Thursday's links and comments

My favorite U.S. senator is not either of the two from my state of Ohio. No, the one I'd like the rest to emulate is Tom Coburn of Texas. GQ Magazine has a lengthy article on Senator Coburn (R-TX) titled "HI, I’M SENATOR COBURN, AND I DON’T WANT YOUR VOTE," here is a portion.

While fellow newcomers observed the customary “freshman silence,” Coburn’s first major move as a senator was to pick a fight with one of his party’s most venerated leaders, Ted Stevens of Alaska, a forty-year veteran of Congress who also happened to be the Senate’s president pro tempore.

The fight was over pork. As the 2006 transportation budget passed through the Senate process, Coburn noticed something odd: $200 million to pay for a bridge in Stevens’s home state—a bridge almost as long as the Golden Gate and taller than the Brooklyn Bridge, connecting an island of fifty people to the coast. In the Senate, these kinds of giveaways are not unusual; members, and especially those in a position of influence, are frequently given millions of dollars for personal spending projects back home, items that bypass the normal review process and are quietly ushered in by their peers (whose own projects get the same deal). But to Coburn, who hadn’t spent forty years in the Senate and didn’t have any of his own special projects and didn’t particularly care about keeping pacts with his new colleagues, $200 million seemed like a lot to spend on a bridge for fifty people. So he tried to take the earmark out. And that’s when Tom Coburn discovered what his life in the Senate would be like.

The real shame is a man like Coburn likely has no chance to change things in D.C.

I wasn't going to post anything about this NY Suns article/expose about Jimmy Carter interceding with the OSI on behalf of a former NAZI SS prison guard who was being deported for several reasons. 1. The "request" came seven years after Carter left the presidency. 2. The subject of the case was already deported and the letter was never acted upon. 3. Carter's long record of anti-semitism has been sufficiently documented that it is hardly newsworthy that he had a "let bygones be bygones" attitude about the holocaust. However, after seeing this entry from Mike's America I decided otherwise. Mike reminds us how the media made such a big deal about President Reagan visiting a German cemetery. The German Chancellor Helmut Kohl requested Reagan visit the cemetery as a sign of healing of the old war wounds. Turns out that among the 2,000 soldiers buried at the cemetery, there were also 49 SS interred. Reagan was criticized on the evening news for about a week. Carter's situation won't even be brought up, but there's no liberal bias in the media, right?

Franken reaching out to lawmakers about possible Senate run. Make up your own punch line. Based on his Air America history I'll just ask if he will get the local Boys and Girls Club to fund his campaign.

Realizing that medicine is a very difficult profession and that it is ridiculous to demand perfection, I'm normally strongly opposed to people suing for mistakes made during an operation. However, I have to make an exception in this case. OUCH!

Here is a local story that makes me ask what is wrong with some people? Cops: Slumber partiers got vodka. A group of 14 year old girls are having a sleep over and the mother hosting the party buys vodka for them. WHAT? As a parent, I worry about whether my kid's friends will introduce them to bad ideas. I don't expect other kid's parents to buy alcohol for them.