Month: March 2012

The candidates have basically nixed the last debate of the primary season, scheduled for this Monday in Portland, Oregon. Erick Erickson sees a missed opportunity for Mitt in the wake of his weak performance in Alabama and Mississippi:

The Romney camp signaled it was tired of the debates. But in the Florida debates the Romney camp largely destroyed Gingrich before winning Florida. In the Mesa, AZ debate on CNN the Romney camp ruined Rick Santorum before winning Arizona and barely Michigan. Both times the Romney campaign used good debate performances to rebound lagging poll numbers into real momentum. Then he decided to stop debating. Out of sight and out of mind, conservatives forgot why they thought he was the guy who could beat Obama.

Mixed feelings here, of course. But it's bizarre to have had a primary process driven, shaped and clarified by debates for so long to suddenly abandon them altogether. That's especially true given what Erickson says above and also true because one of the candidates has as his core argument (however ludicrous) that he would be a better debater than Obama.

Should Obama win a second term, Matt Welch fears that Santorum's ideas will further taint the GOP:

If Romney is the tabula rasa Republican, representing nothing and everything in a bid to get elected by any means necessary, Santorum after Tuesday has cemented his place as the GOP's ideas-and-values man. It's his vision–as opposed to the principled limited-government stance of a Ron Paul–that will have pole position if and when Romney loses to Obama.

Larison, on the other hand, argues against Santorum being "next in line."

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry advances the idea:

Legislators crave the legislative subsidy [lobbyists supply] simply because they don't have the staff to research whether proposed tax X would really kill eleventy zillion jobs. Legislative chiefs of staff are "owned" by Abramoff as soon as he tells them he has a job for them in several years because they're getting paid a pittance. What if every member of Congress had a, say, $20 million staff-and-research budget?

What if a congressional chief of staff made $1 million per year, and what if each congressman had an army of staffers to research policy and draft bills, as opposed to a skeleton staff? The legislative subsidy would just become irrelevant. Or at least, congresspeople would be on equal footing vis-à-vis well-funded lobbyists. And the cost would be a drop in the bucket compared to the federal budget — and even less compared to the social and economic cost of carveouts and tax breaks.

A reader writes:

I love the VFY(Airplane)W feature. Your most recent installment reminds me of a recent article in Scientific American on the science of glories, or circular rainbows, one of which appeared in a photo you posted. The article is beautifully written, tracing the historical significance of glories (they can only be seen against one's shadow and thus may be one reason that holy individuals are seen with halos), all the way to recent breakthroughs in the science behind them. It turns out they are no ordinary rainbows; they depend on a very subtle quantum-mechanical effect known as wave tunneling. The article is behind a paywall at SciAm but well worth a read if you can access it.

(Photo from a Dish reader. More examples on Flickr.)

Sara Robinson claims, with a few caveats, that longer work-weeks are counter-productive:

It’s a heresy now (good luck convincing your boss of what I’m about to say), but every hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul. And it may sound weird, but it’s true: the single easiest, fastest thing your company can do to boost its output and profits — starting right now, today — is to get everybody off the 55-hour-a-week treadmill, and back onto a 40-hour footing.

Matthew Kobach digs into studies on violent media:

[W]hile some audiences do enjoy violent content, additional studies suggest that participants that are exposed to media with the graphic violence edited out enjoy it more than participants who saw media with the graphic violence left intact. This is not to say that the one group did not enjoy the violent content, only that they enjoyed the content to a lesser extent. However, when audiences are given the choice between watching violent content or an edited version, people more often want to watch the violent version. This is where the disconnect exists: We choose to watch content that we enjoy less.

A reader writes:

I'm board certified in anesthesiology and pain medicine. The idea of treating chronic pain is asinine because pain is not a disease.  Pain is a symptom of some underlying anatomic pathology.  Our job as pain specialists is to diagnose what that pathology is and address it.  Whether that involves opioids, physical therapy, injections, surgical consultation, or a tincture of time is dependent on the problem. 

So in short, opioids are but one solution to treating pain.  The question that I ask daily is, what's the cause of the pain?  Because the pain as a disease model is passé. I have no idea what Balko is talking about. 

There is no disagreement about the training of pain doctors.  Pain Medicine is a subspecialty of anesthesiology and requires an extra year of training in fellowship.  There are currently about 250 fellows in training each year in the US. We have our own pain medicine societies such as the International Spine Intervention Society, the American Academy of Pain Medicine, and many more.

Currently the field of pain medicine is evolving because it's a newly formed specialty.  Most of the legit board certified pain doctors are anesthesiologists.  But any Joe Schmoe can claim that mantle with a prescription pad and they have been loose with it.  Almost all of these pill mill doctors are primary care physicians looking for an extra buck.

I for one applaud these new legislations.  I don't know of a single legitimate pain doctor who has left the specialty.  Conversely, I know plenty of shady family docs who are sitting in jail for operating pill mills.  Since the passing of more restrictive laws here in Florida, I have been seeing more of these pill mill patients showing up in my office.  And frankly, they don't need oxycontin or percocet.  Portenoy is a well known drug pusher in New York, so I take what he says with a grain of salt.  No one dies from a lack of pain pills, but people will surely die from its overuse.

Finally, for the record, I'd rather my patients smoke the wacky tobacky than pop pills.

Douthat tires of campaign coverage suggesting that anyone but Romney will be the nominee:

Either Romney will clear the 1,144 delegate threshold in May or early June, or else he’ll fall 50-100 delegates short and need to play a little inside baseball to win some of the uncommitted delegates. In either scenario, Santorum is not going to be the party’s standard-bearer, and neither is Jeb Bush or Chris Christie or Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee or anyone else besides the man who is actually winning, however slowly and grindingly and unexcitingly, the Republican nomination for president.

Michael Brendan Dougherty echoes:

Mitt Romney has won almost 1.2 million more votes than Rick Santorum overall. How much did Rick Santorum gain on him last night? 39,119 votes. So in Rick Santorum's "big wins" he erased approximately 1.35 percent of Romney's lead in votes. That's it. And remember, four years ago Mike Huckabee won these state primaries, but no one for a second believed that he had a chance of taking the nomination away from John McCain. 

Today on the Dish, Andrew framed the election as a choice about a war over Iran, fit Cameron's state visit into Obama's reelection campaign, parsed the poll suggesting an Obama blowout, and found Santorum's nomination strategy in the video above. We compiled reax to the Deep South primary, wondered if Santorum could win Illinois, debated Rick's chances down the road, pinpointed the difference between a "brokered" and "open" convention, and aired a situational explanation for the "weakest field ever." SuperPACs grew by hurting the GOP candidate's chances and voters failed to grasp that Obama lowered their taxes. Ad War Updates here and here.

Andrew praised one of the most insightful reviews of Charles Murray's new book to date, wished the Derb well during chemo, and previewed tonight's South Park premiere. Syria divided evangelicals and neoconservatives, Assad's chemical weapons threatened both his people and the world, and withdrawing from Afghanistan faster was complicated. We shared another terrible story about gays in Catholic institutions (this time, the choir), noted Roy Moore's victory, thought about the consequences of the spreading anti-Limbaugh campaign, updated you on Balko's pain pill series, and checked McGinniss' experiment in online publishing.

Factory farms and PETA alike made their killing of animals invisible (albeit on different scales), while corpse flowers merely smelled awful. Nerds went mainstream, John Carter's in-the-know trailers destined it for box-office flopdom, and rom-coms weren't necessarily so staid. Encyclopedia Britannica ended print publication, TED turned people into ideas, millenials looked likely to move out (eventually), the waiting population boomed, cellphones outpaced toilets in India, and a man charted his life. Chart of the Day here, Correction of the Day here, VFYW here, MHB here, and FOTD here.

– Z.B.