Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee showed that it is possible to defeat the establishment — at least in Iowa. Obama (and John Edwards) beat the presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by bringing in large numbers of new and independent voters. And Huckabee rallied evangelicals to buck Wall Street’s GOP pick, Mitt Romney and his well-financed campaign. As both Obama and Huckabee said, voters want change.
Clinton’s network still will make her tough to beat in the national campaign, but she has to be concerned that Obama won the women’s vote in Iowa and every demographic except older voters.
Meanwhile, Republicans should be concerned that more than 220,000 people attended the Democratic caucuses, compared with estimates of about 112,000 for the Republican caucuses.
Congratulations to the Kansas Jayhawks for proving the doubters wrong and winning the Orange Bowl Thursday night. Many people questioned how good the team was because of its weak nonconference schedule and mediocre Big 12 opponents. But the Hawks proved they belong in a BCS bowl by defeating No. 5 Virginia Tech, 24-21, in a game KU led the entire way.
Of course, what made the 12-1 season so special was that KU wasn’t supposed to be any good this year, as is normally the case. As one fan told The Eagle Thursday, “KU, good in football? That doesn’t even make sense.”
It does now.
How ironic — and possibly illegal. The CIA initially videotaped all its interactions with an injured top al-Qaida operative because it was concerned that he might die while in custody and the CIA wanted to be able to prove that it didn’t kill him, the New York Times reported. But after the CIA starting using waterboarding and other torture techniques on the operative, it wanted to destroy the tapes to avoid a scandal and possible legal proceedings. By destroying the tapes, the CIA is now facing just that, as Attorney General Michael Mukasey wisely has ordered a criminal probe into possible obstruction of justice.
Maybe the questions we’re asking about immigration are too narrow and too shortsighted. “We also ought to ask some broader questions about assimilation, about how to ensure that people, once outsiders, don’t forever remain marginalized within these shores,†wrote Ellis Cose of Newsweek. “That is a much larger question than what should happen with undocumented workers, or how best to secure the border, and it is one that affects not only newcomers but groups that have been here for generations.â€
Turns out those popular TV images of doctors and nurses racing into hospital rooms to administer electric shocks to patients gripped in cardiac arrest might be a bit, um, optimistic.
A study published in the most recent New England Journal of Medicine reports that one-third of patients didn’t get a jolt from a defibrillator in the recommended two minutes or less, instead waiting sometimes as long as six minutes for doctors to administer help. The delays cause thousands of deaths a year and greatly increase patients’ chances of getting brain damage or other complications, according to the study’s authors.
An editorial in the journal recommended more prevalent on-site defibrillators in hospitals and training for nurses to use them.
Meanwhile, if you’re going to have a heart attack, try to have it at a crowded mall, where someone will notice.
Malaysia’s minister of health is bitter about being forced out of office after confessing that, yes, he is the man in two widely circulated sex DVDs. “At the end of the day, it just tells you that honesty sometimes does not pay,†he said. But a political analyst had a better lesson: “You can’t continue in power when you are seen naked.â€
