Critics Slam Overweight Surgeon General Pick, Regina Benjamin

Dr. Regina M. Benjamin, Obama's pick for the next surgeon general, was hailed as a MacArthur Grant genius who had championed the poor at a medical clinic she set up in Katrina-ravaged Alabama. But the full-figured African-American nominee is also under fire for being overweight in a nation where 34 percent of all Americans aged 20 and over are obese. Critics and supporters across the blogsphere have commented on photos of Benjamin's round cheeks, saying she sends the wrong message as the public face of America's health initiatives. But others support the 52-year-old founder and CEO of Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic, citing new research that shows you cannot always judge a book by its cover when it comes to obesity.

The old man swore he saw angels. It was a year or so back, the day 79-year-old Emile Lyons suffered an abdominal aneurysm. "The day my insides busted," he said. The bony commercial fisherman had lived through hurricanes, heart bypasses and his 50th wedding anniversary. But that day, he really believed the Lord had called him home. As two paramedics loaded him into the ambulance, "I saw angels and lights and everything," he said. Through the haze of pain he found a familiar face, his doctor, Regina Benjamin. She had jumped in the ambulance with him, and treated him on the tortuous 30-minute drive to the nearest emergency room, in Mobile. "She saved my life," Mr. Lyons said. "Could be she's an angel, too." It seems like everyone in this impoverished fishing village on Alabama's Gulf Coast has a story to tell about this woman who stitches their shark bites, watches over the babies and comes running when accidents at the docks or shipyards injure husbands and sons. She makes house calls in a Ford pickup and