We have a national health emergency, and Senate Republicans are stalling the surgeon general's confirmation. But then, they don't live in the same country as the rest of us:

A GOP stall on all Health and Human Services nominees has left the department without a surgeon general during a period of a global flu pandemic, prompting the HHS secretary to call for Senate action.

Regina Benjamin, the surgeon general nominee, “is ready to be voted on in the Senate, and we would just strongly urge the United States Senate” to act, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said during an MSNBC interview Friday in which she discused the department's response to the spread of the H1N1 virus.

President Barack Obama on Saturday declared the H1N1 outbreak a national emergency.

“We are facing a major pandemic, we have a well-qualified candidate for surgeon general, she’s been through the committee process. We just need a vote in the Senate,” Sebeilus said. “Please give us a surgeon general.”

Benjamin was unanimously approved by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Oct. 7, but Senate Republicans are holding up all HHS nominees over a so-called gag order on insurance companies that have been critical of Democratic efforts to reform health care.

“We’ve not received any recent calls from the administration about their nominee,” a senior Republican aide said. “There won’t be any time agreements for confirmation of HHS nominees until their actions have been fully reviewed.”

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Check out the above video from Neil Cavuto's show. He had on some weird work-out dude named Michael Karolchyk who has a porn lite website called "Anti Gym" and is a regular FOX guest wearing a "No Chubbies" t-shirt. He wears it a lot, but for this segment it was embarrassing and Cavuto should have objected to it. She is the Surgeon General, after all. I guess I can wear just about anything on TV now. He compared her to a man living in a cardboard box running the Fed. It's disgusting.

As soon as Dr Regina Benjamin was named as our new Surgeon General the right wing haters crawled out from under their rocks. Every single move President Obama makes is immediately transformed into some socialistic/Nazi/Witch doctor conspiracy theory which is amping up the crazies and violence is sure to follow in even greater numbers now than it already has. C&L has vigorously objected to several of President Obama's moves on policy, but the freepers even attacked the jeans he wore when he threw out the first pitch at the All Star game.

Now they've expanded their hatred and have unleashed vile attacks on Dr. Benjamin.

The only problem seems to be that some people think the face is too fat.

From her photos, it appears that Dr. Benjamin will need a generous size 18 military uniform. The anti-fat brigade has been arguing in various online comments sections about her BMI and whether or not the term obese applies. These chattering masses wonder if a country plagued by obesity should have an above average-weight woman speaking to public health.

For me the answer is a resounding yes. This country is full of above-average weight women and children struggling for dignity as well as to lose weight. Achieving either of these is not easy. (Never mind that none of these criticisms have mentioned any actual health concerns Benjamin might or might not have, instead presuming "obesity" as a catch-all for bad health.) Having a confident, big-bodied and big-spirited woman as America's family doctor could do more to improve their health than skinny HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius. It's good to know that even doctors struggle with their weight -- and lead full and active lives in spite of adversity.

Amanda Marcotte has an excellent post about this story.

Yet, as Marcotte points out, there is an increasing tendency to see all of this as yet another opportunity to marginalize and shame certain segments of society based upon appearance:

By saying this, I’m not making any health claims about weight. That discussion, while interesting, is beside the point of this post. It’s enough to know that most people strongly associate health and weight. So when disingenuous sexists start to bellyache about the dangers of letting fat women out in public, they get traction, because it’s becoming increasingly acceptable to suggest that not being perfectly healthy is a moral failing that should be punished with social disapproval, shaming, ostracism, and lowered access to society. Of course, we double down on fat people, and triple down on fat women, because of plain old prejudice, but this isn’t happening in a vacuum. Smokers, people who don’t eat right, and other people with poor health habits are also considered morally inadequate, if harder to judge because they’re harder to spot. The fetish for health management is, I suspect, a large reason that the anti-vaccination movement has taken hold. People who want an edge in the moral olympics of prevention are inventing counterintuitive (and anti-intellectual) shit to do in order to win as the bestest, most deserving of good health.

Joe Gandelman has an answer:

Dear America. Please go worry about something important, rather than whether or not the new Surgeon General looks hawt in a bikini. Trust me, there’s lots of things going on in Washington right now which are worthy of a full blown panic.

I lost 30 lbs using the Weight Watchers system, but I was always a skinny kid. It's not an easy thing to deal with and when FOX attacks overweight people, they are attacking as many teabagger/republicans as they are Democrats. But who they really are attacking are Americans. When was it a moral sin to not look like Ally McBeal?

Sanjay Gupta vs. Michael Moore on the national health care system on Larry King Live, July 2007

WSJ Health Blog:

The Washington Post is reporting that Barack Obama has offered the job of surgeon general to Sanjay Gupta. He’s expected to accept the job, the Post says, citing two unnamed sources. Gupta declined the Post’s request for comment.

Besides his CNN gig, Gupta also appears on CBS and writes for Time Magazine. He was a White House Fellow and a special adviser to Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady. Oh, and he’s a neurosurgeon at Emory and associate chief of the neurosurgery service at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital.

There’s a certain logic to picking a TV talking head to be surgeon general, because the surgeon general is largely a talking head. The top doc does oversee the 6,000-member Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, but the real work of the job is traveling around the country, using the title as a bully pulpit to advance a public health agenda.

Of course, it would be nice if he used that bully pulpit to advocate for Universal Health Care, which would be the single best news for public health in this country, but it doesn't appear that Dr. Gupta thinks there's a problem. Paul Krugman agrees:

I don’t have a problem with Gupta’s qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion.

No, really. It is. Seriously.

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Today's testimony before the House was not quite as riveting as yesterday's Senate session for Petraeus, but I did catch this little tidbit that had me wondering. Rep. Buck McKeon asks Gen. Petraeus to speak to troop morale and this is what he had to say:

Congressman, first of all, let me just say that …I don’t want to start off by generalizing about morale…I want to start off by explaining morale is an individual event. And morale depends from soldier to soldier, and for me as well, on the kind of day that you’re having out there in the theatre. And it’s a roller coaster existence. Now, having said that, as there is actually something called “The Mental Health Assessment” which is done every year, the last one in the late fall, I believe it was. And after several years of a generalization of morale as going down, morale actually went up.

Really? Up??? Five years in, a backdoor draft of stoploss and 3, 4, and 5 tours of duty and the troops are feeling better now? Well, that didn't compute for me, so I had to go find this "Mental Health Assessment" (.pdf) and sure enough, on page 24, there's the statistics Petraeus quoted:

Soldiers ratings of unit morale were significantly higher in 2007 than in 2006 after controlling for sample differences of (1) gender, (2) rank, and (3) months in theater. Figure 2 shows the raw percentages (top graph) and adjusted percents (bottom graph). Notice in the bottom graph that the adjusted percent of Soldiers who rate unit morale high or very high in 2007 is close to double the estimate from 2006.

Ah, there's the rub. If you factor out the women, the NCOs and those who have done multiple tours of duty over several years, things are looking great! By the way, I admit I was never a math major, but that last sentence about the morale being close to double this year...well, that's true if 7.4% was half of 13.1%. Either way, that's only 1 out of every 7 troop members who consider their morale high. Is that something to celebrate?

Or maybe Petraeus wanted to get out in front of this NY Times article:

Army leaders are expressing increased alarm about the mental health of soldiers who would be sent back to the front again and again under plans that call for troop numbers to be sustained at high levels in Iraq for this year and beyond.
Among combat troops sent to Iraq for the third or fourth time, more than one in four show signs of anxiety, depression or acute stress, according to an official Army survey of soldiers' mental health.[..]

Among the 513,000 active-duty soldiers who have served in Iraq since the invasion of 2003, more than 197,000 have deployed more than once, and more than 53,000 have deployed three or more times, according to a separate set of statistics provided this week by Army personnel officers. The percentage of troops sent back to Iraq for repeat deployments would have to increase in the months ahead.

The Army study of mental health showed that 27 percent of noncommissioned officers - a critically important group - on their third or fourth tour exhibited symptoms commonly referred to as post-traumatic stress disorders. That figure is far higher than the roughly 12 percent who exhibit those symptoms after one tour and the 18.5 percent who develop the disorders after a second deployment, according to the study, which was conducted by the Army surgeon general's Mental Health Advisory Team.

And that doesn't even begin to talk about happens when they finally do return home. That's why it's so important for us to support Sen. Jim Webb's Dwell Time Amendment. Hear that, McCain? You want them to stay until the job is done, you have to take care of them to do so.

Via Talk2Action:

George Bush's nominee for Surgeon General has drawn a lot of heat for among other things, his crack-pot anti-gay views as a leader in the United Methodist affiliate of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. But a new report may finally sink his already controversial nomination in a sea of conflicts of interest that have marked his career.

Dr. James Holsinger has also been a longtime leader of the Confessing Movement in the United Methodist Church. The Confessing Movement is a rightwing "renewal group" affiliated with the Washington, DC-based Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), whose purpose for a generation has been to divide and disrupt the historic churchs of mainline protestantism in the interests of advancing neoconservatism and the religious right.

Holsinger was elected to the highest court in the Methodist Church a time when the IRD-affiliated church "renewal" groups had launched efforts to use church judicial systems to enforce their notions of orthodoxy, particularly on matters related to homosexuality.

Now, an investigation Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D. and Lawrence H. McGaughey, Esq., and published at Media Transparency, shows that Holsinger used the sale of a United Methodist Church-owned hospital in Kentucky, as a cash cow for his personal ambitions. It took years of litigation by the church to find out what had happened to its money, only to learn that Holsinger had diverted millions to endow professorships at the Chandler Medical Center at the University of Kentucky where he served as Chancellor and fundraiser-in-chief. Read more...

Paddy at Cliff's blog alerted me to a story that I suspect is being wildly downplayed. From the AP wire:

Overwhelmed by the number of soldiers returning from war with mental problems, the Army is planning to hire at least 25 percent more psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.

A contract finalized this week but not yet announced calls for spending $33 million to add about 200 mental health professionals to help soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health needs, officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.

"As the war has gone on, PTSD and other psychological effects of war have increased," said Col. Elspeth Ritchie, psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general.

It's not a new story, but without a doubt, this is going to be a growing issue for us, one that I'm sure the administration did not factor in at all. Daniel Zwerdling has done a series for NPR on PTSD in returning vets and the way they've been mistreated.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking is this Memorial Day blog by the wife of an Vietnam war vet who took his own life and her ongoing work to recognize and help vets suffering from PTSD before they act as her own husband did. Now that the administration is floating the concept that this will be a "generational" conflict, imagine the exponential damage and pain we're looking at...both here and in Iraq.

  Following up on an item from last week, Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr., Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General, has a record of activism that suggests a strong anti-gay bias. Opposition to his nomination has been growing, but it’s been unclear whether there was enough information available to sink his chances.

Maybe this will do the trick. Holsinger wrote a paper in 1991 arguing that, from a medical perspective, homosexuality is unnatural and unhealthy, a position rejected by professionals as prioritizing political ideology over science.

Holsinger, 68, presented “The Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality” in January 1991 to a United Methodist Church’s committee to study homosexuality. (Read the .pdf paper here.) The church was then considering changing its view that homosexuality violates Christian teaching, though it ultimately did not do so. Relying on footnotes from mainstream medical publications, Holsinger argued that homosexuality isn’t natural or healthy.

“A confirmation fight is exactly what the administration does not need,” said David Gergen, a former adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton, who predicted the paper would cause a “minor storm” among Democrats on Capitol Hill.

“You have to wonder given the quality of some of the nominations that have gone forward recently, whether the selection group in the White House has gone on vacation,” Gergen said. “There has been a growing criticism the administration favoring ideology over competence, and this nomination smacks of that.”

Keep in mind, it’s not just the ‘91 paper that’s raising questions about Holsinger’s anti-gay animus. He also helped found a religious ministry that seeks to “cure” gays of their “lifestyle.”

Via Daily Kos:

Last week, with little fanfare, George W. Bush announced the nomination of Joseph Holsinger to become the Surgeon General of the United States. Said Bush:

"As America's chief health educator, he will be charged with providing the best scientific information available on how Americans can make smart choices that improve their health and reduce their risk of illness and injury."

And speaking of choices, Holsinger and his wife:

...founded Hope Springs Community Church in a warehouse at 1109 Versailles Road. Calhoun called it a socially diverse congregation with a "very vital recovery ministry." It serves the homeless and those with addictions to drugs, alcohol and sex; and it has a Spanish-language Hispanic congregation with its own pastor. [...]

Hope Springs also ministers to people who no longer wish to be gay or lesbian, Calhoun said.

"We see that as an issue not of orientation but of lifestyle," he said. "We have people who seek to walk out of that lifestyle." Read more...

It turns out Holsinger's persecution and hatred of gays goes far beyond his little church. Keep in mind, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will have a say in Holsinger's nomination. Contact your Senators and let them know this intolerant bigot has no place in our government.

Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona's testimony has once again highlighted the extent to which the Bush administration suppresses and manipulates science to fit their narrow ideological view. Whether it's stem cell research, global warming, the Plan B contraceptive, or abstinence-only education, they consistently put appeasing their extremist, fringe base over the interests of the country at large. CNN's Christine Romans details the many battles in Bush's War on Science.

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TONY SNOW: But nobody, as far as I could tell, was, "muzzling" him. But on the other hand, there is certainly nothing scandalous about saying to somebody who was a presidential appointee, you should advocate the President's policies.

That about says it all: If appointed by the Bush administration, you are required to advocate their policies, even if that means suppressing and distorting facts at the expense of the well-being of those you are in office to serve.

The American Prospect's Chris Mooney has written the definitive book on the GOP's War on Science. You can see his keynote address to Planned Parenthood here.