But… How Normal is This Quitting Thing?

The Mudflats reports: Since 1900, about 1200 people have taken a first-term oath of office as governor of a state in the U.S.  A number of them have left office because they were tapped for federal government posts (a la John Huntsman, taking the post as Obama’s ambassador to China, or Spiro Agnew taking the vice-presidency).  A few governors were arrested or impeached.  One was incapacitated with a nervous breakdown, and one left office just ahead of the posse (for impeachment).

How many just up and quit?

Three: Jim McGreevy, Eliot Spitzer and Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin Quits. Again. Or Does She?

My take on Sarah Palin’s departure as governor of Alaska leans a little both ways.

On the one hand, this really is a disturbing trend for someone who would even campaign for our highest office:

1. After graduating from high school, she attends Hawaii Pacific college for one semester, then leaves.
2. She transfers to North Idaho College for two semesters, and leaves.
3. She attends the University of Idaho for two semesters, and leaves.
4. She attends Matanuska – Susitna College for one semester, and leaves.
5. Finally, she attends the University of Idaho for three semesters and graduates.
6. She was appointed to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in 2003, and quit the job less than a year later.
7. And now: she serves 2 1/2 years of a four-year term, and rather puzzlingly quits the job.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that this is not a good-looking resume for the toughest job in the world.  I mean, aside from briefly sportscasting (did she quit that one?) and being mayor of Wasilla, that’s her entire adult life right there.

On the other hand: I would guess that she’s doing one of two perfectly reasonable things:  either she’s stepping out of formal politics entirely to focus on her book and on giving speeches and being helpful to the Republican party, or she’s preparing to run for president in 2012 and wants to be free from the fund-raising shackles on elected officials.  In the former case: she is the only thing the Republican brand has got going right now (aside from Limbaugh, Beck and O’Reilly), and it would help the party a lot if she spent tons of time in the lower 48.  In the latter: strike while the iron’s hot, Sarah.  She could raise untold gobs of cash right now for a presidential run, and it’s not weird for her take advantage of her opportunity.  She hinted at that in her speech.

So, you know, it’s both disturbing and understandable.

I Am Not Making This Up Dep’t:

1. Rush Limbaugh stated on his program that Michael Jackson “flourished under Reagan, languished under Clinton/Bush, and died under Obama.”  What…the… ?????
2. The chyron (words on the lower portion of the screen during a segment) on Fox News (”fair and balanced,” remember?) read thusly yesterday: “Cap & Trade Cover-Up?  Media Focuses on Michael Jackson’s Death.”  I honestly wish I were making this up, but I kid you not:

Friends of all varieties (conservative or otherwise): can you see that you must stop watching and listening to these people?  The level of wingnuttery has gotten truly appalling at this point.

More on Anti-Intellectualism

I’ve got a lot of conservative friends, of course.  And the latest I hear from a number of them is on climate change, and it goes like this: “Old farmers are all saying that the weather just cycles, and always has.  And nobody watches the weather like farmers.”  (This primarily from rural friends in Utah and Colorado.)

Nobody watches like farmers.  Except, of course, climate scientists, who watch it way more closely, over way longer time periods, and in way greater detail.

Why do we have this incredible desire to trust homespun wisdom, when (most, I admit, not all…but hugely most) science is heading the entirely other direction?

Speaking of Healthcare…

…let’s all remember, kids: circumcision is not a do-it-yourself operation.  Especially not if you’re going to use nail clippers.

Happy to provide this kind of public service announcement.

Healthcare Debate: A Personal Story

I’m hearing so much nonsense from the right about “socialized medicine,” as though universal healthcare (which has actually taken the form — maybe — of a public health insurance option, mind you) immediately turns us into North Korea, that I can’t help weighing in a bit.

The key thing that prevents people from embracing universal healthcare, I think, is an absolutely delusional notion of America’s healthcare system as it stands today.  Americans, ignoring every international healthcare study available, persist in believing that their healthcare is reasonably priced (it isn’t — we pay almost double what any other nation on earth pays), available (hah!), and high-quality (37th-best in the world, just ahead of Slovenia and Brunei).  People who understand the above correctly often have a different delusion — that if you had a really serious problem, America is the place to go because our medical education is tops (nope — India, among others, has more innovative medical education).

So, heaven forbid that we would try to fix an incredibly costly, mediocre system.

One of the most interesting arguments I’ve heard revolves around access to care: the theory goes that a nationalized healthcare system produces incredible wait times with overworked doctors.  This is nowhere close to true, of course; the point has been swatted down in study after study.

Basically, folks, it goes like this: all of those 36 countries who get better healthcare than we do, and get it more cheaply — all of them — have nationalized healthcare.

But let’s get down to how it all works, at a personal level.  Let me tell you about my mother’s experience in Costa Rica in April.

We (my wife, three of my kids, and my mom) took spring break this year in Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica.  Manuel Antonio is a little town outside of a little town; we flew into Quepos (pop. 14,000).  It was lovely.

On our first night there, my mother got up to get a drink of water and misjudged the stairs.  She fell, and in the process of falling gashed open her head just above her eye.  It was a pretty bad cut, one that clearly needed stitches, and it was roughly midnight.

We found a taxi to take us to the hospital in Quepos, and prepared for a wait.  We walked into the emergency room, where an attendant simply walked my mother into the medical facility and flagged a doctor to take a look.  She hadn’t even asked my mother’s name.  Within a few minutes, a doctor had taken a look, and very skillfully stitched my mom’s head up (she does not have a noticeable scar today).  She then instructed her to walk across the hall to get an x-ray to ensure that there was no fracture.  Again there was no wait: the x-ray technician walked her right in and took the pictures.  We waited a few minutes for the x-rays to develop, whereupon our doctor looked them over with us and proclaimed her to be sound.  She then gave us her name and asked us to come back, directly to the emergency room, in four days so she could remove the stitches.  We left.  No one had requested a dime, no one had “checked us in,” and no one had made us wait.  We were not alone: others were receiving quick, efficient care at the same time.  Both of us were flabbergasted.

We returned four days later, and our doctor could not be found.  Uh-oh, right?

Not so much.  We just walked up to another doctor and asked if they could do it, and within five minutes we were done.  Again, no one had even asked us for our names.  My mother got excellent healthcare, from very competent physicians who paid attention and took the time necessary to do the job right.

For absolute dang certain, I can tell you this: the same treatment would have taken no less than three hours at my local hospital in the United States.

Let me just say this: if we end up with the kind of healthcare that they have in Costa Rica (ranked just ahead of the U.S., at #36 in the World Health Organization rankings), we will have done ourselves a tremendous favor.

Al Franken

My thoughts go both ways on the now junior senator-elect from Minnesota:

On the one hand: I’m always skeptical of entertainers turning into politicians.  I guess I wonder how their life and work has prepared them for government leadership.  It comes to this, I think: I just went to Wikipedia and (literally) randomly selected a sitting senator, and took a peek at his background prior to the Senate.  As it happens, I picked Chuck Grassley of Iowa.  Grassley served for fifteen years in the Iowa House of Representatives, and then three terms in the United States House of Representatives, before he took his seat in the U.S. Senate.  Franken will take office having served… as a writer and blogger, primarily.

To be fair, though: Franken did graduate cum laude from Harvard with a degree in Political Science, and he recently served as a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.  He’s not entirely a novice.  But still.

And yet: I’m flabbergasted by the hue and cry from Republicans over Franken’s victory.  They paint him as a lightweight, view his election as evidence of just how shallow Democrats are.  This from the party of actors Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sonny Bono; the party of football heroes Jack Kemp, Tom Osborne, Steve Largent, and J.C. Watts; and (most pointedly) the party that is in love with small-town mayor Sarah Palin.  I would think that Republicans would be particularly sensitive to the notion that preparation can come from all kinds of places.  Kemp, Reagan and Watts, particularly, have shown themselves to be worthy of the calling, despite fairly light preparations for their initial forays into politics.  (Kemp, in particular, is probably instructive in terms of what we can expect from Franken.  Both of them were always interested in politics, always Beltway junkies.  Franken can only hope to have as much influence as Kemp did.)

In a nutshell, Republicans: I sort of agree.  But I don’t think I want the lecture to come from you.

People ask me About Watches

…because I’m a watch geek.  I have many, many more than I should.  This is a fetish, of course, so while there is no good reason, there is an explanation:  I think that there are very few ways for a man to stand out.  We all wear essentially the same uniform, every day.  We (mostly) don’t wear jewelry, we don’t (usually) do anything interesting with our hair, and we’re all wearing jeans or khakis with the same basic shirt.  So what we’ve got to work with are: (a) shoes; (b) an interesting tie if you’re wearing one; and (c) a watch.

There you go.  That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

What I am asked a lot is, how would I know a good-quality watch from a cheap one?  What should I look for?  And, what lower or midrange brands do you like?  I’ll address each question here.

1. How can you tell a good-quality watch from a cheap one?  A few things set a quality watch apart: (a) its movement; (b) its design; and (c) its crystal.  There are others, of course, but since we’re sticking to relatively inexpensive watches for this discussion we won’t go into precious metals or other specialized matters.  Movements are mostly either mechanical (automatic or hand-wound), or quartz.  Interestingly, a quartz movement (which is cheaper) is more accurate than a mechanical movement.  But mechanical movements are highly prized as evidence of craftsmanship in a watch.  A Swiss quartz movement (which must have over 50% of its components made in Switzerland, and must be assembled there), though, such as those found in ESQ watches, is still a very high-quality piece of workmanship.  The design of a watch comes down to two things for me: aesthetics and complications.  Certain watches, and I’ll pick here many watches from a maker like Akribos as an example, just don’t look great, even if they are unique.  Other  companies, like Invicta, mostly just copy their basic designs from other manufacturers (which is just lame).  Some companies have a knack for making a good-looking watch.  Honestly, Seiko’s a pretty good example of that — most of their watches look great.  A watch that has complications, like a moonphase function, a chronograph or a perpetual calendar, is evidence of interesting design.  Finally, a good watch has a crystal that doesn’t look cheap.  Back in the day, watch crystals were glass, which was fragile.  Then they went to different forms of plastics, which scratched easily.  Most good watches today come with a synthetic sapphire crystal, which is durable and scratch-proof.  Good mineral crystals can also be nice, if they’re beefy enough.  Lower-end watches have thin mineral crystals or crystals of another material.
2. What should you look for?  Well, some of the above: a design that you like, made of solid materials with a good crystal.  That by itself should put you in fairly good stead.
3. What lower or midrange brands do I like?  I’ll give you some.  Presume that we’re talking about watches that cost in a range between $100 or so and $400.  That’s a fairly low-end watch, but you can still find some that are pretty nice.  For example:

• Emporio Armani.  To my mind, the most consistent maker of nice watches in the $150 – $300 range is Emporio Armani.  The designs are really nice, the crystals are great, and they mostly use good-quality automatic movements.  They’re just nice-looking, good-quality watches:

• TX.  This high-end division of Timex makes really, really nice watches.  They tend to sell for over $500, but they can be had online or at places like Nordstrom Rack for somewhere between $175 and $300.  The movements are superb, they often employ really interesting complications (one of mine has a linear chronograph, and both of mine — I have two — have a second time zone indicator), and they use nice sapphire crystals.

• Haffstreuner.  This is just a quirk of mine, I think: I don’t think Haffstreuner makes excellent watches, so much as I think they make big, clunky man-sized designs that look good on my wrist.

• Zodiac.  Zodiac is sort of the go-to low-end Swiss watch company, and to be honest they make a lot of watches whose designs I think are sort of ho-hum.  But they make a couple of watches I really like.  The one I like is really simply styled, a sort of military dial, and has a really nice crystal and a very dependable movement:

• ESQ.  Like Zodiac, ESQ (a division of Movado) makes a lot of watches I don’t really love.  But they make a few I like a LOT.  My favorite is the Blackfin, which is a really solid 300-meter diver’s watch.  It looks good, and it is just a great timepiece.  A couple of other models are nice, too:

• Seiko.  To be honest, just about every watch Seiko makes is a pretty good watch.  Connoisseurs can huff about Asian watches, but sorry: these guys make really nice-looking watches that work great.  I have a Sportura Chronograph that has a 1/100 of a second stopwatch:

• National Geographic.  You wouldn’t think so, but National Geographic makes some really nice watches, and at a great price.  They make a 1,000-meter dive watch that you can find online for $150, and a number of other interesting designs:

• Citizen.  Another Asian watch company, I don’t like Citizen’s designs as well as I like Seiko’s, but they make a really nice world-timer (it can show the time in spots all around the globe, all at once) that uses its famous Eco-Drive, which uses light for its power source (so you never need a battery):

• Chase-Durer.  Most Chase-Durer watches are a little out of this price range, but they make a really cool watch, the Wing-GMT, that you can often find for somewhere between $250 and $350:

• Orsa.  I love mentioning Orsa, because as far as I know, there’s just this one guy who makes a few watches every year and sells them.  They are incredibly well-built watches, big and beefy and solid, and they use great materials.  The Monstrum is a good 300m dive watch with a thick sapphire crystal:

• Croton.  Croton, a Swiss company, makes a lot of crappy-looking watches.  There.  I said it.  But one, called the Super C, just looks nice on my wrist:

And a couple of others I’d like to especially mention:

• Minorva.  Oh, wow, this is a really weird thing to put into a post on good watches.  Watch guys tend to hate Asian watches, and Chinese watches in particular (since they tend to be knock-offs of real watch companies).  But… Minorva is a Chinese watchmaker, and they are really cheap watches — they can often be had for under $50 on eBay.  It comes to this: I like their designs.  They are mostly not knock-offs of other designs (though one of the watches below is similar to a Jaeger Master Compressor, the others are original), and they look good and wear well.  So there.

• Botta Design.  This is usually a little above $400, but it’s just such a cool watch: Botta makes a watch with a single hand to show the time, on the theory that you mostly don’t need to know that it’s 11:39 so much as you need to know that it’s between 11:30 and 11:45.  (In the picture below, it’s about 10:40.)  Really cool watch:

Utter Nonsense

The current Republican talking point over the whole Iran mess is to suggest that President Obama has not been tough enough with his talk, that he hasn’t been vocal enough.  Representative Dana Rorabacher (R-CA) today took it a bit further and suggested that lives would have been saved, that less violence would have occurred, if only President Obama had been more forceful.

I guess this would be because — the Ayatollah Khamenei, incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, and their various minions have been sitting around wondering what the U.S. thought of all this?

I believe I can state without fear of being incorrect in the slightest degree that, had President Obama been more forceful (and I should here point out: if he was not forceful, he was at least very clear, which is sort of how he is), the leadership of Iran would absolutely not have responded by saying, “Whoops, our bad.  I was unaware that we were making the U.S. uncomfortable.  Now that we know, we’ll absolutely allow these demonstrations to continue unimpeded.”

Do they ever get tired of being so wrong?