Glenn Beck Writes Stephen Colbert’s Scripts
Posted by Phoenix Woman on April 5, 2008
I mean, really:
Last night on his CNN Headline News show, right-wing pundit Glenn Beck hosted global warming skeptic Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). Beck allowed Inhofe to rant about how — with “all the liberals” running the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works — he was forced to sit through hearings on “that nice white fuzzy polar bear.”
Inhofe argued that the polar bear population isn’t endangered. “[I]f anything, it’s an overpopulation problem,” said Inhofe. Beck then jumped in and claimed that, in fact, the extinction of polar bears may be a good thing:
They eat people! For the love of Pete, they’re big, angry bears. They eat people. Not that I say we go out and kill all of them, but I mean, it doesn’t seem to be a problem here. Senator, I can’t take the — I can’t take the lies anymore.
The jokes just write themselves. For instance:
BECK: But while pictures like this may say a thousand words, I only actually need actually 10 words to tell you the truth. The polar bear population is up over 300 percent since 1972.
Sorry, Beckster, not even close:
Some recent media reports have cited inaccurate data concerning polar bears. For clarification on polar bear numbers, we turned to Dr. Andrew Derocher, Chair of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group.
Dr. Derocher is a polar bear scientist with the University of Edmonton in Canada. He also serves on PBI’s Scientific Advisory Council.
Question: The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has proposed that the polar bear be listed as a threatened species. Yet some news reports state that polar bear numbers are actually increasing. For example, the following paragraph appeared on the Fox News Web site:
“In the 1950s the polar bear population up north was estimated at 5,000. Today it’s 20- to 25,000, a number that has either held steady over the last 20 years or has risen slightly. In Canada, the manager of wildlife resources for the Nunavut territory of Canada has found that the population there has increased by 25 percent.”
If this is true, then why are scientists worried about population declines?
Answer from Dr. Derocher: The various presentations of biased reporting ignore, or are ignorant of, the different reasons for changes in populations. If I thought that there were more bears now than 50 years ago and a reasonable basis to assume this would not change, then no worries. This is not the case.
The bottom line here is that it is an apples and oranges issue. The early estimates of polar bear abundance are a guess. There is no data at all for the 1950-60s. Nothing but guesses. We are sure the populations were being negatively affected by excess harvest (e.g., aircraft hunting, ship hunting,self-killing guns, traps, and no harvest limits). The harvest levels were huge and growing. The resulting low numbers of bears were due only to excess harvest but, again, it was simply a guess as to the number of bears.
After the signing of the International Agreement on Polar Bears in the 1970s, harvests were controlled and the numbers increased. There is no argument from anyone on this point. Some populations recovered very slowly (e.g., Barents Sea took almost 30 years) but some recovered faster. Some likely never were depressed by hunting that much, but the harvest levels remained too high and the populations subsequently declined. M’Clintock Channel is a good example. The population is currently down by over 60% of historic levels due only to overharvesting. Some populations recovered as harvests were controlled, but have since declined due to climate-related effects (e.g., Western Hudson Bay). In Western Hudson Bay, previously sustainable harvests cannot be maintained as the reproductive and survival rates have declined due to changes in the sea ice.
But of course this will never be mentioned by either Beck or Inhofe.
Annie said
Interesting – as is your devotion to this topic. Thanks. And now an early morning, insufficient caffeine fueled reaction cum rant –
Why is it that as much as this deserves coverage, and you and other progressive bloggers provide it (thankfully), professional nursing gets a two line mention – and it wasn’t presented in an accurate context? Moreover, there are three million registered nurses laboring under mostly intolerable practice conditions (over 70% report assaults and/or batteries which are job-related). 94% are women, and a majority have children – a significant number of which are school-aged. Patient morbidity and mortality rates are directly affected by whether or not they are cared for by nurses with at least a baccalaureate education. Only about 10% of nurses are represented by unions or collective bargaining agents. Nursing faculty earn less than the newest graduate of a two year technical nursing program (all nursing graduates, regardless of type of educational preparation sit for the same licensing examination and hold the same license to practice professional nursing). There is a paucity of nurses educated at the masters and doctoral level. Nurses are treated as not legitimate and not authoritative by employers, by physicians and largely, by a public which takes them for granted. Nurses used to vote primarily along Democratic lines. No presidential candidate has offered a progressive policy on providing for more nursing faculty, more professional nurses and more autonomy and accaeptable practice conditions for nurses. The progressive blogosphere is silent except for the occasional joke about a nurse stereotype: a Sairy Gamp, a porn character or a Cherry Ames or TV charicature.
Why is this? Why doesn’t nursing get any respect, get any coverage – gawd knows the media gives absolute zero coverage to professional nursing issues, doesn’t cite nursing research, and doesn’t include nurses as experts or as reporters. But the progressive blogosphere?
What makes it OK to take nursing and nurses for granted? What makes it OK to routinely pass over nursing stories, to never ask questions about nursing, to assume that “those wonderful angels of mercy” (gag) are ready, accessible and waiting to take care of you and your family? What makes it OK to refer to nurses by stereotype? Why does the progressive blogosphere have such a blind spot about nurses and nursing? How do we fix that spot and make nursing visible, critical and included?
I write about nursing issues here and here, and one of the ideas I keep tossing around is that the name, Nurse, is what is doing the profession in. So try this on for size: health therapist. If you think that it’s important to you to have a cadre of adequately educated and autonomous health therapists accessible to you in the right setting at the right time, providing the right care and doing so in a sensitive, informed and therapeutic way, then pay attention to nursing issues, and support those of us who are bringing you the stories, presenting the issues, providing progressive solutions and beating the drum in spite of being silenced by everyone – including the progressive blogosphere, so far.
So thank you for the work you do on so many issues. It’s critical, and it’s appreciated. But please add professional nursing to that list. It is a life and death issue for everyone.
Charles said
Annie, here is some advice, offered in the most genial manner. If you want people to get interested in your issue, it helps if you demonstrate how it ties into the issues they are concerned with.
This is a politics blog. That means we talk about all sorts of things, including medicine, but not primarily that occupation. I suggested to my fellow bloggers that the “hook” on this story– the thing that connects it to politics– is the poor quality of the Wall Street Journal’s reporting, which may be ascribed to the political nature of the current owner. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how it’s a political story.
So, if you want to blame anyone for the choice of that particular hook, blame me. As for the amount of time/space devoted to the story, all of us are pretty busy. We spend a fair amount of time just reading up on an issue and making sure we understand it before blogging. So, Phoenix Woman might have dedicated only a few lines to your issue, but that represented a significant sacrifice of time.
I realize that when an issue dear to one’s heart, it’s frustrating when others can’t see just how important it really is. The explanation generally lies in understanding issues in context and in perspective. Nurses aren’t the only ones being treated badly. Most professionals face difficult if not oppressive working conditions. Some nurses do work that can only be called heroic. Others review insurance claims– useful but hardly heroic work.
Nurses aren’t the only ones whose decisions are critical to the society. I could list half a dozen professions, from chemical engineer to district attorney where good judgment means the difference between life and death, sometimes on a very large scale.
My point is that we are all in this together. There are heroes and there are time servers everywhere. We help one another as we are able. To draw people to your cause means having a genuine interest in the causes of others.
Not to mention a genuine appreciation for what help does come your way.
Annie said
Thanks, Charles. I appreciate that, and I do try to put all of my nursing posts and comments in context from the viewpoint of the patient/public/consumer/taxpayer/voter. But I seem to be the sole blogger writing about professional nursing – and it never gains traction in any venue. I understand that other professiona have widespread impact, and I read those related blogs (the public health, worker safety, patient safety blogs). I read the science blogs, I read the medical blogs. I read the health policy and business blogs. THey all, without exception, have much wider readerships and much, much more community and dialogue.
You may be interested to know that having contacted multiple feminist, progressive and social issues blogs, none have been interested in having nursing issues presented. The progressive and feminist blogopsheres just aren’t interested – and that’s what’s very concerning to me.
I was so profuondly moved when I first discovered the blogosphere and the opportunity for community building. But here I am two years later without any community, and none forthcoming. If it’s my writing, then I accept that, but where I’ve asked and received constructive criticsm, that doesn’t seem to be the issue. But I can’t crash the gate.
Meanwhile, patients suffer preventable complications and have impeded recovery, and thousands die preventable deaths. Why isn’t that an attention getter? /rant
Again, I do appreciate what you all are writing here, and how much attention you are giving it. Thanks for taking the time and interest to respond.
I will refer to this in the future as a self critique to make sure I’ve addressed the perspective and parameters you suggest. I recognize that it’s my drabness, poor writing and my own failure. The stories would be best coming from someone else. I just wish someone else was writing them.
shrimplate said
Nurse blogging is but one small corner of the blogosphere. It’s getting there.
Phoenix Woman said
Annie, you’re in the same boat as the union bloggers I know. The whole reason we ever had a flourishing middle class in this country was because of unions, yet whenever Tula Connell blogs about union issues over at Fire Dog Lake, hardly anybody drops by.
Have you tried setting up shop at Daily Kos? Many of their diarists are very interested in health care issues. (And you’d get more readers there than here, believe me.)
Charles II said
Annie, I began political blogging before there were blogs. They were newsletters back then. We set up what was to my knowledge the first live political chat in 1995. It took almost a decade before people like Markos recognized the commercial potential of political blogs and harnessed the business model to it to make it profitable.
I don’t doubt that in time there will be a strong corner of the blogosphere devoted to nursing issues… if you keep at it.
Why isn’t preventable harm or even death a greater attention getter? It is. But there’s a lot of it. Industrial accidents. Crime. Drunk driving. The consequences of US foreign policy.
One of the loneliest witnesses there is is to stand and witness for Haiti. The country is under a brutal occupation, starving, denied basic political freedoms, denied basic medicine. The country is gradually dying. And it often seems that no one cares, even though it is US tax dollars creating all this misery.
In my small way, I witness for Haiti not because I expect to change anything, but because it’s the right thing to do. The Haitians are so overburdened, so helpless under the 50 caliber machine guns and tanks that “keep the peace”– the peace of the graveyard.
We are all Davids, standing against a machine much larger than Goliath. One of its hands is keeping working people subservient. Another is keeping the colonies subservient. Over decades and centuries, the machine loses its grip over things. But it takes the patience of stones to see it through.
Annie said
Thanks, Phoenix Woman, shrimplate and Charles:
I previously blogged at DailyKos, but there was no interest there. As shrimplate knows, the vast majority of the little puddle that is nurse blogging is devoted to insubstantial topics, nursing stereotypes and often, patient bashing to an astounding degree. (My guess is that it’s a factor of intolerable practice conditions and nurses simply venting instead of spending brain power and time of advancing nursing issues).
There is one distinction that is critical – it isn’t just in the blogosphere that nursing issues and patient advocacy lacks proportional representation. The traditional media and the presidential campaign do not report on nursing issues. The demographics of registered nurses is so rich that any candidate who spoke to nursing issues and picked up the nursing vote would garner three million or more votes: from an overwhelmingly female, working aged, head of household or principle wage earner, educated voter.
Moreover, nursing is the sole profession in which it is still socially acceptable to insult, ridicule, and denigrate. We still wink, smirk and nod when nurses are portrayed unfailingly as porn characters, as Nurse Ratcheds, and as brainless ditsy half-step behind physician handmaidens out of a Victorian greeting card. Nurses are portrayed as dolls and as toys. Name a single nurse who is seen as a current day role model for youth, or who is news worthy.
Bottom line is that nurses provide 95% of all reimbursed health services, yet they receive not even 5% of all media health care coverage. On any health story, newspaper health page, news site health site, do a control f or search for the terms nurse or nursing. There will be zero or perhaps on a day when a nurse had killed a patient or two, one mention.
Nurses are not included in health policy decisions, yet they are toiling to produce critical research via the National Institute for Nursing Research, a full fledged NIH institute. Academic, advanced practice and research nurses rarely enjoy joint appointments, and so nurses in clinical practice don’t see these nurses, don’t enjoy daily contact and conversations with them, and don’t benefit from the advances they are making.
Did you know that after taking the licensure exam, there is no requirement for new nurses to gain any further formal education and guided practice? Nurses are at the mercy of their employers for providing orientation, education, mentoring and supervision. Hospitals provide training that is geared to their regulatory requirements and legal risk. They do not for the most part provide nursing education. What clinical education there is most often comes from physicians in the form of continuing medical education. That is not nursing education, and it is not aimed at meeting nursing objectives.
The public suffers every day from its ignorance of nursing issues and how nursing affects their health and welfare. Nursing’s oppression translates into harm, suffering and death on a widespread basis. Just because it isn’t as visible as a crime scene doesn’t make the effects just as devastating. It’s akin to the banality of evil – ever present, but invisible.
Every other profession that Charles mentioned earlier has much better representation at the policy table and in the boardroom than does nursing. None of them is portrayed as brainless bodies with boobs or as toys. None of them is insulted by sister professions, such as physicians slurring nursing.
The saddest part is that nurses have been so thoroughly divided that they act against each other and their collective profession’s self-interests. Horizontal violence against nurses is widespread. I don’t think in the extant system that nurses will ever move forward as a profession until a national external force changes their underlying practice conditions and provides an overwhelming impetus for fundamental change.
Thanks again for your thoughtful and insightful responses. I took a long hiatus from writing about nursing because it was so frustrating and distressing. I think I’m going to again withdraw, and turn to other subjects where there is some possibility for community and for dialogue. I’m too tired to keep orbiting solo without a flight plan, so to speak. *g*
Charles II said
Hm. I think TV is unkind to many people. I am getting pretty tired of the near-universal portrayals of men as fat, clumsy, selfish, dopes with nothing but booze,sex, and football on their minds.
Even if there is an element of truth to it.
I can’t think of any shows that portray nurses in a positive light, but I also can’t think of more than a handful of shows that portray anyone in a positive light. Our television is remarkably negative.
As for continuing education, it’s not correct that no states require it. Texas, for example requires 20 hours every 2 years. Nebraska requires 10 hours (plus 10 hours that can be real or play). Ohio wants 24 hours during the period of licensure. California wants 30 hours every two years.
I took your news challenge to see what proportion of news stories are about scandal. True, there are many. But there’s also a story about how important school nurses are, a story about parish nurses, a very positive editorial about the role of nurses, a positive story about a nurse who counsels student nurses, and a story about a nurse deploying to Iraq.
So, maybe now is a good time to take a break and recharge the spiritual batteries. The nursing story is an important one, but telling it well is equally important.
Annie said
@ Charles: Wow! Thanks so much for delving into the reportage and education. I wasn’t clear about that issue. What I mean to convey is that there is no requirement for any formal education beyond licensure. Nurses rely on the employer to provide initial orientation, clinical education and guided practice until they are able to practice independently. Some employers provide nothing beyond organization based policy and procedure orientation. Further nursing education is done without any requirements for formal curriculum, any standards of education and any clinical practice update requirements. Continuing education is a strange animal, and it doesn’t require any particular curriculum or clinical mentoring of new graduates in any state – yet. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing is probably the best resource for white papers and information about formal nursing education. The National League for Nursing deals primarily with education which prepared nurses for the initial licensure. The AACN deals with all types of college and university-based nursing education through the doctoral level and terminal degrees.
I so appreciate your interest and responses – you have been extraordinarily kind – many, many thanks!
Charles II said
Yeah, those continuing ed credentials sometimes get pretty aery-faery.
My pleasure in discussing the issue, Annie. I’m all in favor of excellence in nursing and excellently-treated nurses.
Curtis said
I should point out that your “Iraqi War Deaths” widget is far more out of whack than anything Beck might have gotten wrong. Pot-kettle, eh?
Phoenix Woman said
Curtis: Got proof?
The Iraqi war deaths count is based on conservative extrapolations from the Lancet-Johns Hopkins study, which counted 655,000 deaths (their middle figure) from the start of the war to July of 2006. Nearly two years have passed since then, and the killings haven’t stopped. A recent poll done by ORB in the UK confirms that the death toll from Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq stands at well over 1 million. (655,000 is bad enough, as it’s one out of every forty Iraqis who were alive prior to the invasion.)
Every attempt to trash the study has gone down in flames, as the attackers have been shown to be dishonest, fools, or both. As statistics experts like John Zogby have said, the methodology is as good as it gets.
Charles II said
Just another drive-by, PW. The point is not to arrive at a more perfect understanding of the truth, but just to make noise.
But your refutation of Curtis is impeccable and hopefully will serve as salt to any slugs that follow his trail.
Phoenix Woman said
Oh, I figured as much, Charles. :-)
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