All-Purpose NuILX thread for American Politics

I like k3vin k too!

guys i'm not on a ledge or anything!

becoming a pharmacist is a defensible choice and an excellent career. you can remain a politics/music nerd too!

yes but all pharmacists are far-right republicans.

that is always 100% true in all cases, because my one pharmacist friend is one of those and owns a large gun

healthcare professionals are scum

actually he's not far right, but his gun is p big

proof.

Med school is rad. Especially 4th year of med school. All I have done this week is interviews and hangin' out in Midwestern hotel rooms (some of which are comped).

Also during an interview today I got asked the "if you could change one thing about medicine, what would it be" question, and I was feelin' a lil political and said "I would like to get for-profit corporations out of all sectors of medicine." It seemed to be well-received, even!

lol. you could have said "single-payer," or "public option," or maybe "repeal obamacare"!

actually maybe "public option, no wait! . . . repeal obamacare and end its death-panels" would have worked nicely.

"I would like to pay neurologists more than all other specialties combined."

lol

"i would outlaw all radiologists none of them can be trusted"

george mcgovern hospitalized after fall.

he was about to appear on c-span.

For reals, though, I think it'd basically be impossible to get physicians to fully sign on to single payer, if for no other reason than most of us spend enough time as students/residents/sometimes attendings in the VA system to get the impression that the VA is a place where getting stuff done is sort of impossible sometimes.

that may be. i've been doing a lot of health care-related work over the past few years, and one thing i'm sure of is that the old fee-for-service model is soon to be a thing of the past. everything will be managed care, of one sort or another (whether it be ACOs or HMOs or some other form).

hey C-L are you applying in mpls??

McGovern, 89, helicoptered to trauma unit:

"About 10 feet from the door he slipped and fell and hit his head," Simmons said. "He was bleeding pretty heavily."

Hang in there, big fella.

I am! On Monday! (I woulda posted this but then ILX asploded)

!!!

good luck, duder. say whuddup to my mans dr. fi0l

good luck, c-l.

Thank you! I may have already seen the winner of my Interview Sweepstakes, but it is still hilarious and fun to do interviews. Plus I get to go to Mayo in a couple weeks! BECAUSE I CAN~

healthcare professionals are scum

Bah. This makes me feel shitty for even saying anything. Obv. river wolf is an excellent example of a liberal-arts grad who will be an awesome health-care professional. One of my favorite uncles was a lawyer before he went back to school for a microbiology Ph.D. Obv. there are also dudes like Atul Gawande and Siddharta Mukherjee who are top-notch doctors/writers.

I guess my thing with K3vin was that I'd never encountered him having talked about his pharmacy studies with the same degree of passion that he talked about other things. Obv. ILX as a whole leans more toward humanities-related subjects than toward hard science, but it still felt sort of dissonant to me. But I have a better understanding now!

sorry i was just bein cranky

np dude u know i <3

Humanities stuff is more exciting to discuss and debate and have opinions on, though, I guess. Like, even with medicine, the stuff that starts arguments is political stuff and the squishy humanities/ethics elements. And you get some of that over the course of the day, but when I talk with my friends from school about medicine stuff it is basically a) patient stories, which are kinda awesome, but I feel weird talking about them on the internet in all but the vaguest of terms, b) gossip about other students/residents/attendings, which is SO AWESOME but does not translate well, and c) talkin' bout residency. In the preclinical years it was talkin' bout how stupid certain stupid things were. (Stupid antiarrhythmics HATE YOU SO MUCH)

I am kind of doing c) right now but again I am compelled to be really vague because I decided to post to the internet with my initials and so if someone really cared enough to try, they could figure out my identity pretty quickly.

Panetta to Israel/Palestine: "Get to the damn table." Watch this cause a shitstorm.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/panettas-advice-for-mideast-peace-talks-just-get-to-the-damn-table/

antiarrhythmics are just the worst.

i'm at FVRS (across the river) rotating through neuro's softer lil brother. hope you enjoy our fair burg! how long you in town?

for some reason i've decided to watch the herman cain announcement on two different live feeds at the same time

live feed 1

feed 2

there's a one second delay between the two feeds and the result is extremely psychedelic

here's a third, if anyone wants to completely blooow their miiiind, duuuuude

feed 3

CNN's treating like the Apollo 11 launch.

They've even got Wolf on the phone from Florida.

he quoted the pokemon movie

lol

The Bush Obama administration's latest decree:

U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets when they take up arms with al-Qaida, top national security lawyers in the Obama administration said Thursday.

The lawyers were asked at a national security conference about the CIA killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and leading al-Qaida figure. He died in a Sept. 30 U.S. drone strike in the mountains of Yemen.

The government lawyers, CIA counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson, did not directly address the al-Awlaki case. But they said U.S. citizens do not have immunity when they are at war with the United States.

Johnson said only the executive branch, not the courts, is equipped to make military battlefield targeting decisions about who qualifies as an enemy.

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lp65xjwH5p1qamtb3o1_500.jpg

only the executive branch, not the courts, is equipped to make military battlefield targeting decisions

Sounds reasonable, until you realize that the targeting decision is what created the battlefield; there was no "battle" until the drone fired its weapon.

http://www.impawards.com/2000/posters/battlefield_earth_ver2.jpg

HUNT: But I’m asking, why did the economy grow a lot? Why were more jobs created in the previous decade under higher taxes than in this decade under lower taxes?

UPTON: I don’t know specifically the answer to that question.

I would have thought Michigan Republican Upton would have said that Republicans in Congress and the tech boom were responsible for Clinton era growth, but I guess these folks never get this obvious question from our esteemed press corps.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/12/04/381510/upton-cant-explain-tax-cuts-jobs/

lol

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_12/an_absurd_choice_for_a_health033923.php

Why is Politico giving such awards in the first place, and really --Paul Ryan for “Health Care Policymaker of the Year”

Did y'all read that Obama called Pakistan's President to offer condolences for those recent mistaken killings/deaths, but I read that he did not offer the apology in a public setting as the White House was afraid that Republicans would use the footage to further their stupid message that Obama is not proud of "American exceptionalism"

the White House was afraid
the White House was afraid
the White House was afraid
the White House was afraid

It's all about politics

that's all "it" is ever about

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_12/an_absurd_choice_for_a_health033923.php

Why is Politico giving such awards in the first place, and really --Paul Ryan for “Health Care Policymaker of the Year”

Politico is hackery congealed and in print form?

Hmm.. so Obama gave a 55-minute speech on economic themes today.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/president-obamas-economic-speech-in-osawatomie-kans/2011/12/06/gIQAVhe6ZO_story.html