April 4, 2008--While We Were Distracted II . . .
While we’ve been sorting through various explanations about just what Bill Richardson said to the Clintons and parsing just what Hillary actually meant when she said that she’s not saying anyone in particular, wink-wink, can’t win but rather all she is saying is that she can. Thus confused we have been left to wonder whether or not this is Hillary speaking in code and thereby really saying, “He cant win because of you know what.” More winking.
During the time this has been going on, if we had been paying attention, we would have learned that a recent study of the writing skills of America’s children revealed that only a third of 8th graders are “proficient” and just a quarter of high school seniors. (See NY Times story linked below.)
While we’ve been trying to figure out what John McCain meant when he said we’ll need to have US troops in Iraq for a hundred years, puzzled about whether he was speaking literally or metaphorically—was McCain saying that they will still be fighting in Iraq in the 22nd century or is it just that we’ll need to have American soldiers there for an indefinite “long, long time”?
During that time other things have been going on. While attempting to understand what McCain is struggling to explain to us, the real Iraqi army lost a major battle to the Shia militia and thereby called our entire Iraq post-occupation strategy into question. Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki sent the government’s Shiite troops, the ones we’ve been equipping and training for the past five years, to Basra to fight other Shia, without informing the US in advance, and then saw them summarily defeated on the battlefield by the informal Mahdi Army. And we would have noticed, if the media were paying attention, that during those few days when the battle raged, more than 1,000 Iraqi government troops deserted. Who could blame them? (See NY Times article linked below.)
While OD-ing on whether a pledged delegate is in fact pledged or if it’s more important to gaining the Democratic nomination to win the popular vote, the delegate count, the most states, or just the largest ones, during this time; while the Clintons keep moving the electoral goalposts, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article about a study that showed that Vytorin and Zetia failed to slow the growth of fatty deposits in arteries. In fact, they actually may work to speed up the growth of the very plaque they were developed to reduce and thus place lives at greater risk than if unmedicated. (See attacked NY Times article.)
Not to be deterred by these inconvenient findings, Merck, which pockets more than $5.0 billion a year from the sales of these drugs, launched a major ad campaign in an attempt to convince the 4 million Americans who take them to ignore the results of the study and keep on popping them.
During the time this has been going on, if we had been paying attention, we would have learned that a recent study of the writing skills of America’s children revealed that only a third of 8th graders are “proficient” and just a quarter of high school seniors. (See NY Times story linked below.)
While we’ve been trying to figure out what John McCain meant when he said we’ll need to have US troops in Iraq for a hundred years, puzzled about whether he was speaking literally or metaphorically—was McCain saying that they will still be fighting in Iraq in the 22nd century or is it just that we’ll need to have American soldiers there for an indefinite “long, long time”?
During that time other things have been going on. While attempting to understand what McCain is struggling to explain to us, the real Iraqi army lost a major battle to the Shia militia and thereby called our entire Iraq post-occupation strategy into question. Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki sent the government’s Shiite troops, the ones we’ve been equipping and training for the past five years, to Basra to fight other Shia, without informing the US in advance, and then saw them summarily defeated on the battlefield by the informal Mahdi Army. And we would have noticed, if the media were paying attention, that during those few days when the battle raged, more than 1,000 Iraqi government troops deserted. Who could blame them? (See NY Times article linked below.)
While OD-ing on whether a pledged delegate is in fact pledged or if it’s more important to gaining the Democratic nomination to win the popular vote, the delegate count, the most states, or just the largest ones, during this time; while the Clintons keep moving the electoral goalposts, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article about a study that showed that Vytorin and Zetia failed to slow the growth of fatty deposits in arteries. In fact, they actually may work to speed up the growth of the very plaque they were developed to reduce and thus place lives at greater risk than if unmedicated. (See attacked NY Times article.)
Not to be deterred by these inconvenient findings, Merck, which pockets more than $5.0 billion a year from the sales of these drugs, launched a major ad campaign in an attempt to convince the 4 million Americans who take them to ignore the results of the study and keep on popping them.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
7:41 AM
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