Last Saturday, I was feeling sick and visited the emergency room at Chestnut Hill Hospital. I arrived at 11:45PM and told the triage nurse that I was suffering from extreme neck pain, dizziness, and nausea. At 3AM, I was finally examined by a staff member, to whom I repeated the same list of symptoms. Around 5AM, I was awakened by a doctor shining a bright light in my face. After making sure I could feel my arms, he asked how I injured my neck. Before I could answer, he cut me off and said “I’ve heard enough. Do you want an x-ray or not?” I told him that I had already been x-rayed, at which point he indicated that he would return shortly and finish his examination.

At approximately 6:30AM, another staff member handed me a prescription for muscle relaxers and ibuprofen along with discharge papers that said “You have been diagnosed with neck pain.” I explained that I already knew I had neck pain, and was more concerned about not being able to walk or drive because of my persistent dizziness and increasing nausea. After several minutes of prodding, they agreed to convince the doctor to come back and actually examine me.

When he returned, the doctor was both confrontational and condescending. Nearly shouting, he starting to enumerate an exhaustive list of procedures that he had already conducted, none of which actually happened. The doctor then snatched the papers from the staffer and threatened to take the prescription back because of my “complaining.” Frustrated but weak, I calmly explained that I simply wanted to make sure that he fully understood the range of my symptoms. At this point, the doctor became more enraged, alternately barking “What do you want me to do?” and mockingly stating “You’re not gonna die!” When I reiterated my desire for help, he deadpanned “Do you want the prescription or not?” I told him that I did, at which point he coldly replied “Then go home.” The doctor then turned around and walked away. As I exited the building, the staff member whispered to me that this behavior was common for the doctor.

Did the doctor think that I was fishing for drugs? Perhaps. Would he have treated me differently if he knew I was a college professor? Probably. Was he a racist? I don’t know, but it’s worth noting that he wasn’t white. What happened to me at Chestnut Hill Hospital is disturbing, but not uncommon. Every day, the nation’s most vulnerable citizens are abused, dehumanized, and underserved in hospitals around the country. Even if the diagnosis  is correct, a doctor’s failure to maintain an ethic of compassion, concern, and care leaves a patient feeling unsafe and unwelcome. This is a truly sickening reality.

The bizarre tale of how the media turned a crooked Republican into the mirage of a principled politician.

McCain’s ‘Maverick’ Myth Is the Media’s Creation
By David Brock and Paul Waldman

Perhaps no word better defines John McCain in the public imagination than “maverick.” It’s a word that, more than “straight talk” or “moderate” or “reformer,” has come to occupy a seemingly permanent place next to the senator’s name in the media. It is also distinct from those other modifiers that have come to identify McCain. As critical as the idea of ideological moderation is to the Myth of McCain, his status as a maverick is not about what he believes but about who he is-something far more important in the personality-driven world of today’s politics.

In later years, when asked to name his proudest moment in Congress, John McCain would go all the way back to his first year in the House of Representatives to point to a case in which he stood against a Republican president. In 1983, McCain voted against Ronald Reagan’s decision to deploy U.S. troops to Lebanon. “I do not see any obtainable objectives in Lebanon,” he said at the time, “and the longer we stay there, the harder it will be to leave.”43 McCain sees the act as a defining moment: the neophyte lawmaker breaking ranks with his party and his political hero. (The actual vote was 270-161 in favor of deployment; McCain was joined by twenty-seven Republicans in opposition.) The dissenters would later be vindicated when a truck bomber slammed into the Marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and precipitating a U.S. withdrawal. “It demonstrated to me that you really have to do, at the end of the day, what you fundamentally know is right,” McCain told the National Journal years later.

At the time, McCain’s decision to object was barely noted (a New York Times story on the House vote buried a quote from him at the bottom of its story). McCain evidently sees his 1983 vote as the moment where his political identity as a maverick began to form, but that reputation did not really take hold until much later. In fact, McCain’s early years in Congress did not attract much national attention, nor did they evince much evidence of what would become the Myth of McCain. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that the press even began to take notice of his self-proclaimed penchant for breaking with party orthodoxy. Early in his career, McCain was seldom described as someone too principled to be bound by party loyalty or the momentary dictates of partisanship. The first time anyone referred to him as a “maverick” in the press appears to be a February 1989 States News Service story, which quoted Dan Casey, then-executive director of the American Conservative Union, saying about McCain, “He is a good conservative but somewhat of a maverick.”There was no explanation of what made him a maverick, other than the fact that the group had given him a rating of merely 80 out of 100. Other such descriptions are few and far between. Another story from 1989, in Newsday, described him as a Republican expected to “break ranks” on Dick Cheney’s proposed budget cuts to the F-14D aircraft program. But apart from these faint glimmers, there was little indication of the McCain image that would eventually form in the press.

In 1992, McCain was one of three Republican senators to vote for Democratic campaign finance reform legislation (all the Senate Democrats except two voted in favor). The bill called for the provision of taxpayer funds and other incentives to urge candidates to abide by voluntary spending limits; it was vetoed by then-president George H. W. Bush, a veto that the Senate failed to override. In 1993, McCain again cast himself in the role of party rebel in the campaign finance debate. In deliberations over an identical measure to the one Bush had vetoed in 1992, McCain proposed amendments that caught the attention of the media. McCain offered one amendment that barred candidates from using campaign money for personal expenses such as vacations, mortgage payments, and clothing purchases, among others. Another amendment pushed for the campaign reforms, if enacted, to go into effect in 1994 instead of 1996, as originally proposed. Little noted was that McCain’s amendment was identical to one that his Arizona colleague, Senator Dennis DeConcini (D), was set to introduce to the Senate, before McCain beat him to the punch by a day-a move that won McCain credit for the amendment.

For the rest of the story, click here.

McCain Highlights Foreign Policy Differences

In an effort to distance himself from President Bush’s foreign policy, John McCain called for closing Guantanamo Bay and said the Unites States could not consider ourselves a lone superpower. What do you think?

Ben Shapiro,
Systems Analyst
“After Bush slandered him for fathering an illegitimate black child and challenged his status as a war hero, this is how McCain repays him?”

Laurie Frendrich,
Horse Trainer
“No more Gitmo? Then where would President McCain put all the enemy combatants that we capture in Iraq over the next thousand years?”

Paulo Garcia,
Cabinet Maker
“He probably didn’t need to end his speech with ‘Ya happy now?’”

Today’s photo of the day shows Chris Webber, who announced his retirement last week. In addition to being one of the most talented power forwards of all time, Webber’s on-the-court and off-the-court style changed the face of the NBA.

Today’s video of the day shows my appearance on O’Reilly last week, where I debated about the Lebron James/Vogue Magazine cover. The next videos show my appearance on MSNBC discussing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.