October Surprise:Iran

An October surprise from the White House to help John McCain get elected.
My prediction: Bombing Iran. Or other short term incursion.

Crook to Prosecutor: The 2009 White House Changeover

Supposing a democrat wins the election, are we all certain that Bush and Cheney are going to go gently into that dark night?

The next president, if democrat, will be picking up the pieces of the last 8 years of policies that he or she strongly disagrees with. At least some of those policies are going to appear to be covering criminal activity: those billions of dollars going in airplanes to Iraq, nobid contracts to Halliburton, signing statements, torture, Cheney's secret energy negotiations, vice presidential visitor logs, paying reporters to report biased news, leaking CIA agent's identities, lost emails, cronyism. The list will be long.

Cheney and Bush and advisers might well be worried about criminal prosecutions. From the Cheney-Bush perspective, the cats will now be in charge of the hen house.
While deleting lots of emails is one way to interfere with prosecution, and taking massive quantities of documents with them is another, there is still likely to be plenty of evidence lying around. Its hard to commit crime on this massive of a scale without leaving some evidence lying around.

I recall a statement in the news from someone at the Pentagon during the night that Nixon resigned. The statement was to the effect that the Pentagon was making certain that all troop movements were authorized and previously scheduled, and that no extra commands that skipped the normal chain of command.
Presumably we will have the same situation in 2009.

Unpreventable Medical Mistakes

I'm looking at a flyer for a seminar titled "Medical Errors in Hospitals: Cause and Prevention". A quote (hopefully not out of context) from the description/abstract: "Medical errors in hospitals are the eighth leading cause of death in the United States - killing approximately 100,000 people per year. Two thirds of these deaths could be prevented."

Well gee. If one third of these deaths could not be prevented, what was the medical error? The patient would have died anyway. If someone is dying, and nothing you as a physician do matters, why is it a medical error? If an error occurred, then maybe you mistakenly caused additional pain, or omitted appropriate palliative care?

Errors that kill someone, who otherwise would have left the hospital is as major an error as it gets. If there is a death, but it isn't preventable, any error in care is of lesser impact. Errors that don't kill someone are of lesser stature, though potentially pretty egregious still...

I would say that the abstract should state that 67,000 preventable deaths occurred. The un-preventable deaths should be omitted.

Is Hillary McCain or John Clinton a Muslim?

Is it time to ask Obama whether he thinks Clinton or McCain is a Muslim? Should Clinton tell the interviewer that it is a stupid, inappropriate question? Both on its face, and indirectly, through the implications, it's not an appropriate question.

And no, the title isn't a misprint. Might not be right, but it wasn't unintentional.