Ihatecamilleyan has won the $50 gift certificate from Amazon.com! If you don’t know how to enter this week’s contest… read below -
Subscribe to my podcast (see the sign-up box in the right hand column) and you are entered to win an Amazon.com$50 gift certificate. Everyone who subscribes will be entered to win. Every Saturday night at nine (EST) all the entries for that week will be placed into a hat and one name will be drawn at random (no family or friends can enter, of course). The contest ends on December 23rd. Everyone who signed up between December 2nd and December 23rd will be entered into a final drawing. The randomly selected winner will win an iPod Nano!!!
Barack Obama announced a large public works project yesterday. This project will help rebuild roads, make public buildings more energy-efficient, renovate our crumbling schools and install modern computers with high-speed Internet access in our schools. It should put 2.5 million people to work. After the shocking news that we lost 533,000 jobs last month, this may be exactly the medicine we need for our ailing economy.
Retired four-star general Eric Shinseki has been named to head the Department of Veterans Affairs. This is the general who said before Congress that it would take several hundred thousand troops to secure Iraq and was promptly fired by Donald Rumsfeld. I argued on this blog a year or so ago that General Eric Shinseki deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
This also means that Iraq war veteran Tammy Duckworth will not be appointed to that position. Several veterans’ groups supported her for the position of Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. There is still a chance she may be named to Barack Obama’s Senate seat.
Louisiana voters have finally firedRepresentative William Jefferson , the indicted Congressman. Unfortunately, from a Progressive stance, his seat has gone not to a Democrat but to a Republican, Anh “Joseph” Cao.
William Ayres, the political football in Barack Obama’s past, has decided that he’s avoided the public spotlight for long enough. He has an op-ed in the New York Times in which he tries to explain that he was not a terrorist. I don’t know…on one hand, I think William Ayres should simply go away. On the other hand, however, I have seen people wrongly accused who have no way of clearing their names. His op-ed is very thoughtful. He mentions he never did “pal around” with Barack Obama. He also discusses his “real regrets” at some of the conduct of the Weather Underground. The problem as I see it is that those who vilified William Ayres will not be convinced by his pronouncement. I think one of the biggest problems is that there is no way to convey the pain, anguish and fear that existed in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drugs, sex, war, sexual revolution, civil rights, and rights for workers are just a few of the issues that our country was trying to resolve in the United States at that time. It is nearly impossible to convey that in a 400-600 word op-ed piece.
Sunny von Bulow has died. She slipped into a coma back in 1980. Her husband was caught up in not one but two sensational trials in which he was accused of injecting her with insulin. She had been in a coma for 28 years. I’m sorry, but you cannot tell me that this was living. May she rest in peace.
Finally, this blog is still acting funny. Not “funny ha ha,” but funny as in weird.
The winner of the first Christmas Amazon prize for signing up for my blog will be named later today!
Errington C. Thompson, MD, is a surgeon, scholar, full-time sports fan and part-time political activist. He is active in a number of community projects and initiatives. Through medicine, he strives to improve the physical health of all he treats...
