“For both parties, next year’s presidential election is, in many ways, a race against the clock. For President Bush, the question is whether he peaks too early. For now, the economic news is good and the war news just barely tolerable.

But take a closer look at both fronts. On the economy, the ideal time for Bush’s reelection would be about now, when everything is on an upswing. Unfortunately, the election is next fall. Economic growth and the beginning of job growth have returned. However, both are built on a unsustainable degree of economic stimulus. The federal budget deficit is about 5 percent of GDP, and rising. Interest rates are at five-decade lows.

With that amount of stimulus, of course the economy grows. Even so, jobs are not yet growing fast enough to reduce unemployment much, and wages are still fairly flat. The problem is that you can’t sustain very high deficits and very low interest rates very long. Money markets look at the rising national debt, and start getting very nervous. That pushes up interest rates.

More ominously, huge budget deficits are linked to huge trade deficits. We finance our deficits and borrowing binge by absorbing capital from the rest of the world. That’s not sustainable either….

Over in the opposition camp, the Democrats have a very different timing problem. For 20 years, they have been tinkering with the nomination process in the hope of getting it done early, so that their standard bearer can be known early and the usual extended brawl avoided.

This year, however, the nomination process could drag on, leaving Democrats pounding on each other rather than honing their challenge to Bush. One of the Democrats’ rule changes requires delegates to be awarded proportionally. No more winning New York by a few votes and being awarded all of its delegates. Every state will now have a split delegation. This change, coupled with a large field of candidates, makes it much harder for any candidate to win half the delegates, and the nomination contest could go all the way to the convention for the first time since 1960…” — Robert Kuttner, TomPaine.com

“Zapping the bugs which often live in office air-conditioning systems can reduce symptoms in workers.” —New Scientist

“The researchers embarking on the first ever assessment of the method hope it will prove safer, cheaper and more flexible to use.” —New Scientist

The New York Times details the collusion between Boeing and Air Force personnel in a proposed $20 billion contract for the acquision of 767’s. Even after the scandal led to this week’s resignation of Boeing’s CEO, the Air Force’s top acquisitions official distributed messages to the parties urging Boeing and the Pentago to close the deal “a.s.a.p.” before public opposition mounted. This official had earlier this year forwarded to Boeing copies of internal Pentagon memos detailing the Defense Dept’s planned negotiating strategy for the contract.

And Pentagon adviser Richard Perle came under fire on Friday for failing to disclose financial ties to Boeing Co., even while championing its bid for a controversial $20 billion-plus defense contract. —CommonDreams

“…(M)obile phone users looking for improved phone reception and service have discovered a new problem: technical glitches and delays in making the number transfers.

Tens of thousands of customers have had to wait several days for their old numbers to work on their new phones and some have waited more than a week – even though switching a number is supposed to take only a few hours. In fact, according to people in the industry, the automated computer processes that are designed to carry out the number switching have been failing about 50 percent of the time – making it necessary for the wireless carriers to check the customer data manually, a time-consuming task.” —New York Times

Cutaneous leishmaniasis, caused by a parasite spread by biting sand flies, has been diagnosed in more than 150 US military personnel in Iraq so far. It causes ugly ulcerated skin lesions which may take months to heal and can only be treated by 10-20 days of a 50-year old unapproved drug that can be administered only intravenously and which is toxic to the liver and pancreas. So far the life-threatening visceral form of leishmaniasis, in which the parasites infest the internal organs rather than the skin, has not been seen. The invasion of Iraq began during the hot season when the sand flies start biting, in contrast to the 1991 Gulf War conducted in the colder season and in which very few contracted the disease. In the current military action, many soldiers have scorned precautions, sleeping outside in their underwear because of the heat and eschewing insect repellent because the sand sticks to it. But even those who sleep under mosquito netting indoors are susceptible, because the Army’s mosquito netting has holes too large to stop the sand flies. Some GIs have presented with more than 200 bites per night. The disease has a long incubation period and hundreds of soldiers in each unit have been bitten and are in danger of developing the disease in coming months. Currently, more than 40 new cases a day are being diagnosed but we can expect that to skyrocket. Soldiers are sent back to the US for treatment, out of service for 30-40 days. Will the Army quietly stop sending infected soldiers for treatment as the numbers continue to mount? —New York Times

The article analyzes the failure of Medicare’s payment structure to provide incentives for better care, and the recently-passed Medicare reforms do nothing to address the effort despite calls from health funding specialists. Psychiatry is different from much of the rest of medicine with respect to Medicare reimbursement in several respects. First, there are few “procedures” in my field, so the situation the article describes in which a hospital gets paid much less for, say, a pneumonia patient if the patient gets better without needing to be placed on a respirator does not apply. Secondly, in other areas of medical care, other than paying for procedures, there is flat-rate reimbursement by the admission or the incident, whereas in psychiatry, Medicare pays by the day (and, unlike other insurers, Medicare is not ‘managed’, i.e. there are no reviewers pressuring the hospital to treat the patient and discharge sooner to save the insurer money). So there is an incentive for psychiatric hospitals, especially those in the for-profit sector, to fill their beds with Medicare patients rather than divert any who present, no matter how possible to send them home instead and stabilize them in the community and prevent a needless admission that would be disruptive and distressing. Furthermore, there is an incentive for the hospital to fill their beds with less sick patients, because sicker patients will cost more in manpower, medications and other resources while they are hospitalized despite fixed reimbursement. I see this at my hospital, where clinical input into the appropriateness of admissions decisions has been excluded by the non-clinical corporate fiscal administrators, and I am convinced inappropriate Medicare admissions become a covert bulwark of the hospital’s profitmaking strategy.

New York Times editorial: “There is no good explanation for why Howard Dean’s office sought to have nearly half of his gubernatorial records sealed away in Vermont.”

There is apparently an epidemic of silly summonses issued by NYPD officers, while police brass deny imposing quotas. —New York Daily News

“This month, Americans will get a second chance to scrutinize the legacy of Ronald Reagan when HBO begins airing its two-part adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, ‘Angels in America.’

The first opportunity to reconsider Reagan, of course, was scuttled in November, when CBS pulled the plug on the notorious, and now almost legendary, TV-movie, ‘The Reagans.’ At the time, conservatives decried the film as an exercise in character assassination, insisting that at best, it employed excessive artistic license in condemning the 40th President’s deplorable response to the AIDS crisis, and, at worst, was a fabricated hack job…

The HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner’s ‘Angels in America‘ is a far harsher indictment of Reagan’s handling of the AIDS. So why has the rightwing remained silent?” —AlterNet

“Mobile phone text messaging has shown high-end PDA users that typing with their thumbs is a more attractive way of entering data than using a stylus, according to PDA manufacturers.” —Australian IT