Archive for July, 2009

Lead Birther Bill Sponsor Votes To Recognize Hawaii As Obama’s Birthplace | TPMDC

GOP Decides to Vote Against the Psychotic “Birthers”: “The House resolution to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Hawaiian statehood — which included language recognizing the state as President Obama’s birthplace, in a none-too-subtle jab at the Birthers — passed this evening by a 378-0 vote. – BF

Lead Birther Bill Sponsor Votes To Recognize Hawaii As Obama’s Birthplace

The House resolution to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Hawaiian statehood — which included language recognizing the state as President Obama’s birthplace, in a none-too-subtle jab at the Birthers — passed this evening by a 378-0 vote.

Among the Yes votes: Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL), the lead sponsor of the infamous “Birther Bill” to require presidential candidates to present their birth certificates, and who had previously said he wouldn’t “swear on a stack of Bibles” that Obama is a natural-born American citizen. Several other co-sponsors of the Birther Bill also voted yes: Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Dan Burton (R-IN), John Culberson (R-TX), Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Randy Neugebauer (R-TX), and Ted Poe (R-TX).

via Lead Birther Bill Sponsor Votes To Recognize Hawaii As Obama’s Birthplace | TPMDC.

Strong correlation of Bush approval to national pre-elect and state exit polls

Strong correlation of Bush approval to national pre-elect and state exit polls

2004 State Recorded vote, Exit Poll and Bush Approval (11/17/05)

There was a strong 0.87 correlation between Bush monthly approval and his corresponding national pre-election poll average. Kerry led the final pre-election polls (after allocating undecideds) by 51-48%. Bush approval on election day was 48%.

There was also a strong 0.89 correlation between the state unadjusted exit polls and corresponding approval ratings one year after the election. Kerry won the aggregate unadjusted exit poll by 52-47%.

Key points:
1- Best-fit linear regressions show that WPE (the average state exit poll discrepancy) decreased going from strong Kerry to Bush states. The strategy was simple: Bush padded his popular vote in strong Kerry states (CA,NY etc); the electoral vote was padded in the battleground states.

2- Bush statewide poll and vote shares were strongly correlated to approval one year AFTER the election. There is a strong relationship between approval and election polls.

3- Bush exit poll shares were negatively correlated to WPE. The exit poll vote discrepancies were weighted heavily in favor of Bush.

It’s just graphically stating the obvious:
Approval ratings are a powerful indicator of the TRUE VOTE…

National Exit Poll

via Progressive Independent – Viewing topic.

Government virus expert paid £116k by swine flu vaccine manufacturers

Government virus expert paid £116k by swine flu vaccine manufacturers -| Mail Online

A scientist who advises the Government on swine flu is a paid director of a drugs firm making hundreds of millions of pounds from the pandemic.

Professor Sir Roy Anderson sits on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), a 20-strong task force drawing up the action plan for the virus.

Yet he also holds a £116,000-a-year post on the board of GlaxoSmithKline, the company selling swine flu vaccines and anti-virals to the NHS.

Sir Roy faced demands to step down yesterday amid claims that the jobs were incompatible. ‘This is a clear conflict of interest and should be of great concern to taxpayers and government officials alike,’ said Matthew Elliott of the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

via Government virus expert paid £116k by swine flu vaccine manufacturers | Mail Online.

Organic Lawn Care Tips – Organic Grass and Lawn Care Tips

21 Organic Lawn Care Tips from a Real Expert  - thedailygreen.com

The celebrated founder of Safelawns.org offers an insider’s guide to growing a healthy, natural lawn without chemical pesticides or fertilizers.

Never spend money on any fertilizer or soil amendment for your lawn or garden without first consulting the results of a soil test.

These diagnostic results — available from virtually all Cooperative Extension offices across the U.S. — will tell you exactly how much N (nitrogen), P (phosphorus) or K (potassium), lime, sulphur or other nutrients to add. Too much nitrogen and phosphorus can harm oceans,
Read more: http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-homes/eco-friendly/organic-lawn-care-tips-47071704#ixzz0MW1C8BXr

via Organic Lawn Care Tips – Organic Grass and Lawn Care Tips – thedailygreen.com.

Antibiotic-resistant salmonella burgers, with a side of flame retardants

Antibiotic-resistant salmonella burgers, with a side of flame retardants  – | Grist

Sometimes I think I write a little too much about the meat industry. But the news it generates is so consistently grave, and so generally underreported, that I can’t resist. Moreover, outbreaks of E. coli and MRSA are really ecological markers—feedback that our way of producing meat is deeply unsustainable and really quite dangerous. We ignore these news flashes from our ecoystem at our peril. So I scribble on.

Here’s the latest: In Colorado, 14 people have fallen ill from hamburger meat tainted with antibiotic-resistent salmonella, the Boulder newspaper Daily Camera reports. (Note that antibiotic-resistent salmonella is distinct from MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant staph infection, increasingly associated with industrial meat production, that kills 20,000 Americans each year—more than AIDS.)

The bad burger came from a Denver-based supermarket chain called King Soopers, which has now recalled 466,236 pounds of it.

via Antibiotic-resistant salmonella burgers, with a side of flame retardants | Grist.

Hard times drive more Michiganders to fish for food

Hard times drive more Michiganders to fish for food  -  Michigan Messenger »

Despite health department warnings that many Michigan fish are contaminated with mercury, PCBs, dioxin and other chemicals, more people are fishing in order to put food on their tables, according to this Detroit Free Press story, which quotes a Dept. of Natural Resources spokeswoman as saying, “It’s a great way to feed a family.”

Reporter L.L. Brasier interviews out-of-work electrician, Kirk Miller, who is relying on fish from Lake St. Clair for protein and finds that he is part of a growing trend.

Miller is among a growing number of anglers in Michigan. Although the number of boat registrations has dropped, likely because of the cost of hauling, gasoline and boat slips, more people are throwing a line in the water than ever before. The state sold 703,695 fishing licenses in 2007 — around the time the state began to slip into a deep recession. That number has jumped by 54,234 this year to 757,929, the highest in the state’s history.

State officials say many people may be like Miller: loading up the tackle box and heading for the lake or river as a way to cut grocery costs and have cheap fun as well.

Unfortunately, this story does not mention the Department of Community Health fish consumption advisory which urges people to learn about contaminants in fish before eating them, and warns that children and pre-menopausal women be especially careful about eating fish.

The health department warns:

via Michigan Messenger » Hard times drive more Michiganders to fish for food.

Scientists Are Concerned About Cancer in Animals

The Wild’s Creeping Killer   |   | Newsweek.com

The great outdoors is a dangerous place for animals, who often die from hunger, predator attacks, or infections. But cancer can also be a culprit, and human pollution may be making it worse.

In 1999, wildlife disease specialist Thierry Work looked over the bow of his small whaler as it cut through a lagoon on the south side of Molokai, an island in Hawaii. On an emergent rock he saw a listless sea turtle, waiting to die.

“This guy was so weak that he just let us pick him up,” says Work, who runs the National Wildlife Health Center’sHonolulu field station. “He was so emaciated that his ventral was completely disked in. You could fill him up with water and use him as a bowl.” Like more than quarter of the green turtles Work has plucked from the water or found stranded on Hawaii’s beaches, this one was covered with tumors on its eyes and mouth, dying from a poorly understood form of cancer.

via Scientists Are Concerned About Cancer in Animals | Newsweek Life | Newsweek.com.

Scientists Say Evolution Causing Women To Become Increasingly Beautiful (VIDEO)

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Scientists Say Evolution Causing Women To Become Increasingly Beautiful (VIDEO)

Fox 5 Chicago aired a startling report about scientists claiming that evolution is causing women to become more beautiful.

Apparently, researchers found that beautiful women are reproducing at a higher rate and that they have a higher proportion of girls to boys.

Men, however, are staying the same, according to the researchers.

WATCH:

via Scientists Say Evolution Causing Women To Become Increasingly Beautiful (VIDEO).

Goldman Sachs Using Taxpayer Money To Put Financial System At Risk, Reps. Charge

Goldman Sachs: Gambling With Your Money?

Goldman Sachs is using its new taxpayer-subsidized status to bring increased risk to the financial system, a group of House members charged Monday. They want to know why the Federal Reserve is allowing it.

The group on Monday sent a letter to the Fed asking for an explanation of why Goldman Sachs is being allowed to speculate wildly even while officially redesignating itself a bank holding company, which theoretically means stricter regulation. The bank designation gives Goldman access to dirt-cheap Federal Reserve loans.

Goldman initially applied for the new designation last fall, so that it could access bailout funds (since paid back). Because bank holding companies, unlike investment banks, have access to a host of valuable taxpayer subsidies, they are required to reduce the risk associated with their investment activity. But Goldman then applied to the Federal Reserve for an exemption to the rules, saying that it takes time to alter a business model. The exemption was granted in February — and Goldman went on to take even greater risks. Its Value-at-Risk model, a widely used measure of the risk of loss, recently showed potential trading losses at $245 million a day; in May 2008, it was $184 million a day.

via Goldman Sachs: Gambling With Your Money?.

Did ‘Blue Dog’ bash his liberal constituents as conspiracy nuts?

Did ‘Blue Dog’ bash his liberal constituents as conspiracy nuts? – The Raw Story »

A Democratic congressman may have some explaining to do to his constituents after telling Politico that a quarter of them back a crazy conspiracy theory.

In an article entitled “GOP headache: The birther issue,” Lisa Lerer and Daniel Libit report on how Republicans are finding out that “there’s no easy way to deal with the small but vocal crowd of right-wing activists who refuse to believe that President Barack Obama was born in the United States.”

But it’s this part in which the Democratic chairman of the House Agriculture Committee is quoted which might have the largest impact:

Out-party politicians have long had to deal with conspiracy theorists on their side — the people who think that the Clintons killed Vince Foster or that the Bush administration helped orchestrate the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Twenty-five percent of my people believe the Pentagon and Rumsfeld were responsible for taking the twin towers down,” said Rep. Collin Peterson, a Democrat who represents a conservative Republican district in Minnesota. “That’s why I don’t do town meetings.”

via The Raw Story » Did ‘Blue Dog’ bash his liberal constituents as conspiracy nuts?.

World will warm faster than predicted in next five years, study warns

World will warm faster than predicted in next five years, study warns  || The Guardian

New estimate based on the forthcoming upturn in solar activity and El Niño southern oscillation cycles is expected to silence global warming sceptics

The world faces record-breaking temperatures as the sun’s activity increases, leading the planet to heat up significantly faster than scientists had predicted for the next five years, according to a study.

The hottest year on record was 1998, and the relatively cool years since have led to some global warming sceptics claiming that temperatures have levelled off or started to decline. But new research firmly rejects that argument.

The research, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, was carried out by Judith Lean, of the US Naval Research Laboratory, and David Rind, of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The work is the first to assess the combined impact on global temperature of four factors: human influences such as CO₂ and aerosol emissions; heating from the sun; volcanic activity and the El Niño southern oscillation, the phenomenon by which the Pacific Ocean flips between warmer and cooler states every few years.

via World will warm faster than predicted in next five years, study warns | Environment | The Guardian.

Senators’ bipartisan health ‘compromise’ drops public option

OPS: Sold OUT

Senators’ bipartisan health ‘compromise’ drops public option – Raw Story »

Six bipartisan members of the Senate Finance Committee have reached an agreement on healthcare reforms that eschews the president’s insistence on a low-cost, public option, a published report said Monday evening. The plan also drops the requirement for employers to provide their workers’ insurance.

Though significantly stripped down from prior versions, the group’s compromise would prevent any insurance company from denying coverage and would block higher premiums for patients with pre-existing conditions, the Associated Press reported.

The senators’ effort was cheered by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and drug company lobbying group PhRMA, the report noted.

“Obama’s top domestic priority has suffered numerous setbacks in recent weeks, and Republicans have stepped up their criticism,” AP continued. “A Senate vote has been postponed until September. Administration and Democratic leaders hope to show significant progress before lawmakers begin their monthlong recess in hopes of regaining momentum.

via Raw Story » Senators’ bipartisan health ‘compromise’ drops public option.

AP IMPACT: Dodd, Conrad told deals were sweetened

AP IMPACT: Dodd, Conrad told deals were sweetened

Despite their denials, influential Democratic Sens. Kent Conrad and Chris Dodd were told from the start they were getting VIP mortgage discounts from one of the nation’s largest lenders, the official who handled their loans has told Congress in secret testimony.

Both senators have said that at the time the mortgages were being written they didn’t know they were getting unique deals from Countrywide Financial Corp., the company that went on to lose billions of dollars on home loans to credit-strapped borrowers. Dodd still maintains he got no preferential treatment.

Dodd got two Countrywide mortgages in 2003, refinancing his home in Connecticut and another residence in Washington. Conrad’s two Countrywide mortgages in 2004 were for a beach house in Delaware and an eight-unit apartment building in Bismarck in his home state of North Dakota.

via AP IMPACT: Dodd, Conrad told deals were sweetened – Yahoo! News.

Congress may push India’s IT firms to Mexico with H-1B crackdown

Congress may push India’s IT firms to Mexico with H-1B crackdown

If U.S. clamps down on visas, India’s alternative may be Mexico and NAFTA

WASHINGTON — As Indian firms fight the threat of H-1B restrictions, IT services companies might not leave their fate to politics. In an effort to reduce their need for visas, they may look to increase their presence south of the border.

Indian IT firms have boosted operations in Mexico in recent years to serve Latin American and U.S. customers. One advantage to doing so involves the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which enables Mexican and Canadian professionals to work in the U.S. without an H-1B visa.

via Congress may push India’s IT firms to Mexico with H-1B crackdown.

AP Sources: Senate group omitting Dem health goals

OPS: We are being sold out – again.

AP Sources: Senate group omitting Dem health goals

WASHINGTON – After weeks of secretive talks, a bipartisan group in the Senate edged closer Monday to a health care compromise that omits a requirement for businesses to offer coverage to their workers and lacks a government insurance option that President Barack Obama favors, according to numerous officials.

Like bills drafted by Democrats, the proposal under discussion by six members on the Senate Finance Committee would bar insurance companies from denying coverage to any applicant. Nor could insurers charge higher premiums on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions.

But it jettisons other core Democratic provisions in a reach for bipartisanship on an issue that has so far produced little.

The effort received a boost during the day from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, normally a close ally of Republicans. In a letter to committee leaders, the business group called for the panel to “act promptly, preferably before” the Senate’s scheduled vacation at the end of next week. In doing so, the business organization dealt a blow to the Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and other GOP lawmakers who have called repeatedly for Democrats to slow down.

via AP Sources: Senate group omitting Dem health goals – Yahoo! News.

Inhofe: Oil And Gas Usage Doesn’t Create Any Pollution

OPS:  Suicidal. Willing to lie, or utterly delude themselves about ANYTHING.

Inhofe: Oil And Gas Usage Doesn’t Create Any Pollution

This afternoon, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) took to the Senate floor and basically made a pitch for the oil and gas industry. He said that to ensure “energy security,” the United States should increasingly “extract our own resources.” According to Inhofe, this solution would not only achieve energy independence, but it would also be pollution-free:

People complain that we are buying — importing from the Middle East — oil and gas. And then they find out that we have it all right here. We don’t have to do that. If their argument there is “Well, we don’t want to use oil and gas because we think it pollutes” — which it doesn’t — but if that’s their argument, then why are we willing to import it from Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East?

Watch it:

via Think Progress » Inhofe: Oil And Gas Usage Doesn’t Create Any Pollution.

Wichita CBS Reports ‘C Street Cult’

Wichita CBS Reports ‘C Street Cult’  (Everyday Citizen)

After several blogs here and crossposted to DailyKos, the exposure of the C Street Cult has gained a lot of traction in my state as well as nationally. The local mainstream media in Kansas is now starting to take a closer look at the alleged right wing religious cult that forms the foundation of C Street’s ‘The Fellowship’.

With denials from Rep. Todd Tiahrt and admissions from Sen. Sam Brownback and, now, with the discovery that Rep. Jerry Moran actually lives at C Street, citizens are left to wonder if these elected officials will ever come clean and tell the whole truth.

What has been their individual and collective participation in the financial organization of C Street? When will they expose and explain the payoff of Ensign’s mistress? Those that live with ‘The Family’ or operate from inside the organization surely will want to tell us what they know about C Street’s do-it-yourself exorcisms. What about the slew of other allegations regarding secretive payoffs, untoward behavior, lock-step policy efforts, and the concerted cover-ups of scandals allegedly orchestrated by the legislators most intimately involved with C Street?

If there isn’t anything wrong with C Street and ‘The Fellowship’ or ‘The Family’ is indeed just a regular old prayer group, then why is there no transparency about what is happening and going on?

via Wichita CBS Reports ‘C Street Cult’ (Everyday Citizen).

Pelosi Vows Passage of Health-Care Overhaul

Pelosi Vows Passage of Health-Care Overhaul  - washingtonpost.com

‘It Will Win’: Confidence Grows as Democrats Plan to Resume Talks

Defying skeptics in her party, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed Sunday to overcome lingering obstacles and pass health-care reform in the House, restoring momentum to President Obama’s top domestic priority and order to her own unruly Democratic caucus

“When I take this bill to the floor, it will win,” Pelosi (Calif.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “This will happen.”

The speaker, who has struggled to overcome a series of recent setbacks, raised the stakes by planning to restart talks Monday among bickering Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee, one of three House panels with jurisdiction over health care and where the bill stalled last week. Democratic leaders are newly confident that these differences can be resolved, possibly in time to bring a House bill to the floor before lawmakers depart Friday for the August recess, although Pelosi did not commit to a timetable.

via Pelosi Vows Passage of Health-Care Overhaul – washingtonpost.com.

FEMA toxic trailers expose larger RV industry problem

FEMA toxic trailers expose larger RV industry problem

A July 23 report from the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General officially blames FEMA for putting victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita at risk by mishandling formaldehyde problems in trailers. “FEMA officials, in our opinion, did not take sufficiently prompt and effective action to determine the extent of the formaldehyde problem in the emergency housing units once they were aware that such a problem might exist,” the report states.

It turns out this problem is more widespread than the FEMA trailers. FEMA purchased units available for sale to the general public. The FEMA trailers exposed a problem that largely has gone unnoticed in the U.S. for decades. Many people have tested their private RVs and found high levels of formaldehyde (see www.toxictrailers.com) and a number of them have been poisoned by formaldehyde in their offices and temporary classrooms, according to a Sierra Club report.

Although FEMA subsequently arranged for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to perform a study of formaldehyde levels in occupied trailers, FEMA caused delays that blocked the study’s progress, the report says.

via FEMA toxic trailers expose larger RV industry problem.

Credit card firms raise fees before law changes

Credit card firms raise fees before law changes  - The Boston Globe

• Discuss Have your credit card fees gone up?

So for an upfront fee of 3 percent, the 47-year-old software executive used the checks to charge nearly $40,000 to his credit card for renovations to his home in Medford.

via Credit card firms raise fees before law changes – The Boston Globe.

AP INVESTIGATION: Main Street’s soaring sour loans

AP INVESTIGATION: Main Street’s soaring sour loans

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – As the effects of the economic collapse began pouring down Main Street, the government last year was left holding a record $2.1 billion in write-offs of small business loans it had guaranteed. Officials expect the number of defaults to rise as the nation continues to climb out of the recession.

Records obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act show the public is paying to offset bank losses on small business loans across the country, from a convenience store in the tiny Canadian border town of Houlton, Maine, to a graphic arts design company on the island of Hawaii, more than 5,000 miles away.

Despite having loans written off, little companies such as Caffe Sportivo, an espresso shop and small gym in Redwood City, Calif., are barely scraping by.

via AP INVESTIGATION: Main Street’s soaring sour loans – Yahoo! News.

Does a Fellowship ‘Cult’ Own Rep. Todd Tiahrt?

Does a Fellowship ‘Cult’ Own Rep. Todd Tiahrt?

Yesterday evening I had the chance to interview Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family about Kansas politicians: Congressman Todd Tiahrt, Senator Sam Brownback, and Rep. Jerry Moran and their connections to C Street. He had some tough words for Rep. Tiahrt whom he outed as a member of the religious cult on The Rachel Maddow show earlier this week.

Jeff Sharlet is a journalist who has been writing about religion for about 15 years and is a contributing editor for Harper’s and Rolling Stone. He spent the last 5 years as a research scholar at the New York Research Center for Religion and Media.

In our interview, I asked Jeff about how he was able to uncover this secret conservative cult. Jeff was invited into the cult as everyone else is. Though he did not personally live in the C Street house, he did stay at one very similar and visited the C Street house. He was able to share information with me about the organization that goes much farther than one house in Washington…

via Does a Fellowship ‘Cult’ Own Rep. Todd Tiahrt? (Everyday Citizen).

Global Ocean Surface Temperature Warmest On Record For June

Global Ocean Surface Temperature Warmest On Record For June

ScienceDaily — The world’s ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for June, breaking the previous high mark set in 2005, according to a preliminary analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Additionally, the combined average global land and ocean surface temperature for June was second-warmest on record. The global records began in 1880.

Global Climate Statistics

• The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for June 2009 was the second warmest on record, behind 2005, 1.12 degrees F (0.62 degree C) above the 20th century average of 59.9 degrees F (15.5 degrees C).
• Separately, the global ocean surface temperature for June 2009 was the warmest on record, 1.06 degrees F (0.59 degree C) above the 20th century average of 61.5 degrees F (16.4 degrees C).
• Each hemisphere broke its June record for warmest ocean surface temperature. In the Northern Hemisphere, the warm anomaly of 1.17 degrees F (0.65 degree C) surpassed the previous record of 1.12 degrees F (0.62 degree C), set in 2005. The Southern Hemisphere’s increase of 0.99 degree F (0.55 degree C) exceeded the old record of 0.92 degree F (0.51 degree C), set in 1998.
• The global land surface temperature for June 2009 was 1.26 degrees F (0.70 degree C) above the 20th century average of 55.9 degrees F (13.3 degrees C), and ranked as the sixth-warmest June on record.

via Global Ocean Surface Temperature Warmest On Record For June.

In this Republican dystopia, Obama’s not even a citizen

Obstructionist, always. But now Republicans are barmy   | | The Guardian

Beyond shutting off all of Obama’s initiatives, the party harbours deniers of everything from climate change to his citizenship

Last Friday, Orrin Hatch, the veteran Republican senator from Utah, announced that he would vote against the confirmation to our supreme court of judge Sonia Sotomayor. Hatch is a devout conservative, and Sotomayor seems pretty liberal, so on the face of it, you might say, so what? Here’s what.

Hatch has been in the Senate for 32 years and has never voted against any president’s high court nominee. True, most of the nominations in that time have been made by Republican presidents. But even so, Hatch’s history means he has voted for two nominees who were obviously liberal, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Sotomayor’s record does not mark her out as appreciably to their left, and in terms of years of service on the bench, she towers over them. So what’s changed?

Hatch’s decision reflects the degree to which, during the Obama era, American conservatism – already fiercely ideological and obstructionist, operating according to sets of “facts” produced and paid for by oil companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and other corporate interests – has contrived to go completely barmy.

via In this Republican dystopia, Obama’s not even a citizen | Michael Tomasky | Comment is free | The Guardian.

The Great Tax Con Job

The Great Tax Con Job

Thom Hartmann 

Republicans are using the T-word – taxes – to attack the Obama healthcare program. It’s a strategy based in a lie.

A very small niche of America’s uber-wealthy have pulled off what may well be the biggest con job in the history of our republic, and they did it in a startlingly brief 30 or so years. True, they spent over three billion dollars to make it happen, but the reward to them was in the hundreds of billions – and will continue to be.

As my friend and colleague Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks pointed out in a Daily Kosblog recently, billionaire Rupert Murdoch loses $50 million a year on the NY Post, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife loses $2 to $3 million a year on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, billionaire Philip Anschutz loses around $5 million a year on The Weekly Standard, and billionaire Sun Myung Moon has lost $2 to $3 billion on The Washington Times.

Why are these guys willing to lose so much money funding “conservative” media? Why do they bulk-buy every right-wing book that comes out to throw it to the top of the NY Times Bestseller list and then give away the copies to “subscribers” to their websites and publications? Why do they fund to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year money-hole “think tanks” like Heritage and Cato?

via The Great Tax Con Job | Thom Hartmann.

Lawmakers Against Health Reform Receive 65% More In Industry Donations Than Those Voting For Reform

Analysis: Lawmakers Against Health Reform Receive 65% More In Industry Donations Than Those Voting For Reform - On The Hill

A new analysis of campaign contributions to members of key congressional committees handling health reform legislation found that members of three committees who voted against reform have received significantly more in campaign contributions from the health and insurance industries than those who voted for reform.

In addition, the legislation appears to have been slowed in two final committees whose members received much more from the health and insurance industries than their colleagues on the three committees that have passed legislation, the study reports.

“These numbers tell a story that Americans already know to be true: committee members who voted in the interests of the health and insurance industries have received more money, on average, than those who didn’t,” says David Donnelly, national campaigns director of Public Campaign Action Fund (PCAF), the organization that conducted the study.

via On The Hill: Analysis: Lawmakers Against Health Reform Receive 65% More In Industry Donations Than Those Voting For Reform.

As Trees Fall in the Amazon, Fears That Tribes Won’t Be Heard

An Amazon Culture Withers as Food Dries Up   - NYTimes.com

XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — As the naked, painted young men of the Kamayurá tribe prepare for the ritualized war games of a festival, they end their haunting fireside chant with a blowing sound — “whoosh, whoosh” — a symbolic attempt to eliminate the scent of fish so they will not be detected by enemies. For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe’s primary source of protein.

But fish smells are not a problem for the warriors anymore. Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.

via As Trees Fall in the Amazon, Fears That Tribes Won’t Be Heard – NYTimes.com.

Quick, quiet genetic corn approval questioned

Quick, quiet genetic corn approval questioned

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has quietly approved a new genetically engineered corn with eight different insect- and weed-fighting traits, but farmer and environmental groups in Canada say the approval was rushed and environmental risks ignored.

Developed through a research agreement between Monsanto and Dow AgroSciences, SmartStax corn is unique in that it “stacks” eight different genetically engineered traits that will allow corn to tolerate certain weed- and insect-killing products made by the two companies.

Each of the eight traits has been individually approved by the CFIA, but opponents are concerned there might be unintended consequences when the traits are combined.

“You’d think that a combination of eight GE traits would trigger an environmental assessment, but the CFIA has (provided) no public record of their evaluation,” said Lucy Sharratt, co-ordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network.

The CFIA has also conditionally authorized for SmartStax a reduction in the size of the buffer zone, or “refuge,” normally required around genetically engineered corn

via Quick, quiet genetic corn approval questioned.

Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks

Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks  -| CommonDreams.org|

by Thom Hartmann

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that “Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the US… Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total US pay in 2007, the latest figures available.”

One of the questions often asked when the subject of CEO pay comes up is, “What could a person such as William McGuire or Lee Raymond (the former CEOs of UnitedHealth and ExxonMobil, respectively) possibly do to justify a $1.7 billion paycheck or a $400 million retirement bonus?”

It’s an interesting question. If there is a “free market” of labor for CEOs, then you’d think there would be a lot of competition for the jobs. And a lot of people competing for the positions would drive down the pay. All UnitedHealth’s stockholders would have to do to avoid paying more than $1 billion to McGuire is find somebody to do the same CEO job for half a billion. And all they’d have to do to save even more is find somebody to do the job for a mere $100 million. Or maybe even somebody who’d work the necessary sixty-hour weeks for only $1 million.

So why is executive pay so high?

via Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks | CommonDreams.org.

Forget high crimes, felony, even treason… we are in a whole new category of criminality …

Forget high crimes, felony, even treason… we are in a whole new category of criminality …

…what word can be used to describe a crime in which the entire planet is put at risk, the entire human race is endangered?

The Bush-Cheney gang has committed many a crime. Of this there is no doubt and no question. In some cases, their crimes have been seen by many as nothing short of treason. Making money off a fabricated war in which Americans have been killed, for example, would qualify. Outing a CIA officer, in yet another example, would qualify. There are many crimes, much evidence, and little justice, of this we are all aware. The word treason certainly applies to some of these crimes.

But what word can be used to describe a crime in which the entire planet is put at risk, the entire human race is endangered? What do you call a group of people who are so corrupt that they are willing to risk the entire planet and everything on it for short-term profit? Read the below and tell me what to call this level of criminality:

“Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months.

The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanise Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

via at-Largely: Forget high crimes, felony, even treason… we are in a whole new category of criminality ….

Democratic Senator Fact Sheet

OPS: Here is an excellent resource web site for checking up on Why the Democrats are voting the way they are ON THE PUBLIC OPTION

Progressive Change Campaign Committee PAC (www.boldprogressives.org) and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

WeWantThePublicOption.Com! – Democratic Senator Fact Sheet.

The Solution

The Solution

The administration now says it underestimated the severity of the economic downturn. But the truth is it overestimated the effect of stimulation.

Sen. Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings, with video by Craig Harrington

Editor’s Note: The following article was contributed by Former Senator Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings, author of Making Government Work.

The administration now says it underestimated the severity of the economic downturn. But the truth is it overestimated the effect of stimulation. In the Bush eight-year term, we increased the debt or stimulated the economy $5 trillion. In the same period, household debt increased or stimulated the economy an additional $7 trillion, for a total of $12 trillion stimulation in eight years. This year’s deficit has already added another $1.5 trillion additional stimulus and we are still losing jobs like gangbusters. Stimulation has spent its effect.

Now we must turn to globalization and the loss of jobs from offshoring. Globalization is nothing more than a trade war for market share with production looking for a country cheaper to produce. Japan started this trade war for market share after World War II by closing its market, subsidizing its production, and selling its export near cost, making up the profit in the closed market. It worked. Toyota is No. 1 while GM declares bankruptcy. Now China has the supermodel of a closed market, controlled labor, and protectionism for its production and trade as the United States blindly cries “protectionism” and remains AWOL in this trade war. Two years ago, the Princeton economist, Alan Blinder, estimated that the country is losing three to four million jobs a year to offshoring. The principal problem with the economy is that it is being offshored. The United States must come in from the cold and engage in the trade war. Fortunately, we can do this by solving the problems now facing Washington.

The Democrats’ problem is to pay for health care. The Republicans’ problem is to cut taxes and stop deficit spending. Replacing the corporate tax with a 5% VAT will cut taxes, pay for health care, and stop deficit spending.

via Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.

Boehner Claims He Doesn’t Know Doctors Who Support House Health Bill, Trashes AMA For Endorsing It

Boehner Claims He Doesn’t Know Doctors Who Support House Health Bill, Trashes AMA For Endorsing It  -  Wonk Room »

Yesterday, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) denied that doctors supported the health care bill now moving through the House and attacked the American Medical Association for endorsing the legislation:

REPORTER: What is your reaction to the AMA’s endorsement of Obama’s plan?

BOEHNER: I have yet to talk to a doctor who is supporting the plan that is moving through the House. And for the American Medical Association to come out in support of this plan, even though I would think a great majority of their doctors are opposed to it, strikes me as inconsistent at best.

Watch it:

via Wonk Room » Boehner Claims He Doesn’t Know Doctors Who Support House Health Bill, Trashes AMA For Endorsing It.

House Republicans Confused About Their Health Care Alternative

House Republicans Confused About Their Health Care Alternative Wonk Room »

As Republicans work to derail the President’s health care reform effort, they seem uncertain about their own health care agenda. After agreeing to “develop real solutions to improve our health care system” in February, pledging to “lead the effort to make health care work for Americans” in March, insisting that “no report or headline can take the place of a comprehensive plan” in June, and arguing that the Republican plan is “actually much more detailed than their [Democratic] plan has been” in July, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), chair of the GOP Health Care Solutions Group, is unsure if Republicans want to fix health care through legislation.

Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Richard Burr (R-SC) introduced the Patients’ Choice Act during HELP Committee mark-up, but House Republicans have yet to rally behind a single alternative or offer any substantive details or legislative language. On Wednesday, Blunt said, “Our bill is never going to get to the floor, so why confuse the focus? We clearly have principles; we could have language, but why start diverting attention from this really bad piece of work they’ve got to whatever we’re offering right now?”

via Wonk Room » House Republicans Confused About Their Health Care Alternative.

Report: Legal Needs Of The Poor Unmet Over 80% Of The Time

Report: Legal Needs Of The Poor Unmet Over 80% Of The Time

law-booksThe law does not enforce itself. Americans entitled to health care or Social Security benefits depend on hearings and lawsuits to ensure that wrongfully denied benefits are paid. Tenants who are abused by their landlords rely on courts to keep those landlords in line. Corporations have no incentive to comply with laws protecting consumers unless they can be sued into compliance (which is exactly why they fight so hard to immunize themself from lawsuits. )

Moreover, as the Supreme Court recognized more than 75 years ago, “[e]ven the intelligent and educated layman has small and sometimes no skill in the science of law,” so such laymen cannot stand up for their own rights without a lawyer in their corner. According to a report by the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), however, “less than 20 percent of the legal needs of low-income Americans” are currently being met. A void which effectively creates a law-free zone around millions of Americans.

via Wonk Room » Report: Legal Needs Of The Poor Unmet Over 80% Of The Time.

The Biggest Supreme Court Case You’ve Never Heard Of

The Biggest Supreme Court Case You’ve Never Heard Of

The judiciary has long been the go-to branch for corporations who don’t think they should have to follow the same laws as everyone else. How else could health insurers achieve near total immunity from the law? How else could employers strip women of their abilty to fight back against pay discrimination, and how else could the corporate sector create a biased system of corporate-owned courts that are virtually guarenteed to rule against consumers and employees? No lawmaker could expect to remain in office if they endorsed such policies, but the Supreme Court, apparently, is shameless.

One big reason that the Court can give corporations such massive giveaways is because their work is buried in complex doctrines and legalese. Voters would rebel against a bill which gave medical device makers total immunity from the law when their defective products kill someone, but when Justice Scalia writes that “the pre-emption clause enacted in the Medical Device Amendments of 1976, bars common-law claims challenging the safety and effectiveness of a medical device given premarket approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA),” most Americans don’t realize that he’s given the medical device immunity exactly the same immunity.

The mother of all the Supreme Court’s corporate-immunity-through-obfuscation cases may be this year’s decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal. Traditionally, the justices were very reluctant to kick people out of Court before they have the opportunity to at least gather evidence. Thanks to Iqbal, however, plaintiffs now must jump through a new, potentially insurmountable hoop before they can even seek evidence from their opponent. As the New York Times explains:

via Wonk Room » The Biggest Supreme Court Case You’ve Never Heard Of.

DNC Strikes Back with Health Care Ads

YouTube – DNC Strikes Back with Health Care Ads.

Methland: The Drug Epidemic That Ravaged the Midwest

Methland: The Drug Epidemic That Ravaged the Midwest

By Charles Homans, Washington Monthly.

The meth epidemic tearing apart America’s small towns is in many ways a product of the global economy.

In an early scene in Nick Reding’s Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, a former meatpacker turned small-time methamphetamine cook in Oelwein, Iowa, named Roland Jarvis, inspired by a paranoid hallucination involving black helicopters, pours the hazardous chemicals comprising his home meth lab down the drain and then lights a cigarette, inadvertently blowing up his house and melting off most of his face. When the local police sergeant — a high school classmate of Jarvis’s — arrives on the scene, Jarvis begs him to shoot him. No one — the cops, the paramedics, Jarvis himself — quite knows what to do. None of them has really been here before.

This, in a nutshell, is what scared Americans about methamphetamine when it began to seep into the periphery of the national consciousness, building into a full-blown panic by the mid-2000s. The drug itself, a powerful stimulant, is unpleasant enough, but as Reding observes, “[i]n truth, all drug epidemics are only in part about the drugs.” What allowed meth to capture the public imagination so fully was the way in which it attacked the stories that Americans told themselves about the primordial decency of the heartland. Aside from its ease of manufacture — you can make meth out of readily available industrial and pharmaceutical products, enabling a twenty-first-century variant on the moonshiners of earlier generations such as Jarvis — the drug’s most novel aspect was its clientele: the same predominantly white small-town residents who had watched the urban depredations of crack cocaine from afar and told themselves that they weren’t that kind of people. “We’re in Iowa, for God’s sake,” a former Oelwein high school principal, explaining his decision to request police patrols of his school, tells Reding. “We don’t do that.” In mainstream America’s Rockwellian imagination, police officers in towns like Oelwein were supposed to be stopping high school kids from making out in cars on prom night. In the meth age they suddenly needed bulletproof vests and hazmat training.

via Methland: The Drug Epidemic That Ravaged the Midwest | DrugReporter | AlterNet.

Bush Era Horrors Will Haunt Us Until We Truly Face Them

We can’t just “move forward.” We need to face who we’ve been and just how badly we’ve acted, if we care to become something better.

An American Hell

Don’t Turn the Page on History – Facing the American World We Created

By Tom Engelhardt

We’ve just passed through the CIA assassination flap, already fading from the news after less than two weeks of media attention. Broken in several major newspapers, here’s how the story goes: the Agency, evidently under Vice President Dick Cheney’s orders, didn’t inform Congress that, to assassinate al-Qaeda leaders, it was trying to develop and deploy global death squads. (Of course, just about no one is going to call them that, but the description fits.) Congress is now in high dudgeon. The CIA didn’t keep that body’s “Gang of Eight” informed. A House investigation is now underway.

We’re told that the CIA — being the president’s private army and part of the executive branch of our government — has committed a heinous dereliction of duty. In fact, not keeping key congressional figures up to date on the developing program could even “be illegal,” according to Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin. (Not that Congress, when informed of Bush administration extreme acts, ever did much of anything anyway.)

via TomDispatch.

Will Obama sell out to the healthcare industry?

OPS: If we remember the Coup ‘attempt’ against FDR and the Story of Smedley Butler we understand that Moyers is dead on. The Reich will stop at NOTHING.

Will Obama sell out to the healthcare industry?    | Salon

If all the big industry players get what they want, the country won’t get the reform it needs

Dangerous Alliance of Health Industry and Right-Wingers Will Stop at Nothing to Derail Progressive Reforms

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Push finally came to shove in Washington this week as the battle for healthcare escalated from scattered sniper fire into all-out combat. If it all seems to be getting more and more confusing, join the club. It’s hard to see what’s happening through all the gun smoke.

The Republicans have more than healthcare reform in their bombsights — they want a loss for Obama so crushing it will bring the administration to its knees and restore GOP control of Congress after next year’s elections. In the words of Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

The “Waterloo” of DeMint’s metaphor, of course, is not the 1974 ABBA hit but the battle in 1815 that ended Napoleon Bonaparte’s rule as emperor of France — a humiliating defeat and a turning point in European history. Right-wingers like Glenn Beck see Obama as Napoleon incarnate, a popular emperor who must be stopped.

via Will Obama sell out to the healthcare industry? | Salon.

The feds should fund abortion

The feds should fund abortion    | Salon

Signs point to a healthcare plan that would continue to deny federal money for abortions. That would be a mistake

It was Oct. 3, 1977, when the first reported death from the cutoff of federal funds for abortion known as the Hyde Amendment occurred. Rosie Jimenez, a single mother and college student in the border town of McAllen, Texas, had sought an abortion from her gynecologist. The gynecologist turned her down because Medicaid would no longer pay for abortions. Rosie went to an unlicensed midwife instead, who for $120 inserted a catheter in her uterus and sent her home.

Fever, nausea, cramps and bleeding resulted and 12 hours later Rosie was admitted to the hospital in septic shock. She denied having an abortion, but the evidence was clear. Seven days later she died — bleeding from every orifice in her body and green from gas gangrene, according to her friends.

I thought about Rosie as I read a letter sent in late June to Speaker Nancy Pelosi by 19 “pro-life” House Democrats affiliated with the organization Democrats for Life in America. Led by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., the representatives laid down the first major antiabortion challenge to healthcare reform, saying that “Plans to mandate coverage for abortions, either directly or indirectly, are unacceptable.” They warned Pelosi “we cannot support any healthcare reform proposal unless it explicitly excludes abortion from the scope of any government-defined or subsidized health insurance plan.”

via The feds should fund abortion | Salon.

Homeland Security Inspector General Report Echoes ProPublica Investigation

Homeland Security Inspector General Report Echoes ProPublica Investigation

By Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica

The Federal Emergency Management Agency failed to speedily react to a public health threat posed by formaldehyde-contaminated trailers it provided to Hurricane Katrina victims, according to a report (PDF) released Thursday night by the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security.

The report bolsters the findings of a ProPublica investigation published last year, which found that FEMA misused a flawed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study to suppress public concerns about the formaldehyde problem.

Our investigation found that CDC officials who studied formaldehyde levels in the trailers used the wrong safety standard to determine exactly how harmful the fumes were.

Formaldehyde is considered a probable carcinogen by the CDC and can increase the risk of asthma attacks and other respiratory problems in people who inhale it.

via On The Hill: Homeland Security Inspector General Report Echoes ProPublica Investigation.

For Some Pilots, Home Is An LAX Parking Lot

For Some Pilots, Home Is An LAX Parking Lot  – NPR 

Lot B at LAX: Not exactly Los Angeles’ toniest address.

Every few minutes, another plane lands or takes off on the runway just a few yards away. The noise is deafening.

But this is the place a few dozen commercial pilots, flight attendants and ground crew members call home.

The Tremor Of Planes

“Oh, the airplanes? I guess there’s airplanes around here,” jokes Dave Hunt, a pilot for one of the big airlines.

He doesn’t seem to mind the constant noise.

Neither does his neighbor, Pete Hopkins, who handles air freight for one of the big air fleets. They live in RVs outfitted with kitchens, bathrooms and small bedrooms, powered by generators and solar batteries.

When the planes touch down, you can feel the ground shaking, like an earthquake. Hunt and Hopkins are unfazed.

via For Some Pilots, Home Is An LAX Parking Lot : NPR.

How much does the Average American Make? Breaking Down the U.S. Household Income Numbers.

OPS:  It’s time to roll back the Reagan Tax cuts

How much does the Average American Make?

Breaking Down the U.S. Household Income Numbers.

How much does the typical American family make?  This question is probably one of the most central in figuring out how we can go about fixing our current economic malaise.  After all, we don’t hear many people saying in today’s world that they have too much money.

The median household income in the United States is $46,326.  Here in California people have a hard time understanding that yes, 50 percent of our population live on $46,000 or less a year.  Even today, all the elixirs and remedies being thrown around fail to focus on income and the big brother of income, solid employment.  Dual earner households have a higher median income at $67,348.

To highlight the massive discrepancy I’ve put together a chart showing the household income distribution:

via How much does the Average American Make? Breaking Down the U.S. Household Income Numbers..

The big lie of Afghanistan

The big lie of Afghanistan -  | The Guardian

My country hasn’t been liberated: it’s still under the warlords’ control, and Nato occupation only reinforces their power

In 2005, I was the youngest person elected to the new Afghan parliament. Women like me, running for office, were held up as an example of how the war in Afghanistan had liberated women. But this democracy was a facade, and the so-called liberation a big lie.

On behalf of the long-suffering people of my country, I offer my heartfelt condolences to all in the UK who have lost their loved ones on the soil of Afghanistan. We share the grief of the mothers, fathers, wives, sons and daughters of the fallen. It is my view that these British casualties, like the many thousands of Afghan civilian dead, are victims of the unjust policies that the Nato countries have pursued under the leadership of the US government.

Almost eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed by the continued domination of fundamentalists and by a brutal occupation that ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.

via The big lie of Afghanistan | Malalai Joya | Comment is free | The Guardian.

BEA : Personal Saving Rate

BEA : Personal Saving Rate.

U.S. Treasury and Fed Determined to Destroy Dollar and Force Savers to Spend: Investing in a Government Hoping for a U.S. Dollar Collapse.

U.S. Treasury and Fed Determined to Destroy Dollar and Force Savers to Spend: Investing in a Government Hoping for a U.S. Dollar Collapse.

Tuesday’s action by the Federal Reserve has placed us into the history books.  The Fed cut the federal funds rate to an unprecedented 0.25% and gave a rather firm statement that they are prepared to keep the rate at this low level as long as the markets deem it necessary.  When asked why they didn’t cut rates down to 0 a Fed official replied that it would help the credit markets run more smoothly.  The markets don’t believe that.  In fact, the markets have been trading near the zero percent mark for some time now.

As the market volatility has increased causing 2008 to be one of the most volatile years on record, we are seeing some historical action occur.  First, let us look at 3 key economic indicators:

via U.S. Treasury and Fed Determined to Destroy Dollar and Force Savers to Spend: Investing in a Government Hoping for a U.S. Dollar Collapse..

Despite Pledge to Cut Military Ties to Coup Regime, US Continues to Train Honduran Soldiers at School of Americas

Despite Pledge to Cut Military Ties to Coup Regime, US Continues to Train Honduran Soldiers at School of Americas

By Amy Goodman interviews Linda Cooper, James Hodge and Nikolas Kozloff

While the European Union cut off aid to the coup regime in Honduras, the United States continues the money flow, and while the US says it has cut military ties, the National Catholic Reporter reveals Honduran army officers are still receiving military training at the notorious School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Honduras, where the coup regime is defying growing international pressure to restore ousted President Manuel Zelaya. On Monday, the European Union announced the suspension of over $92 million in aid. The move came one day after the regime rejected a proposal for Zelaya’s return but with new limits on his authority and under a power-sharing government. Presidential elections would also have been moved up to October. Zelaya accepted the entire plan, which was proposed by mediator Oscar Arias, the Costa Rican president, but the de facto coup government said it won’t accept Zelaya’s reinstatement under any condition. After the talks broke down, Arias warned Honduras is on the brink of “civil war and bloodshed.”

Zelaya has vowed to return with or without an agreement. In Honduras, his supporters continue daily protests, leading up to a two-day national strike set to begin Thursday. On Monday, hundreds marched near the Honduran Congress.

via Despite Pledge to Cut Military Ties to Coup Regime, US Continues to Train Honduran Soldiers at School of Americas | Honduras |Axisoflogic.com.

An Incoherent Truth

An Incoherent Truth  - NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman

Right now the fate of health care reform seems to rest in the hands of relatively conservative Democrats — mainly members of the Blue Dog Coalition, created in 1995. And you might be tempted to say that President Obama needs to give those Democrats what they want.

To grasp the problem, you need to understand the outline of the proposed reform (all of the Democratic plans on the table agree on the essentials.)

Reform, if it happens, will rest on four main pillars: regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition.

By regulation I mean the nationwide imposition of rules that would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage based on your medical history, or dropping your coverage when you get sick. This would stop insurers from gaming the system by covering only healthy people.

via Op-Ed Columnist – An Incoherent Truth – NYTimes.com.

Whistleblower tells of America’s hidden nightmare for its sick poor

Whistleblower tells of America’s hidden nightmare for its sick poor -  The Observer

When an insurance firm boss saw a field hospital for the poor in Virginia, he knew he had to speak out. Here, he tells Paul Harris of his fears for Obama’s bid to bring about radical change

Wendell Potter can remember exactly when he took the first steps on his journey to becoming a whistleblower and turning against one of the most powerful industries in America.

It was July 2007 and Potter, a senior executive at giant US healthcare firm Cigna, was visiting relatives in the poverty-ridden mountain districts of northeast Tennessee. He saw an advert in a local paper for a touring free medical clinic at a fairground just across the state border in Wise County, Virginia.

Potter, who had worked at Cigna for 15 years, decided to check it out. What he saw appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most without any medical insurance, descended on the clinic from out of the hills. People queued in long lines to have the most basic medical procedures carried out free of charge. Some had driven more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were treated in the open air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on trolleys on rain-soaked pavements.

via Whistleblower tells of America’s hidden nightmare for its sick poor | World news | The Observer.

Ted Kennedy is making a final press for universal healthcare, from his sickbed

Ted Kennedy is making a final press for universal healthcare, from his sickbed  – - Los Angeles Times

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) listens carefully during the closing session of the White House’s forum on health care reform in the East Room of the White House March 5, in Washington, DC.

As Congress wrestles with legislation to give Americans access to quality care, which the Democrat worked toward for 46 years, the senator is sidelined with brain cancer, but not out of the game.

Reporting from Washington — Ted Kennedy wakes up mornings in his house on Cape Cod to a packet of news clippings put together by his wife. If there’s a hearing going on in Washington, he watches on his computer.

Five hundred miles away, Congress is wrestling with historic legislation to give every American access to quality healthcare. It is the moment the Massachusetts Democrat has worked toward for 46 years. But instead of marshaling the crowning achievement of his political career, he is sidelined, battling brain cancer.

via Ted Kennedy is making a final press for universal healthcare, from his sickbed – Los Angeles Times.

Ha’aretz has the only sober view of the US/Israel relationship

Foreign policy: Ha’aretz has the only sober view of the US/Israel relationship

But Netanyahu has larger problems than Kadima. It may be fine to play  macho to his home audience, but he stands to hurt not only himself, but Israel with this kind of posturing. And finally, Ha’aretz, the country’s oldest newspaper, has penned an extremely sober and honest look at the possible consequences of ignoring repeated calls from the American President to

via Foreign policy: Ha’aretz has the only sober view of the US/Israel relationship.

Supernova Waves Rolled Over Mammoths

Supernova Waves Rolled Over Mammoths

A distant supernova that exploded 41,000 years ago may have led to the extinction of the mammoth, according to research that will be presented by nuclear scientist Richard Firestone of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Firestone, who conducted this research with Arizona geologist Allen West, will unveil this theory at the 2nd International Conference “The World of Elephants” in Hot Springs, SD. Their theory joins the list of possible culprits responsible for the demise of mammoths, which last roamed North America roughly 13,000 years ago. Scientists have long eyed climate change, disease, or intensive hunting by humans as likely suspects.

Now, a supernova may join the lineup. Firestone and West believe that debris from a supernova explosion coalesced into low-density, comet-like objects that wreaked havoc on the solar system long ago. One such comet may have hit North America 13,000 years ago, unleashing a cataclysmic event that killed off the vast majority of mammoths and many other large North American mammals. They found evidence of this impact layer at several archaeological sites throughout North America where Clovis hunting artifacts and human-butchered mammoths have been unearthed. It has long been established that human activity ceased at these sites about 13,000 years ago, which is roughly the same time that mammoths disappeared.

via Supernova Waves Rolled Over Mammoths.

Rep. Jerry Moran Tied to C Street Cult

Rep. Jerry Moran Tied to C Street Cult

Earlier this week we told you about the connection with Kansas Senator Sam Brownback and Rep. Todd Tiahrt to the conservative cult The Fellowship on C Street. And Colin has a great piece today about the article in the KC Star where Tiahrt tried to walk back his relationship with them

Well… now McClatchy has another addition to that list. Rep. Jerry Moran from the Kansas First District and candidate for US Senate is now an open resident of C Street.

I once thought of Moran as the lesser of the two evils in the Kansas Senate Race, but to now know that Moran is aligned with this secret society and “church” cult on Washington DC Capitol Hill

via Rep. Jerry Moran Tied to C Street Cult (Everyday Citizen).

Why nuclear energy is not the answer to Climate Change

Why nuclear energy is not the answer to Climate Change

t’s funny. People really believe that nuclear power is emissions free. Powering cities with nuclear, they propound, is the panacea to climate change. And yet, if you really take a look at the fuel cycle, it is obvious nuclear energy is, in fact, emissions intensive.

First off the ore needs to be mined. This involves drilling, explosions, heavy equipment. Even at the EPA standard of 15 grams of carbon per break horsepower engine hour, this translates to a lot of carbon. Then the ore needs to be shipped to a processing facility, or mill.

Here, twenty-four hours a day, heavy equipment loads the ore into a hopper, the intake into the semi-autogenous grinding mill. This grinding mill uses electricity (coal) to turn an enormous steel drum filled with metal tumbling balls. Additionally, tons – yes tons – of concentrated sulfuric acid are needed to help leach the uranium from the ore, among quantities of other highly caustic chemicals, all of which must be prepared on industrial scales and shipped to the facility.

After a number of other mechanical operations, all of them energy intensive, the ore must be dried in an oven, where, twenty-four hours a day, countless kilo-watt hours are burned heating the rock to temperature.

via Why nuclear energy is not the answer to Climate Change.

Exiled Honduras president camps out on border

Exiled Honduras president camps out on border  – - euronews

The following article has been retrieved from the archive and no longer contains the original video.

Day two of the stand-off on the Honduras border. Deposed president, Manuel Zelaya told supporters he would set up camp on the Nicaraguan side, to put pressure on the coup leaders who threw him out of his own country last month.

He also complained that his wife and family were still in Honduras and were prevented from travelling by the government which replaced him.

Tensions are mounting in the Central American country as divisions widen between Zelaya’s supporters – mainly Hondura’s poor – and the interim administration.

So far there has been little violence but the body of a young man was found in El Paraiso close to where the military broke up protests on Friday.

via Exiled Honduras president camps out on border – Politics : news, world | euronews.

Pre-Existing Condition: Healthcare Reform Hits a Wall

Pre-Existing Condition: Healthcare Reform Hits a Wall  -  Pensito Review »

Not again.

The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein has it exactly right about health care. We can’t let things keep going as they are.

Among the range of options for health-care reform, there’s one that is sure to raise your taxes, increase your out-of-pocket medical expenses, swell the federal deficit, leave more Americans without insurance and guarantee that wages will remain stagnant.

That’s the option of doing nothing, letting things continue to drift as they have for the past two decades as we continue to search in vain for the perfect plan that would let everyone have everything they want and preserve everything they already have while getting someone else to pay for it.

So the next time you hear someone throwing a hissy fit because health reform might raise taxes on some people, or steer people into managed care, or require small businesses to contribute $2 a day for each employee’s coverage, just remember to ask yourself: And that’s compared with what?

via Pensito Review » Pre-Existing Condition: Healthcare Reform Hits a Wall.

Conyers calls for criminal investigation into Bush administration

OPS:  He ‘calls for’ a lot of things.  How effective has any of it been?

Conyers calls for criminal investigation into Bush administration

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee has called for both a criminal investigation and a blue-ribbon panel to look into “Bush administration abuses of power and misconduct.”

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) told the National Press Club Friday that both avenues should be pursued because a criminal investigation would be done in private, while a blue-ribbon “9/11-type” panel would work publicly and would create a public record of the Bush administration’s actions.

Conyers also slammed former Bush administration officials who are refusing to testify before the judiciary committee. He rejected the notion that “executive privilege” prevents Bush White House officials from answering questions before Congressional committees.

“Wait a minute,” he said, “you don’t know what questions we’re going to ask.”

via The Raw Story » Conyers calls for criminal investigation into Bush administration.

Quote

“If conservatives get to call universal health care
“socialized medicine”…
I get to call private, for profit health care,
soulless vampire bastards,
making money off of human pain.”

- Bill Maher 7.24.09

Smedley Butler Stopped American Fascist Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR

Note: The initial post is good – but there are many comments on this post that contain additional excellent information.

OPS:  Know who was involved?  Prescott Bush, Goodyear,  Heinz, DuPont, Birds’ Eye, Maxwell House,  J.P. Morgan, Bethlehem Steel, Fortune Magazine…..  The Fascists are among us.

Smedley Butler Stopped American Fascist Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR

Their aim was to put an end to “Socialist New Deal.”

United States Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler exposed their conspiracy.
The treason was chronicled by the great Dave Emory in this interview with author Jules Archer.
For more, the BBC’s “Document” program did an excellent report.

Gen. Butler’s good work is seldom mentioned in high school history –
which is about the extent of most American citizen’s knowledge of their nation’s past.

You almost never read that Butler received two Medals of Honor for his gallantry during war, which he called a “racket.”

Oh well, DU. It’s just another fascist conspiracy at play.

The Plot to Sieze the White House by Jules Archer

Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940) blew the whistle on the little- known plot of the title. He was on public television the fall of 1993 in “The Road to Rock Bottom”–Part 2 of The Great Depression series (Blackside production). Near the end it shows Butler in shirtsleeves, urging on 10,000 of the war veterans who had marched to Washington and camped in Anacostia DC. It was July 1932. The Bonus Army asked for early payment of moneys promised for 1945. “Some were the same men who had fought under Smedley Butler in the Spanish-American War, the Philippines campaign, the Boxer Rebellion, …Caribbean interventions, the Chinese intervention of 1927-8, and World War I” (p 3).

via Smedley Butler Stopped American Fascist Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR – Democratic Underground.

NYT “Blows Cover Off Trading Scam.” Schumer Flips On Wall St.

NYT “Blows Cover Off Trading Scam.” Schumer Flips On Wall St.

Finally!

It’s been just over three weeks since the July 3rd arrest of former Goldman Sachs IT executive Sergey Aleynikov inadvertently blew the lid off the intricacies of exactly how those great vampire squids on Wall Street manage (no past tense here) to suck Main Street dry.

(Actually, come to think of it, that didn’t take long at all.)

The high frequency trading (“HFT”) scam on Wall Street is being exposed to the masses as we blog.

And, at least to some degree, it is because we blogged and it is because we took the time to spell out the details of this story in obscure trade magazines, and not-so-obscure larger media outlets, that this is happening now.

The NY Times’ Tobin Harshaw provides what may be the very best–and pretty damn even-handed, too–roundup of current commentary on the matter in today’s NY Times: “Weekend Opinionator: ‘Is Wall Street Picking Our Pockets?’.”

Referencing and then quoting stock market guru Karl Denninger, Harshaw first refers to yesterday’s major milestone of a piece in the NY Times, by Carl Duhigg: “Traders Profit With Computers Set at High Speed.”

Then Harshaw paraphrases Denninger:

via Daily Kos: NYT “Blows Cover Off Trading Scam.” Schumer Flips On Wall St..

BILL MAHER NEW RULES Jul 24, 2009 – Health Care

“If conservatives get to call universal health care “socialized medicine”… I get to call private, for profit health care, soulless vampire bastards, making money off of human pain.”

YouTube – BILL MAHER NEW RULES Jul 24, 2009 10 52 PM.

Obama Presses For Health Care Overhaul, Citing Benefits For Small Businesses (VIDEO)

Obama Presses For Health Care Overhaul, Citing Benefits For Small Businesses (VIDEO)

President Barack Obama, citing a new White House study suggesting that small businesses pay far more per employee for health insurance than big companies, said Saturday the disparity is “unsustainable  it’s unacceptable.”

“And it’s going to change when I sign health insurance reform into law,” the president said in his weekly Internet and radio address.

A new study by the White House Council of Economic Advisers said small businesses pay up to 18 percent more to provide health insurance for their employees. As a result, fewer of them do so and the number has been shrinking further in these hard economic times.

It was released Saturday as part of the administration’s aggressive campaign to build public and congressional support for Obama’s health care efforts.

via Obama Presses For Health Care Overhaul, Citing Benefits For Small Businesses (VIDEO).

US stops giving militant death tolls in Afghanistan

OPS:  Oh that’ll help

US stops giving militant death tolls in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON — The US military in Afghanistan has stopped releasing figures showing how many militants have been killed in fighting with US-led forces, officials said Friday.

“Indicating the number of insurgents killed has little relevance to impacting the lives of Afghans,” Rear Admiral Gregory Smith said in an email to AFP.

“In fact, if that were the only purpose and metric, you would likely only extend the time it takes to bring about an end to the insurgency.”

Smith sent an order last month to NATO and US forces blocking the military from releasing details on militant death tolls and providing estimates instead.

“The goal of security operations in an insurgency is to separate the people from the insurgents. Without access to the people, the insurgents lose their main center of gravity,” he said.

Smith, who is revamping communications for the US military and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, stressed US-led military operations were not aimed at killing insurgents.

The objective was to “clear areas of insurgency and give the people a chance to reconnect with official forms of governance and to rebuild their lives, socially and economically.”

via AFP: US stops giving militant death tolls in Afghanistan.

Sen. Dodd Brings Lobbyists To Tears, Takes Their Money

Sen. Dodd Brings Lobbyists To Tears, Takes Their Money

Facing the toughest re-election fight of his nearly 30 years in the Senate, Sen. Christopher Dodd boasts about snubbing lobbyists.

Yet even as he touts his independence, the embattled Connecticut Democrat is still cashing lobbyist campaign checks and rubbing shoulders with them at fundraisers and party gatherings.

Dodd, perhaps the most vulnerable Senate Democrat in 2010, has driven home his message in fundraising pitches and campaign videos.

“The lobbyists can’t get meetings with Chris,” Dodd’s campaign manager Jay Howser said in a recent e-mail to supporters. “He won’t return their phone calls … Chris just isn’t giving them the time of day.”

The videos even suggest Dodd has been so hard on lobbyists that he’s made them cry.

via Sen. Dodd Brings Lobbyists To Tears, Takes Their Money.

The Recession Is Over! But Not for You–Yet.

OPS:  SO glad it’s over for Wall Street and the Oligarchy.  Now, how about the rest of us?

The Recession is Over   | | Newsweek.com

Now what we need is a new kind of recovery.

In Westport, Mass., about 60 miles southwest of Boston, traffic crawls along Route 6 as drivers make their way to the nearby Atlantic beaches like Horseneck or Baker’s. A 10-worker crew pouring and raking asphalt onto the road slows their progress. It’s the kind of small annoyance drivers nationwide face each summer. It’s also one small manifestation of President Barack Obama’s ambitious strategy for jump-starting the economy.

In April, the P.J. Keating Co., a construction firm based in Lunenburg, Mass., bid on about a dozen stimulus projects funded through the U.S. Transportation Department. It won two contracts, including this $4.06 million job, rescuing what would have been a dismal year for P.J. Keating, says David Baker, 36, a manager of construction operations. As business dwindled over the past two years, the firm laid off about a dozen people. “We definitely would have been faced with another half-dozen layoffs had we not gotten these stimulus projects,” Baker says. Instead, the company kept all its remaining 300 employees, and hired five new ones. Ordinarily, a few -government-funded jobs, like traffic on Route 6, wouldn’t be noteworthy. But the tableau neatly encapsulates the promise—and pitfalls—of an economy at an inflection point.

via The Recession Is Over! But Not for You–Yet. | Newsweek Business | Newsweek.com.

What You Might Not Know About the Recovery

What You Might Not Know About the Recovery  - NYTimes.com

SIX months ago, when President Obama and I took office, we were confronted with an economic crisis unparalleled in our lifetime. The nation was hemorrhaging more than 700,000 jobs a month, the housing market was in free fall, and the fate of the financial system hung in the balance. Credible economists were handicapping the probability of a depression. The actions we took — passing the Recovery Act, stabilizing the banking system, pressing to get credit flowing again and helping responsible homeowners — brought us back from the precipice. Monthly job losses are down, financial markets are improved, and economic contraction has slowed. We still have a long way to go, but clearly we are closer to recovery today than we were in January. The Recovery Act has been critical to that progress.

Notwithstanding this progress, the nature of the Recovery Act remains misunderstood by many, and misconstrued by others: critics have suggested that the entire $787 billion is being spent on pet programs. As the person leading the administration’s efforts to put the Recovery Act into effect, I want to set the record straight.

The single largest part of the Recovery Act — more than one-third of it — is tax cuts: 95 percent of working Americans have seen their taxes go down as a result of the act. The second-largest part — just under a third — is direct relief to state governments and individuals. The money is allowing state governments to avoid laying off teachers (14,000 in New York City alone), firefighters and police officers and preventing states’ budget gaps from growing wider.

via Op-Ed Contributor – What You Might Not Know About the Recovery – NYTimes.com.

Iraq Veterans Find Afghan Enemy Even Bolder

Iraq Veterans Find Afghan Enemy Even Bolder   - NYTimes.com

NAWA, Afghanistan — In three combat tours in Anbar Province, Marine Sgt. Jacob Tambunga fought the deadliest insurgents in Iraq.

But he says he never encountered an enemy as tenacious as what he saw immediately after arriving at this outpost in Helmand Province in Afghanistan. In his first days here in late June, he fought through three ambushes, each lasting as long as the most sustained fight he saw in Anbar.

Like other Anbar veterans here, Sergeant Tambunga was surprised to discover guerrillas who, if not as lethal, were bolder than those he fought in Iraq.

“They are two totally different worlds,” said Sergeant Tambunga, a squad leader in Company C, First Battalion, Fifth Marines.

“In Iraq, they’d hit you and run,” he said. “But these guys stick around and maneuver on you.”

via Iraq Veterans Find Afghan Enemy Even Bolder – NYTimes.com.

British Economists Send Apology To Queen

OPS:  Interesting.  The list of serious economists that DID see it coming is a large one.

British Economists Send Apology To Queen

Sorry Ma’am – we just didn’t see it coming.

A British newspaper reported Sunday that a group of eminent economists have apologized to Queen Elizabeth II for failing to predict the financial crisis.

The Observer newspaper reported that a letter has been sent to the Queen after she demanded, during a visit to the London School of Economics last November, to know why nobody had anticipated the credit crunch.

According to the newspaper, the letter says that says “financial wizards” who believed that their plans to manage risky debts and protect the financial system were infallible were guilty of “wishful thinking combined with hubris.”

Signatories to the three-page letter include Tim Besley, a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee and historian Peter Hennessy.

The newspaper said the content was discussed during a seminar with a group of leading economists in June, including Nick MacPherson, a permanent secretary at Britain’s Treasury, and Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill.

via British Economists Send Apology To Queen.

Obama’s Health Care Struggle — Waterloo or Water Down?

Obama’s Health Care Struggle — Waterloo or Water Down?  | CommonDreams.org

by Bill Moyers & Michael Winship

Push finally came to shove in Washington this week as the battle for health care escalated from scattered sniper fire into all-out combat. If it all seems to be getting more and more confusing, join the club. It’s hard to see what’s happening through all the gunsmoke.

The Republicans have more than health care reform in their bombsights — they want a loss for Obama so crushing it will bring the administration to its knees and restore GOP control of Congress after next year’s elections. In the words of Republican Senator Jim DeMint, “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

The “Waterloo” of DeMint’s metaphor, of course, is not the 1974 ABBA hit but the battle in 1815 that ended Napoleon Bonaparte’s rule as Emperor of France — a humiliating defeat and a turning point in European history. Right-wingers like Glenn Beck see Obama as Napoleon incarnate, a popular emperor who must be stopped.

Here’s what Beck said on his television show Monday, July 20: “I’m telling you, this guy is dangerous. He’s never lost before. He won’t understand… like, ‘Who are you to question me?’ I mean, this guy is practically an imperial President now. When he starts to lose and people start to question him and push him back against the wall, he’s not gonna know how to react.”

via Obama’s Health Care Struggle — Waterloo or Water Down? | CommonDreams.org.

Capitalism, Sarah Palin-Style

Capitalism, Sarah Palin-Style  | The Progressive

Excerpted from the August issue of The Progressive magazine

What if the bailout actually works, what if the financial sector is saved and the economy returns to the course it was on before the crisis struck? Is that what we want? And what would that world look like? The answer is that it would look like Sarah Palin. Hear me out, this is not a joke.

Palin was the last clear expression of capitalism-as-usual before everything went south. That’s quite helpful because she showed us—in that plainspoken, down-homey way of hers—the trajectory the U.S. economy was on before its current meltdown. The core of her message was this: Those environmentalists, those liberals, those do-gooders are all wrong. You don’t have to change anything. You don’t have to rethink anything. Keep driving your gas-guzzling car, keep going to Wal-Mart and shop all you want. The reason for that is a magical place called Alaska. Just come up here and take all you want. “Americans,” she said at the Republican National Convention, “we need to produce more of our own oil and gas. Take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska, we’ve got lots of both.”

And the crowd at the convention responded by chanting and chanting: “Drill, baby, drill.”

via Capitalism, Sarah Palin-Style | The Progressive.

Revealed: The Secret Evidence of Global Warming Bush Tried to Hide

Revealed: The Secret Evidence of Global Warming Bush Tried to Hide  | CommonDreams.org

Photos from US spy satellites declassified by the Obama White House provide the first graphic images of how the polar ice sheets are retreating in the summer. The effects on the world’s weather, environments and wildlife could be devastating

Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months.

via Revealed: The Secret Evidence of Global Warming Bush Tried to Hide | CommonDreams.org.

The End of the Dollar?

The End of the Dollar?

The IMF will vote August 7th on a measure which, if passed, would increase the volume of Special Drawing Rights – the IMF’s basket currency- eightfold. 

The U.S. dollar has been under considerable scrutiny and pressure in the past several months. Treasury Secretary Geithner was laughed at during a June university tour in China when he proclaimed that the American government and dollar were sound and financially stable.

More than one month ago NYU economist Nouriel Roubini discussed the very real prospect that the dollar would soon be replaced as the global reserve currency. At the April 2, 2009 meeting of the G20 in London, People’s Bank of China governor Zhou Xiaochuan derided American spending habits and called for an end to the dollar’s hegemony.

Governor Xiaochuan called for the International Monetary Fund to use its own basket currency – the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) – as a replacement. He stopped short of declaring that the Chinese yuan should replace the dollar as the dominant global currency – likely because it would instigate a dispute between China and the European Union.

via Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.

Lobbyists the silver lining in health care storm?

This article explains why the health mafia is supporting Obama-care. Obama-care sends them a lot more money. That money comes from us. – Mike5000

Lobbyists the silver lining in health care storm?

WASHINGTON — A strong force, perhaps as powerful in Congress as President Barack Obama, is keeping the drive for health care going even as lawmakers seem hopelessly at odds.

Lobbyists.

The drug industry, the American Medical Association, hospital groups and the insurance lobby are all saying Congress must make major changes this year. Television ads paid for by drug companies and insurers continued to emphasize the benefits of a health care overhaul — not the groups’ objections to some of the proposals.

“My gut is telling me that something major can pass because all the people who could kill it are still at the table,” said Ken Thorpe, chairman of health policy at Emory University in Atlanta. “Everybody has issues with bits and pieces of it, but all these groups want to get something done this year.” As a senior official at the Health and Human Services department in the 1990s, Thorpe was deeply involved in the Clinton administration’s failed effort.

President Barack Obama on Saturday continued his full-court press to pass health care reform legislation. In his weekly Internet and radio address, Obama cited a new White House study indicating that small businesses pay far more per employee for health insurance than big companies — a disparity he says is “unsustainable — it’s unacceptable.”

“And it’s going to change when I sign health insurance reform into law,” Obama said, adding that he has “a sense of urgency about moving this process forward.”

This time, the health care industry groups see a strategic opportunity. As lawmakers squabble, the groups are focused on how to come out ahead in the end game.

via The Associated Press: Lobbyists the silver lining in health care storm?.

Our American Train Wreck – By Accident or Design?

Our American Train Wreck – By Accident or Design?  – American’s Journey:

It is my firm belief that the Average American Family is in for some big shocks and some hard times with regards to their savings, civil rights, and the future direction of their country. And if these Americans shrink from their duty to get involved they won’t have to worry about the country their children will inherit – because somebody else will own it.

I base these opinions on information available mostly on the internet. Yes – the internet – the last bastion of free speech where even a JackRabbit can express views for the consideration of others. Will it last?

The election of Obama demonstrated that the public knows what they want – but for some reason they can’t get what they want. How is it possible to have elected Obama yet the war plan accelerates? Once again we get a smooth-talker who, exactly like GWB did upon election, acts in opposition to campaign promises. If you remember the debates – it was obvious who the corporate owned media deemed worthy of debate time and who they didn’t. Is it a coincidence that corporations benefit from Obama’s actions and the public suffers? Hmmm – how many times the president’s salary was spent getting him elected? No profit-first corporation spends money unless they expect a return on investment.

via American’s Journey: Our American Train Wreck – By Accident or Design?.

White House eases stimulus lobbyist restrictions

OPS:  And another promise bites the dust

White House eases stimulus lobbyist restrictions – TheHill.com -

In a significant change, the Obama administration will now allow lobbyists to meet and have telephonic discussions with government officials regarding economic recovery projects.

The lifting of the ban comes after K Street has cried foul for months and has challenged the White House on its restrictions.

n March, President Obama announced that government officials would not be allowed to consider the views of lobbyists regarding specific stimulus projects unless the requests are put in writing. The materials also had to be posted on an agency’s website within three business days of receipt. Lobbyists have said that the policy was one more example of the administration’s disdain for their industry.

Now, the just-revised rules will allow government personnel to accept meetings and calls from federally registered lobbyists on the implementation of stimulus projects. The head of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, issued a new guidance late Friday regarding the administration’s communications with registered lobbyists about economic recovery funds.

via TheHill.com – White House eases stimulus lobbyist restrictions.

Barack Obama’s health reform plans are a bitter pill for his personal doctor

Barack Obama’s health reform plans are a bitter pill for his personal doctor   - Telegraph

President Barack Obama’s personal doctor for more than two decades is bitterly disappointed by the health care reforms being pushed through Congress at the urging of his former patient.

Dr David Scheiner remains a big fan of the man he treated for 22 years in Chicago. But does not believe the planned overhaul goes far enough to help the poor and uninsured, and will cost too much because of pressure from the health care industry.

The 71-year-old physician, who has treated low income patients for his entire career in the city’s Hyde Park neighbourhood, believes Mr Obama favours an NHS-style “single payer” system, but backed away under pressure from the health industry.

via Barack Obama’s health reform plans are a bitter pill for his personal doctor – Telegraph.

Perry raises possibility of states’ rights showdown with White House over healthcare

OPS:  Republicans, fighting for your right to be bankrupted by one hospital stay, or die from a pre-existing condition

Perry raises possibility of states’ rights showdown with White House over healthcare –   Star-Telegram.com

Gov. Rick Perry, raising the specter of a showdown with the Obama administration, suggested Thursday that he would consider invoking states’ rights protections under the 10th Amendment to resist the president’s healthcare plan, which he said would be “disastrous” for Texas.

Interviewed by conservative talk show host Mark Davis of Dallas’ WBAP/820 AM, Perry said his first hope is that Congress will defeat the plan, which both Perry and Davis described as “Obama Care.” But should it pass, Perry predicted that Texas and a “number” of states might resist the federal health mandate.

“I think you’ll hear states and governors standing up and saying ‘no’ to this type of encroachment on the states with their healthcare,” Perry said. “So my hope is that we never have to have that stand-up. But I’m certainly willing and ready for the fight if this administration continues to try to force their very expansive government philosophy down our collective throats.”

via Perry raises possibility of states’ rights showdown with White House over healthcare | Nation | Star-Telegram.com.

And That’s Not the Way It Is

And That’s Not the Way It Is – NYTimes.com

Frank Rich

Not to take anything away from Walter Cronkite, but he beat out Henry Kissinger by only four percentage points when a 1974 Roper poll asked Americans whom they most respected. The successive blows of Vietnam and Watergate during the Cronkite ’60s and ’70s shattered the nation’s faith in most of its institutions, public and private, and toppled many of the men who led them. Such was the dearth of trustworthy figures who survived that an unindicted official in a disgraced White House could make the cut.

In death, “the most trusted man in America” has been embalmed in that most comforting of American sweeteners — nostalgia — to the point where his finest, and most discomforting, achievements are being sanitized or forgotten. We’ve heard much sentimental rumination on the bygone heyday of the “mainstream media,” on the cultural fractionalization inflicted by the Internet, and on the lack of any man who could replicate the undisputed moral authority of Uncle Walter. (Women still need not apply, apparently.) But the reason to celebrate Cronkite has little to do with any of this and least of all to do with his avuncular television persona.

What matters about Cronkite is that he knew when to stop being reassuring Uncle Walter and to challenge those who betrayed his audience’s trust. He had the guts to confront not only those in power but his own bosses. Given the American press’s catastrophe of our own day — its failure to unmask and often even to question the White House propaganda campaign that plunged us into Iraq — these attributes are as timely as ever.

via Op-Ed Columnist – And That’s Not the Way It Is – NYTimes.com.

Antitrust Chief Hits Resistance in Crackdown

Antitrust Chief Hits Resistance in Crackdown  - NYTimes.com

President Obama’s top antitrust official and some senior Democratic lawmakers are preparing to rein in a host of major industries, including airline and railroad giants, moving so aggressively that they are finding some resistance from officials within the administration.

The official, Christine A. Varney, the antitrust chief at the Justice Department, has begun examining complaints by the phone companies Verizon and AT&T that their rivals — major cable operators like Cablevision and Cox Communications — improperly prevent them from buying sports shows and other programs that the cable companies produce, industry lawyers said.

At the request of some lawmakers, notably Senator Bernard Sanders, independent of Vermont, Ms. Varney is examining whether small agricultural operations are being hampered unfairly by large food processors, particularly in the milk industry, congressional aides said.

Ms. Varney has also challenged agreements that the Federal Trade Commission and consumer groups say discourage pharmaceutical companies from marketing more generic drugs. And she is examining a settlement between Google and book publishers and authors to make more books available online.

via Antitrust Chief Hits Resistance in Crackdown – NYTimes.com.

Minimum wage stuck in the 1950s

Commentary: Minimum wage stuck in the 1950s   | McClatchy

Are you better off than you were 40 years ago? Not if you’re a minimum-wage worker.

It would take $9.92 today to match the buying power of the minimum wage at its peak in 1968, the year Martin Luther King died fighting for living wages for sanitation workers.

In today’s dollars, the 1968 hourly minimum wage adds up to $20,634 a year working full time. The new federal minimum wage of $7.25 comes to just $15,080. That’s $ 5,554 in lost wages.

“It is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis … getting part-time income,” King told workers in Memphis, Tenn., days before his murder. King said, “We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate with daily basic necessities of life.”

Imagine what King would say today.

The minimum wage is stuck in the 1950s. With the raise, the minimum wage is higher than 1950′s inflation-adjusted $6.71, but lower than the 1956 minimum wage of $7.93 in today’s dollars.

The long-term fall in worker buying power is one reason we are in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The federal minimum wage was not enacted during good times, but during the extraordinarily hard times of the Great Depression. When the minimum wage became law in 1938, one out of five workers was unemployed and job creation was crucial.

via Commentary: Minimum wage stuck in the 1950s | McClatchy.

Spitzer: Federal Reserve is ‘a Ponzi scheme, an inside job’

OPS:  Yep!  You can learn more about why this is true here

Spitzer: Federal Reserve is ‘a Ponzi scheme, an inside job’

The Federal Reserve — the quasi-autonomous body that controls the US’s money supply — is a “Ponzi scheme” that created “bubble after bubble” in the US economy and needs to be held accountable for its actions, says Eliot Spitzer, the former governor and attorney-general of New York.

In a wide-ranging discussion of the bank bailouts on MSNBC’s Morning Meeting, host Dylan Ratigan described the process by which the Federal Reserve exchanged $13.9 trillion of bad bank debt for cash that it gave to the struggling banks.

Spitzer — who built a reputation as “the Sheriff of Wall Street” for his zealous prosecutions of corporate crime as New York’s attorney-general and then resigned as the state’s governor over revelations he had paid for prostitutes — seemed to agree with Ratigan that the bank bailout amounts to “America’s greatest theft and cover-up ever.”

via Raw Story » Spitzer: Federal Reserve is ‘a Ponzi scheme, an inside job’.

Today’s

Today’s Best Cartoons.

Most Bankruptcies Caused by Medical Bills

Most Bankruptcies Caused by Medical Bills

A new study reveals that through-the-roof medical bills are the cause of more than 60 percent of bankruptcies in the U.S. From 2001 to 2007, bankruptcies associated with medical debt increased by 50 percent, and 75 percent of the families surveyed actually had health insurance.

CNN:

This year, an estimated 1.5 million Americans will declare bankruptcy. Many people may chalk up that misfortune to overspending or a lavish lifestyle, but a new study suggests that more than 60 percent of people who go bankrupt are actually capsized by medical bills.

Bankruptcies due to medical bills increased by nearly 50 percent in a six-year period, from 46 percent in 2001 to 62 percent in 2007, and most of those who filed for bankruptcy were middle-class, well-educated homeowners, according to a report that will be published in the August issue of The American Journal of Medicine.

via Truthdig – Ear to the Ground – Most Bankruptcies Caused by Medical Bills.

Steele says he fears health reform because it could be like the GOP’s intervention in Terri Schiavo’s case.

Steele says he fears health reform because it could be like the GOP’s intervention in Terri Schiavo’s case.

In 2005, President Bush, along with congressional Republicans, decided they could use the tragic case of Terri Schiavo — a severely brain-damaged woman who had been incapacitated for the past 15 years — as a “great political issue” to get the pro-life base “excited.” Congressional Republicans forced both chambers into a special session with four days of extended debate to craft legislation that instructed doctors to reinsert Schiavo’s feeding tube. They also took the “extraordinary step” of subpoenaing Schiavo to testify before Congress. Yesterday morning on Washington Times radio, RNC Chairman Michael Steele said health reform would be “socialism,” and he held up the GOP’s handling of the Schiavo case as an example of what he fears:

STEELE: That’s the mood the administration is beginning to take. You understand what the underlying principle of socialism is. It is government control of the means of production. In this case, it is the government controlling the means of providing health care to the American people. It is inserting itself into the very fabric of the decisions that you make, have to make every single day. It’ll make the Terry Schiavo case look like a walk in the park. You know, you’re going to have meetings and committees, government agencies and bureaucrats making decisions on what kind of health care you get.

Listen here:

via Think Progress » Steele says he fears health reform because it could be like the GOP’s intervention in Terri Schiavo’s case..

Rep. Virginia Foxx: ‘There Are No Americans Who Don’t Have Health Care’

OPS: Sociopathic and delusional

Rep. Virginia Foxx: ‘There Are No Americans Who Don’t Have Health Care’

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC)Earlier today, several female Republican House members held a press conference today to attack President Obama’s push for health insurance reform. “The Democrat way is not reforming healthcare, it’s destroying it,” announced Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).

Perhaps the most attention-grabbing moment occurred when Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) announced that “there are no Americans who don’t have healthcare“:

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) disputes President Obama’s claim that 47 million Americans lack healthcare. “There are no Americans who don’t have healthcare. Everybody in this country has access to healthcare,” she says. “We do have about 7.5 million Americans who want to purchase health insurance who can not afford it,” she says, urging Congress to adopt a new plan for healthcare reform that wouldn’t “destroy what is good about healthcare in this country” and “give the government control of our lives.”

Listen here:

via Think Progress » Rep. Virginia Foxx: ‘There Are No Americans Who Don’t Have Health Care’.

Grassley: Obama Has ‘Said To Me Privately’ That He Is Willing To Drop A Robust Public Option

Grassley: Obama Has ‘Said To Me Privately’ That He Is Willing To Drop A Robust Public Option

On Bloomberg’s Political Capital this weekend, host Al Hunt asked Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) what he thought of the “tone and substance” of President Obama’s press conference this week. Like he has said before, Grassley underscored his opposition to a public health insurance option.

In a call with progressive bloggers a day before the press conference, Obama said he continues to “believe that a robust public option would be the best way to go.” In the press conference itself, Obama said a public option is necessary “to keep the insurance companies honest” and his view that by taking “some of the profit motive out,” you can get a “better deal” for consumers.

But in his interview with Hunt, Grassley claimed that Obama has told him privately that he is willing to consider “reasonable alternatives” to a robust public option:

GRASSLEY: One of the most controversial things we are facing — and one that the House does and Senator Kennedy’s committee does — is bring a government health insurance program into existence. He still spoke highly about that. And that’s not going to get bipartisan support.

And it would have been good if he had said to the entire country what he said to me privately — that he would look to alternatives for that. And we have a very good alternative by going with cooperatives because we’ve known them for 150 years in America. And allowing them to sell health insurance for more competition.

via Think Progress » Grassley: Obama Has ‘Said To Me Privately’ That He Is Willing To Drop A Robust Public Option.

Three Rules for Living through the Second Depression

Three Rules for Living through the Second Depression

believe we are on the precipice of the Second Depression. Though President Obama is working valiantly to turn the country’s financial ship, it appears to me that due to the lack of a genuine economic engine to create sufficient, sustaining, value-adding jobs, change will come too late. What should the common man do?

Much of the advice on how to live through such hard times is often too specific, not specific enough or draconian. How many of us are ready or should even consider survivalist methods? Who among us can afford to completely restructure their finances on a moments notice? Which of us can effectively plan now for the unforeseen severity we may or may not face?

I have often found that everything in life can be boiled down to Three Rules that pretty much envelop the whole enchilada. I call these simple statements of essential truth a “Three Rules” poem. They can be fun, amusing, thoughtful, whimsical, etcetera. This one, presented for your approval and commentary, is dead serious.

via OpEdNews » Three Rules for Living through the Second Depression.

The Importance of the Inspector General

OPS: irrelavant. As we saw with the DOJ once republicans got their hands on it. The Same thing would happen to this position

The Importance of the Inspector General

Sen. Charles Grassley would like to see an Inspector General in Chief for the United States to lead a crusade against fraud and waste in the government.

Senator Charles Grassley, writing for Politico, stated that the United States must root out waste wherever it can and make the government more efficient and accountable. One way of achieving this would be through the often overlooked Inspector General’s office.

Right now the United States has 69 independent Inspectors General, but Grassley would like to see a larger, more centralized, and more official organization. In particular he would like to see an Inspector General in Chief for the United States to lead a crusade against fraud and waste in the government.

In his column, Grassley alluded to the importance of IGs during the 1980s when waste at the Defense Department – the infamous $750 toilet seat – was brought to public scrutiny. With massive increases in government spending following the two Bush and Obama stimulus packages, he wants to see more inspectors tasked with overseeing all of the budget expansions.

via Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.

Legislating Misinformation: Conservative Media Making Up Details Of Health Reform Bill

Conservative media run with false IBD claim that health bill outlaws private coverage.

YouTube – Legislating Misinformation: Conservative Media Making Up Details Of Health Reform Bill.

Limbaugh’s Lies Sabotage the Health Reform Debate

Limbaugh’s Lies Sabotage the Health Reform Debate

By Sue Wilson, AlterNet. Posted July 25, 2009.

In conservative states, right-wing talk show hosts are spreading lies about reform. No wonder Blue Dog Dems are blocking health care overhaul.

There’s a showdown at the House Energy and Commerce Committee corral. Seven Blue Dog Democrat members are banding together, and if they don’t get their way, they can gun down the health care bill.

The Blue Dog Seven are spooked by pressure from their constituents and recent polls that show American’s approval of Obama’s health care initiative has dropped below 50 percent for the first time.

Drive across the seven states they represent: Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee, and Utah, turn on your car radio, and you’ll know why public opinion has changed. According to Pew research, 22 percent of Americans get their news from talk radio. And conservative talkers have been lying to their listeners about what’s in the health care bill.

via Limbaugh’s Lies Sabotage the Health Reform Debate | Media and Technology | AlterNet.

Wireless power system shown off

Wireless power system shown off – BBC

Electric tech could make plugs obsolete

A system that can deliver power to devices without the need for wires has been shown off at a hi-tech conference.

The technique exploits simple physics and can be used to charge a range of electronic devices over many metres.

Eric Giler, chief executive of US firm Witricity, showed mobile phones and televisions charging wirelessly at the TED Global conference in Oxford.

He said the system could replace the miles of expensive power cables and billions of disposable batteries.

“There is something like 40 billion disposable batteries built every year for power that, generally speaking, is used within a few inches or feet of where there is very inexpensive power,” he said.

Trillions of dollars, he said, had also been invested building an infrastructure of wires “to get power from where it is created to where it is used.”

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Wireless power system shown off.

Chinese experts grow live mice from skin cells

Chinese experts grow live mice from skin cells  | | Reuters

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Chinese researchers have managed to create powerful stem cells from mouse skin and used these to generate fertile live mouse pups.

They used induced pluripotent skin cells, or iPS cells — cells that have been reprogrammed to look and act like embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cells, taken from days-old embryos, have the power to morph into any cell type and, in mice, can be implanted into a mother’s womb to create living mouse pups.

Their experiment, published in Nature, means that it is theoretically possible to clone someone using ordinary connective tissue cells found on the person’s skin, but the experts were quick to distance themselves from such controversy.

via Chinese experts grow live mice from skin cells | Science | Reuters.

The Secret GOP Sex Diary

The Secret GOP Sex Diary   – - The Daily Beast

by Max Blumenthal

Hot on the heels of the Sanford and Ensign scandals comes the adulterous tale of Chip Pickering. Max Blumenthal on why Republicans don’t want the former congressman’s diary released.

While former Rep. Chip Pickering of Mississippi allegedly carried on an extramarital affair with Elizabeth Creekmore Byrd, he recorded details of his exploits in a secret diary, including the dates and locations of his adulterous encounters.

Pickering, a Republican, described several assignations he had with Creekmore Byrd inside the C Street House, a Capitol Hill townhouse inhabited by an all-male group of right-wing Republican congressmen belonging to The Fellowship, an evangelical group, according to a person familiar with the diary’s contents.

And according to a divorce filing by Pickering’s estranged wife, Leisha, the former congressman’s diary reveals the identities of several men who enabled his adulterous trysts and helped him cover his tracks.

via The Secret GOP Sex Diary – Page 1 – The Daily Beast.

Wayne County Star Traces Racist Posts to Homeland Security

Racist Web Posts Traced to Homeland Security   – NYTimes.com

After federal border agents detained several Mexican immigrants in western New York in June, an article about the incident in a local newspaper drew an onslaught of vitriolic postings on its Web site. Some were racist. Others attacked farmers in the region, an apple-growing area east of Rochester, accusing them of harboring illegal workers. Still others made personal attacks about the reporter who wrote the article.

Most of the posts were made anonymously. But in reviewing the logs of its Internet server, the paper, The Wayne County Star in Wolcott, traced three of them to Internet protocol addresses at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees border protection.

Homeland Security started an investigation into the posts this month, according to the reporter, Louise Hoffman-Broach, and Richard M. Healy, the Wayne County district attorney. A spokeswoman for the federal agency’s inspector general said she could neither confirm nor deny an investigation; department rules prohibit the use of office equipment for the personal transmission of material that could offend fellow employees or the public.

via Wayne County Star Traces Racist Posts to Homeland Security – NYTimes.com.

Bernanke: ‘I Don’t Know’ Which Foreign Banks Got Half Trillion U.S. Dollars (VIDEO)

Bernanke: ‘I Don’t Know’ Which Foreign Banks Got Half Trillion U.S. Dollars (VIDEO)

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke ventured to the Hill this week for his semi-regular beating at the hands of freshman Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.).

Grayson’s Fed exchanges have become small sensations online; a May grilling of the Fed inspector general approaching a million views on YouTube and roughly another million on other video players.

His most recent battle with Bernanke, which is already on its way to 100,000 views, was fought over the Fed’s project of “central bank liquidity swaps.” The Huffington Post first reported the swaps in March. In response to the global economic crisis, the Fed has injected hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars into foreign central banks in exchange for foreign currency. The swaps represent a radical intervention by the Fed in the global money supply but have barely been covered by the media. They are done without approval from or oversight by the Congress or the White House.

Bernanke, asked by Grayson what the central banks did with the U.S. money, replied: “I don’t know.”

Grayson, in an interview with the Huffington Post, said that the lending program represents a startling amount of decision-making authority vested with one man.

via Bernanke: ‘I Don’t Know’ Which Foreign Banks Got Half Trillion U.S. Dollars (VIDEO).

Microwave weapon will rain pain from the sky

Microwave weapon will rain pain from the sky – - – New Scientist

THE Pentagon’s enthusiasm for non-lethal crowd-control weapons appears to have stepped up a gear with its decision to develop a microwave pain-infliction system that can be fired from an aircraft.

The device is an extension of its controversial Active Denial System, which uses microwaves to heat the surface of the skin, creating a painful sensation without burning that strongly motivates the target to flee. The ADS was unveiled in 2001, but it has not been deployed owing to legal issues and safety fears.

Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) in Quantico, Virginia, has now called for it to be upgraded. The US air force, whose radar technology the ADS is based on, is increasing its annual funding of the system from $2 million to $10 million.

The transmitting antenna on the current system is 2 metres across, produces a single beam of similar width and is steered mechanically, making it cumbersome. At the heart of the new weapon will be a compact airborne antenna, which will be steered electronically and be capable of generating multiple beams, each of which can be aimed while on the move.

via Microwave weapon will rain pain from the sky – tech – 23 July 2009 – New Scientist.

World Prepares to Dump the Dollar

OPS: Pay attention to this.

World Prepares to Dump the Dollar  – theTrumpet.com

American economists think the world can’t afford to let go of the dollar’s reserve currency status. The world is about to teach them differently.

What do China, India, Brazil, Russia, France and Germany have in common? These countries most often can’t agree on anything. But they are united in one strange—and ominous—way. They blame the United States for wrecking the global economy. And they think the dollar is the wrecking ball.

One rock-solid, foundational belief underpins almost all economic theory in America: faith in the dollar’s unassailable status as the world’s reserve currency. Foreigners hold so many dollars that they can’t afford to stop buying them, the theory goes. Therefore the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency is sound. But the dollar is now coming under a concentrated attack. Are American economists about to get schooled?

via World Prepares to Dump the Dollar | Columns | theTrumpet.com.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re Appointing Who? Please Obama, Say It’s Not So!

The man that brought you Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone is now america’s food safety czar

You’re Appointing Who? Please Obama, Say It’s Not So!

The person who may be responsible for more food-related illness and death than anyone in history has just been made the US food safety czar. This is no joke.

Here’s the back story.

When FDA scientists were asked to weigh in on what was to become the most radical and potentially dangerous change in our food supply — the introduction of genetically modified (GM) foods — secret documents now reveal that the experts were very concerned. Memo after memo described toxins, new diseases, nutritional deficiencies, and hard-to-detect allergens. They were adamant that the technology carried “serious health hazards,” and required careful, long-term research, including human studies, before any genetically modified organisms (GMOs) could be safely released into the food supply.

But the biotech industry had rigged the game so that neither science nor scientists would stand in their way. They had placed their own man in charge of FDA policy and he wasn’t going to be swayed by feeble arguments related to food safety. No, he was going to do what corporations had done for decades to get past these types of pesky concerns. He was going to lie.

via Jeffrey Smith: You’re Appointing Who? Please Obama, Say It’s Not So!.

Is Big Pharma Trying to Take All the Fun out of Pot?

Is Big Pharma Trying to Take All the Fun out of Pot?

Drug researchers are trying to replicate marijuana’s therapeutic effects, but without the “side effect” of getting people high.

Pricey pharmaceutical-marketing newsletters have touted cannabis-derived drugs as the next blockbuster for the industry, but the biggest companies are primarily researching drugs whose effect is the opposite of the cannabis herb.

Numerous drug researchers are trying to develop medications that replicate the herb’s therapeutic effects without the harm of inhaling smoke and the side effect of getting people high.

Others are looking into cannabinoid agonists, drugs that enhance the body’s natural cannabinoid system — or cannabinoid antagonists, which disrupt it — and have been the pharmaceutical industry’s main focus. Despite the millions of medical-marijuana users, both U.S. government restrictions and drug companies’ need for exclusive ownership have limited research into herbal cannabis.

In any case, it will likely be a while before many cannabis-derived drugs arrive in your local pharmacy.

via Is Big Pharma Trying to Take All the Fun out of Pot? | DrugReporter | AlterNet.