“I knew that they would want to know my medications, dosages and what tests had been done, and I knew that I couldn’t remember all of it. The doctors in Springfield were able to pull up my records and ask me questions. It worked out beautifully,” he said.....
“If the tornado had hit a month earlier, before installing the electronic health record system in Joplin, St. John’s would not have been able to bring up our mobile hospital within a week’s time. We still would not be operational at this point,” said Mike McCreary of Mercy Technology Services. “Today, patients have continuity of care across all of our physician locations and the new St. John’s Mercy Hospital, and connection to the entire Mercy health system, because of our EHR [Electronic Health Records] and our ability to quickly re-establish communication services.”
McCreary noted that St. John’s patients also have access to historical medical records. More current health information was stored within the new EHR, and older paper records had been scanned prior to the tornado and are securely stored on servers located in other communities.The EMR system? Epic's.
WASHINGTON — President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.
Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.
But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.
Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.
A White House spokesman, Eric Schultz, said there had been “a full airing of views within the administration and a robust process” that led Mr. Obama to his view that the Libya campaign was not covered by a provision of the War Powers Resolution that requires presidents to halt unauthorized hostilities after 60 days
Read the rest of the article. The White House knows that most people have never heard of the OLC, and they're going on that, forgetting that the OLC is a vital, vital institution, and that being cavalier with it (or portraying it as "just another adviser") is setting all sorts of bad precedents. One of the strongest controls on the foolishness that David Addington (Cheney's Cheney: nice in person but wiht crazy ideas about executive power) was the OLC and its refusal to allow Bush a free leash, as if the President could ignore the law.
“It should come as no surprise that there would be some disagreements, even within an administration, regarding the application of a statute that is nearly 40 years old to a unique and evolving conflict,” Mr. Schultz said. “Those disagreements are ordinary and healthy.”
I’ll be writing a lot about the presidential election over the next 16 months, but at the outset I would just like to remark that I’m opining on this whole campaign under protest. I’m registering a protest because for someone of my Hamiltonian/National Greatness perspective, the two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic. Their programs are unusually unimaginative. Their policies are unusually incommensurate to the problem at hand.Certainly many of these issues can be traced to the various causes of wage inequality, among them skill-bias technical change, and they aren't the government's "fault" in the way the massive deficits from the Bush Tax Cuts are the government's "fault." Moreover, life now is much better than it was a few decades ago in many ways - we have cell phones, open communication, and longer life expectancy. But we could do better - much better.
This election is about how to avert national decline. All other issues flow from that anxiety.
The election is happening during a downturn in the economic cycle, but the core issue is the accumulation of deeper structural problems that this recession has exposed — unsustainable levels of debt, an inability to generate middle-class incomes, a dysfunctional political system, the steady growth of special-interest sinecures and the gradual loss of national vitality.
"Epic is an economic engine that's a Wisconsin outlier: A booming business that's about as far from the state's manufacturing heritage as you can get.As you can see from the graph on the right side, Epic is a very quickly growing company; my work will be to help pick up some of the sales and projects that Epic's immense success is securing. But just as importantly, the reasons for that growth are immediately observable: Epic is a fantastic company, with fantastic methods and values, which produces a valuable project that does good and makes money.
The company is moving to wean itself off fossil fuels in a big way.
Already, most buildings on the sprawling campus are heated and cooled with a ground-source heat pump system, which means the campus needs no natural gas for heating and no electricity for cooling in the summer.
About 1,300 solar panels were erected in recent months on a latticelike structure above an employee parking lot."
