Michael Jackson died of a sleep disorder

Thanks to Little Miss Attila, I just read the New York Times story from 8/24/09 based on information obtained in Texas from court documents regarding the investigation into the death of Michael Jackson on June 25. The documents name the cause of death as the anesthetic propofol, which should never be used outside of a hospital because of the degree to which it suppresses breathing.

So why do I say Michael Jackson died of a sleep disorder? Because he would not have demanded, manipulated, bribed and coerced doctors and nurse practitioners to give him the propofol and other drugs to make him sleep if he did not have a sleep disorder, which was probably undiagnosed, and definitely was not being treated appropriately. Even so, Jackson was so willful that it appears he disregarded the advice of any health professional that disagreed with the treatment and drugs that Jackson desired. So Jackson also died of his own willfulness.

The New York Times piece gives the most complete timeline I’ve read to date of the events surrounding Jackson’s death, but I think they have one thing wrong. Jackson was probably dead as a doornail by the time his personal physician, cardiologist Dr. Conrad Murray, returned to his side after leaving him to go to the bathroom. And waiting 82 minutes from discovering Jackson not breathing until calling 911? In the movies that time would be spent on getting rid of evidence.

Also, Cherilyn Lee has been identified in other news stories as a nurse practitioner. Nurse practitioners are allowed to prescribe medications when they are practicing under a doctor’s supervision. That is why Jackson approached her begging for a prescription for propofol. Ms. Lee refused and cautioned Jackson.

So — Michael Jackson may not have died of obstructive sleep apnea, but the root cause of his death is still a sleep disorder because he told the medical professionals appeasing him — you can’t say “treating” — that he just wanted to sleep.

I have to think about death, now

I love writing posts for this blog but I have to concentrate the next week on writing my book on end-of-life care choices and doing some other chores. I’ve tried balancing both, but I enjoy this so much that I have neglected the other work.

I hope my regular readers will amuse themselves in the archives, or continue to visit to use the newsfeed to the right of this post. I’ll be back, blog-wise, on Monday, August 31.

(But if it turns out I can’t go cold turkey, there may be episodes of cat blogging.)

Obama's tanking, so expect a lie about Gov. Palin in 3, 2, 1 …

The Obama playbook calls for a big media distraction from stories about his tanking popularity and cries of outrage with his performance now emanating from the Left, of all places — see here, here and here. So, I am updating my Obama Prevarication Predictor to add that within 72 hours of the release of really bad poll numbers about Obama’s performance as president, there will be a HUGE lie either about Gov. Palin, or attributed to her, in order to distract the media and public from the true, bad news about Obama.

At -14, Obama had the worst result on the Rasmussen Presidential Approval Index of his presidency on Sunday, August 23. (Today he has leapt up to -12.) The last time his numbers hit their lowest was July 30, at -12, probably due to the controversy following Obama’s July 22 primetime healthcare reform press conference where he spent an hour selling a bill he’s never read, that exists in no fixed form, with solutions that even people with a modest command of healthcare reform know were lowhanging fruit plucked and discarded in the 1990’s, and made the accusation that doctors make the decision to remove body parts based on their personal financial goals rather than the patient’s needs — then capped his performance with a truly spectacular display of cluelessness about the office of the president and his own deficient character in what became “Gatesgate.”

Then, on August 1, an Alaskan blogger put out the bogus claim that Gov. Sarah Palin was divorcing her husband Todd. Poof! Just like magic, the media and blogosphere pounced on the new bone.

The distraction did not go as well as planned, however, due to the investigative work of bloggers Dan Riehl of Riehl World View (see here) and Stacy McCain of The Other McCain (see here). So sad — not only was the rumor completely false, but also Riehl found that one of the bloggers purveying it, Jesse Griffin, had a no-show job paid for by big-time Obama contributors and had a behavioral profile disturbing in a single man working as a kindergarten teacher’s assistant. Copious sunlight had the same effect on Griffin that it does on traditional vampires.

So, Obama’s tanking and his playbook calls for a distraction right about now. However, I have to wonder if the usual henchbloggers and mainstream media shills might be a little reluctant to do Obama’s dirty work this time around. Dan Riehl found their money trail. It may take some time to make a new one. Which also can be found in due course. Sunlight is not going to flatter them at all, I suspect.

Update, 8/24/09: THAT was fast! See dear Stacy McCain at The Other McCain on the latest mendacious anti-Palin blogger to get outed and find the sunshine to be very unpleasant indeed. And what a coincidence her anti-Palin blog was founded on 9/15/08 at the same time the Obama campaign appeared to settle on a strategy to fight the damage that Gov. Palin did to Obama’s popularity after Sen. McCain chose her as his running mate. And I see Dan Riehl is hot on her trail, too: “When first we practice to deceive.“

Obama's hit -14 and Dan explains why he's 'bust-o'

Obama's presidential approval rating hit -14 on 8/23/09, its lowest number ever.
Obama's presidential approval rating hit -14 on 8/23/09, its lowest number ever.

OK, given that my previous post was all about bare breasts, I could not resist using Dan Collins’ blog headline “Bust-o” for this one telling you to go read his post set off by a piece at Politico that Dan found deficient. It is a thorough, well-supported and extremely satisfying shellacking. Here is a sample:

Largely missing from [Politico’s] analysis, which is punctuated with a lot of 20/20 hindsight observation, is any appreciation of how Obama and his administration’s lack of candor might have affected perceptions of his trustworthiness. Consider, for example, the promises regarding transparency. Obama stated that all major pending legislation would be posted in order to give the public a chance to view it for a minimum of five days before he signed it. This promise–like the promise to conduct health care negotiations live on C-SPAN–has simply not materialized. Instead, the administration has been conducting its own closed-door negotiations with PhRMA, including a quid pro quo in the form of $150 million in television ad buys to promote the health care agenda, but without tort reform.

By coincidence, Obama hit his lowest approval rating ever in today’s Rasmussen Presidential Approval Index, -14. This number is derived by subtracting the number of voters who strongly disapprove of Obama’s performance from the number that strongly approve: 27 – 41 = -14.

Becky's back and bringing the bare-breasted goodness

In honor of "Go Topless Day": Bea Arthur nude by John Curin, 1991, Tate Gallery.
In honor of "Go Topless Day": Bea Arthur nude by John Curin, 1991, Tate Gallery.

Becky Chandler is back and blogging at Bing about bare breasts! With photos that are — and I am unanimous in this — NSFW!

Of course.

Becky is a libertarian lesbian lawyer and mother who blogged at Just a Girl in Short Shorts Talking About Whatever until Obama supporters angry with her trenchant observations about their hero got Blogger to shut her down on the specious claim that the illustrations on her blog were X-rated. Beg to differ — they were frisky but not over the line. But she was shut down, nonetheless.

Becky’s next move was microblogging at Twitter, where you can follow her at @beckychr007. (And while you’re there, you are welcome to follow me at @conservativelez.)

And today I see Becky has gone back to long form blogging with a blog at the Ladies of Liberty Alliance on Ning. Well! She has gotten down to testing their TOS limits right out of the gate, so to speak, God bless her. Today’s post is in support of “Go Topless Day.”

We lesbians love this kind of thing. Seriously. Our festivals are filled with bare-breasted women. And pillow fights. Lots of pillow fights. Except when we’re Jello wrestling. Or at the sex toy tent trying on dildo harnesses. Because an army of lovers cannot get out of bed in the morning. Or fail — one of those things for sure — I haven’t been to a lesbian music festival since Sisterfire in 1988 or ’89.

I am 55 and I notice that Becky didn’t post any photos of women my age, which is pure ageism, or my weight, which is looksism — I am NOT making that word up, when I was in the bloom of youth in the 1970’s it was considered very bad! — but I am going to let that slide. One of the things I loved so much about Margaret, whose breasts were very beautiful, was that SHE thought my breasts were beautiful, too, even as I aged and put on weight. I’d be afraid to attend “Go Topless Day” because for one thing, while I do not like wearing a bra, I do not feel the cruel lash of discrimination about having to wear a shirt, and for another, I’m pretty sure that if I did go topless at the protest, they would hand me a t-shirt and say, “Um, we didn’t mean you.”

Update, 8/24/09: Where are my manners? The skin on women’s breasts is so sensitive to sunlight, especially the areolae and nipples. So, Becky, dear, I am an experienced caregiver and if your nipples got sunburned yesterday, I’ll be happy to rub them with a soothing lotion for as long as it takes until you — ahem — feel better.

Republican candidate in Virginia supports homosexual equality

Over the last year I’ve started to see the Democratic party as an organization that makes promises to idealistic people that it doesn’t intend to keep in order to get their support. Now I’m not surprised that I couldn’t cash in any Democrat/liberal promises like wheelchair access to an annual lesbian event for my life partner that was run by — I am not making this up — prominent lesbian disabled rights activists.

Also over the last year I’ve learned how much fiscal conservatism and the Republican party are about liberty and individual empowerment. And in one or two of my early posts on this blog, I predicted that it is Republicans who understand marriage and who would be the ones who would enact laws for marriage equality for lesbians and gays.

So I’m really not surprised at all that Republican Eric Brescia, who is running for the House of Delegates in Virginia, says that it is because of his Republican values that he supports changes in Virginia law described here in support of homosexual equality.

Oh, and while I’m not surprised, I am really, REALLY glad.

Bookworm finds a description of Obama in Jane Austen's 'Persuasion'

Over at Right Wing News, Bookworm has some apt then-and-now musings:

There’s a reason for my little extended meditation on Obama’s personality as it first appeared and as it actually is. For my own pleasure, I’ve been rereading Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which stands second only to Pride & Prejudice in my estimation. P&P is a youthful work about first chances. Persuasion, which was Austen’s last book, is a mature work about second chances.

Austen makes clear, though, that not all people are deserving of second chances. An important character in the book, although he doesn’t fully make an appearance until about halfway through is a Mr. Eliot, a cousin to the heroine, and the heir to her father, a baronet. Early in the book, Jane Austen explains that, in his 20s, this Mr. Eliot rudely ignored any family claims on him and, showing disrespect to the title in a class conscious age, married a “low born” woman simply for her money. Later in the book, he reappears in his 30s, ostensibly a changed character. All are charmed — except for Anne, the heroine, who does not trust him. Her suspicions prove to be true, when she learns from a reliable source that he was and is a debauched, immoral and cruel man.

Click here to read the whole thing and see the remarkable insight Austen displays into a character so remarkably like Obama.

On Obamacare, the president contradicts himself every other breath

I have a theory that my idealistic friends who still trust Obama do so because they only tune in on what he is saying when they hear him saying something they agree with. This works with a trustworthy person — even a small sample of what they say will be consistent with everything else they say. So you can get away with tuning in here and there and now and then.

However, Obama has no conscience and says whatever he thinks people want to hear in order to get them to give him their votes, money, power and labor. This is who he is and his training in the tactics of Saul Alinsky greatly refined his technique. Therefore you must listen to Obama practically 100 percent of the time to notice his flip-flops, mutually exclusive positions on issues and his outright betrayals and treacheries. And, it turns out, the Wall Street Journal listened to 100 percent of what Obama had to say at his healthcare reform town halls last week and had this to say:

Over the past week, President Obama has held three town-halls to make the case for his health-care plan. While he didn’t say much that he hasn’t said a thousand times before, his remarks did offer another explanation for the public’s skepticism of ObamaCare. Namely, the President contradicts himself every other breath. Consider:

He likes to start off explaining our catastrophe of a health system. “What is truly scary—what is truly risky—is if we do nothing,” he said in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. We can’t “keep the system the way it is right now,” he continued, while his critics are “people who want to keep things the way they are.”

However, his supporters also want to keep things the way they are. “I keep on saying this but somehow folks aren’t listening,” Mr. Obama proclaimed in Grand Junction, Colorado. “If you like your health-care plan, you keep your health-care plan. Nobody is going to force you to leave your health-care plan. If you like your doctor, you keep seeing your doctor. I don’t want government bureaucrats meddling in your health care.”

Mr. Obama couldn’t be more opposed to “some government takeover,” as he put it in Belgrade, Montana. In New Hampshire, he added that people were wrong to worry “that somehow some government bureaucrat out there will be saying, well, you can’t have this test or you can’t have this procedure because some bean-counter decides that this is not a good way to use our health-care dollars.”

So no bureaucrats, no bean-counters. Mr. Obama merely wants to create “a panel of experts, health experts, doctors, who can provide guidelines to doctors and patients about what procedures work best in what situations, and find ways to reduce, for example, the number of tests that people take” (New Hampshire, again). Oh, and your health-care plan? You can keep it, as long your insurance company or employer can meet all the new regulations Mr. Obama favors. His choice of verbs, in Montana, provides a clue about what that will mean: “will be prohibited,” “will no longer be able,” “we’ll require” . . .

Maybe you’re starting to fret about all those bureaucrats and bean-counters again. You shouldn’t, according to Mr. Obama. “The only thing I would point is, is that Medicare is a government program that works really well for our seniors,” he noted in Colorado. After all, as he said in New Hampshire, “If we’re able to get something right like Medicare, then there should be a little more confidence that maybe the government can have a role—not the dominant role, but a role—in making sure the people are treated fairly when it comes to insurance.”

The government didn’t get Medicare right, though: Just ask the President. The entitlement is “going broke” (Colorado) and “unsustainable” and “running out of money” (New Hampshire). And it’s “in deep trouble if we don’t do something, because as you said, money doesn’t grow on trees” (Montana).

So the health-care status quo needs top-to-bottom reform, except for the parts that “you” happen to like. Government won’t interfere with patients and their physicians, considering that the new panel of experts who will make decisions intended to reduce tests and treatments doesn’t count as government. But Medicare shows that government involvement isn’t so bad, aside from the fact that spending is out of control—and that program needs top-to-bottom reform, too.

Voters aren’t stupid. The true reason ObamaCare is in trouble isn’t because “folks aren’t listening,” but because they are.

Once people start listening to Obama enough to find out this is his modus operandi all the time — so it’s never a question of WHETHER Obama will betray you, but WHEN — well, I predict a widespread epidemic of fierce moral urgency when people lose their hope Obama will change and finally see that the only thing real about him is his lust for power.