Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Colbert's idea is great. If you voted against the stimulus plan, then you shouldn't get any of that money for your congressional district.

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House Passes Stimulus Plan

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the $819 billion economic recovery plan yesterday–without a single Republican vote. That’s right. Even though President Obama reached out to them a number of times in a spirit of bipartisanship (and agreed to add the tax cuts they wanted), not one Republican voted for the plan. Apparently, they don’t care that Americans favor the stimulus plan. Economists too.

The reality is the Republicans would rather play politics and they are trying to use fiscal discipline as their excuse for opposition. Please. These are the same guys who oversaw a doubling of the national debt while Bush was in office! More than anything the Republicans are worried that if the stimulus helps us get out of this crisis and it creates jobs, it will serve as proof that the Democrats are better stewards of the economy—and that, of course, will affect their electoral chances for the midterm elections in 2010. 

The Senate takes up its version of the stimulus bill next week. With it's large Democrat majority, the bill is expected to pass and make its way to President Obama's desk in mid-February.

Gallop Poll: More People Identify As Democrats

The chickens have come home to roost.  Gallup released a report yesterday on its politcal party affiliation survey of more than 350,000 U.S. adults.  The results, depicted in the map above, show some very bad news for the Republicans. Nate Silver explains:

That's right: just five states, collectively containing about 2 percent of the American population, have statistically significant pluralities of adults identifying themselves as Republicans. These are the "Mormon Belt" states of Utah, Idaho and Wyoming, plus Nebraska, plus Alaska. By contrast, 35 states are plurality Democratic, and 10 states are too close to call.

Any Questions?

This is your brain:
This is your brain on football:

The Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE), at the Boston University School of Medicine, is currently conducting a study on concussions and, as the pics above show, their findings were astonishing:

Far from innocuous, invisible injuries, concussions confer tremendous brain damage. That damage has a name: chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

On Tuesday afternoon, researchers at the CSTE released a study about the sixth documented case of CTE in former NFL player Tom McHale, who died in 2008 at the age of 45, and the youngest case to date, an 18-year-old multi-sport athlete who suffered multiple concussions.

While CTE in an ex-NFL player's brain may have been expected, the beginnings of brain damage in an 18-year-old brain was a "shocking" finding, according to Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts, and co-director of the CSTE.

"We think this is how chronic traumatic encephalopathy starts," said McKee. "This is speculation, but I think we can assume that this would have continued to expand."

CTE has thus far been found in the brains of six out of six former NFL players.

..McKee, who also studies Alzheimer's disease, says the tangles closely resemble what might be found in the brain of an 80-year-old with dementia.

..The damage affects the parts of the brain that control emotion, rage, hypersexuality, even breathing, and recent studies find that CTE is a progressive disease that eventually kills brain cells.

The Blagojevich Sideshow: Finale Today!

After threatening that he would boycott his impeachment trial, Gov. Rod Blagojevich will present closing arguments this morning. It should be quite entertaining. In case you haven't had a chance to watch his many nutty interviews this week, this video condenses them nicely:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

UPDATE:

He's out.

Clueless

There's more bad economic news today. But don't ask the Republicans. Looks like they've been attending the John "The fundamentals of the economy are strong" McCain School of Economics:

Thanks to Republican economic policies, the U.S. economy is robust and job creation is strong.

  

What!??! Perhaps someone should tell these idiots that about 2 million people have lost their jobs over the past 4 months and the unemployment rate, now at a 16-year high of 7.2 percent, could hit 10 percent or higher later this year, under some analysts' projections. Something tells me that the page will be scrubbed soon. 

Words Not Bombs

What a novel concept:

President Barack Obama's administration will engage in "direct diplomacy" with Iran, the newly installed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said Monday. 

Not since before the 1979 Iranian revolution are U.S. officials believed to have conducted wide-ranging direct diplomacy with Iranian officials. But U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice warned that Iran must meet U.N. Security Council demands to suspend uranium enrichment before any talks on its nuclear program. 

"The dialogue and diplomacy must go hand in hand with a very firm message from the United States and the international community that Iran needs to meet its obligations as defined by the Security Council. And its continuing refusal to do so will only cause pressure to increase,"

Obama discussed this extensively during the presidential campaign. He also made reference to talking to our enemies during his inaugural address: "..we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." 

Of course, the Republicans will predictably say that engaging Iran is akin to "appeasing the Nazis." They conveniently forget that Ronald Regan (that ultra-liberal) engaged the Soviets during the Cold War and  Richard Nixon opened  relations with the Chinese. Obama has the right idea and I'm sure he will adopt President Regan's common refrain: "Trust, but verify."

Obama Moves to Make America Green

A repudiation of 8 years of head-in-sand environmental policy: 

In one key move, Obama is aiming to let California and other states set their own tailpipe emission standards — without having to get a waiver from the Environmental Protection Administration, as has been the case. The policy change would furnish another alternative for reducing greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide, which contribute to global warming. It also would reverse a Bush era policy that put up legal obstacles to California's go-it-alone stance.

Last week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, sent a letter to Obama asking him to give California and other states permission to implement the tough tailpipe-emission standards. Schwarzenegger said Obama "has a unique opportunity to both support the pioneering leadership of these states and move America toward global leadership on addressing climate change."

The goal:

..automobile manufacturers will quickly have to retool to begin producing and selling cars and trucks that get higher mileage than the national standard, and on a faster phase-in schedule. The auto companies have lobbied hard against the regulations and challenged them in court.

As I have noted recently, it's only a matter of time before gas prices go up again. Especially considering that the taxpayers have bailed out the auto industry to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, it's about time that they start making cars that use less gas and have a reduced impact on the environment. Kudos, Mr President.

UPDATE: He's not done:

Outlining his energy priorities, he said the country would not be held "hostage to dwindling resources, hostile regimes, and a warming planet". He called for greater fuel efficiency and an "energy economy" aimed at creating millions of jobs.

"We will commit ourselves to steady, focused, pragmatic pursuit of an America that is freed from our energy dependence, and empowered by a new energy economy that puts millions of our citizens to work." He added: "Now is the time to meet the challenge of this crossroads of history, by choosing a future safer for our country, prosperous for our planet, and sustainable."

And after years of putting ideology over science and facts, you gotta love this:

My administration will not deny facts. We will be guided by them.

More details on Obama's energy policy can be found here.

He's Lost It

They must be preparing a padded cell for  Illinois' beleaguered Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Facing an impeachment hearing which begins today, he's begun an all-out media blitz in an attempt to defend himself of the charges that he tried to sell Obama's Senate seat. In recent days, he's complained that the trial is rigged and compared himself to a cowboy being lynched for a crime he didn't commit as well as other jailed leaders such as Nelson Mandela, MLK, and Gandhi. During an interview with Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning America," he revealed that he considered Oprah to fill Obama's Senate seat. 

Not surprisingly, his antics have caused his lead attorney to quit.

UPDATE: Oprah responds..

Had she instead been exercising on the treadmill, watching "Good Morning America," as is her typical morning routine, she said, "I probably would have fallen off the treadmill. I'm pretty amused by the whole thing."

Obama to GOP: I'm in Charge

Ha:

The top congressional leaders from both parties gathered at the White House for a working discussion over the shape and size of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan. The meeting was designed to promote bipartisanship.

But Obama showed that in an ideological debate, he’s not averse to using a jab.

Challenged by one Republican senator over the contents of the package, the new president, according to participants, replied: “I won.”

The statement was prompted by Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona , who challenged the president and the Democratic leaders over the balance between the package’s spending and tax cuts, bringing up the traditional Republican notion that a tax credit for people who do not earn enough to pay income taxes is not a tax cut but a government check.

Obama noted that such workers pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, property taxes and sales taxes. The issue was widely debated during the presidential campaign, when Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, challenged Obama’s tax plan as “welfare.”

With those two words — “I won” — the Democratic president let the Republicans know that debate has been put to rest Nov. 4 . 

First Ever Stem Cell Clinical Trial Begins

There has been a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research since 2001 (thanks, Bush!). As I explained in this blog post a few months ago, stem cells are master cells that have the ability to transform themselves into other cell types, including those in the brain, heart, bones, muscles and skin. For this reason, stem cell therapy has the potential to cure a number of diseases and injuries such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and strokes.

In a surprising turn of events (hmmm..the same week as President Obama's inauguration--coincidence? Not likely.), the FDA announced that it will allow Geron, a U.S. biotech company, to start the world's first study of a treatment based on human embryonic stem cells — a long-awaited project aimed at spinal cord injury:

 

The cells will be injected into the spinal cord at the injury site 7 to 14 days after the injury occurs, because there is evidence the therapy will not work for much older injuries.

 

Geron’s therapy involves using various growth factors to turn embryonic stem cells into precursors of neural support cells called oligodendrocytes, which are then injected into the spinal cord..

 

The hope is that the injected cells will help repair the insulation, known as myelin, around nerve cells, restoring the ability of some nerve cells to carry signals. There is also some hope that growth factors produced by the injected cells will spur damaged nerve cells to regenerate.

 

The study is a so-called Phase I trial, aimed mainly at testing the safety of the therapy. There would still be years of testing and many hurdles to overcome before the treatment would become routinely available to patients.

 

It's a tragedy that this type of work has been banned for the last 8 years. So many people could have benefited. And for what? It's not like leftover embryos from in vitro fertilization (which is where the cells for this type of work are derived) aren't discarded after a few years anyway. We might as well put them to good use.

Lock 'Em Up and Throw Away the Keys

Stories like this really drive me nuts:

Kara Neumann, 11, had grown so weak that she could not walk or speak. Her parents, who believe that God alone has the ability to heal the sick, prayed for her recovery but did not take her to a doctor.

After an aunt from California called the sheriff’s department here, frantically pleading that the sick child be rescued, an ambulance arrived at the Neumann’s rural home on the outskirts of Wausau and rushed Kara to the hospital. She was pronounced dead on arrival.

The county coroner ruled that she had died from diabetic ketoacidosis resulting from undiagnosed and untreated juvenile diabetes. The condition occurs when the body fails to produce insulin, which leads to severe dehydration and impairment of muscle, lung and heart function.

About a month after Kara’s death last March, the Marathon County state attorney, Jill Falstad, brought charges of reckless endangerment against her parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann. Despite the Neumanns’ claim that the charges violated their constitutional right to religious freedom, Judge Vincent Howard of Marathon County Circuit Court ordered Ms. Neumann to stand trial on May 14, and Mr. Neumann on June 23. If convicted, each faces up to 25 years in prison.

Something tells me that few people will be surprised by this:

The Neumanns, who had operated a coffee shop, Monkey Mo’s, in this middle-class suburb in the North Woods, are known locally as followers of an online faith outreach group called Unleavened Bread Ministries, run by a preacher, David Eells. The site shares stories of faith healing and talks about the end of the world. An essay on the site signed Pastor Bob states that the Bible calls for healing by faith alone. “Jesus never sent anyone to a doctor or a hospital,” the essay says. “Jesus offered healing by one means only! Healing was by faith.”

I guess we should just shut down all the hospitals and put all the doctors and nurses out of business, huh? People, believe what you want to believe, but to let your child die when there are prefectly good medical treatments available, that's pure insanity.

Listen To Your Mother

Last week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine contains a troubling story of a medical student who inadvertently infected a quadriplegic Iraq war veteran with MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant bacteria that plagues hospitals. The photo you see above is the result of a simple petri dish test. The left panel (the placebo group) reveals the growth of MRSA after the student imprinted his unwashed hand and the dish was incubated (this allows the bacteria to grow to the point where bacterial colonies [the red granules you see in the pic] are visible). The panel on the right (the experimental group) shows that the dish lacked any MRSA growth when the student cleaned his hand with alcohol foam. 

Although most MRSA infections occur in hospitals or other health care settings, other infectious diseases can be spread by poor hygiene:  

Infectious diseases that are commonly spread through hand-to-hand contact include the common cold, flu and several gastrointestinal disorders, such as infectious diarrhea. Some people with the flu, particularly older adults and people with chronic medical problems, can develop pneumonia. The combination of the flu and pneumonia, in fact, is the eighth-leading cause of death among Americans. Inadequate hand hygiene also contributes to food-related illnesses, such as salmonella and E. coli infection. As many as 76 million Americans get a food-borne illness each year. 

Time To Get To Work

After the past 8 years, this sure is a sight for sore eyes..

Good Morning, Mr President. It's a New Day

Yesterday was as much a watershed moment for this country as any in our history. I thought President Obama's speech struck the right tone. It was inspiring yet somber. It offered a great balance of vision, pragmatism, and idealism. Most importantly, his speech was a clarion call. He's calling us all to return to a participatory government: participatory not just in the sense of choosing our leaders, but in actually following them to get the work of the nation done:

We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions -- that time has surely passed.

Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

Similarly:

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

Obama portrayed his response to the moment at hand as ideology-free: 

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage. 

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them--that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works--whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.

Yes, we can. We are in for some interesting times, and I can't help but smile.

The full speech can be read here and watched here. An awesome satellite image of the Washington Mall during the inauguration can be seen here.

Before we witness history today, let's remember another historical night..

Inauguration Day Schedule

The oath of office will be administered to the President-elect and the Vice President-elect on the steps of the United States Capitol in Washington, DC on January 20, 2009 beginning at 11:30 a.m. The Presidential Inauguration Committee has announced the official program for the inaugural swearing-in ceremony as follows: 

Musical Selections
The United States Marine Band
The San Francisco Boys Chorus and the San Francisco Girls Chorus

Call to Order and Welcoming Remarks
The Honorable Dianne Feinstein

Invocation
Dr. Rick Warren, Saddleback Church, Lake Forest, CA

Musical Selection
Aretha Franklin

Oath of Office Administered to Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
By Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, The Honorable John Paul Stevens

Musical Selection, John Williams, composer/arranger
Itzhak Perlman (Violin), Yo-Yo Ma (Cello), Gabriela Montero (Piano), Anthony McGill (Clarinet)

Oath of Office Administered to President-elect Barack H. Obama
By the Chief Justice of the United States, The Honorable John G. Roberts, Jr. 

Inaugural Address
The President of the United States, The Honorable Barack H. Obama

Poem
Elizabeth Alexander

Benediction
The Reverend Dr. Joseph E. Lowery

The National Anthem
The United States Navy Band "Sea Chanters" 

Presidential Inaugural Parade

January 20, 2009, 2:30 p.m. 

The New York Times has an excellent interactive map and other details here.

The Financial Crisis Worsens

Free market economic system, my ass. This week, the government announced another round of bailouts for the banking industry:

Two weeks after closing its purchase of Merrill Lynch at the urging of federal regulators, the government cemented a deal at midnight Thursday to supply Bank of America with a fresh $20 billion capital injection and absorb as much as $98.2 billion in losses on toxic assets..

The second lifeline brings the government’s total stake in Bank of America to $45 billion and makes it the bank’s largest shareholder, with a stake of about 6 percent.

 

By the way, the graph above shows Bank of America's stock price over the past year (down nearly 80%). 

The government also announced that Chrysler Financial would be getting a $1.5 billon loan. And there are rumors that Wells Fargo might also need more capital. Unfortunately, there are more casualties:

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp said National Bank of Commerce of Berkeley, Illinois and Bank of Clark County of Vancouver, Washington were closing with other banks taking over their insured deposits. In 2008, 25 banks were seized by officials, up from just 3 in 2007.

And:

Circuit City became the largest retailer to fall victim to the expanding financial crisis Friday, announcing it will shut down its remaining 567 U.S. stores at the cost of 34,000 more jobs after failing to sell the business.