visit of the Chilean President later in the day?

[RV]

If you're a simple caveman like me and don't understand why healthcare has gotten so goddamn expensive to the point that it'll cripple our economy in a few years, this is a good start:

Somewhere in the United States at this moment, a patient with chest pain, or a tumor, or a cough is seeing a doctor. And the damning question we have to ask is whether the doctor is set up to meet the needs of the patient, first and foremost, or to maximize revenue.

There is no insurance system that will make the two aims match perfectly. But having a system that does so much to misalign them has proved disastrous. As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients.

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?

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.

You also don't have your employer pick out a contractor to build your home for you (and everyone else).  Perhaps the tax laws should change to make it less advantageous for an employer to provide health care, and more advantageous for an individual to find an insurance program to his liking.

Addressed in the article:

The third class of health-cost proposals, I explained, would push people to use medical savings accounts and hold high-deductible insurance policies: "They'd have more of their own money on the line, and that'd drive them to bargain with you and other surgeons, right?"

He gave me a quizzical look. We tried to imagine the scenario. A cardiologist tells an elderly woman that she needs bypass surgery and has Dr. Dyke see her. They discuss the blockages in her heart, the operation, the risks. And now they're supposed to haggle over the price as if he were selling a rug in a souk? "I'll do three vessels for thirty thousand, but if you take four I'll throw in an extra night in the I.C.U."—that sort of thing? Dyke shook his head. "Who comes up with this stuff?" he asked. "Any plan that relies on the sheep to negotiate with the wolves is doomed to failure."

I do agree that there should be re-aligning of incentives for doctors - the question is whether the health care market is one that's efficient enough to react to the demands of the sheeple.

Here's a follow up interview with the dude who wrote the New Yorker health care article. The guy drops the word "incentives" enough to make morph stain his momjorts.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/06/an_interview_with_atul_gawande.html