tagged w/ Epic Fail
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Friday October 3, 2008 10:03 EDT
How Sarah Palin blew it
Joe Biden and Sarah Palin were talking to two different Americas Thursday night. Actually, that's unfair to Joe Biden; he was trying to talk to everyone. I can say for certain, though, that Sarah Palin was talking to -- and winking at -- her own private Idaho, and for long stretches of the debate, it was an unnerving experience.
We could be in for a few days of pro-Palin commentary, since her subjects and verbs corresponded. For at least the first hour, she held her own; she was funny sometimes, occasionally charming. Still, the Obama-Biden ticket will survive it. Biden was stronger on every single substantive point, and that's the impression that will last.
But the pit bull in lipstick was back. After her disarming "Hey, can I call you Joe?" Palin was vicious, with a winning smile. After a passionate Biden plea to "walk with me in my neighborhood," in Delaware and Scranton, where "the middle class has gotten the short end," she ridiculed him: "Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again! Pointing backwards again!"
There were two key moments for me when Sarah Palin blew it badly. One was substantive, one was symbolic. The substantive was her bizarre statement about being happy that Dick Cheney had expanded the powers of the vice-presidency, and wanting to expand the powers more. I think that's what she said, it was one of many moments I didn't entirely understand her point, but I got her overall meaning. Biden came back with a decisive: "Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president in American history," and he defended the existing limits on vice-presidential power. Point: Biden. Big time.
The symbolic moment Palin flubbed was subjective, of course. But I instant-messaged a friend that she lost the debate when Biden choked up over losing his wife and child in a car accident in which his sons were critically injured -- and she went straight back into "John McCain is a maverick." I truly expected her to express human sympathy with Biden, and her failure to do so showed me something deeply wrong with her. But maybe that's just me.
She made other mistakes that others have already caught: She called the top commander in Afghanistan "General McClellan"; his name is David McKiernan. She said the troop levels in Iraq are down to pre-surge levels; they're not. She simply didn't answer a lot of the questions. Moderator Gwen Ifill tried to pull her back, but Palin is stubborn; she had her talking points, and she stuck to them.
I thought Biden and Palin tied for the first third of the debate, that Palin actually won the second third on moxie and charisma, not policy (Biden looked visibly angry at a few points, and that's never good), but Biden cleaned her clock in the last third. He quoted his dad telling him, "Champ, when you get knocked down, get up!" -- and he listened to his father. Biden got up, and he won the debate.
We'll see how it plays out in the days to comFriday October 3, 2008 10:03 EDT
How Sarah Palin blew it
Joe Biden and Sarah Palin... more
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Many American hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find nursing homes willing to accept them without insurance. Medicaid does not cover long-term care for illegal immigrants, or for newly arrived legal immigrants, creating a quandary for hospitals, which are obligated by federal regulation to arrange post-hospital care for patients who need it.
American immigration authorities play no role in these private repatriations, carried out by ambulance, air ambulance and commercial plane. Most hospitals say that they do not conduct cross-border transfers until patients are medically stable and that they arrange to deliver them into a physician’s care in their homeland. But the hospitals are operating in a void, without governmental assistance or oversight, leaving ample room for legal and ethical transgressions on both sides of the border.
Indeed, some advocates for immigrants see these repatriations as a kind of international patient dumping, with ambulances taking patients in the wrong direction, away from first-world hospitals to less-adequate care, if any.
“Repatriation is pretty much a death sentence in some of these cases,” said Dr. Steven Larson, an expert on migrant health and an emergency room physician at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. “I’ve seen patients bundled onto the plane and out of the country, and once that person is out of sight, he’s out of mind.”
Hospital administrators view these cases as costly, burdensome patient transfers that force them to shoulder responsibility for the dysfunctional immigration and health-care systems. In many cases, they say, the only alternative to repatriations is keeping patients indefinitely in acute-care hospitals.
“What that does for us, it puts a strain on our system, where we’re unable to provide adequate care for our own citizens,” said Alan B. Kelly, vice president of Scottsdale Healthcare in Arizona. “A full bed is a full bed.”
Medical repatriations are happening with varying frequency, and varying degrees of patient consent, from state to state and hospital to hospital. No government agency or advocacy group keeps track of these cases, and it is difficult to quantify them.
A few hospitals and consulates offered statistics that provide snapshots of the phenomenon: some 96 immigrants a year repatriated by St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix; 6 to 8 patients a year flown to their homelands from Broward General Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; 10 returned to Honduras from Chicago hospitals since early 2007; some 87 medical cases involving Mexican immigrants — and 265 involving people injured crossing the border — handled by the Mexican consulate in San Diego last year, most but not all of which ended in repatriation.
Over all, there is enough traffic to sustain at least one repatriation company, founded six years ago to service this niche — MexCare, based in California but operating nationwide with a “network of 28 hospitals and treatment centers” in Latin America. It bills itself as “an alternative choice for the care of the unfunded Latin American nationals,” promising “significant saving to U.S. hospitals” seeking “to alleviate the financial burden of unpaid services.”
[click link above for entire 9 page article]
more on the topic here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/us/18immig.html#Many American hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured... more
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Update: they found most of the crash debris in South Pacific
Saturday was a bad day for science, as a privately funded rocket carrying three $atellites was lost on its way to space, bringing a third failure in a row to an Internet multimillionaire's effort to create a market for low-cost space-delivery.
Falcon 1 is a two-stage, liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosene powered launch vehicle, and the world's first new orbital rocket in more than a decade.
Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO, said after the launch that although it was an obvious disappointment not to reach orbit, the flight of the first stage with the new Merlin 1C engine, which will be used in Falcon 9, was “picture perfect.”
It appears that a problem occurred during separation on Saturday, which caused the stages to be held together. The matter is still under investigation, and more details will be available as soon as the engineers realize what happened.
“The most important message I'd like to send right now is that SpaceX will not skip a beat in execution going forward,” said Musk, adding that flights four and five for Falcon 1 are almost ready, and that he's already given green light to begin fabrication of flight six. The Falcon 9 development is still on track.
Even with a failed launch, SpaceX said they have more than sufficient funding to continue launching Falcon 1 and develop Falcon 9 and Dragon. “For my part, I will never give up and I mean never,” said Musk.
The Falcon 1's mission is to deploy three separating satellites that will orbit at an inclination of 9 degrees: the Trailblazer satellite developed by SpaceDev, and two smaller NASA satellites. The three satellites attach to the Falcon 1 second stage via the Secondary Payload Adaptor and Separating System developed by ATSB, which is owned by the Government of Malaysia.
Space X is the winner of the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services competition (COTS), and will contribute to help the American mission on the International Space Station after the Space Shuttle retirement in 2010.
Update: they found most of the crash debris in South Pacific
Saturday was a bad day... more
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And hardcore gamers respond with a resounding *yawn.*
Here are the highlights from Nintendo's E3 2008 press conference:
-Ubisoft's Shaun White Snowboarding to use Wii Balance Board
-Nintendo selling 200k Wiis a week, 700k a month
-Animal Crossing: City Folk coming to Wii in 2008
-Nintendo introduces the Wii Speak community microphone (Welcome to 2001 Nintendo)
-Wii Sports Resort coming to the Wii, with Motion Plus in tow
-English version of DS recipe application coming to America in November (Hooray?)
-Nintendo announces GTA: Chinatown Wars
-Nintendo announces Wii Music with 50 instruments
But c'mon Nintendo! I realize you're number one and don't really have to work hard for your money anymore like you did the last generation, but this is just plain lazy. Where are my actual GAMES?!And hardcore gamers respond with a resounding *yawn.*
Here are the highlights... more
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