Day: September 14, 2005

Not So Sure About My Grandma’s Surgeon

One of the reasons I moved and bought a house was so I could take care of my grandmother. She’s had a lot of heart problems over the past several years and though she still gets around okay, she needs a little extra help sometime. A few weeks ago, she had an angioplasty procedure and today I took her to her vascular surgeon for a follow-up that was extremely frustrating on a number of levels.

The most frustrating part was that we never got to see the doctor. I had set up a 10:30 a.m. appointment and kept my mornings free. Well when 12 p.m. came around and I was still stuck in the waiting room, I inquired when we might actually get to see the surgeon. At least 20-30 minutes was the reply. I simply didn’t have the time to wait around for that and rescheduled. Complete waste of time with almost no feedback or information from the surgeon’s staff.

The bizarre thing, though, was when I stepped out of the waiting room to make a number of calls on my cell phone after I realized I was going to be there a lot longer than I anticipated. My cellular provider has very poor coverage in that part of town, so I walked quite a ways from the building and made several calls. Then I started to walk back inside.

And it was at that time that I saw a couple nurses and an office staff member of surgeon’s huddled outside the door. Smoking.

It’s a vascular surgery office for Christ’s sake. There are people coming in and out with oxygen tanks. And there are these three yahoos smoking right outside the main entrance. Surreal.

Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is The Washington Times

The Washington Times has published an extended essay by its editorial page editor Tony Blankley. Blankley argues for World War II-style censorship of the press.

What makes this funny is that The Washington Times was itself party to an intelligence disclosure that immeasurably helped Osama Bin Laden and other high-level Al Qaeda figures.

In 1998, the Clinton administration was accused of attacking suspected terrorist sites in Sudan and Afghanistan in order to divert attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Someone in the government leaked — and the Washington Times promptly published — information that Osama Bin Laden regularly used satellite phones and that the U.S. was able to monitor those conversations as well as pinpoint Bin Laden’s location (hence, the attack on Afghanistan had a reasonable chance of killing Bin Laden).

Bin Laden reportedly stopped using satellite phones shortly after that revelation.