Getting it wrong the first time: Almost one-fourth of Medicare heart patients are readmitted within 30 days.
Almost one in ten surgeons have made “major” errors recently.
Study: Meditation reduces heart attacks and strokes.

MSNBC just put out the article, “Seven items you didn’t know were in the Senate Bill.” At #1, was Senator Jeff Merkley’s nursing mandate. Also listed is millions for helping teens become an adult (see below):

“Nursing mothers get a break: Emp…

The electorate wildly prefers politicians who look good. That's been a truism in United States races since Richard Nixon's infamous sweaty performance in a televised debate with JFK in 1960. Not that looks weren't important before, but they played far less of a role. America's celebrity fetish, which mushroomed during the …

As the climategate scandal unfolds, Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, has offered a rather perverse defense of some the IPCC's top and most influential climate scientists. In an interview reported on in the UK Guardian, Pachauri, who has no…

It’s official, I am now an elected official, having won a random drawing – that’s democracy in action – for Judge of Election in my precinct.  While I am unsure of the duties of the office, I will insist that my staff call me “The Honorable Matt Brouillette”, at least for the next few weeks.

My question for legislator blog readers: is it too early to start fundraising for my re-election campaign?

Official Election Notice Letter

Click here for Tommy James and the Shondells' contribution to the discourse.

Oxytocin…helps lubricate our every prosocial exchange, the thousands of acts of kindness, kind-of kindness and not-as-nakedly-venal-as-I-could-have-been kindness that make human society possible…a raft of new research in humans suggests that oxytocin underlies the twin emotional pillars of civilized life, our capacity to feel empathy and trust.
Full article by Natalie Angier in The New York Times.

Brookline has had a busy week.
First, the town and its unions agreed to adopt the state’s Group Insurance Commission as their insurer for municipal employees — which should be a big source of savings.
The longstanding position of the Town Administrator has been no movement from the current premium cost-sharing arrangement of [...]

The Politico reports:
ACORN, the troubled community service organization, recently considered changing its name in a bid to rehabilitate its image, according to an internal memo obtained by POLITICO.
The document, which will be released Tuesday as part of a Republican congressional forum on ACORN,…

Liberty Live hopes you enjoyed your turkey day since now it’s time to resume our focus on the biggest turkeys of them all, the politicians who are seeking to fowl (forgive the pun) our health care.
 
It would be one thing if the national conversation on this issue actually was one – a conversation, that is. But what we’re seeing is more of a shoutversation than a conversation, which says anything that comes out of this will be troublesome.
 
Consider today’s polling data showing 53 percent of Americans oppose current legislative efforts while only 41% favor them. What’s worse is this from the linked Rasmussen Reports article:

While advocates say the plan is needed to control the cost of health care, 56% of voters now say it will have the opposite impact and push prices even higher. Just 17% believe passage of the plan will lead to lower costs.

In other words, nobody believes the claims of those who are pushing any of the bills currently in the hopper. Why don’t they believe them? Here’s a recent example from This Week with George Stephanopolous that features Senators Tom Coburn, R-Okla and Ben Nelson, D-Neb, and Representatives Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Fla over the issue of whether recent recommendations on mammogram screenings, which were universally panned by just about everyone, will end up having the force of law via bureaucratic manipulation:
 
 

 
Are claws getting bared here or what?
 
A recent David Broder column in The Washington Post on how nobody believes Pres. Barack Obama’s promise that he won’t sign a health care bill that will add to the deficit is another example. While Washington, D.C. insiders who support the president claim that recent proposals are deficit-neutral, Broder, the ultimate middle-of-the-roader, picks the bills apart and comes down on the side of the public saying, “every expert I have talked to says that the public has it right. These bills, as they stand, are budget-busters.” For Broder, that’s tough talk.
 
There isn’t even consensus on this stuff among those pushing it. Democrats in the House and the Senate are playing push-me-pull-you with this proposal, that commission, or some other policy such that whatever opposition there is to anything is as much from the inside as it is from anywhere else. The term non-starter is getting applied to everything.
 
White noise – we’re hearing tons of white noise. But we’re not hearing anything approaching leadership, wisdom, or concern for the real needs of the American people. Jobs and the economy are lost in the health-care shuffle.
 

If the process has degenerated to something approaching a junior high girl fight in the cafeteria (saw one once – nastiest thing in the world), then no good thing will come of it. With something like that, the best thing to do is walk away. Maybe that’s what needs to happen right now with health care legislation.
 
The Piper