Best of the Blogs

Thanks Skippy

Our thanks to Skippy the Bush Kangaroo for the shout out. Those of you who read BofB daily should take a look at the Skipman's page. He's way cool.

posted by Jerry Bowles 8:52 PM

Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky

The Washington Post today has a devastating and detailed report of how the Bush administration knowingly and falsely hyped the nuclear threat from Iraq to build support for the war. Dick Cheney and Condi Rice both invoked the image of "mushroom clouds" on numerous occasions although the evidence to support the belief that Iraq had a working nuclear program was flimsy at best. For example, the U.S. insisted that Iraq's was trying to buy high-strength aluminum tubes to use as centrifuges to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. Iraq claimed, and IAEA, the world's nuclear watchdog, uncovered strong evidence to support that claim, that it was using them for conventional rockets.

In fact, experts from U.S. national laboratories reported in December to the Energy Department and U.S. intelligence analysts that Iraq was manufacturing copies of the Italian-made Medusa 81 rocket. Not only the Medusa's alloy, but also its dimensions, to the fraction of a millimeter, matched the disputed aluminum tubes.

Clearly, Condi and Dick the Dabbler had to have known this when they were thowing up images of mushroom clouds and nuclear winter. Al is right; these people are incapable of distinguishing fact from fantasy.

posted by Jerry Bowles 12:06 PM

The scarlet tenets

If you listen to fellow sinner Shrubby, you’ll get the message that our nation’s class-skewed health care system is all about choice.

Especially if your name is Tenet Health Care and you choose to report a second-quarter loss of $195 million.

Santa Barbara-based Tenet, the nation’s second largest hospital chain, took its name as a symbol of the ethical standards it pledged it would abide by. “Tenet’s name reflects our core business philosophy” their website says.

Operating 114 hospitals across the US, 40 of which are in California, that’s a lot of tenets to uphold.

One ethical tenet that seemed to fall between the cracks was Tenet’s “uneeda heart surgery” program. The Justice Department charged that doctors at Tenet’s Redding, California medical center performed unnecessary heart surgeries. But Tenet paid a $54 million settlement, ending Elder Ashcroft’s criminal and civil investigations into the firm.

In addition, government investigators caused Tenet to voluntarily revamp its method of billing Medicare for hospital charges for the sickest patients. In plain English, this means Tenet was overbilling Medicare. According to the Los Angeles Times (search for Tenet health care articles in their archives and pay to view) Medicare officials have accused the company of collecting inappropriately large amounts of reimbursements, which plummeted to $16 million in the second quarter of this year (after the feds took notice) from $223 million a year earlier. Nice window dressing.

So who’s on the board of this Titanic of hospital operators. Well, there’s Ed Kangas, the chairman, former head of the big Deloitte-Touche accounting firm, who was brought in to clean up the Tenet mess. And Van B. Honeycutt, who runs the spook-connected Computer Science Corporation. And then there is former US Senator and Debra Winger consort Bob Kerrey. One would think that SEAL Bob spent enough time in Southeast Asia to know how to step in and stop the bleeding.

posted by Groom 5:19 AM