links for 2009-07-14

Tens of thousands of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are not being diagnosed or treated quickly enough, says a watchdog.

The National Audit Office says over half a million people in England live with the disease, with 26,000 new cases a year – double the current estimate.

But only a tenth are treated within three months of symptoms starting, as ideally they should be.

This is because many delay seeing a GP, and RA is difficult to diagnose.

It's probably a bit kind to say that Sarah Palin "wrote" this. There are no words in all capital letters. There are no sports metaphors. There is nothing at all like "*((Gotta put First Things First))*." The stylistic and grammatical tics on display in last week's speech are totally absent. Sarah Palin signed her name to this. Or at least let someone else do so.

But that's not all that's missing. The term "global warming" is absent. So is "climate change." It's a bit like an op-ed that attacks firefighters for pointing pressurized water cannons at everything but never mentions fires, or a column that condemns surgeons for sticking sharp things into people but never mentions illness.

There is no shortage of threats to our economy. America's unemployment rate recently hit its highest mark in more than 25 years and is expected to continue climbing. Worries are widespread that even when the economy finally rebounds, the recovery won't bring jobs. Our nation's debt is unsustainable, and the federal government's reach into the private sector is unprecedented.
Unfortunately, many in the national media would rather focus on the personality-driven political gossip of the day than on the gravity of these challenges. So, at risk of disappointing the chattering class, let me make clear what is foremost on my mind and where my focus will be:

I am deeply concerned about President Obama's cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.

When I began examining the political affiliation of faculty at the University of Oregon, the lone conservative professor I spoke with cautioned that I would "make a lot of people unhappy."

Though I mostly brushed off his warning – assuming that academia would be interested in such discourse – I was careful to frame my research for a column for the school newspaper diplomatically.

The University of Oregon (UO), where I study journalism, invested millions annually in a diversity program that explicitly included "political affiliation" as a component. Yet, out of the 111 registered Oregon voters in the departments of journalism, law, political science, economics, and sociology, there were only two registered Republicans.

Bill Clinton, off the cuff at a student event in Washington last week, answered "yeah" to the question of whether he supports same-sex marriage.

The Nation, which caught the remark, says "Clinton's reversal is the highest-profile one to date," and it puts him further out either than his wife or President Obama who stands at risk of being left behind by his party on a fast-moving issue.

The Associated Press fact-checks the panel's top Democrat: “In endorsing Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy did some creative rewriting of history. And he put quote marks around it. Trying to head off criticism of a controversial comment, Leahy misquoted Sotomayor's own words in kicking off the second day of her confirmation hearings.”

As politicians in Washington, DC debate what to do about global warming, the Northeast has been hit with record low temperatures this morning.

According to ABC News, the cities of Binghamton and Rochester in New York and Hartford, CT experienced record lows for July today.

Meanwhile, here in the Granite State, temperatures in Concord fell to 47-degress this morning, the lowest since 1940. Temperatures in Portsmouth came witin one degree of the lowest ever in July.

U.S. Army Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook, set to deploy to Afghanistan, says he shouldn’t have to go.
Cook’s lawyer, Orly Taitz, who has also challenged the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency in other courts, filed a request last week in federal court seeking a temporary restraining order and status as a conscientious objector for his client.

In the 20-page document — filed July 8 with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia — the California-based Taitz asks the court to consider granting his client’s request based upon Cook’s belief that Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and is therefore ineligible to serve as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Armed Forces.

His reason?

Barack Obama was never eligible to be president because he wasn’t born in the United States.

A sweeping overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system to be announced on Tuesday in the U.S. House of Representatives will include a surtax on millionaires of 5.4 percent, congressional sources said.

The tax rate is higher than the 3 percent surtax lawmakers had been discussing earlier and would be imposed on those making more than $1 million a year, the sources said.