That is a fantastic story. My family has had great experiences with hospitals using EMRs in the past. Particularly, the St. Vincent Hospital system in Portland, OR was fantastic. My wife had to have some MRIs and CT Scans and then talk to specialists. As soon as she registered at the first doctor she saw in the system, she never had to re-register at any of the other doctor's offices. They always had all of her medical information that any of the other facilities in the system had including the MRI and CT Scans. It was a dream from the patient's standpoint.
Other medical systems have had horrible EMRs. We've always tried to get copies of all medical records for the family wherever we've lived and it's appalling how many have no capability to give it to you in an electronic form so we have a file folder 12 inches deep filled with paper copies which are almost as useless as not having any at all because they're in a format that's extremely hard to find information and to look back over time to identify trends.
The one good thing the government does is establish standards. They've been doing it at least as long as when they established a standard size for railroad tracks in the 19th century. If the government can establish a standard for all doctors/medical facilities to interchange information in an electronic form, it would make gathering and storing information for a patient extremely easy and it transferring information to new doctors and facilities extremely easy. The biggest problem with the current EMRs is the lack of standardized interfaces. If the government can facilitate that, we'd be light-years ahead in being able to manage our own health care.
The war begins each day on the long drive into the desert, just past the Super Buffet and the Home Depot and the Petco, and the swath of look-alike houses that cling to the city's edge, along the forty miles of the strangest daily commute in America. Air Force Staff Sergeant Charles Anderson plucks his wristwatch from the cupholder and crosses into the war zone. He wears the watch only at work, and the ritual shifts his thoughts away from the everyday, which lately has been occupied by wedding plans and house hunting. He drives in silence, no music or news, past rocky scrubland that mirrors the Afghan mountains, valleys, and plains he'll spend his workday patrolling. First Lieutenant John Hamilton crosses over as he passes the High Desert State Prison, thirty miles outside Las Vegas, northwest on route 95. His cell-phone calls always drop off here, and over time he has come to think of the prison as the demarcation line between homelife and battlefield. A few more miles and Creech Air Force Base rises from the desert, a cluster of buildings at the foot of barren hills, cast gold by the early-morning sun. Captain Sam Nelson is the last to cross over. He steps into a plain brick building, home to the 42nd Attack Squadron, pulls his cell phone from his green flight suit, and leaves it on a counter with a pile of others. He passes through a doorway, from unclassified to secret, and the door shuts and locks behind him.
On this July morning, the three will crew a Reaper -- big brother to the Predator -- an unmanned aerial vehicle scanning the landscape from about twenty thousand feet, seventy-five hundred miles away. Nelson flies it, and Anderson runs the array of cameras and sensors that hang under the plane's nose and can see the hot barrel of a freshly fired weapon from miles off in the dark of night. Hamilton, the mission intelligence coordinator, feeds them reports from the battlefield and talks to the "customers," their name for the ground troops they'll be supporting in Afghanistan. He's twenty-four, still soft in the face, and studied public policy at Stanford; now in the morning paper he reads about policy he helps implement. He digs that. Never mind that his neighbors don't know how close to the war he really is every day. In the Reaper Operations Center, crowded with computers and flat-screen TVs, he settles in at his workstation, which has a bank of six computer screens, a laptop, two secure phone lines, and a radio headset. On the bottom center screen, he'll soon have nine message windows open, chatting with his bosses at Creech, commanders in Afghanistan, and troops on the battlefield.
The top middle screen shows the view from the Reaper -- in this case Afghanistan at rest. The sun has already set, but the infrared lens illuminates a darkened world in a palette of black and white. Down the hall, Nelson and Anderson step into the Ground Control Station, a windowless room ten feet wide and twenty feet deep, with beige walls and a drop-tile ceiling. At the far end, two men in flight suits and radio headsets sit in bulky tan faux-leather chairs before a cubicle cockpit of joysticks, throttles, and ten monitors. They stare at Afghanistan's roads and schools and markets and homes, as they have for the past several hours. Nelson and Anderson, their relief, slip into the seats as the Reaper flies on. Nelson checks his cargo, shown as neon-green silhouettes at the bottom of his center screen: four Hellfire missiles and two five-hundred-pound GBU-12 laser-guided bombs. Another shift of remote-control combat has begun.
At this very moment, at any given moment, three dozen armed, unmanned American airplanes are flying lazy loops over Afghanistan and Iraq. They linger there, all day and all night. When one lands to refuel or rearm, another replaces it. They guard soldiers on patrol, spy on Al Qaeda leaders, and send missiles shrieking down on insurgents massing in the night. Add to those the hundreds of smaller, unarmed Unmanned Aer
I think you're spot-on with most of your observations. There are a whole lot of things that have come together here in the 21st century to cause the obesity problem we have today and I believe it has very little to do with a lack of self-control or will-power as is generally believed.
Exercise definitely has value, just not when it comes to weight loss. Exercise helps your body be healthier and strengthens muscles and your heart. But the common belief is that exercise is critical to weight loss and it actually isn't. Being more active is. You can bust your butt for 2 hours in the gym and blow it all in a couple minutes with a sugary snack. Exercise to be healthy. Eat right to lose weight.
That's because, apparently, exercise has very little to do with weight loss. It's all about eating.
When people who oversimplify weight loss, they say things like, "It's simple. Burn more calories than you eat." They tend to think that if you are over weight, it's merely because you have no self control. I think there are a lot of factors that going into being over weight.
Overweight people probably have a genetic propensity. I don't think it has anything to do with metabolism. I think it has everything to do with their hunger drive. There are a few drives that are very primal in humans. Hunger is probably the strongest because it's key to survival. It's impossible to use will-power to overcome drives in the long-term. I think some people are born with a stronger hunger drive that their will-power alone can't defeat.
Another thing is the ready access to refined sugars and simple carbohydrates. Fast food is so plentiful and cheap and by eating a lot of it, I think it disrupts what our bodies think it needs and triggers hunger to get more. It's like an addiction. Your body wants to get the endorphines and feeling of well-being that eating high-calorie simple carbohydrates bring.
I also believe that the "science" of marketing has progressed a lot in the past 50 years and all this marketing that we are bombarded with affects us psychologically. I think this is a contributing factor.
Finally I think a key reason why Americans are more overweight than ever before is simply because of affluence. Affluence brings you access to more food. It's easy to be thin if you don't have a lot of extra money to eat restaurant food.
Again, I believe that will-power is a dead-end street. If a person is simply relying on will-power, they will fail each and every time and screwing up their bodies even worst. I think a diet in protein and complex carbohydrates is key in keeping hunger at bay. I also think that rearranging your life so that you don't have the opportunities to be exposed to the wrong kinds of foods is key. I think there are more things you can do but it's never as simple as some people make it out to be.
The 100 windmills are not the same as the 300ft tall ones they're planning on putting in the Gulf of Mexico. They're separate projects. It doesn't say how big the 100 windmills for the data center in the pan handle of Texas are, though they are 3.3 MW so I'd imagine that they'd still be big.
True but not for a very long time. I once read the blog of a man who converted his car to be electric. When he went to license the car, his state already had a tax in place for cars that didn't use gas based off of odometer readings when the car is registered. Is there any reason the fed couldn't do the same thing via the states?
I just think the simplest way to do things is the most effective. Gas taxes are a very logical and inherently fair way of funding road projects. If need be, they could tie it to the average mpg of all cars on the road to counter the improvements in efficiency. The only instance this doesn't work is for a car that plugs in and gets part of its energy from the grid in which case there could be a simple odometer method of taxing the driver at registration.
It seems to me that this is a solution looking for a problem. Or more likely, a solution for a "problem" that the government isn't sharing with us (ie, improved ways to track citizens).
Unless you multiply your mileage by some rate based on gross vehicle weight, then Hummers will be paying the same for the same miles driven as a Prius. Which one is tearing up the roads more?
This would be unnecessary. The heavier the car, the worst the gas mileage and therefore the more tax paid. It all works out in the end.
The rest of the comment was immaterial. Does it really matter why a person feels they're better than someone else? Are your reasons inherently better than a celebrity's? I found it humorous. You apparently didn't. That's cool.
There is such a thing as age-appropriate. Children are not born being able to handle all the good, bad, and ugly the world has to offer. As they develop intellectually, psychologically, and emotionally, they'll be able to handle more and more. It's up to the parents to filter their exposure until they can handle different things.
You are correct that their main effort is to reduce congestion as the poster clarified in response to my post. I do think, though, that having automatic tolls during congested time periods would be a more economical model to persue in getting the desired effect.
Gas taxes are a poor proxy for travel volume but are very good for road wear and tear since the weight of vehicles tend to correlate with gas consumption. It's not perfect, but it's a straight way of spreading the costs of road maintenance to those who cause their proportion of road damage.
I just think that the most high-tech method of solving the problem isn't always the most efficient. That was my only point.
I know they are somewhat conflicting numbers but they both seem to come from presumably reliable sources. I simply used the one where I wouldn't have to do the extra math and go looking for the us child population number statistics. Either way, it is not on par with a lightning strike and dying in a car accident is much more likely so it has no bearing on the original point.
You're right. There are varying statistics on the page but I was taking the "worst case" one near the bottom from Discover magazine (partly because I was too lazy to do the math with the other numbers):
Each year 3,600 to 4,200 children are abducted by someone outside the family; 1/2 of them are age 12 or older; 2/3 are female; at least 19% of these abductors are not strangers to their victims-Finklehor, p. 10. *The chance of a minor being kidnapped by a stranger is 1 in 560, by a family member 1 in 180. - Discover Magazine as reported by Gannett News Service 5/28/96.
This stat uses the non-family but not necessarily stranger-only stats. It's an even lower chance if you're only using the numbers where the kidnapping is completely random.
I'm not sure why presumably reliable sources would have such varying statistics.
I watched the preview and it shows a woman arguing that there is an equal chance of being struck by lightning as being kidnapped (non-family). A little research shows that:
* You have a 1 in 560 chance of being kidnapped by a non-family member and of those 1/5 will be murdered.
* You have a 1 in 280,000 chance of being struck by lightning.
* You have a 1 in 100 chance of dying in a car accident.
While the lady in the video was grossly overestimating the chances of being struck by lightning, there may not be much cause to freak your kids out about "stranger danger". They need to know the information and how to protect themselves, but they definitely shouldn't be made to be hermits and more than they shouldn't be prevented from riding in cars.
One thing is for sure, though. Don't get your statistics from Penn and Teller videos.
It makes sense, in a way, I guess. I assume they've done studies to see if all of that will actually cost less than what they plan on saving with the improved traffic control. I've heard of plans in some places to toll certain roads during rush hour the same way they toll carpool lanes if you're not in a carpool. In this way, it encourages people to drive during off-peak hours. It sounds like a similar solution.
Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to simply take an odometer reading each year when you register your car and do a quick subtraction? Why in the world would they need a GPS? They could even make a check for odometer tampering part of the safety check.
Or, of course, they can simply tax the gasoline which essentially does the same thing, or maybe they already do that:).
Leave it to government to find a more complicated way to do exactly what they're already doing.
Having said that, I do object to religious organizations behaving politically, as the LDS church has done. There is a line between a church declaring its stance, and a church behaving like a political party. Donating $20 million dollars to a referendum campaign crosses that line. Such behavior is prohibited in many european countries, notably France, and with good reason. Church leaders should not wield political power. This is a lesson which I fear the US will have to learn the hard way.
See, there it get's tricky. Donating money for political causes is considered free speech. The money is used to sponsor TV spots and other advertisements to express their side of the argument. Shouldn't the voters have both sides of any argument? There were plenty of anti-prop 8 commercials out as well. Voters looked at the arguments presented and made a decision. To prohibit churches from being able to get their side of the argument out inherently gives a huge advantage to the opposition of any moral question being voted on.
The biggest reason this proposition got so much funding had more to do with protecting churches' (there were more than the Mormon church donating money to oppose it) rights to preach and practice their religion as they see fit. They saw the results of similar actions in Massachussets and the effects it had on how church members practice their religions and they felt they had to protect their rights and what better way than through the political process.
As a Mormon, I agree with you 100%. If people don't agree with what the leadership of the church teaches or does, then they should leave the church. The way it works in the Mormon church is that it's either right or wrong. There really isn't any middle ground.
Every Muslim should denounce every act of terrorism that they don't agree with. They don't have to take out an ad in a newspaper or anything. They can denounce it in their hearts and if it comes up in conversation they can make a point.
Equally so, I denounce all abortion clinic bombings and if it comes up in a conversations, just like it just now did, I'm more than happy to tell you so.
What would really be nice to help their cause, is if Muslim organizations would go out of their way to make press statements denouncing terrorist acts. From what I've seen, when these leaders from Muslim organizations come out on TV to talk about Muslim extremism, they'll usually try to neatly sidestep any attempt to get them to denounce the acts. Then again, it may be for their personal safety that they do so.
Further, as for the theory that Obama will be hated in four years because he can't fix it, why was FDR reelected continuously through the depression which he allegedly couldn't/didn't fix?
He made more and more people dependent on him and the government dole. That's an excellent way to stay in office.
Slashdot Mirror
That totally made me laugh. It almost made Dr. Pepper come out my nose!
That is a fantastic story. My family has had great experiences with hospitals using EMRs in the past. Particularly, the St. Vincent Hospital system in Portland, OR was fantastic. My wife had to have some MRIs and CT Scans and then talk to specialists. As soon as she registered at the first doctor she saw in the system, she never had to re-register at any of the other doctor's offices. They always had all of her medical information that any of the other facilities in the system had including the MRI and CT Scans. It was a dream from the patient's standpoint.
Other medical systems have had horrible EMRs. We've always tried to get copies of all medical records for the family wherever we've lived and it's appalling how many have no capability to give it to you in an electronic form so we have a file folder 12 inches deep filled with paper copies which are almost as useless as not having any at all because they're in a format that's extremely hard to find information and to look back over time to identify trends.
The one good thing the government does is establish standards. They've been doing it at least as long as when they established a standard size for railroad tracks in the 19th century. If the government can establish a standard for all doctors/medical facilities to interchange information in an electronic form, it would make gathering and storing information for a patient extremely easy and it transferring information to new doctors and facilities extremely easy. The biggest problem with the current EMRs is the lack of standardized interfaces. If the government can facilitate that, we'd be light-years ahead in being able to manage our own health care.
The war begins each day on the long drive into the desert, just past the Super Buffet and the Home Depot and the Petco, and the swath of look-alike houses that cling to the city's edge, along the forty miles of the strangest daily commute in America. Air Force Staff Sergeant Charles Anderson plucks his wristwatch from the cupholder and crosses into the war zone. He wears the watch only at work, and the ritual shifts his thoughts away from the everyday, which lately has been occupied by wedding plans and house hunting. He drives in silence, no music or news, past rocky scrubland that mirrors the Afghan mountains, valleys, and plains he'll spend his workday patrolling. First Lieutenant John Hamilton crosses over as he passes the High Desert State Prison, thirty miles outside Las Vegas, northwest on route 95. His cell-phone calls always drop off here, and over time he has come to think of the prison as the demarcation line between homelife and battlefield. A few more miles and Creech Air Force Base rises from the desert, a cluster of buildings at the foot of barren hills, cast gold by the early-morning sun. Captain Sam Nelson is the last to cross over. He steps into a plain brick building, home to the 42nd Attack Squadron, pulls his cell phone from his green flight suit, and leaves it on a counter with a pile of others. He passes through a doorway, from unclassified to secret, and the door shuts and locks behind him.
On this July morning, the three will crew a Reaper -- big brother to the Predator -- an unmanned aerial vehicle scanning the landscape from about twenty thousand feet, seventy-five hundred miles away. Nelson flies it, and Anderson runs the array of cameras and sensors that hang under the plane's nose and can see the hot barrel of a freshly fired weapon from miles off in the dark of night. Hamilton, the mission intelligence coordinator, feeds them reports from the battlefield and talks to the "customers," their name for the ground troops they'll be supporting in Afghanistan. He's twenty-four, still soft in the face, and studied public policy at Stanford; now in the morning paper he reads about policy he helps implement. He digs that. Never mind that his neighbors don't know how close to the war he really is every day. In the Reaper Operations Center, crowded with computers and flat-screen TVs, he settles in at his workstation, which has a bank of six computer screens, a laptop, two secure phone lines, and a radio headset. On the bottom center screen, he'll soon have nine message windows open, chatting with his bosses at Creech, commanders in Afghanistan, and troops on the battlefield.
The top middle screen shows the view from the Reaper -- in this case Afghanistan at rest. The sun has already set, but the infrared lens illuminates a darkened world in a palette of black and white. Down the hall, Nelson and Anderson step into the Ground Control Station, a windowless room ten feet wide and twenty feet deep, with beige walls and a drop-tile ceiling. At the far end, two men in flight suits and radio headsets sit in bulky tan faux-leather chairs before a cubicle cockpit of joysticks, throttles, and ten monitors. They stare at Afghanistan's roads and schools and markets and homes, as they have for the past several hours. Nelson and Anderson, their relief, slip into the seats as the Reaper flies on. Nelson checks his cargo, shown as neon-green silhouettes at the bottom of his center screen: four Hellfire missiles and two five-hundred-pound GBU-12 laser-guided bombs. Another shift of remote-control combat has begun.
At this very moment, at any given moment, three dozen armed, unmanned American airplanes are flying lazy loops over Afghanistan and Iraq. They linger there, all day and all night. When one lands to refuel or rearm, another replaces it. They guard soldiers on patrol, spy on Al Qaeda leaders, and send missiles shrieking down on insurgents massing in the night. Add to those the hundreds of smaller, unarmed Unmanned Aer
I think you're spot-on with most of your observations. There are a whole lot of things that have come together here in the 21st century to cause the obesity problem we have today and I believe it has very little to do with a lack of self-control or will-power as is generally believed.
Exercise definitely has value, just not when it comes to weight loss. Exercise helps your body be healthier and strengthens muscles and your heart. But the common belief is that exercise is critical to weight loss and it actually isn't. Being more active is. You can bust your butt for 2 hours in the gym and blow it all in a couple minutes with a sugary snack. Exercise to be healthy. Eat right to lose weight.
That's because, apparently, exercise has very little to do with weight loss. It's all about eating.
When people who oversimplify weight loss, they say things like, "It's simple. Burn more calories than you eat." They tend to think that if you are over weight, it's merely because you have no self control. I think there are a lot of factors that going into being over weight.
Overweight people probably have a genetic propensity. I don't think it has anything to do with metabolism. I think it has everything to do with their hunger drive. There are a few drives that are very primal in humans. Hunger is probably the strongest because it's key to survival. It's impossible to use will-power to overcome drives in the long-term. I think some people are born with a stronger hunger drive that their will-power alone can't defeat.
Another thing is the ready access to refined sugars and simple carbohydrates. Fast food is so plentiful and cheap and by eating a lot of it, I think it disrupts what our bodies think it needs and triggers hunger to get more. It's like an addiction. Your body wants to get the endorphines and feeling of well-being that eating high-calorie simple carbohydrates bring.
I also believe that the "science" of marketing has progressed a lot in the past 50 years and all this marketing that we are bombarded with affects us psychologically. I think this is a contributing factor.
Finally I think a key reason why Americans are more overweight than ever before is simply because of affluence. Affluence brings you access to more food. It's easy to be thin if you don't have a lot of extra money to eat restaurant food.
Again, I believe that will-power is a dead-end street. If a person is simply relying on will-power, they will fail each and every time and screwing up their bodies even worst. I think a diet in protein and complex carbohydrates is key in keeping hunger at bay. I also think that rearranging your life so that you don't have the opportunities to be exposed to the wrong kinds of foods is key. I think there are more things you can do but it's never as simple as some people make it out to be.
At least Defense is a constitutionally enumerated power of the federal government, unlike most of the other spending.
The 100 windmills are not the same as the 300ft tall ones they're planning on putting in the Gulf of Mexico. They're separate projects. It doesn't say how big the 100 windmills for the data center in the pan handle of Texas are, though they are 3.3 MW so I'd imagine that they'd still be big.
True but not for a very long time. I once read the blog of a man who converted his car to be electric. When he went to license the car, his state already had a tax in place for cars that didn't use gas based off of odometer readings when the car is registered. Is there any reason the fed couldn't do the same thing via the states?
I just think the simplest way to do things is the most effective. Gas taxes are a very logical and inherently fair way of funding road projects. If need be, they could tie it to the average mpg of all cars on the road to counter the improvements in efficiency. The only instance this doesn't work is for a car that plugs in and gets part of its energy from the grid in which case there could be a simple odometer method of taxing the driver at registration.
It seems to me that this is a solution looking for a problem. Or more likely, a solution for a "problem" that the government isn't sharing with us (ie, improved ways to track citizens).
This would be unnecessary. The heavier the car, the worst the gas mileage and therefore the more tax paid. It all works out in the end.
Maybe this could be helpful to you.
The rest of the comment was immaterial. Does it really matter why a person feels they're better than someone else? Are your reasons inherently better than a celebrity's? I found it humorous. You apparently didn't. That's cool.
That's pretty funny.
There is such a thing as age-appropriate. Children are not born being able to handle all the good, bad, and ugly the world has to offer. As they develop intellectually, psychologically, and emotionally, they'll be able to handle more and more. It's up to the parents to filter their exposure until they can handle different things.
You certainly don't want to eat the old snow. You shouldn't eat yellow snow either, for that matter.
You are correct that their main effort is to reduce congestion as the poster clarified in response to my post. I do think, though, that having automatic tolls during congested time periods would be a more economical model to persue in getting the desired effect.
Gas taxes are a poor proxy for travel volume but are very good for road wear and tear since the weight of vehicles tend to correlate with gas consumption. It's not perfect, but it's a straight way of spreading the costs of road maintenance to those who cause their proportion of road damage.
I just think that the most high-tech method of solving the problem isn't always the most efficient. That was my only point.
I know they are somewhat conflicting numbers but they both seem to come from presumably reliable sources. I simply used the one where I wouldn't have to do the extra math and go looking for the us child population number statistics. Either way, it is not on par with a lightning strike and dying in a car accident is much more likely so it has no bearing on the original point.
This stat uses the non-family but not necessarily stranger-only stats. It's an even lower chance if you're only using the numbers where the kidnapping is completely random.
I'm not sure why presumably reliable sources would have such varying statistics.
I watched the preview and it shows a woman arguing that there is an equal chance of being struck by lightning as being kidnapped (non-family). A little research shows that:
* You have a 1 in 560 chance of being kidnapped by a non-family member and of those 1/5 will be murdered.
* You have a 1 in 280,000 chance of being struck by lightning.
* You have a 1 in 100 chance of dying in a car accident.
While the lady in the video was grossly overestimating the chances of being struck by lightning, there may not be much cause to freak your kids out about "stranger danger". They need to know the information and how to protect themselves, but they definitely shouldn't be made to be hermits and more than they shouldn't be prevented from riding in cars.
One thing is for sure, though. Don't get your statistics from Penn and Teller videos.
It makes sense, in a way, I guess. I assume they've done studies to see if all of that will actually cost less than what they plan on saving with the improved traffic control. I've heard of plans in some places to toll certain roads during rush hour the same way they toll carpool lanes if you're not in a carpool. In this way, it encourages people to drive during off-peak hours. It sounds like a similar solution.
Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to simply take an odometer reading each year when you register your car and do a quick subtraction? Why in the world would they need a GPS? They could even make a check for odometer tampering part of the safety check.
:).
Or, of course, they can simply tax the gasoline which essentially does the same thing, or maybe they already do that
Leave it to government to find a more complicated way to do exactly what they're already doing.
I like SoftAppleGoo better..
See, there it get's tricky. Donating money for political causes is considered free speech. The money is used to sponsor TV spots and other advertisements to express their side of the argument. Shouldn't the voters have both sides of any argument? There were plenty of anti-prop 8 commercials out as well. Voters looked at the arguments presented and made a decision. To prohibit churches from being able to get their side of the argument out inherently gives a huge advantage to the opposition of any moral question being voted on.
The biggest reason this proposition got so much funding had more to do with protecting churches' (there were more than the Mormon church donating money to oppose it) rights to preach and practice their religion as they see fit. They saw the results of similar actions in Massachussets and the effects it had on how church members practice their religions and they felt they had to protect their rights and what better way than through the political process.
As a Mormon, I agree with you 100%. If people don't agree with what the leadership of the church teaches or does, then they should leave the church. The way it works in the Mormon church is that it's either right or wrong. There really isn't any middle ground.
Every Muslim should denounce every act of terrorism that they don't agree with. They don't have to take out an ad in a newspaper or anything. They can denounce it in their hearts and if it comes up in conversation they can make a point.
Equally so, I denounce all abortion clinic bombings and if it comes up in a conversations, just like it just now did, I'm more than happy to tell you so.
What would really be nice to help their cause, is if Muslim organizations would go out of their way to make press statements denouncing terrorist acts. From what I've seen, when these leaders from Muslim organizations come out on TV to talk about Muslim extremism, they'll usually try to neatly sidestep any attempt to get them to denounce the acts. Then again, it may be for their personal safety that they do so.
He made more and more people dependent on him and the government dole. That's an excellent way to stay in office.