Fun Facts to Know and Tell

Posted on September 24, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt’s latest piece is a treasure trove of fun facts about medical malpractice.

To wit:

The direct costs of malpractice lawsuits — jury awards, settlements and the like — are such a minuscule part of health spending that they barely merit discussion, economists say. But that doesn’t mean the malpractice system is working . . .

$60 billion a year, or about 3 percent of overall medical spending, is a reasonable upper-end estimate [of wasteful treatment] . . .

Medical errors happen more frequently here than in other rich countries, as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recently found. Only a tiny share of victims receive compensation . . .

All told, jury awards, settlements and administrative costs — which, by definition, are similar to the combined cost of insurance — add up to less than $10 billion a year. This equals less than one-half of a percentage point of medical spending.

Hmmmm. Makes a fellow think.

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Ad o’ the Day (pat. pending)

Posted on September 24, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

So rock band Pearl Jam finally extricated itself from a seven-album deal with Sony that took 15 years to fulfill and they wind up signing with . . . Target?

Here’s the TV spot promoting Pearl Jam’s new offering Backspacer, available “only at Target, or download it only on iTunes.”

A largely sympathetic NPR piece – Pearl Jam, Playing a Business Deal by Ear – reports:

Starting Sunday, Sept. 20, you can buy Backspacer on the Pearl Jam Web site, on iTunes, on Xbox’s Rock Band game, as a Verizon ringtone or at Target.

Some fans were startled by the partnership with a big-box retailer. They remember how the band used to rail against corporate interests — tearing down ad banners at concerts and fighting a losing battle with Ticketmaster over service charges. So Pearl Jam made a point of getting Target to agree that the 800-some members of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores could also sell Backspacer.

A helluva lot of good that’s going to do.

Look for Pearl Jam Preserves soon at a Target near you. I’m guessing raspberry will sell best.

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The Five-and-Dime Menino

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

So Mayor Tom Menino got his birthday wish and now faces City Councilor Michael Flaherty (D- I Have A Lot More Money Than Sam Yoon) in the Boston mayoral bakeoff on November 3.

It’s easy to dismiss Flaherty as the five-cent Tom Menino, until you remember the scene from “The Philadelphia Story” when Jimmy Stewart’s Macauly Connor describes the fiancee of Katherine Hepburn’s  Tracy Lords as “a five-cent Kidd” – as in, tabloid publisher Sidney Kidd.

Cary Grant’s C.K. Dexter Havens responds:

Well, I always thought Kidd himself was the five-cent Kidd.

Along the same lines, I always thought Menino himself was the five-cent Menino.

Welcome to Mayor Tom Menino, term five.

Cent.

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Dude, What a Dowd-er

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

To promote the premiere of its new primetime drama “The Good Wife” starring Julianna Margulies, CBS ran a full-page ad in Thursday’s New York Times with blurbs from The New York Post, Entertainment Weekly, and USA Today.

There was also this blurb, from the Times itself:

“.  . . Julianna Margulies channels Jenny, Silda, Hillary and Elizabeth . . . “

That would be Adirondack Jenny Sanford, Spitzee Silda Spitzer, Pilloried Hillary Clinton, and Enabler Elizabeth Edwards.

The blurb would be from New York Times Op-It Girl Maureen Dowd, who last month wrote this in a column headlined “Lust, American Style:”

There’s even a TV show inspired by the wives of misbehaving politicians — women who long to never hear the words “long suffering” again. In the new CBS drama “The Good Wife,” Julianna Margulies channels Jenny, Silda, Hillary and Elizabeth, summoning stoicism even when her teenage daughter tells her, “Some girl said Dad slept with a hooker my age.”

So – what? – Dowd can’t get a byline in some puffed-up primetime-premiere plug?

O tempora! O mores!

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List o’ the Day®

Posted on September 22, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

While the Boston mayoral race heats up to room temperature, U.S. News & World Report has released its list of 10 Cities for Political Junkies.

They are, in descending order (slideshow here):

Reston, VA

Asheville, NC

Walnut Creek, CA

Bethesda, MD

San Ramon, CA

Annandale, VA

Mission Viego, CA

Syracuse, NY

Laguna Viguel, CA

(and . . .  drumroll, please . . .)

Brookline, MA

U.S. News description:

It may not be able to claim the title of wealthiest town in America anymore, but Brookline is still very affluent. The median family income is $120,933, much higher than the $77,409 average for the state overall. The high income level partially explains the town’s interest in political affairs.

The People’s Republic sensibility of Brookline explains the rest of the town’s interest in political affairs.

(Full disclosure: The hardworking staff at Campaign Journal lives in Brookline, so there are bragging rights involved here.)

U.S. News described its overall approach to the list this way:

When U.S. News looked for the places where residents have the greatest interest in political affairs, it wasn’t the heavily red or blue areas that popped up . . .

It shouldn’t be surprising that places with a mix of ideologies tend to breed more interest in the political system. Data show that political participation increases in areas where parties are competitive. People are motivated to vote and participate when they know the election won’t be a wash for one side. So, voter turnout in a place often depends on how purple it is, says Thomas Patterson, a professor of government at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

The criteria U.S. News employed in constructing the list were based on data measuring household activity in current events and political affairs, as well as voter registration statistics and subscriptions to political magazines.

(Full disclosure: The hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider subscribes to both The Weekly Standard  and The New Republic, thereby perhaps skewing the Brookline results.)

Further disclosure: Who cares?

We’re Number Ten!

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Brian Williams, NBC AncHuckster

Posted on September 21, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Sunday night’s Emmy Awards weren’t bad, but the same can’t be said of NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams’ cameo, in which he flogged NBC’s Saturday Night Live Emmy-nominated writers.

Washington Post TV critic Lisa Moraes thought it was swell in her real-time blogging of the awards show.

The reading of best writers in comedy/variety series is always one of the highlights of the Emmy show but this year was particularly original. Billy Crystal singing the Letterman show names and Brian Williams reading hte [sic] “SNL” names were particularly good.

Or . . . maybe . . . a . . . little . . . unseemly – not unlike Williams’ pimping of Jay Leno’s new 10 p.m. show during the NBC News “Inside the White House” series last May.

It’s not that Williams is a wholly owned subsidiary of NBC’s entertainment division.

It’s just that he looks like it.

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Posted on September 21, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

From Campaign Outsider’s Meme Alert® desk:

The quite likely NCIS -inspired “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” is sweeping the political opinion-industrial complex.

Witness last week’s Weekly Standard editorial, “A Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Presidency?” Here’s the lede:

The single most damning story about President Obama so far is one we know courtesy of his national security adviser, Jim Jones. Visiting the newly installed military commanders in Afghanistan in late June, Jones told General Stanley McChrystal that if he requested more troops any time soon, Obama would have a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” (i.e., “What the f–“) moment.

Interestingly,  The New Republic’s current edition has the same WTF moment:

Jones cautioned that Obama would have a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”–or WTF (as in, “What the fuck?”)–moment were he to get such a [troop-escalation] request anytime soon.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, yeah?

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Hypocrisy With A Capital Hyatt

Posted on September 20, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick is “troubled” by the Hyatt Hotels Corp. firing of 100 housekeepers at the three Boston-area Hyatts, according to a Boston Globe report on Saturday.

Hyatt Hotels Corp. laid off the entire housekeeping staffs at the Hyatt Regency Boston, Hyatt Regency Cambridge, and Hyatt Harborside Hotel at Logan International Airport after the morning shift had ended on Aug. 31, citing challenging economic conditions. The chain immediately replaced the housekeepers with workers from an external staffing firm. The dismissed housekeepers were making upward of $15 an hour; their replacements are reportedly earning about half that.

But here’s the worst part:

The hotel said in Boston it has been working for more than three years with Hospitality Staffing Solutions, the Georgia firm that is now doing all of the housekeeping in Boston-area Hyatts. When the hotel eliminated its housekeeping units, about half of the housekeepers at two of the three local Hyatts were Hospitality Staffing employees, Hyatt said. Some housekeepers told the Globe they had been asked to train outside workers whom they believed were fill-ins for vacations, but those workers ended up replacing the staff.

“The transition to contract housekeeping services was not sudden and secretive,’’ the Hyatt statement said.

Actually, it was both. But why get technical about it when there’s small change to pocket?

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Worcester T&Gee, Just Take It

Posted on September 20, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

From Saturday’s Boston Globe piece on the paper’s expected fire sale to either a group headed by Stephen Taylor, a member of the family that sold the Globe to the New York Times Co. in 1993 for $1.1 billion, or Platinum Equity a California-based investment firm that everyone assumes will strip the Globe like a car left overnight on the Cross-Bronx Expressway:

The Taylor team is up against a deep-pocketed Beverly Hills, Calif., investment firm, Platinum Equity, which has acquired 100 companies since 1995. Both groups bid about $35 million for the Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, plus the assumption of $59 million in pension liabilities for the two papers. The Times Co. also owns the T&G and may sell it along with the Globe.

What – the Worcester T&G is a gift with purchase? Cue the great American poet e.e. cummings on the demise of the Wild West era, which is analogous to today’s frontier media moment:

Buffalo Bill's
        defunct
               who used to
               ride a watersmooth-silver
                                        stallion
        and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                         Jesus
        he was a handsome man
                             and what i want to know is
        how do you like your blueeyed boy
        Mister Death
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Get With The Programming

Posted on September 20, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

So the Fox News Channel runs an ad in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post  “in which Fox accused its competitors of missing the story of the so-called antitax protests in Washington last Saturday,” as the New York Times reported this Saturday.

CNN and ABC responded in high dudgeon, which was entirely predictable, but this paragraph in the Times report seemed business-as-unusual:

One of Fox’s main prime-time commentators, Glenn Beck, had been vocal in supporting the event and had a two-hour special on the air Saturday during the event. But Fox News executives generally argue that Mr. Beck is what they label “programming” and not news, because his show is an opinion program.

What exactly does “programming” mean in that context? It it “reality-based” (a term of dismissal during Bush the Lesser’s reign)? Or is it exempt-from-reality, the way reality TV shows are?

C’mon, Fox News.

You report. We decide.

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