The Daily Standard has the highlights of Vice President Dick Cheney‘s remarks at Saturday night’s annual Gridiron dinner in Washington. The ending of Vice-President Cheney’s remarks are absolutely appropriate and his other comments are clever, such as this one:
“Lots of familiar faces here tonight. I always feel a genuine bond whenever I see Senator Clinton. She’s the only person who’s the center of more conspiracy theories than I am.”
Texas cities’ Chambers of Commerce are not wild about this report.
This Rand Corporation study concludes that many of the improvements in health that medical advances have bestowed upon middle-aged and older Americans will likely be effectively erased over the next 20 years if Americans’ weight continues to increase.
The proportion of health care expenditures associated with treating the consequences of obesity would increase from 14 percent in 2000 to 21 percent in 2020 for 50-69 year-old men, and from 13 percent to 20 percent for women in the same age group, according to the study to be published in the March/April edition of Health Affairs ($).
Absent changes in health behavior or medical technology and assuming obesity trends continue through 2020, the study predicts that the proportion of people 50-69 with disabilities (those who are limited in their ability to care for themselves or perform other routine tasks) will increase by 18 percent for men and by 22 percent for women between 2000 and 2020.
These statistics — coupled with America’s broken health care finance system and accelerating Medicare costs — indicate that health care in America is headed for a day of reckoning soon. In my view, one of the Bush Administration’s biggest political problems in the upcoming election is the perception of many Americans that the administration ignores major domestic issues such as these.
As readers of this blog know, Victor Davis Hanson is one of my favorite commentators on America’s position in the world and its war against Islamic fascists. Dr. Hanson finally has his own website. I suspect that this site will go on more than a few favorite lists over the several days.
Former Tour player and longtime CBS golf color commentator Ken Venturi has written a book — “Getting Up and Down: My 60 Years in Golf” (Triumph Books, April 2004) about his life in professional golf. Golf Magazine recently ran an excerpt from the book in which Venturi recalled how Arnold Palmer broke a rule on the historic 12th hole of Augusta National on his way to beating Venturi to win his first Masters Golf Tournament in 1958. Not surprisingly, that was interpreted by some in the golf community as Venturi saying that Palmer had cheated on his way to winning the Masters.
This NY Times article today has Venturi falling over himself publicly apologizing for what he termed a “misunderstanding” over his observation regarding Arnie’s rule-bending. “Arnold played a second ball incorrectly,” Venturi said in the statement. “This was due in part to Arnold not understanding the rule, which stipulates a player must declare playing a second ball prior to the playing of the original ball. This does not make Arnold Palmer a cheat.”
With his second ball, Palmer saved a par-3 that the Masters rules committee upheld on appeal, in contrast to the double-bogey five that he would have had with his embedded ball. Those two strokes turned out to be the difference in Palmer’s winning his first of seven major titles (and first of four Masters).
Note to Venturi — Don’t bash the King.
Following this earlier post on the bankruptcy of the entity that owns the Rose Garden, Portland, Oregon’s NBA basketball arena, this Oregonian article provides further background on the financial difficulties of the arena. Interestingly, a substantial drop off in attendance to Portland Trailblazer games is cited as the primary cause of the arena’s financial problems.
Daniel Drezner points us to a clever Foreign Policy article by Kenneth Rogoff, former IMF chief economist and professor of economics and Thomas D. Cabot professor of public policy at Harvard University in which Professor Rogoff compares the pre-election macroeconomic policies of President Bush against those of former President Richard Nixon and other world leaders. The entire article is a must read, but here is an excerpt to give you a flavor of the article:
Does all this election-year economic engineering pay? In the short run, yes, because voters sure like a booming economy and a free-spending government at election time. They don?t seem to question why anyone should reward a politician for artificially boosting an economy before elections, even if doing so produces serious long-term problems. Perhaps, like moviegoers who expect to be emotionally manipulated, voters just enjoy an election-year high.
Of course, U.S. presidents are hardly the only or the best practitioners of electoral economics. Mexico, for example, boasts a history of political business cycles that make the United States look fiscally Puritan. Mexican Presidents JosÈ LÛpez Portillo in 1982 and Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1994 set benchmarks that few have surpassed. Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin gave away the country?s natural resource base (under the guise of ?privatization?) to ensure his reelection in 1996, a problem the country is still painfully sorting through today. In Italy, every prime minister seems to produce a fiscal splurge come election time?and Italy has a lot of elections. But then, a country does not achieve one of the world?s highest debt-to-GDP ratios (more than 100 percent) without effort.
Both the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal ($) have extensive articles about the results of a Bristol-Myers Squibb sponsored study that compared high doses of Pfizer‘s most powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs, Lipitor, with Bristol-Myers Squibb’s less potent drug, Pravachol. Both drugs are statins, a class of medications that block a cholesterol-synthesizing enzyme and are often prescribed for patients with heart problems.
Much to Bristol-Myers’ dismay, the study concluded that the patients taking Lipitor were significantly less likely to have heart attacks or to require bypass surgery or angioplasty than those taking Pravachol. The study is spurring discussion among cardiologists and the medical community that lowering cholesterol far beyond the levels that most doctors currently recommend can substantially reduce heart patients’ risk of suffering or dying of a heart attack. This could greatly change how doctors treat patients with heart disease and will likely result in re-evaluation of how low cholesterol levels should be even for people without heart problems.
Today is the Texas Primary election, so remember to vote. Here is the prior post in which I provide my recommendations in the Republican primary judicial races.
Thomas O. Hicks, chairman and CEO of Dallas-based private equity firm Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, announced Monday that he would retire a year from now to focus on his personal investments. Hicks, Muse & Furst is still attempting to recover from big losses that it suffered from investments in telecommunications and Internet companies. Mr. Hicks is majority owner of the Dallas Stars NHL hockey club and the Texas Rangers MLB baseball club, both of which have their share of financial problems at this point.