Health Care Costs Hurting companies
November 24, 2009
NaturalNews
by David Gutierrez
Businesses in the United States are expected to spend 9 percent more on health care in 2010 than they did in 2009, according to an annual survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
According to previous surveys, the cost of health care increased by 9.9 percent between 2007 and 2008, then another 9.2 percent between 2008 and 2009.
The economic recession has contributed to the projected increase in health care costs in two ways. First, workers nervous about the possibility of being laid off have began using their health plans more heavily, out of fear of becoming uninsured. Unemployment has also affected health insurance costs by driving increasing numbers of people to public insurance programs such as Medicaid. This has built a significant blow to the profits of private insurers, who have responded by raising the rates that employers are expected to pay.
Employers, in turn, pass costs along to their employees. Forty-two percent of employers surveyed said that they planned to increase employees’ premiums, while 41 percent said that they planned to share increasing costs with their workers by changing their coverage plans. Twenty percent said that they planned to implement high-deductible health plans within the next two years.
The survey found that the number of people in high-deductible plans has been increasing, leading directly to lower use of medical services because people can simply no longer afford them.
More than two-thirds of employers in the survey said that they offered wellness or disease-management programs intended to reduce health care costs, although they did not find them very effective at cost reduction. Forty percent of employees said they were enrolled in wellness programs, while 15 percent were enrolled in disease-management programs
Not all factors are pushing costs up, however. Even if no health care reform plan is implemented, the patents on five blockbuster drugs are said to expire in 2010, while even more are set to enter the public domain in the following two years.
Drug Ads Drive Up Health Costs
November 23, 2009
Reuters
by Peter Cooney
When consumer advertising began for the popular blood-thinner Plavix, Medicaid insurance programs for the poor and disabled spent millions more on the drug, even though the ads did not tempt doctors to write more prescriptions, researchers reported on Monday.
They said the study suggested that while ads might not directly increase the number of prescriptions, they still affect the cost of publicly funded healthcare because drugmakers appear to build the cost of the ads into their prices.
“Consequently, payers and policymakers should appropriately still be concerned about direct-to-consumer advertising for publicly funded reimbursement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid,” Michael Law of the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research at the University of British Columbia, and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The team studied pharmacy data on Plavix or clopidogrel, the $9 billion-a-year seller made by Sanofi-Aventis (SASY.PA: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz). They looked at 27 Medicaid programs from 1999 through 2005.
Plavix is used widely to treat heart attack patients. It works in a similar way to aspirin by stopping platelets — tiny blood cells vital for the normal clotting process — from clumping together.
From 1999 to 2000, there were no consumer-directed ads for Plavix. But from 2001 to 2005, U.S. advertising spending for Plavix topped $350 million, or an average of $70 million a year.
During the study period, doctors servicing Medicaid patients did not change the prescribing trends, but the amount of money spent by Medicaid on the drug rose dramatically.
Drug-Resistant Bacteria on Rise in US
November 24, 2009
Reuters
by Cynthia Osterman
Cases of a drug-resistant bacterial infection known as MRSA have risen by 90 percent since 1999, and they are increasingly being acquired outside hospitals, researchers reported on Tuesday.
They found two new strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus — MRSA for short — were circulating in patients and they are different from the strains normally seen in hospitals.
Ramanan Laxminarayan of Princeton University in New Jersey and colleagues studied data on lab tests from a national network of 300 microbiology laboratories in the United States for their study.
“We found during 1999-2006 that the percentage of S. aureus infections resistant to methicillin increased more than 90 percent, or 10 percent a year, in outpatients admitted to U.S. hospitals,” they wrote in a report published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
“This increase was caused almost entirely by community-acquired MRSA strains, which increased more than 33 percent annually.”
MRSA is now entrenched in U.S. hospitals. It was also known to be circulating in the community but it was not clear whether patients were carrying the infections out of hospitals, or the other way around.
Laxminarayan’s team found that many more people were being diagnosed with the community-acquired strains, and these strains were not replacing the known hospital strains. Instead, they are just adding to the overall number of MRSA cases.
“Our findings have implications for local and national policies aimed at containing and preventing MRSA,” they wrote.
For one thing, new, fast tests are needed so patients can be diagnosed and treated quickly. It is possible to treat MRSA but doctors need to know straight away so they start patients on the correct antibiotics.
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Organic Turkey Recipe
November 24, 2009 by KT
Filed under Kevin's Blog
Are you wondering how to roast your organic turkey this year? Well, there’s the old fashioned way: You get up at the crack of dawn, get out the roasting pan and get to work. Then, there are roasting bags that you buy in the market, but they’re made from plastic, which is neither healthy nor environmentally friendly.
And finally, there’s the paper bag trick!
Here’s what you need:
Ingredients
1 turkey, chicken or capon (cooking time is based on a 10-pounder)
8 garlic cloves, sliced
2 onions, coarsely chopped
3 stalks celery, coarsely chopped
3 carrots, coarsely chopped
3 bay leaves
2 T coconut oil or raw organic butter
Directions
Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.
Rinse the turkey with cold water. Pat dry with paper towels.
Fill the cavity with your choice of stuffing, packed loosely.
Seal the cavity with skewers and tuck the turkey wings under the body.
Rub softened butter or coconut oil over the outside of the turkey.
Salt and pepper the outside sparingly.
Spray the inside of the bag with water and pour out any excess.
Place the turkey inside the bag, legs first. Roll up the opening so the bag is sealed.
Place carrots, celery, onions, garlic and bay leaves in the bottom of the roasting pan.
Put the giblets (if they come in a little bag, take them out) in the pan and add chicken stock until it reaches a depth of 1/2 inch.
Place the bag, with the turkey inside, on the vegetables so that the turkey breast is facing up.
Roast for 2-1/2 hours.
Check the temperature of the turkey by carefully rolling back the bag and inserting a meat thermometer into the thickest part of the thigh.
When the temperature is 155 degrees F, tear the paper bag open and increase the oven temperature to 425 degrees F.
Roast the turkey another 30 minutes, basting every 10 minutes, until the temperature registers 170 degrees F and the skin is golden brown.
Place the turkey on a serving dish, and tent with aluminum foil. Let rest 20 minutes. Throw away the paper bag.
The Gravy
Pour the juices that are left in the roasting pan through a sieve and into a small saucepan. Using the back of a wooden spoon, press against any solids stuck in the sieve to extract as much liquid as possible.
Heat juices over medium heat and cook until the liquid thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon.
Carve turkey and serve with thickened roasting juices.
Tips & Warnings
You can usually order a fresh, organic turkey from a natural food store or specialty market. They are well worth the effort, tasting much better than commercially grown, mass-produced fowl. In general, I recommend cooking with these meats whenever possible.
Natural food stores should have clean, all-natural brown bags that are ideal for turkey roasting.
If you have a frozen bird, make sure you allow enough time for the turkey to defrost IN THE REFRIGERATOR, not at room temp – up to several days, depending on bird size.
This year enjoy a Thanksgiving Day full of simple pleasures. Allow the focus of the day to be the people, rather than the food. Serve small portions, instead of piling your plate high with food, and stuffing yourself. Chew every bite thoroughly, savoring both the aroma and flavor of each dish, while enjoying food and friendship. Eat and relax with the knowledge that there will be another meal, as this will not likely be your last. So, take the time to breathe deeply, remembering to love and appreciate others, while having gratitude for your life.
Have a great week,
KT
Vioxx Problems Known Years Before Recall
November 23, 2009
New York Times
by Natasha Singer
What could be done to prevent another Vioxx? This pain medication for arthritis became a blockbuster after its introduction in 1999, only to be taken off the market in 2004 when a study linked the drug to an increased risk of heart attack and strokes.
A new study published Monday in Archives of Internal Medicine offers an ambitious proposal to determine a drug’s risks sooner than they might otherwise become evident. The authors propose a system to examine widely prescribed drugs through safety analyses that would pool data as they emerge from various clinical trials of a medication and aggregate the information for a fuller picture of a drug’s harms and benefits.
As policy makers in Washington push for various forms of evidence gathering to determine the safety and effectiveness of medical treatments, the study proposes a broad model for monitoring drug safety that would consist of detailed publicly available data that independent researchers could freely analyze.
Such a database could be continually updated and aggregated with new information, as the results of new studies were published, to calculate a near real-time balance sheet of a drug’s risks and benefits.
Dr. Joseph S. Ross, the lead author of the study, said the objective of the researchers was to determine whether this kind of sequential cumulative analysis could serve as a new model for monitoring the safety of drugs after they enter the market.
“How could we be doing post-market surveillance in a better way?” said Dr. Ross, an assistant professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan. “For drugs that we are concerned about, that are high risk, this could be a blueprint going forward.”
Drug makers and researchers regularly conduct studies called meta-analyses in which they aggregate results from some previous studies of a drug, using the combined information to summarize the benefits and risks of a treatment. But the new study proposes a continuously updated model. Using data from Vioxx as their example, the researchers reported that Merck, the drug’s maker, could have known about the increased cardiovascular risk several years earlier if the company had used the methodology.
The cumulative analysis of the researchers showed that by May 2002 — more than two years before Merck pulled Vioxx off the market — study patients on the drug had a 39 percent increased risk of heart attack or death compared with people taking a placebo.
Dr. Ross and his co-authors have each worked as paid consultants to plaintiffs involved in lawsuits against Merck over Vioxx injury claims. The researchers used documents obtained through the litigation, including detailed data from Merck’s Vioxx studies, to conduct their analysis.
In a statement Monday, Merck questioned the methodology of the authors, saying that the researchers had used categories that were too broad. The researchers, for example, counted heart attacks and deaths that happened after patients had stopped taking Vioxx.
In 2000, a study financed by Merck had reported an increased cardiovascular risk in patients taking Vioxx compared to those taking a pain medication called naproxen. The Food and Drug Administration then asked Merck to add a warning to the drug’s label.
But Merck said that the company had conducted its own regularly updated analyses of clinical trial data on Vioxx and had not determined there was a problem until 2004.
Swine Flu Vaccines Pulled in Canada due to Allergic Reaction
November 24, 2009
ABC News
by Meera Selva
Canadian doctors have been advised not to use a batch of 170,000 swine flu vaccines after six reports of serious allergic reactions among recipients, but there are no similar reports from other countries, pharmaceuticals company GlaxoSmithKline PLC said Tuesday.
Authorities routinely monitor vaccines for any signals of problems, such as the allergic reactions that do occur, rarely, every year. Company spokeswoman Gwenan White said that GlaxoSmithKline advised medical staff in Canada ast week to refrain from using one batch of the vaccine while they look into reports that that it might have caused more allergic reactions than normal.
Six people in Canada had suffered an allergic reaction, said Tim Vail, the spokesman for Canada’s health minister. The batch contained about 170,000 doses. It was not immediately clear how many had been administered, although Vail said the majority had been.
“We’re not seeing any thing wild or spooky or crazy about our vaccine at all,” Vail said, arguing it may have been a statistical anomaly that the reactions occurred.
GlaxoSmithKline is only investigating the one batch of its swine flu vaccine in Canada. White said no other doses of its swine flu vaccine around the world are affected.
White said U.K.-based GlaxoSmithKline wrote to Canadian health care professionals advising them to stop using the batch on Nov. 18. She says a total of 7.5 million doses of the vaccine have been distributed in Canada.
Dr. Joel Kettner, Manitoba’s chief medical officer of health has said they are being cautious and are following the advice. He urged people not to be alarmed, saying that any allergic reactions occur shortly after inoculation, don’t last long and have not led to long-term health problems.
The provincial Alberta government was also holding back the vaccine, although it had not seen a jump in reactions.
GlaxoSmithKline is the world’s second largest drug maker by revenue. Its shares were up 0.08 percent on the London stock exchange at 1,278.50p ($21.19)
New Jobless Rate: 17.5% Of Workers Are Unemployed
November 19, 2009
CNBC
by Jeff Cox
As experts debate the potential speed of the US recovery, one figure looms large but is often overlooked: nearly 1 in 5 Americans is either out of work or under-employed.
According to the government’s broadest measure of unemployment, some 17.5 percent are either without a job entirely or underemployed. The so-called U-6 number is at the highest rate since becoming an official labor statistic in 1994.
The number dwarfs the statistic most people pay attention to—the U-3 rate—which most recently showed unemployment at 10.2 percent for October, the highest it has been since June 1983.
The difference is that what is traditionally referred to as the “unemployment rate” only measures those out of work who are still looking for jobs. Discouraged workers who have quit trying to find a job, as well as those working part-time but looking for full-time work or who are otherwise underemployed, count in the U-6 rate.
With such a large portion of Americans experiencing employment struggles, economists worry that an extended period of slow or flat growth lies ahead.
“To me there’s no easy solution here,” says Michael Pento, chief economist at Delta Global Advisors. “Unless you create another bubble in which the economy can create jobs, then you’re not going to have growth. That’s the sad truth.”
Pento warns that forecasts of a double-dip (“W”) or a straight up (“V”) recovery both could be too optimistic given the jobs situation.
Instead, he believes the economy could flatline (or “L”) for an extended period as small businesses struggle to grow and consequently rehire the workers that have been furloughed as the U-3 unemployment rate has doubled since March 2008.
As that trend has happened, the U-6 rate has expanded at an even more dramatic pace. Economists cite several reasons for the phenomenon.
For one, more workers are becoming discouraged as real estate—the focal point for the expansion in the earlier part of the decade—has collapsed and taken millions of directly related and ancillary jobs with it.
Many workers believe those jobs aren’t coming back, and have thus quit looking and added themselves to the broader unemployment count.
Jobs vs Deficit
November 23, 2009
Wall Street Journal
By Elizabeth Williamson
The White House is lukewarm about proposals by congressional Democrats to introduce broad legislation to create jobs, instead favoring targeted measures that would be less likely to inflate the deficit, administration officials said.
There is as yet no agreement within the White House or in Congress on how to try to curb the U.S. jobless rate. But the differences in opinion suggest that rifts could emerge among Democrats as they wrestle with how to beat back the highest unemployment rate in a generation.
The jobless rate, which hit 10.2% in October, has continued to climb despite the implementation of a $787 billion stimulus package in February.
Democrats’ fates in 2010 midterm elections could hinge in part on the success of their efforts to curb unemployment. Recessions historically have cost incumbents in an election year. Heavy losses could threaten Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, and affect the party’s chances of passing legislation addressing President Barack Obama’s priorities.
A survey of economists to be released Monday by the National Association for Business Economists suggested that a solid recovery in the U.S. economy should ensure that jobs would be created beginning in the second quarter of 2010.
“While the recovery has been jobless so far, that should soon change. Within the next few months, companies should be adding instead of cutting jobs,” said NABE President Lynn Reaser. According to the survey conducted Oct. 24-Nov. 5, the recovery, fueled by rising business investments and a continued increase in stock prices, should be strong enough to bring employment gains from around April 2010.
Still, with more than 7.3 million jobs lost since December 2007, 61% of the panelists don’t expect a complete recovery of the previously lost jobs until 2012.
Hamstrung by the nation’s $1.4 trillion deficit and his pledge not to raise taxes on middle-class Americans, Mr. Obama is keen to avoid any measures suggestive of a second, big-ticket stimulus. With about half of the February stimulus spending spoken for, the measure has created about 640,000 jobs, fewer than the number of jobs lost in January alone.
“There is no discussion of a package like a second stimulus, but we are working closely with Congress and consulting with outside experts to determine the right policies and the right steps,” said White House deputy press secretary Jennifer Psaki.
House Democrats have said they plan to introduce a jobs bill next month. Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) on Sunday told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Senate Democrats were keen to pass the health-overhaul bill as quickly as possible, so they could turn to jobs legislation.
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Fed Under Fire as Public Anger Mounts
November 23, 2009 by Andrew
Filed under Government
November 23, 2009
My Way
By Tom Raum
Suddenly the Federal Reserve is everybody’s punching bag.
Strip the Fed of its bank regulation powers, some in Congress are demanding. Get probing audits of its behind-the-scenes operations, others say.
The chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is always fair game for criticism and second-guessing, usually over interest rate actions. But this year the criticism is much broader as Congress responds to widespread public anger that the Fed bailed out Wall Street but not ordinary Americans, and with unemployment in double digits.
Former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin Jr. famously said that the central bank’s job was to yank away the punchbowl just when everybody is starting to party. And while Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has signaled the Fed will keep interest rates low for now, a round of higher rates inevitably will come.
The Fed finds itself both the punchbowl keeper and the punching bag. Imagine the outcry when it does begin to crank up rates – perhaps just ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Fireworks seem likely at Senate confirmation hearings early next month on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Bernanke to a second four-year term as chairman.
Many economists and Fed watchers say congressional efforts to rein in the Fed’s powers could interfere with the central bank’s ability to help guide the fragile economy to recovery.
The Fed’s very independence and its unique ability among U.S. institutions to create money out of thin air enabled it to act quickly to stabilize the nation’s financial system after it froze up last September after the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers investment house, Fed backers say.
“It might have been the Fed’s finest moment when it had to jump into the market,” said David M. Jones, a former Fed economist and president of DMJ Advisors, a Denver-based consulting firm. “We still have to wait to see how effective the Fed is in its exit strategy and whether it can keep inflation in check. But this badgering by Congress, even if there is populist sentiment, is inappropriate.”
The Fed’s aggressive intervention also set the stage for the current criticism. Many lawmakers question whether the Fed’s money machine has mainly benefited financial markets and not the broader economy. Lawmakers are also peeved that the central bank acted without congressional involvement when it brokered the 2008 sale of failed investment bank Bear Stearns and engineered the rescue of insurer American International Group.
Bernanke, first appointed by President George W. Bush, has worked closely with both Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in confronting the worst financial crisis in decades. Geithner also has gotten his share of congressional wrath, mainly for his administering of the $700 billion bank bailout fund.
“In the past, the Federal Reserve was held in very high esteem,” said Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, a libertarian who twice ran quixotic presidential campaigns and remains a darling of skeptics of Washington. Now, it’s “the source of our problem,” suggests Paul, author of the best-seller “End the Fed.”
Usually an outlier, Paul suddenly has found an army of at least 307 House colleagues and 30 senators marching behind his legislation to subject the Fed to intense scrutiny by Congress’ Government Accountability Office. The House Financial Services Committee endorsed Paul’s approach 43-26 last week over objections from its chairman, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.
The bill would authorize Congress to audit not only the Fed’s lending programs but its basic decisions to set monetary policy by raising or lowering interest rates. Paul has been introducing a version every year since the early 1980s, but this is the first time it has garnered any serious attention.
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who will preside over Bernanke’s confirmation hearings, has proposed legislation that would strip the Fed of its bank-regulation authority and give the Senate a role in selecting the 12 regional Federal Reserve bank presidents.
Dodd says his measure would return the Fed to its core mission of setting monetary policy, claiming it proved itself “an abysmal failure” by not cracking down on risky lending practices that led to the financial meltdown.
Dodd is in an extremely tight battle for re-election, even though he has served in Congress for 35 years.
“I don’t think it ever hurts to have a member of Congress stand up and denounce the Fed. There is a lot of anger out there, and this is basically a therapeutic gesture,” said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University.
Still, Baker said, it probably isn’t wise to tamper with the formula that makes the Fed “very much an anomaly in American government. It’s independent, it has to be. You don’t want the Fed to be under the control of the president. And it kind of sits out there – not in the executive branch, not in the legislative branch, not in the judicial branch. Sort of its own little element in the separation-of-powers constellation.”
While the Fed is subject to some congressional oversight, its decisions don’t have to be ratified by the president or Congress. Fed officials are not paid with money appropriated by Congress.
Should Bernanke be worried?
“Not only should be worried, he’s clearly ratcheted up his game in terms of his communications with Congress,” said Norman Ornstein, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Ornstein said the Fed bashing this time is different from before, with “a broader base of support. And it’s coming from people who in the past would not have hit the Fed. There’s a lot of populist anger out there – on the left, in the center and on the right. And politicians are responsive to that.”
—
EDITOR’S NOTE: Tom Raum covers economics and politics for The Associated Press.
(This version CORRECTS to show that Ron Paul twice ran for president, as Libertarian Party candidate in 1988 and in 2008 as a Republican seeking the party nomination.)
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Obama’s Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage
November 23, 2009 by Andrew
Filed under Government
November 23, 2009
Spiegel Online
By Gabor Steingart
There were only a few hours left before Air Force One was scheduled to depart for the flight home. US President Barack Obama trip through Asia had already seen him travel 24,000 kilometers, sit through a dozen state banquets, climb the Great Wall of China and shake hands with Korean children. It was high time to take stock of the trip.
Barack Obama looked tired on Thursday, as he stood in the Blue House in Seoul, the official residence of the South Korean president. He also seemed irritable and even slightly forlorn. The CNN cameras had already been set up. But then Obama decided not to play along, and not to answer the question he had already been asked several times on his trip: what did he plan to take home with him? Instead, he simply said “thank you, guys,” and disappeared. David Axelrod, senior advisor to the president, fielded the journalists’ questions in the hallway of the Blue House instead, telling them that the public’s expectations had been “too high.”
The mood in Obama’s foreign policy team is tense following an extended Asia trip that produced no palpable results. The “first Pacific president,” as Obama called himself, came as a friend and returned as a stranger. The Asians smiled but made no concessions.
Lost Some Stature
Upon taking office, Obama said that he wanted to listen to the world, promising respect instead of arrogance. But Obama’s currency isn’t as strong as he had believed. Everyone wants respect, but hardly anyone is willing to pay for it. Interests, not emotions, dominate the world of realpolitik. The Asia trip revealed the limits of Washington’s new foreign policy: Although Obama did not lose face in China and Japan, he did appear to have lost some of his initial stature.
In Tokyo, the new center-left government even pulled out of its participation in a mission which saw the Japanese navy refueling US warships in the Indian Ocean as part of the Afghanistan campaign. In Beijing, Obama failed to achieve any important concessions whatsoever. There will be no binding commitments from China to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A revaluation of the Chinese currency, which is kept artificially weak, has been postponed. Sanctions against Iran? Not a chance. Nuclear disarmament? Not an issue for the Chinese.
The White House did not even stand up for itself when it came to the question of human rights in China. The president, who had said only a few days earlier that freedom of expression is a universal right, was coerced into attending a joint press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao, at which questions were forbidden. Former US President George W. Bush had always managed to avoid such press conferences.
Relatively Unsuccessful
A look back in time reveals the differences. When former President Bill Clinton went to China in June 1998, Beijing wanted to impress the Americans. A press conference in the Great Hall of the People, broadcast on television as a 70-minute live discussion, became a sensation the world over. Clinton mentioned the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when the government used tanks against protestors. But then President Jiang Zemin defended the tough approach taken by the Chinese Communists. At the end of the exchange, the Chinese president praised the debate and said: “I believe this is democracy!”
Obama visited a new China, an economic power that is now making its own demands. America should clean up its government finances, and the weak dollar is unacceptable, the head of the Chinese banking authority said, just as Obama’s plane was about to land.
Obama’s new foreign policy has also been relatively unsuccessful elsewhere, with even friends like Israel leaving him high and dry. For the government of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, peace is only conceivable under its terms. Netanyahu has rejected Obama’s call for a complete moratorium on the construction of settlements. As a result, Obama has nothing to offer the Palestinians and the Syrians. “We thought we had some leverage,” says Martin Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel under the Clinton administration and now an advisor to Obama. “But that proved to be an illusion.”
Even the president seems to have lost his faith in a genial foreign policy. The approach that was being used in Afghanistan this spring, with its strong emphasis on civilian reconstruction, is already being changed. “We’re searching for an exit strategy,” said a staff member with the National Security Council on the sidelines of the Asia trip.
‘A Lot Like Jimmy Carter’
An end to diplomacy is also taking shape in Washington’s policy toward Tehran. It is now up to Iran, Obama said, to convince the world that its nuclear power is peaceful. While in Asia, Obama mentioned “consequences” unless it followed his advice. This puts the president, in his tenth month in office, where Bush began — with threats. “Time is running out,” Obama said in Korea. It was the same phrase Bush used against former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, shortly before he sent in the bombers.
There are many indications that the man in charge at the White House will take a tougher stance in the future. Obama’s advisors fear a comparison with former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, even more than with Bush. Prominent Republicans have already tried to liken Obama to the humanitarian from Georgia, who lost in his bid to win a second term, because voters felt that he was too soft. “Carter tried weakness and the world got tougher and tougher because the predators, the aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators, when they sense weakness, they all start pushing ahead,” Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker in the House of Representatives, recently said. And then he added: “This does look a lot like Jimmy Carter.”
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