Just who is Mukasey working for? Certainly not the American people or U.S. National Security.

I’m always amazed and how much talent there is in each agency and bureaucracy but also ironically how crushed these people are because the “leaders” are political automatons like at the EPA, or the over the top arrogant Ms. Chutzpah herself Laurita Doan who is thankfully gone from GSA

Obama has been literally surrounded by them for years and actually every President has them. even in the agency bureaucracy and Congress as you also know there are large lists of state of the art people who testify for them or work for them day in and day out but the many many problems remain.

I could write a book about the politicization of the CDC at the top, but for example in the last few days it has come to light that Dick Cheney and his staff actually edited information out of testimony that was given by CDC head Julie Gerberding, M.D. because they didn’t want to improve standards on emisssion of green house gases.

A doctor with any ethics/integrity at all would have told them “no way” and of course the Bush administration would have fired her. The CDC predictably says no harm no foul. This isn’t the first time the administration has edited her testimony to Congress by a long shot. And as Marcy has beautifully shown, they are pulling Mukasey’s strings every step of the way.

Cheney’s Staff Cut Testimony On Warming

Remember also Michelle Obama was a VP for community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals since May 2005 until the campaign started, and before that was executive director of community affairs there, and before that Dean of Student services at the University of Chicago. He has and will have access to the best and brightest and the AMA’s tools and resources are located in Chicago where Obama’s are.

I know that since I was a kid the AMA has had a predatory or slick or doctor centered rather than patient centered image for many people or the idea has persisted that they don’t have patient interests at heart, but I haven’t found any of this in my adult life in any of their initiatives and I have no particular reason to cheerlead for them. Almost every initative they currently have (and there are a lot of them) are targeted at improving patient access to care and fighting off plans that limit it.

The incoming President is a lady named Nancy Neilsen who has made the centerpiece of her incoming address to cover the uninsured or make universal care actually happen. She’s an internist, a Ph. D. in microbiology, and medical school associate dean from Buffalo NY.

All that’s encouraging but I guess we’ll have to see what happens.

Medical care is always a big political issue and politically it is incredibly more complex than a lot of us think it needs to be. What drives me up a wall is the amount of money wasted on fiascos like Iraq that or spent in Pakistan that could go along way towards providing the care that the Bush administration has been bent on cutting. There are also crazy serial medical mandates (from Congress or HHS etc.) as I know you’ve seen (as well as many other kinds of mandates like a universal ID card by DHS) to states with no way on earth to pay for them.

Yeah, I’ve always hoped that if I ever found myself having to say stuff that weak and wrong, I’d know it was time to hang it up.