Sunday Funnies (late edition)

Diabetes is just a pain in the ass.

This pretty much describes me:

For some people with diabetes, the burden of adhering to their daily care regimen nearly equals that of their diabetes-related health complications, a U.S. study finds.

University of Chicago researchers conducted interviews with more than 700 adults with type 2 diabetes.

As reported in the October issue of Diabetes Care, some patients said the inconvenience and discomfort of having to take numerous medications each day, carefully monitoring their diet, and getting the required amounts of exercise had a major impact on their quality of life.

I have written about my illness previously, and this is a typical day:

Each day, a typical diabetes patient takes many medications, including two or three different pills to control blood sugar levels, one or two pills to lower cholesterol, two or more pills to reduce blood pressure, and an aspirin to prevent blood clots. As the disease progresses, the number of drugs increases and often includes insulin shots, according to background information in the study.

From 12 percent to 50 percent of patients interviewed said they were willing to give up 8 of 10 years of life in perfect health to avoid a life with diabetes complications, but between 10 percent and 18 percent of patients said they were willing to give up 8 of 10 years of healthy life to avoid life with treatments.

I emphasized that last part because that's precisely how I feel.

The only thing I can eat without remorse or reservation is vegetables. Not fruit -- even watermelon spikes my blood sugar. Forget pineapple or strawberries. Red meat slams my cholesterol, and alcohol sends my trigylcerides into the ozone.

So how would YOU like a nice salad for breakfast this morning?

The decisions you make three to five times a day about what to put in your mouth have, for me, those afore-mentioned "long-term implications" under consideration: shall I have the salmon or the filet? The sandwich or the salad? The mocha Frapp or the tea?

No pasta. No bagels. No soup (too much sodium). Nothing fried. One glass of wine or one beer, period. Walk for twenty minutes, minimum, after dinner every single evening. Don't forget to pack both meds and healthy snacks every time you leave the house, lest you go hypoglycemic. Despite tight control of my blood glucose for the past few years, I still experience one of these episodes about once or twice a month.

Forget about Italian food. Pass on the Chinese takeout. La comida Mexicana is off the menu as well. Can have some sushi (sashimi obviously being the wiser choice). Mashed potatoes? Very funny. Rice? Ha ha. Corn? I don't think so. Whole grains -- complex carbs also including beans, for example -- are better than the bleached, refined ones, but not by much. Bread, chips, crackers, pastry, cake, cookies, ice cream? Pizza? A cheeseburger and fries? Are you nuts?

I didn't have bad eating habits before my diagnosis; I ate only a little red meat even when I was 20-something. I always liked all kinds of fish. I stopped drinking cow's milk (me soy guy) decades ago. As in two decades ago. No sodas for at least as long a period of time. I was also moderately active or more all of my life, playing sports as a kid, climbing and hiking with the Scouts as an adolescent, intramural basketball and softball in college, and so on. Throughout my thirties I took vitamins and supplements and was in the gym four days a week for an hour lifting, followed by another half-hour of aerobic activity. Now, once I tapered off and then stopped altogether about five years ago, I quickly gained 25 pounds. And became diabetic.

There was no history of the disease on either side of my family, and no incidence of heart disease either (sometimes diabetes goes undetected in individuals for years until they experience a cardiac event -- or a stroke, for example). Can't blame it on the genes. Can't find much of anything to blame it on, really; I just got lucky, I guess.

So anyway, it's just a drag when you're out with friends and everybody else is having the fajitas or the fettucine alfredo or the Philly cheese steak and you're having the grilled chicken salad (not the Caesar and no ranch dressing) for the tenth time that week.

Is an occasional guilty pleasure worth the risk of onset of failing kidneys -- or reduced vision or an amputated foot -- a few years earlier than perhaps it would have occurred?

Sometimes it is, yes.

How much of life is really worth living if you have to deny yourself virtually everything that makes it worth living in the first place?

So once in a while -- not very often, and certainly not as often as I would like -- I have the nachos or the pasta or the fried rice, and take extra medicine, and don't fucking worry about it.

Sunday Funnies (early edition)

965 and $123,520

That's as of a few minutes ago.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed, on behalf of Rick Noriega as well as all of us in the Tex-blogosphere who took on this challenge. You exceeded our expectations.

Now let's bring our troops home:

Can a Republican get elected with just the white vote?

They are certainly going to test the theory:

The top four Republican presidential candidates have set off a debate over whether the GOP is paying enough attention to blacks and Hispanics by skipping Thursday night's debate on minority issues.

The four leading Republican candidates — former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Arizona Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney — cited scheduling conflicts in saying they could not attend the debate at Morgan State University, a historically black college.

After the GOP pooh-poohed a CNN/YouTube debate, after they stiffed the Hispanic community by failing to make room on their schedules for an Univision face-off, after they criticized their Democratic counterparts for refusing to debate on the Fox Propaganda Channel.

Why, it even confounds Eye of Newt:

"I'm puzzled by their decision. I can't speak for them. I think it's a mistake. I wish they would change their minds — they still have a few days — and I wish they would in fact go to the debate Thursday night," Gingrich, who is considering entering the race for the GOP nomination, said earlier this week.

If it puzzles a man of his towering intellect, just imagine how the African-American community must feel.

So who do you think should be the VP nominee?

I thought my man John Edwards was triumphant in last night's debate, as did most others, and whether Hillary has peaked or not is a conversation for another day.

For today let's speculate idly about who might be on the undercard for various candidates Republican and Democratic.

Hillary could pick Obama or Tom Vilsack or Evan Bayh and be just fine, but I think she takes Bill Richardson, or even better for her, Wesley Clark. He just solves a lot of her negatives by being a white military Southern gentleman.

Obama almost has to pick a white guy with "gravitas" (see Dick Cheney 2000) which likewise suggests Clark, or perhaps Biden or Dodd. Two senators brings up a lot of bad memories from the past two cycles, though, so look for a heavyweight like Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania (no pun intended, Governor). But Barack sort of needs someone from the South or West also, so perhaps Brian Schweitzer of Montana is a possibility.

Edwards could go in any number of directions should he wind up as the Democratic nominee. He could pick a female elected official such as Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas or Janet Napolitano of Arizona. Both of those red states would be in play along with a block of surrounding midwestern or southwestern states. Or he could select Richardson or Obama to break the GOP stranglehold on the South and Southwest.

The Republicans? They're in a quandary because all of their front-runners have some significant negatives, but my belief is that irrespective of who emerges from the conservative scrum, the winner taps Mike Huckabee as his running mate. Mostly because he's a Christian, but also because he isn't a freak.

Unless Eye of Newt can somehow pole-vault past the "pygmies", as he calls them, and then I think he has to pick another outsider, and possibly a Westerner for geographic balance.

Larry "Wide Stance" Craig is just the man he's looking for.

What do you think? Give me a few fer-instances in the comments.

Stale Rice

ThinkProgress reports the deflation of Kinda Sleazy:

Over the past two years, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been on the Sunday talk shows 30 times, making her the most second frequent guest after Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE).

But that may be changing. In his Washington Post column, Howard Kurtz reveals that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is no longer a “prize catch” for the Sunday talk shows. She was recently turned down by both CBS and NBC:

The secretary of state has always been considered a prize catch for the Sunday talk shows. But when the White House offered Condoleezza Rice for appearances eight days ago, after a week focused on Iraq, two programs took the unusual step of turning her down.

Executives at CBS and NBC say Rice no longer seems to be a key player on the war and that her cautious style makes her a frustrating guest.

“I expected we’d just get a repetition of the administration’s talking points, which had already been well circulated,” says Bob Schieffer, host of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” who questioned two senators instead. “We’d had a whole week of that with General Petraeus and President Bush.”

Television media aren’t the only ones uninterested in Rice. A few months ago, every single major newspaper turned it down an op-ed by Rice on Lebanon. Price Floyd, formerly the State Department’s director of media affairs, recounted that the piece was filled glowing references to President Bush’s wise leadership and “read like a campaign document.”

Recent reports indicate that Rice’s influence within the White House is also waning, giving way to the more extreme policies of Cheney and his allies. A Newsweek article in June found that Cheney’s national-security team had “been actively challenging Rice’s Iran strategy in recent months.” In April, Rice advocated that five members of the Iran Revolutionary Guard be freed from captivity, but she was overruled after Cheney “made the firmest case for keeping them.”

These reports contrast when Rice first became Secretary of State. The media gushingly predicted she would succeed because she and Bush “know each other so well they have conversations based on body language” and speculated that she may even run for president in 2008.

This past Sunday, none of the five network talk shows turned down Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), who appeared on ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox.

Back to academia with you, Madam Secretary.