Month: May 2006
We’re Number One — In Fatties
Tubbo nation: According to an American Demographics analysis of census information, the United States leads the world in overweight and obese people, with nearly 23 percent of the world’s obese population aged 15 or older.
The U.S. share of the merely overweight (about 7 percent) isn’t that far out of line with its share of world population (less than 5 percent). But the problem is obesity, as determined by body mass index, which measures weight in relation to height. “Overweight” means a BMI of 25 up to 30; “obese” is 30 or above.
BMI is not a perfect measure. For example, a 200-pound, 5-foot 10-inch body builder has a BMI of 29, or borderline obese, despite having more muscle than fat. However, such cases are the exceptions to the rule, and BMI, which dates to the 1800s, remains the standard for governments.
U.S. males aged 15 or older last year had a mean BMI of 28.4, according to World Health Organization. Women’s average was 28.8. For adults of average height in the U.S., a man is considered obese at 196 pounds; a woman at 174 pounds.
The nation is getting fatter. U.S. government surveys show the average U.S. adult man aged 20-74 weighs 191 pounds and the average woman weighs 164, both up about 24 pounds (or 96 McDonald’s Quarter Pounders) from the early 1960s. About three-fourths of Americans aged 15-plus in the U.S. were overweight or obese in 2005, with about four in 10 obese, according to WHO.
With 22.6 percent of the world’s fattest residents age 15+, the U.S. is far above the 5.3 percent share of runner-up Mexico, according to American Demographics. The analysis found 1.6 billion overweight people age 15-plus worldwide last year (34.5 percent of that population), including 400 million clinically obese.
Across 192 nations, WHO’s mean BMI 2005 projection for males 15-plus was 24.4; for females, it was 25.3 — past the tipping point for overweight.
Hugging the Tar Baby???
Talk about your memorable debuts. New Whitehouse SpokesTool Tony Snow blew it so big today that I would not be surprised if his were the shortest reign as press secretary in our nation’s history.
Tony was so unnerved by Helen Thomas’ relentless follow-up ala the Steve Colbert video at the White House correspondent’s dinner, that he worked the phrase “tar baby” into his answer for Martha Radditz. Amazing. Watch it yourself at CrooksandLiars.
And if today was any indication, we are in for an even worse time with Tony that with Scottie or Ari. First he says he won’t comment on the USA Today story on phone calls, then he goes on to hold forth at length about it. Next he quotes poll numbers that show dumbass Americans are unconcerned and follows that up by saying the president ignores polls. I don’t know about you but I’m already tired.
Now You Can Profit Off the War of Words In the Media
Bullshit market: Though we here at Pensito Review are loathe to send our intelligent and discriminating readers to other Web sites, sometimes one comes along that is just too good not to share.
Trendio is a site that allows you to “play” the “stock exchange of headline news” by buying words you think are going to be used more often in the media than other words. Depending on how well you pick them, your portfolio will grow or shrink. And hey, they give you a stake of $10,000 play money to start with, so you’ve got nothing to lose but time.
The idea of investing in buzz words is appealing to those of us who believe in words and the power of words, and occasionally accidentally string them into semi-cogent sentences. Good luck playing the market of ideas!
Poll: Bush at 32% in Zogby
How low can he go?
President Bush’s speech to the nation on immigration reform Monday night drew mixed reviews, but left a plurality of likely voters across the nation skeptical that the illegal immigration problem would be solved by Washington, an overnight Zogby Interactive poll shows.
This as the President’s overall job approval numbers fall to 32%, according to a separate Zogby International survey conducted via telephone before the immigration speech Monday.
Poll: Most People Liked Bush’s Immigration Ideas
Migrating opinion: According to National Journal’s PollTrack, President Bush’s immigration proposals were relatively well-recieved Monday night, based on an overnight poll from CNN. Pollsters interviewed 461 adults who watched the primetime TV address that had been identified and pre-screened as part of a larger poll over the weekend. The sample was 41 percent Republican, 23 percent Democrat and 36 percent independent.
Nearly 80 percent said they had a positive reaction to the speech; 67 percent said they had a “generally positive” view of the policies Bush set forth, and 27 percent said they had a “generally negative” view.
About 75 percent said they favored Bush’s proposal to allow illegal immigrants to earn citizenship, and about 70 percent said they supported Bush’s proposal to allow foreign citizens to work in the U.S. temporarily.
A new Gallup survey detected a slight bounce for Bush: His approval split came in at 33/61, compared with a 31/65 split from a few days ago. However, just a quarter of respondents said they were satisfied with the direction of the country, down 2 points since Gallup’s April survey.
Congress Needs ‘Ethics for Dummies’ Training
Ethics-deficit disorder: The National Journal’s Charlie Cook muses on how and why members of Congress get into ethical trouble and how and why they never seem to learn from their and their opponents’ missteps. His solution? A film on ethics, like the old hair-blood-and-eyeballs drivers’ ed movies of high school, to be shown to congress members regularly as a kind of cautionary tale.
After each set of scandals, lawmakers seem to watch their p’s and q’s for a while, but then some of the veterans fall back into bad habits and some newcomers succumb to age-old temptations. As soon as previous scandals are out of sight, the prospect of getting caught apparently is out of mind.
There tends to be an equal amount of stupidity, hypocrisy, malfeasance, and even mean-spiritedness on either side of the aisle.So, here’s an idea for the House and Senate majority and minority leaders of January 2007 — whoever they will be. Have a media consultant put together a 15-minute video that reviews the past 30 years of Capitol Hill scandals and what happened to the miscreants involved. Show it at your party’s first caucus and make attendance mandatory. The ethics show would be the congressional equivalent of the gory driver’s ed films used to frighten teenagers.
Cook notes that life — and politics — would be considerably easier for both parties if their members would just behave:
There isn’t a whole lot that Republicans can do about Iraq and Bush’s unpopularity, but these other problems are, collectively speaking, self-inflicted, just as Mollohan and Jefferson are self-inflicted wounds for Democrats. I often wonder whether congressional leaders realize how ridiculous they look defending the bad behavior of their own members. Do they really think that viewers will be swayed by the contention that their party’s members must be considered innocent until proven guilty if they don’t give the same benefit of the doubt to the other party’s lawmakers?
And Cook offers an excellent rationale for remaining an independent voter, unaffilated with either party:
Partisanship being what it is, a member can depend on the opposition to throw a gigantic spotlight on any alleged transgression. And both sides tend to be guilty of selective outrage, becoming insufferably self-righteous about the indiscretions of opponents while turning a blind eye to misdeeds within their own party.
To me, that’s one reason it’s so easy to be an independent. There tends to be an equal amount of stupidity, hypocrisy, malfeasance, and even mean-spiritedness on either side of the aisle, if you look hard enough. And that makes it difficult to root for one side or the other with much enthusiasm. Most partisans just won’t admit that truth.
Ain’t it the truth, Charlie. Yeah, when was the last time we heard about an ethically challenged independent?
Quote du Jour
To criticize one’s country is to do it a service …. Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism — a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation.
— J. William Fulbright (1905-1995), American senator
How Republicans Think: It Only Took Hitler Four Years to Exterminate 6 Million Jews, So It Should Only Take U.S. Eight Years to Deport 12 Million Mexicans
“If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.”
Writing in the rightwing “news” site WorldNetDaily, a genius named Vox Day, whose bio says he is “a novelist and Christian libertarian. He is a member of the SFWA, Mensa and the Southern Baptist church, and has been down with Madden since 1992,” posits that the United States could model the Nazis’ effiency at population control in dealing with the illegal alien crisis:
[President Bush] plans to address the nation tonight, a speech wherein he will almost surely attempt to deceive citizens into believing that he does not wish the mass migration from Mexico to continue unabated. He will likely offer some negligible resources for law enforcement and border security – resources which will never materialize – in return for an amnesty program that will grant American citizenship to the Mexican nationals who have helped lower America’s wage rates by 16 percent over the last 32 years.
And he will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: “Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it’s just not going to work.”
Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.
