The White House acknowledged today that Obama “was both surprised and frustrated” by how hotly contested the special election has become. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters today that the president is “not pleased” with how much Coakley is struggling.
Today Barack Obama may get a rude awakening. As Jay Cost notes:
Coakley will rightly get most of the blame should Brown actually pull off what once seemed to be an impossible victory. Yet much of the responsibility will have to rest with Barack Obama, who has guided his party so poorly that it is having trouble making an appeal to voters in Massachusetts.
Whether it’s babies or the middle-aged, they are tagging people for these operations right and left. Because so many Haitians don’t have medical records, a doctor we followed, Dr. Julie Manley from Raleigh, N.C., was walking around with a pad of paper and writing down what patients needed and taping it to their chest.
Many non-governmental organizations, including Doctors without Borders, have said they’re 24 hours from running out of supplies. The private hospital Sacré Coeur said they’re holding on by the skin of their teeth.
Susan Tollefsen, who gave birth to her 2 year old daughter Freya when she was 57, is now 59 and pregnant with baby #2.
A 59-year-old woman has become the oldest person ever to be offered fertility treatment by a British clinic.
Leave aside the ethical considerations due to possible harm to the fetus due to developing in a 59 year old womb. It is amazing that a 59 year old womb might carry a baby to term. Of course, a few older women have already completed pregnancies successfully (though some with premature delivery). Rajo Devi, 70 when she gave birth to a premature baby, might hold the record for oldest woman to deliver a baby. This is risky stuff for the woman. 69 year old Spanish woman Maria del Carmen Bousada died of cancer 2 years after giving birth to twins. She might have gotten the cancer from hormones used to reverse her menopause. Since her brother might not live long enough to raise the twins they’ll probably wind up orphans at some point. Higher rates of complications with age stir ethical debate about elderly women starting pregnancies.
The willingness of some women in their 50s and older to try to start risky pregnancies makes me think women like them will eventually try untested risky stem cell rejuvenation therapies to make their wombs and other body parts more able to carry a baby to term. The desire to reproduce is an instinct that drives some to take considerable risks with their health and the health of the babies they bear.
rather than admit he’d erred in openly supporting ballot-stuffing in Massachusetts, MSNBC libtalker Ed Schultz followed up by saying he’d actually prefer to vote “twenty times” instead of ten. Clearly, Schultz relishes the attention, but at what cost?
It seems that the Fruit of the Kaboom bomber really didn’t have much to worry about. POTUS’ first meeting was the 22nd of December. Everything was well. Anything that could go wrong was being addressed.
Really? This administration had better get that sorry collective IQ working sometime soon. How many red flags can you miss?
In a separate White House meeting that day, Mr. Obama’s homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, led talks on Yemen, where a stream of disturbing intelligence had suggested that Qaeda operatives were preparing for some action, perhaps a strike on an American target, on Christmas Day.
Yet in those sessions, government officials never considered or connected links that, with the benefit of hindsight, now seem so evident and indicated that the gathering threat in Yemen would reach into the United States.
Just as lower-level counterterrorism analysts failed to stitch together the pieces of information that would have alerted them to the possibility of a suicide bomber aboard a Detroit-bound jetliner on Christmas, top national security officials failed to fully appreciate mounting evidence of the dangers beyond the Arabian Peninsula posed by extremists linked to Yemen.
