News Cut: March 26, 2008 Archive

The Guardian reports today that the marriage rate in the UK has fallen to its lowest level since the mid-19th century.

The trend is familiar to the U.S., where marriage rates have been falling for some time. In Minnesota, for example, the latest statistics show six people per thousand married in 2004, compared to 7.7 in 1990.

So what?

In the Boston Globe today, columnist Stephen Bailey says increasing single-parenthood is creating a separate-but-equal society in America:

Andy Sum has spent years documenting rising inequality in America and has come to believe that what has happened to families is at the heart of it. What the numbers show, he says, is increasing single-parenthood, limited earnings among single moms, declining earnings and rate of marriage among men with no post-secondary schooling, and the tendency for college-educated young adults to marry one another, what the sociologists call "assortative mating." MBAs marry MBAs; nobody is interested in rescuing Cinderella any more.

There has been a debate for months now about what begat what in Iraq. Was an era of comparative calm in Baghdad and Basra the result of the "surge," or was it the result of a cease fire called by Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr? And was the cease fire caused by the surge?

It appears we're about to find out. Over the last day or so fighting has intensified between Iraqi forces and the fighters for al-Sadr.

McClatchy Newspapers Baghdad bureau chief Leila Fadel has just posted an update to her excellent blog, Baghdad Observer, after returning from some time away. She suggests that people in Baghdad could feel something coming...

But before we left he looked at me and another foreign reporter and warned in Arabic that times had changed. It's good that we were wearing scarves and the long black Abaya, this is a good cover, he said. People had changed in the market. Their minds did not work the same way, he said. He offered us juice and asked us to come back for a meal at his home.

Much has been made of an alleged bias in the media against particular presidential candidates. One week Hillary Clinton complains about media treatment, the next week Barack Obama similarly complains.

But few people seem to be noticing the most damaging bias: the bias against covering issues of the campaign.

Yesterday, it can be argued, the most important current issue to Americans -- the economy and the housing crisis -- revealed the most stark differences yet in the current presidential campaign. It happened when John McCain, speaking to a group of Hispanic business owners, said:

"It is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers."

The issue, to its credit, was front-page news to the New York Times, especially since it came just a day after Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed government intervention in the crisis.

Similar credit goes to National Public Radio, which featured the -- here comes that word -- issue on its All Things Considered broadcast on Wednesday evening.

So how did it play in the morning papers and evening and morning TV news? Not so much. None of the TV broadcasts Wednesday evening considered the story, preferring instead to expand on the Clinton "misstatement" (some might call it a lie) on her trip to Bosnia -- not an insignificant story, but one that was entering its fourth news cycle. On the morning TV programs, the big story was split between Chelsea Clinton telling students the Monica Lewinsky fallout in her family was "none of your business," and the transgender man who says he's pregnant. CBS even carried a story that seemed to apologize for its transfixing on gaffes by pointing out it's a "slow news period." Hello?

As for the newspapers, none of the Minnesota papers I checked this morning carried the story. One, the Star Tribune, had only one presidential candidate story on the front page and that was about Obama being related to Brad Pitt. The Pioneer Press carried a story about McCain being tight with Joe Lieberman (an angle, for the record, News Cut explored almost two months ago.)

News bosses outside of Washington and New York, it would appear, have concluded that you won't read a story about the candidate differences on a major issue.

And the situation sounds similar to the assessment of the annual State of the News Media report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism on this disconnect.

Looking at stories that the public said they were most closely following, significant interest gaps emerged for several other news events -- revelations that the dangerous staph "superbug" called MRSA was more common than previously thought, recalls of pet food, the troubled U.S. economy in the week that investor guru Warren Buffett said taxes on the rich were too low, and President Bush's veto of the legislation intended to expand health insurance for children.

As was the case with many of the topic areas that got little coverage in the press, the common characteristic that defines these particular stories, including the spike at the gas pump, is that they speak to the nuts and bolts of daily existence, such as health and money.

Now that the news has trickled into the metro that Michele Bachmann has filed legislation to protect our right to buy incandescent lightbulbs, it's becoming apparent how to get legislation noticed, if not necessarily enacted. Slap "freedom" in the title somewhere.

Bachmann's bill is The Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act.

Of course, the smoking ban in Minnesota was called the Freedom to Breathe Act.

What other "freedom" legislation is out there?

Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 - This federal law reinstated four criteria to determine whether religious freedom had been violated by the government.

The Academic Freedom Act - In Florida, the bill would allow teachers to teach theories critical of evolution.

Internet Freedom Act of 2008 - Rep. Ed Markey's legislation to order the FCC to assess competition in broadband.

Freedom from Automated Political Calls Act

Freedom to Bank Act - In the words of author Ron Paul, "To sunset Federal laws and regulations which treat the American people like children by denying them the opportunity to make their own decision regarding control of their bank accounts and what type of information they wish to receive from their banks, and for other purposes."

Freedom to Fly Act of 2007 - Allows commercial pilots over 60 to keep flying.

Freedom to Display the American Flag Act of 2005 - Apparently this is a problem somewhere.

Freedom to Fish Act

Freedom to Be A Patriot Act - Would've prevented federal funds from going to any agency that barred the flying of the flag.

Broadcaster Freedom Act - Sen. Norm Coleman's bill to outlaw return of the Fairness Doctrine.

Business Checking Freedom Act - 2005 bill would've allowed banks to pay interest on business checking accounts.

Every now and again there are little dustups in political circles that are worth ignoring since the outrage is -- at least to a certain degree -- manufactured to fit the political gain that can be achieved.

Take, for example, a short article on John McCain's dental work that appeared on the Minnesota Monitor Web site this week.

If bloggers are saying one thing about John McCain this week it's that the 71-year-old has some serious grit. Of course, that grit comes in the form of McCain Mouth, a deformity that apparently causes teeth to look like a mess of yellowed and contorted Chiclets. Today, BuzzFeed.com has picked up on the mouth meme, turning McCain's piano-key chompers into an official phenomenon.

Not exactly a penetrating look at an issue, to be sure. It's best filed under "N" for "nonsense," the kind of stuff that gives bloggers a not-quite-deserved reputation.

Then local Republican blogger Michael Brodkorb picked up on it.

This is a really disgusting attack on Senator McCain and Minnesota Monitor should be embarrassed. I left a comment on Minnesota Monitor asking if the author of this post, Molly Priesmeyer, was aware that McCain's teeth were broken when he was a P.O.W.

Local blogger Charlie Quimby debates the extent to which McCain's teeth were broken, but nevertheless reminded me of something I saw at the Republican National Convention in 2004.

Here's a picture I took and a blurb I wrote while visiting with the Minnesota delegation :

Some guy from Virginia was handing out these Band Aids with a purple heart, an obvious attack on John Kerry's medals in Vietnam. The GOP asked people to stop wearing them because they didn't want to be questioning Kerry's service in Vietnam. This woman isn't listening to the party. A lot of delegates aren't.

The Minnesota delegation -- some delegates, anyway -- were wearing the Band Aids. And mocking Kerry's war injuries was de rigueur during the convention among Minnesota delegates, as indicated by another reference I made in a piece about Minnesota delegates helping out by repainting a neighborhood center.

By early in the afternoon, it seemed that the tendency to talk politics was in reverse proportion to the amount of time actually spent with the kids. Back at the day-care center, the walls in Brooklyn are pretty much the same as the ones in Minnesota. A delegate hurt his finger. "Is your finger OK?" one delegate asked. "Yeah, and I put in for a Purple Heart," he replied.

Kerry's suffering during the war was certainly nowhere near McCain's, of course. But that's not really the point. The point is that in politics, the outraged now are quite often the participants then.

More investigation of what it costs to preserve my freedom to choose incandescent light bulbs.

A spreadsheet prepared by Productdose.com compares the costs of burning three different kinds of bulbs: the CFL, the incandescent, and the LED. You can download it here and plug in your own electric bills, kilowatt rate, and type of bulbs in your home.

Let's give it a try.

The average home is said to use 1,500 kwh per month. We'll cut it to 1,000 per month at about 11 cents per kilowatt hour, for a total of about $110 a month.

Here are the numbers, based on 20 light bulbs in the home and an estimated daily usage of an hour.

At $36.94 yearly savings, I could pay off the new gas tax on 738 gallons of gasoline. I fill up about every 8 days with 12 gallons of gas (Chevy Cavalier). So I use about 550 gallons of gasoline in a year. I could pay the tax on the gas and still have $9.40 left over to put toward the increased excise tax.

The Mark Yudof post I wrote the other night jogged my memory enough that I want to follow up on life after the University of Minnesota's General College. There were a lot of predictions made a few years ago about the net effect of of folding it into the College of Education and I'm interested in finding out how reality matches the predictions.

I'll be talking with various officials over there this week but if you were a student at General College, or are currently at the College of Education in part of the curriculum that replaced the GC, I'd love to chat with you about your experience. Write to me at bcollins@mpr.org.

Scott Haig at Time Magazine reports the mood was more foul at the American Academy of Orthopaedics convention in San Francisco earlier this month, mostly because the Department of Justice has turned the spotlight on the cozy relationship (some people say "kickbacks") between doctors and the orthopedic device industry.

No more free dinners, or flashlights or pens. And this year there was a new rule that every research presentation had to be preceded with a full disclosure of all monetary deals the speaker had with any company.

That requirement, says Haig, didn't stop much:

Every single fully trained doctor I heard speak was getting paid by a company; many of the bigger-name doctors were getting paid by three or four. How much money was still the subject of gossip -- the exact amount is not required to be broadcast in these podium confessionals. The DOJ has, however, ordered companies to list the doctors in their employ, as well as the amounts paid them, on their websites. Judging by those figures, it adds up to plenty. And it got our attention at AAOS. Some doctors thought it immoral; others lamented the doubt it cast on the integrity of research. But I think most just wanted in.

One wonders today whether this culture has gotten so ingrained into the medical profession that it's no longer able to see what the problem with it might be.

The New York Times reported today that a 2006 study on lung cancer that suggested 80 percent of lung cancer could be prevented through widespread use of CT scans, was funded by the tobacco industry through a front group called the Foundation for Lung Cancer.

Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, editor in chief of the medical journal, said he was surprised. "In the seven years that I've been here, we have never knowingly published anything supported by" a cigarette maker, Dr. Drazen said.

The conclusion of the study was questioned almost immediately. Yet it took the Times going through the tax records from the group to ask what Drazen's editors should've asked the researcher two years ago: Who paid you?

In Minnesota, the issue came up this month during testimony on a bill that would ban the the sale of prescriber-specific prescription information for commercial purposes.

On the blog of the National Physicians Alliance, Chris McCoy, who testified, wrote that the hearing earlier this month quickly shifted.

At several intervals, several of the state Senators expressed their personal experiences. I never expected to have many of my arguments presented by a legislator, but one described working in a psychiatry office that has weekly lunches sponsored by drug companies.

McCoy criticized supporters of the practice who say they need "detailing" (as it's called) to keep up with the latest medical information. " There are plenty of unbiased, evidenced-based sources of information about new drugs," says McCoy.

Minnesota is one of the few states that has banned large gifts from drug companies to doctors.