links for 2010-07-21

Nov. 3:

DAVID ROBERTS, GRIST: It’s all I can do not to start bawling.

LUKE MITCHELL, HARPER’S: I’m picturing something like VJ Day in Times Square. Seriously!

JOHN BLEVINS, SOUTH TEXAS COLLEGE OF LAW: It’s all I can do to hold it together.

Nov. 4:

MOIRA WHELAN, NATIONAL SECURITY NETWORK: I’m looking across the street at my polling place, and the line is wrapped around the block. I nearly burst into tears when I saw it. I’m feeling like today is closing the door on a terrible era, and opening another. I’m glad you started this thread because I was feeling kind of like I was the only one who is deeply emotional today.

HENRY FARRELL, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY: I had to close my office door yesterday because I was watching YouTube videos of elderly African Americans saying what this meant to them and tearing up.
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The fourth estate indeed.

How corrupt can you get?

Maybe the Right blogosphere was right about the LEFT MSM. Wait they were….

Blogosphere, please join me in celebrating the birth of Cabalist, the wittily-named successor to Ezra Klein's infamous Journolist, the listserv of liberal bloggers, pundits and academics that inadvertently brought down (very temporarily) the ex-Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel, and which is now the subject of an endless and embarrassing (for certain former Journolist participants) investigation by The Daily Caller, which has discovered e-mail chains suggesting that certain Journolist members were secretly devising partisan campaigns to advance Democratic Party interests.
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More group think from the LEFT

Dr. David Blumenthal, the Obama administration's National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, said on Tuesday that patients can choose to omit procedures such as abortions and positive HIV tests from the electronic health records (EHR) that every American is supposed to have by 2014 under the terms of the economic stimulus law that President Barack Obama signed last year.

Blumenthal's office, a subdivision of the Department of Health and Human Services, was created by the stimulus law specifically to generate the standards and regulations that will govern the federally mandated use of EHRs.
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Do we really want government involved in this?

Hell No……

The White House did a sudden about-face Wednesday and begged for forgiveness from the black Agriculture Department employee whose ouster ignited an embarrassing political firestorm over race. She was offered a "unique opportunity" for a new job and said she was thinking it over.

With lightning speed, the controversy moved from Monday's forced resignation of a minor U.S. Ag official in Georgia to Tuesday's urgent discussions at the White House amid a rising public outcry and then to Wednesday's repeated apologies and pleas for Shirley Sherrod to come back.

Sherrod said she resigned under White House pressure after the airing of a video of racial remarks she made at an NAACP gathering. But Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said repeatedly on Wednesday that the decision had been his alone.
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Oops….

Background: Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) is an inflammatory marker produced by the epithelial cells of the prostate acini. In the presence of inflammation or malignancy of the prostate, PSA levels are ?4 ng/ml. This preliminary study was conducted to evaluate any association between periodontitis and PSA levels in chronic prostatitis patients.

Conclusion: Subjects having comorbidity of CAL ?2.7 mm and moderate/severe prostatitis have higher PSA levels than those with either condition alone.
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Get those routine dental cleanings, folks

Patients typically have no idea what their doctor jots down about them after an office visit, and rarely read those notes, even though they have the legal right to do so. Now, an ambitious project called OpenNotes aims to change that, by giving patients access to the notes recorded after every medical encounter, according to today’s Informed Patient column.

In a paper published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers detailed the decidedly mixed reactions they received in the planning stages of the project, when they surveyed doctors and patients on their attitudes about opening doctors’ notes to patients. In an unusual move, they are now widening that net, offering both medical professionals and the lay public the opportunity to weigh in with their own reactions in an online survey and on the Annals website.
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Read it all

Hundreds of residents of one of the poorest municipalities in Los Angeles County shouted in protest last night as tensions rose over a report that the city’s manager earns an annual salary of almost $800,000.

An overflow crowd packed a City Council meeting in Bell, a mostly Hispanic city of 38,000 about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles, to call for the resignation of Mayor Oscar Hernandez and other city officials. Residents left standing outside the chamber banged on the doors and shouted “fuera,” or “get out” in Spanish.

It was the first council meeting since the Los Angeles Times reported July 15 that Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo earns $787,637 — with annual 12 percent raises — and that Bell pays its police chief $457,000, more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck makes in a city of 3.8 million people. Bell council members earn almost $100,000 for part-time work.
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Where has the Los Angeles County Grand Jury been?

AWOL