It is amazing to me how far into the dark ages medicine is when it comes to tracking what patients take and when. I practice in a rural clinic and getting information like this is like pulling teeth. I call other doctors to get old records, and they fax me 3 pages in response. Not the entire, 200 page record. Three pages. I can call pharmacies but even honest patients sometimes forget where they got medications filled in the past. If the patient is from out of state, or recently lived elsewhere, it is twice as hard.

This infuriates me because, if I stop my car in East Bumpass, Arkansas, fill up with gas and use my debit card to pay, my bank knows in about ten seconds. If I apply for a mortgage, the lender pulls my records and sees that I missed two utility bill payments in 2005. But if a patient comes to my office with back pain asking for relief, what are the chances I will find out that he got a prescription for 60 Vicodin yesterday from a doctor 30 miles away across the state line? Zero.

Medications are dangerous. Doctors need a complete pharmaceutical history to properly treat patients. I think the public would be completely shocked if they knew how rarely a doctor has an accurate list of medications to work from when he sees a patient. I am certain it is less than 50% of the time.

People will continue to die until a physician can get online and pull up a list of every medication a patient filled in the last year. It's as simple as that.

Does this mean the government should deem some securities too safe for leveraging and ban this? There are some investments, like utilities or Fannie Mae bonds, that are widely regarded as bedrock investments. Companies like Carlyle take advantage of this and leverage the investment 32 times.

Any investment leveraged 32 times is automatically unstable, no matter how golden its rating. It seems to me that Carlyle fooled a lot of people by borrowing against what seemed like extremely safe investments, when in fact the investments were undermined by their leveraging.

So I wonder aloud if the SEC should forbid speculation on investments that are considered so reliable that people depend on them as a safety net. It would increase investor confidence, something we need right now.

is to force Clinton or Obama to bow out. If this happened, their supporters would be furious forever. It would divide the party worse than any prolonged fight ever could.

The only way this works is for us to find a winner, fair and square. I think the HRC followers would accept Obama if he won fairly. As an Obama guy I would accept HRC if she won fairly.

Hell, I even accept that GW Bush won in 2000.

It would be terrible, though, if the DNC or the superdelegates weighed in and forced the issue. I'm voting next week in Mississippi, and damn it, my vote better count!

First of all, we can vote. I know I am speaking to the choir here, but let's not forget the essentials.

Second, we can write. There is misconception that blogging or letters to the editor or to our Congressman is a waste of time. It is not. Writers concentrate attention, and create cover for politicians. If for some crazy reason there is a politician out there who wants to do the right thing, it boosts his courage to know that hundreds or thousands of bloggers are backing him up. Politicians are provocative when they think they have backing. They can't do anything if the masses are silent.

Third, we have to cast about for a way to formulate this issue for the general public. Look at what happened when Al Gore hit on a way to convey global warming to the masses. Finally, after more than a decade in the wilderness, carbon emissions control is entering the first tier of political issues. We keep writing about it, the issue doesn't go away. Eventually someone will hit on way to sell this to a receptive public, and the issue will take off.

I write my Congressman and tell him I expect surveillance to be addressed in every election and while he is in Washington. I might be the only one. But when someone else decides to do it too, there will be two of us. Eventually, a few hundred emails a month cannot be ignored.

That's how it's done. It's either that or revolution, so when you write, remember that the alternative is violence. That might make you write more earnestly.

Yes, you can see that from a mile away. That is why Clinton appears so calculating and shifty in her viewpoints. They are not entirely hers, but instead are fed to her by her advisers.

I don't think a candidate has to be completely hands-on to be effective. But she does have to make it clear that her campaign must focus on her ideas, and that concepts must flow from the top down, so the campaign looks like the candidate, rather than bottom up, which tends to make a candidate look wobbly.

I sincerely doubt doing the dishes results in more sex.

Sex ain't exactly new. Men have been wanting it for about a million years, and as any woman who has visited a bar can tell you, every trick the could conceivably get a woman into bed has been tried to death.

If the doing-the-dishes gambit worked, men would be angling to get into women's kitchens from the world "Hi." Women love to SAY that is the way to get them into bed. Yeah right, and I floss every day and never eat fried food.

I'll believe it the day I am sitting in a bar and watch a man approach a woman and say, "Babe, I got a bottle of Dawn in the car," and she gets up and leaves with him.