Seems To Be A Shortage Of Personal Responsibility

An article in the June 2009 issue of The American Journal of Medicine is certainly appropriate in today's discussion about health care.

Lifestyle choices are associated with cardiovascular disease and mortality. The purpose of this study was to compare adherence to healthy lifestyle habits in adults between 1988 and 2006.

Analysis of adherence to 5 healthy lifestyle trends (≥5 fruits and vegetables/day, regular exercise >12 times/month, maintaining healthy weight [body mass index 18.5-29.9 kg/m2], moderate alcohol consumption [up to 1 drink/day for women, 2/day for men] and not smoking) in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 1988-1994 were compared with results from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2001-2006 among adults aged 40-74 years.

Over the last 18 years, obesity has increased from 28% to 36%; regular physical activity has decreased from 53% to 43%; and eating 5 or more fruits and vegetables a day has decreased from 42% to 26% among adults aged 40-74 years.

Adherence to all 5 healthy habits has gone from 15% to 8% (P <.05).

Adherence to healthy habits is no more likely in people with cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, or hypercholesterolemia.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

Are You At The Right Park?

Most people in Spokane are familiar with The Joy of Running Together sculpture (commonly referred to as the Bloomsday runners) in Riverfront Park. This week during my lunchtime runs I've noticed several groups of school children counting the figures in the sculpture. Today at the end of my run I walked for a bit to cool off. A young boy with a pencil and paper was walking on the path towards the sculpture.

"C'mon," he told his friend. "We have to count the naked people."

The Sky Is Falling!

In a recent op-ed published in the Spokesman-Review, Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers warns us of a rogue activist judge out to impose his will on the rest of us.

Once again, our way of life in the Northwest is being threatened. Today the threat isn’t from a politician or Wall Street financier. It’s from a judge in Portland.

With a stroke of a pen, U.S. District Judge James Redden last week undermined years of teamwork and collaboration and put removing the lower Snake River dams back on the table.

Redden threatened to reject a federal salmon restoration plan, required by the Endangered Species Act, because he doesn’t think it does enough to protect migrating salmon. The biological opinion, or BiOp, is an agreement between Idaho, Montana and Washington, most Columbia River tribes and the federal government to improve salmon runs without destroying the dams, their electricity and valuable irrigation reservoirs.

The case is 3:01-cv-640 within the U.S. District Court, District of Oregon. There are about 45 parties involved which include the states of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon, various Native American tribes, the federal government, and environmental groups. There are over 1700 filings in the case which started in 2001. What caught our congresswoman's attention? A letter from Judge James Redden to all parties.

I still have serious reservations about whether the "trending toward recovery" standard complies with the Endangered Species Act, it s implementing regulations, and the case law. Even if "trending toward recovery" is a permissible interpretation of the jeopardy regulation, the conclusion that all 13 species are, in fact, on a "trend toward recovery" is arbitrary and capricious because:

And he lists six very clear reasons and then continues.

I urge you to consider implementing some, or all, of the following measures as part of the adaptive management process:

And he gives six suggestions, one of which is:

* developing a contingency plan to study specific, alternative hydro actions, such as flow augmentation and/or reservoir drawdowns, as well as what it will take to breach the lower Snake River dams if all other measures fail (i. e., independent scientific evaluation, permitting, funding, and congressional approval);

Your way of life is being threatened, folks. Get down there and put your body between the dams and the machines of destruction that the judge dares to dispatch to breach them.

Before it's too late.

Rick Santorum Schools Us On Black People...

...and marriage.

And you have an African-American community, particularly in the poor inner city areas, we're looking at out of wedlock birthrates in three quarters to 75 percent (sic) of children being born out of wedlock. Marriage is an institution that's a bridge too far for too many African-American woman and is not desirable among African-American males.

I think he has to realize that flying to New York is self-indulgent. Go down to the corner bar and have a drink, a shot and a beer.

It does not matter where you go with your wife, is that it's with your wife.

And it is not going to Broadway. All right, once in awhile, you do something special. But it is mundane that really makes the marriage special, but because you are with your wife the mundane isn't mundane. It's special.

I had no idea.

A Record To Be Proud Of

An opportunity for those who are so strongly concerned with protecting life to speak out.

At roughly 6 p.m. tonight, Texas Gov. Rick Perry will make history when he presides over the 200th execution of his tenure. It's a chilling achievement, one that dwarfs that of his predecessor, George W. Bush, who famously signed off on 152.

...

In Harris County, which sends more prisoners to the death chamber than any other jurisdiction in the country, a major scandal over its dilapidated and mismanaged forensics crime lab has provided an alarming backdrop to innocence claims by Texas prisoners, on death row or not.

...

What is it about Texas that it breeds such figures as Judge Sharon Keller, who, on the day the Supreme Court decided to hear a landmark case on the constitutionality of lethal injection, refused to allow a last-minute appeal filed by attorneys trying to save the life of a client scheduled to die that night because, in her words, "We close at 5"?

At least we can proudly say we're more civilized than other countries. A little more.

Self-Righteousness

Pearl Before Swine is one of my favorite comics and today's issue is particularly funny.