Back to Contents

November / December 2009
Volume 21, Number 6

Quotations of interest that may affect counties

PRETTY PLEASE

“This is a dumb bill but I love it. I really do.”

— media analyst Mark Hughes, talking about the Commercial Loudness Mitigation Act, or CALM, which mandates that television commercials not be louder than the programs in which they appear.

RX FOR DOCTORS
If you go to your local library and can’t find a book in the stacks, a librarian consults a computer that tells you all you need to know: If the library carries that book, when the book is due back, whether it’s overdue or lost. If they don’t carry the book, they can tell you which branches do. And — if you’re like me, perpetually returning books late — your local librarian can, with a hint of scorn in their voice, deny you further checkouts until you return that book and cough up your fee. In short, libraries are technologically integrated; gone are the labyrinthine card catalogs in favor of streamlined digital records. Same for banks. Same for airlines.

But not healthcare. The vast majority of doctors in this country are not integrated with each other, with the local pharmacies, or with laboratories. We work in our own silos, blind to the outside world. A patient walks in our door, we escort them to an exam room, jot down what they tell us on loose pieces of paper. We exam them, diagnose their afflictions, and send them on their way.

— Rahul K. Parikh, M.D., in a Salon column suggesting that doctors need to be more like librarians to combat “doctor shoppers” and prescription pill addicts.

FINE BY HIM
When government wants to discourage something, the instinct is to criminalize that behavior. But small infractions often get lost by prosecutors and courts that have to focus on more serious crimes. Scofflaws abound. It is often more effective to impose small civil fines, as with parking tickets. Wilmington, Delaware decriminalized penalties to ensure property owners kept their properties clear of trash and up to code. Smaller penalties plus swift enforcement translates into better behavior.

— John O’Leary on the Ash Institute’s
“Better, Faster, Cheaper” blog on government efficiency,
of which he is executive editor

HEARING AID
When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father in Nigeria reported concern over his son’s “radicalization” to the U.S. Embassy there last month, intelligence officials in the United States deemed the information insufficient to pursue. The young man’s name was added to the half-million entries in a computer database in McLean and largely forgotten.

The lack of attention was not unusual, according to U .S. intelligence officials, who said that thousands of similar bits of information flow into the National Counterterrorism Center each week from around the world. Only those that indicate a specific threat, or add to an existing body of knowledge about an individual, are passed along for further investigation and possible posting on airline and border watch lists.

“It’s got to be something that causes the information to sort of rise out of the noise level, because there is just so much out there,” one intelligence official said.

— The Washington Post

CHURCH WORK
From Connecticut to California, churches, temples, and mosques are wading into the jobs crisis by helping their worshipers find work. With a national unemployment rate of 10 percent, job seekers need any lead they can get, even if it comes from a priest or a rabbi.

Historically, religious denominations and institutions have played some role in people’s careers. For years, some Christian churches have advocated for raising the minimum wage. What has shifted has been the level to which churches, synagogues, and temples are becoming involved in the nitty-gritty of people’s job searches. “On a practical level, we want our members to be affluent,” says Guy E. Felixbrodt, a community initiatives coordinator at the 4,000-member temple B’nai Jeshurun, which offers resume-writing workshops, self-marketing seminars and entrepreneur boot camps.

— Newsweek.