Fox News Vs Obama

Fox News has been whining that it is being attacked by the Obama administration. Really? You be the judge:

House Unveils Healthcare Reform Bill

The Senate presented theirs earlier in the week. Now it's the House of Representatives' turn:

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, on Thursday unveiled a $894 billion health care package that would provide insurance to up to 36 million people by broadly expanding Medicaid, the state-federal insurance program for the poor, and by offering subsidies to moderate-income Americans to buy insurance either from private carriers or a new government-run plan.

House Democratic leaders, citing cost analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, said the bill would reduce future federal deficits by about $30 billion over the next 10 years, meeting President Obama’s demand that the health legislation not add “one dime” to the nation’s indebtedness.

This fact sheet outlines the key provisions.

Next? Debate (assuming a Republican filibuster is unsuccessful) and merging the Senate and House bills together.

Colbert Slams Gay Marriage Opponents

Earlier this year Washington state passed a law called "Everything But Marriage" which expanded the state's domestic partnership law to offer same-sex couples the same rights as straight married people. Naturally, this was met with deep dismay by anti-gay marriage bigots. One such group, Protect Marriage Washington, collected signatures to get a referendum on the ballot to overturn the law, but refuses to produce the list of those who signed the petition to prove its validity to detractors. Enter Stephen Colbert:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Don't Ask Don't Tell
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Michael Moore

Don't Just Sit There

Echoing President Obama's call during the election, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert tells us how an active citizenry can make a difference:

Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening) degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent millions of lives into tailspins. Where people once might have deluged their elected representatives with complaints, joined unions, resisted mass firings, confronted their employers with serious demands, marched for social justice and created brand new civic organizations to fight for the things they believed in, the tendency now is to assume that there is little or nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them.

This is so wrong. It is the kind of thinking that would have stopped the civil rights movement in its tracks, that would have kept women in the kitchen or the steno pool, that would have prevented labor unions from forcing open the doors that led to the creation of a vast middle class.

This passivity and sense of helplessness most likely stems from the refusal of so many Americans over the past few decades to acknowledge any sense of personal responsibility for the policies and choices that have led the country into such a dismal state of affairs, and to turn their backs on any real obligation to help others who were struggling.

The nation’s political leaders and their corporate puppet masters have fouled this nation up to a fare-thee-well. We will not be pulled from the morass without a big effort from an active citizenry, and that means a citizenry fired with a sense of mission and the belief that their actions, in concert with others, can make a profound difference.

It can start with just a few small steps. Mrs. Parks helped transform a nation by refusing to budge from her seat. Maybe you want to speak up publicly about an important issue, or host a house party, or perhaps arrange a meeting of soon-to-be dismissed employees, or parents at a troubled school.

The Public Option Must Be A Zombie

Saying it over and over, doesn't make it true:



Ultimately, this proves 2 things: 1) The people at Fox News are a bunch of no-nothing idiots, and 2) An active citizenry can influence our elected leaders by harassing them with phone calls, emails, and petitions.

Getting Closer

Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid announced yesterday that he is putting a government-run health insurance program (the so-called public option) in the Senate bill that will go to the floor for a full vote in the coming weeks. This is important because by putting the public option in the bill that goes to the floor (as opposed to making Senators add it in with an amendment to the bill) makes it much harder to remove later on in the process.

If the bill passes through Congress and President Obama signs it (which he most certainly will), everyone will benefit. Of course, people who do not have health insurance would have an affordable option (even if they have a preexisting medical condition). In addition, people with private health insurance would benefit indirectly because health insurance companies would be forced to reduce premiums to compete with the public option (which would not look to make a profit and would be large enough to negotiate lower prices on pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and other medical supplies and devices, further reducing the costs of delivering medical care).

As a compromise to "conservative" Dems, individual states would be allowed to "opt out" of this plan after one year. Of course, that means that if the public likes the new program, it would likely be political suicide for a state politician to endorse an opt out. For example, Medicaid has an opt out provision, but not one state has opted out. Public health insurance, in other words, is too popular for states to opt out.

Rachel explains:

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

Although we are not there yet, we've passed a big milestone. We have a bill going to the Senate floor with a public health insurance option, something the pundits in Washington predicted would never happen.

Rethinking Bottled Water

I love water. I very rarely drink coffee or soda, so it's about all I drink. I remember when I was about 12 years old bottled water started to become popular, and like most people at the time, I wondered why anyone would pay good money for water when it's free out of the tap. Obviously the vast majority of us (myself included) were eventually converted to bottled water drinkers.

Besides the sheer insanity of transporting bottled water across the globe and apart from the trail of fossil fuels burned and greenhouse gases emitted, it takes 1.5 million barrels of oil (some of which, of course, comes from the Middle East and therefore helps props up autocratic regimes) a year just to make the plastic water bottles Americans use, according to the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, plus countless barrels to transport it from as far as Fiji and refrigerate it.

Did you ever wonder where all those millions water bottles go once we discard them? Many end up in the largest landfill on earth: the Pacific Ocean. Consequently, we've created the planet's largest known floating garbage dump, affectionately called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Well, actually there's two. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California; scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas! The Western Garbage Patch forms east of Japan and west of Hawaii.

Of course, this has a serious impact on the environment. Photographer Chris Jordan recently took a trip to one of the garbage patches and documented dozens of dead albatrosses which had their bellies full of plastic garbage.


More pics here.

I think many people simply assume that bottled water is purer than tap water. Not necessarily. 20/20 did an interesting experiment:



To sum up, bottled water is not only bad for the environment, but most people can't tell the difference between bottled and tap water. As for me, I've been using a Brita pitcher for years and years and I have a glass at work that I fill with tap from the fountain or a water purifying machine. Will I be eliminating all bottled water? Well, not completely (I'll buy a bottle if I'm away from home, for example), but I will certainly limit it quite a bit.

Science as Art

Crossing a microscope with a camera gives you a micrograph, a tiny photograph that allows artists and scientists to show the beauty that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Every year the Nikon Small World competition celebrates this hidden world. Some of my faves:

Mouse Purkinje (brain) cells (40x)














Mosquito larvae (100x)














Fungal infection of a plant (25x)














And the first place winner of the competition...

Anther (the pollen producing and storing part) of the thale cress plant (20x)
















More here.

Is It Time to Change Careers?

Unemployment figures, while better than they were last year, are still grim. The US Labor Department recently reported that there are about 6.3 unemployed workers competing, on average, for each job opening. CNN/Money lists the best 50 jobs in America. Here are the top 20 (notice that 14 are either in health care or information technology), along with their forecasted growth over the next 10 years:

Rank	Job title	Job growth (10-year forecast)
1	Systems Engineer	45%
2	Physician Assistant	27%
3	College Professor	23%
4	Nurse Practitioner	23%
5	Information Technology Project Manager	16%
6	Certified Public Accountant	18%
7	Physical Therapist	27%
8	Computer/Network Security Consultant	27%
9	Intelligence Analyst	15%
10	Sales Director	10%
11	Anesthesiologist	14%
12	Software Developer	28%
13	Pharmacist	22%
14	Occupational Therapist	23%
15	Nurse Anesthetist	23%
16	Software Product Manager	28%
17	Business Analyst, IT	29%
18	Attorney/Lawyer	11%
19	Physician/General Practice	14%
20	Human Resources Manager	13%

The Public Option Jumps Another Hurdle

We might be getting closer. Members of Congress who say that the inclusion of a government public health care option would be too expensive have one less excuse:

A preliminary estimate from the Congressional Budget Office projects that the House Democrats' health care plan that includes a public option would cost $871 billion over 10 years, according to two Democratic sources.

CBO also found that the Democrats' bill reduces the deficit in the first 10 years.

This new CBO estimate, which aides caution is not final, is significantly less than the $1.1 trillion price tag of the original House bill that passed out of three committees this summer. More importantly, it comes under the $900 billion cap set by President Obama in his joint address to Congress last month.

CBO analyzed what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls a "more robust" public option -- one that ties reimbursement rates for doctors to current Medicare rates, plus a 5 percent increase.

Equally important, this bill would cover 96 percent of all Americans, providing greater bang for each federal dollar spent.

Wall Street Bonus Madness

This is simply outrageous. Even as the rest of the nation continues to suffer from rising unemployment and severe hardship, the same banks that we bailed out at enormous taxpayer expense one year ago are handing out record pay and bonuses to its employees.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman spells it out:

What’s wrong with financial-industry compensation? In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses. This encourages excessive risk-taking: some of the men most responsible for the current crisis walked away immensely rich from the bonuses they earned in the good years, even though the high-risk strategies that led to those bonuses eventually decimated their companies, taking down a large part of the financial system in the process.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert adds:

We’ve spent the last few decades shoveling money at the rich like there was no tomorrow. We abandoned the poor, put an economic stranglehold on the middle class and all but bankrupted the federal government — while giving the banks and megacorporations and the rest of the swells at the top of the economic pyramid just about everything they’ve wanted.

And we still don’t seem to have learned the proper lessons. We’ve allowed so many people to fall into the terrible abyss of unemployment that no one — not the Obama administration, not the labor unions and most certainly no one in the Republican Party — has a clue about how to put them back to work.

Meanwhile, Wall Street is living it up. I’m amazed at how passive the population has remained in the face of this sustained outrage.

Even as tens of millions of working Americans are struggling to hang onto their jobs and keep a roof over their families’ heads, the wise guys of Wall Street are licking their fat-cat chops over yet another round of obscene multibillion-dollar bonuses — this time thanks to the bailout billions that were sent their way by Uncle Sam, with very little in the way of strings attached.

Whether it's the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980s or the Dot.Com bubble of the 1990s or the Enron collapse or the mortgage meltdown last year -- it's always the same old story. The rich and powerful Wall Streeters take huge risks and when all hell breaks loose, they get bailed out by the taxpayer, while needy individuals get little social protection. In other words, losses are socialized and profits privatized; it's socialism for the rich and capitalism for everybody else.

When do the Obama administration and the Democratic legislative leadership begin to address the underlying problems of the economy and reform of the seriously broken financial system? Tough talk is not enough, Mr President.

Where Do Our Tax Dollars Go?

If you pay taxes, then you have paid for a small part of everything in this revealing poster (click here to enlarge):



It's appalling that military/defense spending eats up 2/3 ($717 billion/year) of the entire federal budget. We have billions for pointless wars, but we can't provide basic medical care for our citizens. Sad.

Shampoo Science

Despite my lack of hair, I found this interesting:

..if you do a quick survey of a few shampoo ingredients labels, you’ll quickly see how the top 10 list looks nearly the same on all of them. But what are those ingredients, and what do they do? We broke down the ingredients on the back of the bottle.

1. Water. Up to 80 percent of shampoo is this basic element. Without enough of it, the lathering liquid wouldn’t pour from the bottle.

2. Surfactant. Basically a detergent, this additive does the bulk of the work. Surfates clean by surrounding dirt and oil so water can rinse them away. Ingredients like ammonium lauryl sulfate and ammonium laureth sulfate tend to be easier on sensitive scalps than sodium lauryl sulfate.[snip]

3. Foaming agents. Ingredients like cocamide or cocamidopropyl betaine provide the satisfying suds that complete the hair-washing experience. Lather, however, is purely aesthetic. “Lather doesn’t have anything to do with how well a shampoo works,” says Ni’Kita Wilson, a cosmetics chemist for Cosmetech Laboratories. “Manufacturers put lathering agents in shampoos because it’s what consumers expect.”

4. An acidic ingredient. Items like sodium citrate or citric acid on your shampoo label are added to keep shampoo at the right pH level. The acidic pH interacts with the hair's slightly negative charge to help the cuticle, the outer layer of the hair, maintain a smooth, flat surface.

5. Silicones like dimethicone, or anything ending in 'one.' These are polymers that deposit a lightweight coating on the hair. They help create smoothness and add shine.

6. Polyquaternium. Much like a fabric softener, it helps make hair more manageable by depositing a fatty conditioner and fighting static. It also thickens the shampoo formula so it’s easier to pour.

7. Panthenol, fatty alcohols, and nut oils. These common additives moisturize and lock in hydration.

8. Midazolidinyl urea, iodopropynyl, isothiazolinone, and sodium benzoate. [snip] Since many of the other ingredients are made from organic materials, they can grow mold and bacteria. These additives keep your shampoo from turning into a science project.

I've long suspected this:

Natural extracts and other additives that manufacturers brag about on the label don’t do much for your hair..

This, of course, begs the obvious question: If all of these ingredients are basically the same and "botanical extracts" do nothing, then why pay $8 (or $20) for a bottle of shampoo?

Exactly.

Republicans Say the Darndest Things

Man, I love living in the Internet age. When you say something stupid on TV, it comes back to haunt you.



Remind me why we continue to listen to these people?

Choose Your Own Health Insurance Adventure

Do Your Part to Support the Public Option

After months of delay, the full Senate is about to debate and vote on landmark health care legislation. But first, Senator Harry Reid and Democratic leaders have a big decision to make:

Will the Senate consider real health care reform with a robust public health insurance option, or a watered-down compromise full of giveaways to the insurance companies?

This is a hugely important decision. Progressive champions in Congress are standing strong for the public option and Sen. Reid himself has expressed support—but he's under immense pressure from a few conservative obstructionists who oppose it.

Please sign Moveon.org's petition here. They will present it to Sen. Harry Reid and Democratic leaders.

Also, please call/email President Obama and your Congressional leaders. You can find their contact info here. The two minutes this takes can make a huge difference.

What does Earth look like when viewed from Mars?

The Mars Orbiter Camera snapped the pic below (larger pics here). In addition, an alignment of Earth and Jupiter allowed the camera to acquire an image of both planets (Earth is in the top half of the pic and Jupiter is in the bottom half). Mars and the orbiting camera were 86 million miles from Earth and almost nearly 600 million miles from Jupiter. That's far.



This reminds me of the pic called the "Pale Blue Dot" and the insightful words of the late Astronomer Carl Sagan:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Fly Art

Weird, but kinda cool at the same time:







More pics here.

RNC Chairman Michael Steele: “I’m the cow on the tracks”

Health care reform cleared a significant hurdle yesterday, with the Senate Finance Committee voting to approve the Baucus bill. Only one Republican had the sense to vote for it. Although this bill does not have a public option in it, three House and a Senate Committees have already passed bills with a public option. Negotiations over the final bill will now move to the full House and Senate. We need to keep the pressure on them to include a public option. Needless to say, the insurance lobby and the Republicans will fight tooth and nail against it. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, in particular, will be a tough obstacle to overcome:

Olbermann: "The insurance companies are at war with America."

In case you haven't seen it yet, Countdown’s Keith Olbermann points out that there is no higher human priority than health and therefore no more basic government responsibility than ensuring the care of its citizens. If you haven’t seen it yet, this is something you are going to want to watch from heart rending start to sobering finish:

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

The Most Trusted Name in News?

The Daily Show skewers CNN for letting blatant lies and propaganda go unchallenged all day long on their network. Simply brilliant:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
CNN Leaves It There
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

No matter how many times it happens, I'm still amazed at the fact that it's a comedy show that provides some of the best media analysis around. This clip also reminded me why I barely watch CNN anymore. I'm gonna have to leave it there.

A Dose of Facts About Health Care Reform

Health care reform has dominated the news for the last several months. Despite this, the media has done a terrible job explaining why we need reform. I've compiled a few key facts:

1. Americans spend more on health care than any other nation and yet we don’t live longer or have better health outcomes (we rank 50th in life expectancy; 33rd or 46th in infant mortality, depending on whether you ask the UN or CIA; and the worst in preventable deaths due to treatable conditions out of 19 leading industrialized nations). In 2000, the World Health Organization ranked the US health care system as the 37th best in the world.

2. Over the last decade, employer-sponsored health insurance premiums have increased 131%. Employees have seen their share of job-based coverage premiums increase at nearly the same rate during this period, jumping from $1,543 to $3,515. As a result, people are being forced to cut back on health care costs by putting off doctors' visits (28% of patients surveyed) or procedures (22%), declining tests (20%), skipping filling prescriptions (20%), and taking expired meds (15%) or skipping doses (15%). Without reform, the average family premium is projected to rise to over $22,000 in the next decade.

3. Nearly one million Americans go bankrupt every year because of medical expenses. According to a study in the American Journal of Medicine, 62% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were partly the result of medical expenses. Of those who filed for bankruptcy, nearly 80% had health insurance. According to another study, about 1.5 million families lose their homes to foreclosure every year due to unaffordable medical costs. That's right, people who have health insurance are losing their homes and life savings because they cannot afford medical care for themselves or their children.

4. The United States is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not provide universal health care. The Census Bureau estimated that 45.7 million Americans under age 65 did not have insurance in 2007. Without reform, at least 6.9 million more Americans will be uninsured in 2010. Another 25 million are underinsured. Considering the millions who have lost their jobs during the recession, these figures are surely higher now. The result? According to a Harvard study, 45,000 Americans die every year (one person every 12 minutes) because of a lack of health insurance coverage. That means if you don't have insurance you have a 40% higher risk of death than someone who does. What does this say about our society?

5. In 45 states across the country, insurance companies are allowed to deny coverage to people with a pre-existing medical condition. In fact, 21% of people who apply for non-employer-based health insurance get turned down, charged a higher price or offered a plan that excludes coverage for their pre-existing condition. Relatively minor conditions like hay fever, asthma, previous sports injuries, and even a history of domestic violence or if your 2 month old baby is overweight, can trigger high premiums or denials of coverage. Further, people with insurance are currently subject to rescission if they become ill. That means they can drop your coverage on the grounds that you had an undisclosed pre-existing condition (often for bullshit reasons).

6. If you have private insurance you like, you can keep it - and your costs will go down. What if you lose your job or don't get coverage from your employer? Reform will allow access to affordable care through a public option (a government-run insurance program like Medicare). Although I would much rather have a single-payer (universal health care) system, the public option is the best plan under debate to increase access to health care and reduce costs. Because a public option would not seek to earn profits and would compete with private insurers, its creation will put pressure on insurance companies to reduce their prices.

7. Poll after poll has shown that a large majority of Americans want health care reform with a public option. Doctors are in favor of the public option. So what's the hold up? The insurance and pharma companies are spending $1.4 million a day to spread misinformation and lies about health care reform. Shockingly, there are 6 insurance company lobbyists for every member of Congress. Additionally, the key members (which includes Democrats and Republicans) drafting the legislation are the ones getting the most "campaign donations" (read: bribes) from insurers and pharma.

We can't let insurance companies, Big Pharma, Republicans and others with a vested interest in the status quo use misinformation to derail efforts to lower healthcare costs for all Americans. They did it before. The stakes are simply too high to let them succeed again.

What can you do? Call or email your elected officials and demand that they vote for health insurance reform with a public option (anyone can spare the 2 min it takes to do this). Sign petitions (here, here and here). Attend rallies. Talk to your friends, families and neighbors. Support Keith Olbermann's call to put a free clinic every week in the cities of the states of the six shameful senators who are blocking reform. Please do something. Time is running out.

Telling It Like It Is

I recently told you about Rep. Alan Grayson, the Florida Democrat who declared on the House floor that the Republicans’ health-care plan amounted to “Don’t get sick,” and “If you do get sick, die quickly.” He's fast becoming my favorite member of Congress:

A Right Delayed is a Right Denied

President Obama will be addressing the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, tomorrow night. Bill Maher hilariously explains why it's time for President Obama to overturn "don't ask, don't tell":

One, because it's the right thing to do and two, because it will throw the conservative base into such a frenzied, pants-shitting panic that they'll drop all that BS about death panels and socialism and let us all get some actual work done.

Because here's the thing about today's conservatives: they're not bright. They can't keep a lot of ideas in their head at once. And by "a lot" I mean "two." If we can get them all worked up about fighting the gay menace, it will siphon away all that crazy, right wing, town-hall energy from all the other big issues they've been fighting. The tea-baggers don't know what the word "socialism" means. But they do know what the word "gay" means, because their hairdresser explained it to them once, and they don't like it. They will be drawn to it like a moth to a flamer. Bush was practically re-elected on a promise to keep boys from kissing. Which is ridiculous, because if you want to stop gays from having sex, wouldn't you let them get married?

Besides, as Lewis Black said, "we needs boots on the ground and if some of the boots are Prada, then FABULOUS!"

And the kicker from Maher:

And when they get out there on Sunday [gay rights march on Washington DC], Gay Nation also needs to do everything in their power to scare the hell out of right-wing homophobes. I want to see you guys rollerblading down the Mall in nothing but a speedo and a nun's habit, holding a sparkler in one hand and a penis popsicle in the other.

Time To Crack Some Heads

I can only hope this is true:



First Alan Grayson calls out the Republicans, now this. Is it possible that the Dems are finally playing hardball? Be still, my beating heart.

How Times Have Changed

George W Bush's policies (pre-emptive war waged on false pretenses, disregard for the Geneva conventions regarding torture, arrogant unilateralism, world-wide economic crisis, denial of climate change, etc) did extensive damage to America's reputation around the world. The election of President Obama seems to have changed that:

The United States is the most admired country globally thanks largely to the star power of President Barack Obama and his administration, according to a new poll.

It climbed from seventh place last year, ahead of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan which completed the top five nations in the Nation Brand Index (NBI).

"What's really remarkable is that in all my years studying national reputation, I have never seen any country experience such a dramatic change in its standing as we see for the United States for 2009," said Simon Anholt, the founder of NBI, which measured the global image of 50 countries each year.

And now the big news this morning:

President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” a honor that came less than nine months after he made United States history by becoming the country’s first African-American president.

The award, announced in Oslo by the Nobel Committee while much of official Washington — including the president — was still asleep, cited in particular the president’s efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

“He has created a new international climate,” the committee said.

Of course, his detractors will say that he hasn't done anything to deserve this award (including one jackass who suggested that he got it because of affirmative action). Andrew Sullivan makes this important point, though:

If any person has done more to advance some measure of calm, reason and peace in this troubled word lately, it's President Obama. I think the Cairo speech and the Wright speech alone merited this both bridging ancient rifts even while they remain, of course, deep and intractable. He has already done more to heal the open wound between the West and Islam than anyone else on the planet.

Although these accolades are nice and all, there's much to be done.

Doing Nothing Is Not An Option

As the richest country on earth (and the ONLY industrialized country that doesn't offer universal health care to its citizens), we should be embarrassed that we allow this to go on.

Faces of American Health Care, Part 1 from austin considine on Vimeo.

Pretty Cool

Two things I love: baseball and Rachel Maddow.

The Republican Strategy: Label Everything They Don't Like 'Socialist'

..no matter how ridiculous it sounds. Nonsense from Republican Congressman Steve King:

So in the end this is something that has to come with a, if there's a push for a socialist society, a society where the foundations of individual rights and liberties are undermined and everybody is thrown together, living collectively off of one pot of resources earned by everyone. That is, this is one of the goals they have to go to is same-sex marriage because it has to plow through marriage in order to get to their goal. They want public affirmation. They want access to public funds and resources. Eventually all those resources will be pooled because that's the direction we're going. And not only is it a radical social idea, it is a purely socialist concept in the final analysis.

The Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan breaks it down:

You realize that King must have no understanding of the word, or that the word has now become synonymous in Foxland with "anything that scares me." How on earth is allowing 2 percent of people the right to marry the person they love a path to redistribution of wealth or government ownership of the means of production?

Marriage is an institution that helps people be independent of the state. If one spouse gets sick, it is his or her spouse's first responsibility to care for him or her. Without the spouse, the government would have to step in. Marriage encourages responsibility, long-term commitment, and leads to better health. All of that too helps people remain independent of the state. In fact every single argument that social conservatives make about marriage for straights - and rightly so - also applies to marriage for gays.

Where's the Beef (Inspection)?

The New York Times tells a horrifying story about the shoddy beef inspection practices in our country. Although for any one who has read/seen Fast Food Nation, none of this should come as a surprise:

Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen.

Many big slaughterhouses will sell only to grinders who agree not to test their shipments for E. coli, according to officials at two large grinding companies. Slaughterhouses fear that one grinder’s discovery of E. coli will set off a recall of ingredients they sold to others.

The food safety officer at American Foodservice, which grinds 365 million pounds of hamburger a year, said it stopped testing trimmings a decade ago because of resistance from slaughterhouses. “They would not sell to us,” said Timothy P. Biela, the officer. “If I test and it’s positive, I put them in a regulatory situation. One, I have to tell the government, and two, the government will trace it back to them. So we don’t do that.”

Here's something to think about next time you ask for your burger to be cooked medium rare:

Meat companies and grocers have been barred from selling ground beef tainted by the virulent strain of E. coli known as O157:H7 since 1994, after an outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants left four children dead. Yet tens of thousands of people are still sickened annually by this pathogen, federal health officials estimate, with hamburger being the biggest culprit. Ground beef has been blamed for 16 outbreaks in the last three years alone, including the one that left Ms. Smith paralyzed from the waist down. This summer, contamination led to the recall of beef from nearly 3,000 grocers in 41 states.

In fact, the USDA only tests 0.05% of the nation's ground beef for bacteria that could kill you. Like so many other things happening in our country today, this is another chilling example of how powerful corporations have become and how little our elected officials can (or will) do to regulate them. It's all about profit. Public health be damned.

By the way, if you still insist on eating ground beef (and I occasionally do), it's best that you have the butcher or supermarket grind the beef for you. For more info on this, I suggest you check out books like "The Omnivores Dilemma" and "Fast Food Nation."

Doc: "Access to Appropriate Health Care is a Human Right"

Dr. Paul Hochfeld of Mad As Hell Doctors makes a strong case for health care reform:



"I think this is the civil rights issue of our generation and we need to start every discussion with 'access to appropriate health care is a human right.'"

Indeed.

The Moral Argument for Health Care Reform

I have to make it a point to read Marty Peretz's blog at The New Republic more often:

I do not pretend that any of the health care formulas now being trumpeted around Washington are even near-perfect. But I do know that what we have now is ethically deficient. Any reality that counts the emergency room as routine health care is ethically deficient. And it is time that the nation deal with this. President Obama has tried, and he is being undermined.

...What the president is trying to do is to style a system that is non-exclusionary. There is no plausible moral argument against that. Unless you think that economically marginal folk should be excluded.

Darwin's Rottweiler

A disturbing Gallup poll conducted earlier this year found that only 39% of Americans accept the theory evolution. I see two key reasons for this. First, our education system has done a miserable job in explaining evolution to students (by not devoting sufficient time to it. After all, we're talking about a fairly complex scientific concept here and we all know how science savvy Americans are), mostly due to reason #2: Evangelical Christians. These people have railed against evolution since Darwin's time, spreading misinformation and lies. Apparently, they must really believe that there is a conspiracy by hundreds of scientists from all over the world to fool the public into thinking that life evolved from lower forms. And the planned celebrations surrounding the 150 year anniversary of the publication of Darwin's "On the Origin of the Species" has only stirred up the hornet's nest. For example, former teen idol Kirk Cameron recently unveiled his plan to distribute thousands of altered copies of Darwin's book to college students.

How were they altered you ask? Darwin's masterpiece will include a 50-page introduction that slams evolution and paints Darwin as both racist and misogynistic and explicitly highlights "Adolph Hitler's undeniable connection to the theory." (this awesome YouTube video addresses many of Cameron's ridiculous points, one by one)

Thankfully, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins answers back with a book of his own:

In "The Greatest Show on Earth", Richard Dawkins takes on creationists, including followers of 'Intelligent Design' and all those who question the fact of evolution through natural selection. Like a detective arriving on the scene of a crime, he sifts through fascinating layers of scientific facts and disciplines to build a cast-iron case: from the living examples of natural selection in birds and insects; the 'time clocks' of trees and radioactive dating that calibrate a timescale for evolution; the fossil record and the traces of our earliest ancestors; to confirmation from molecular biology and genetics. All of this, and much more, bears witness to the truth of evolution. "The Greatest Show on Earth" comes at a critical time: systematic opposition to the fact of evolution is now flourishing as never before, especially in America. In Britain and elsewhere in the world, teachers witness insidious attempts to undermine the status of science in their classrooms. Richard Dawkins provides unequivocal evidence that boldly and comprehensively rebuts such nonsense.

Unpatriotic

Get this. Republicans actually cheered Obama's failure to bring the Olympics to Chicago. Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman hits the nail on the head:

So what did we learn from this [Cheering at Chicago's lost Olympic bid] moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.

But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.

Can you imagine what the Republicans would have said/done if the Dems had cheered a failed bid by W to have Dallas host the Olympics?

WIll It Be A Pop-up Book?

Redonkulous:

Sarah Palin's upcoming memoir is already the top bestselling book on the shopping sites of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, a month and a half before the book goes on sale.

At least one Republican isn't cheering.

Be Sure to Get Your Zs

Don't sleep on this:

Studies have demonstrated that poor sleep and susceptibility to colds go hand in hand, and scientists think it could be a reflection of the role sleep plays in maintaining the body’s defenses.

In a recent study for The Archives of Internal Medicine, scientists followed 153 men and women for two weeks, keeping track of their quality and duration of sleep. Then, during a five-day period, they quarantined the subjects and exposed them to cold viruses. Those who slept an average of fewer than seven hours a night, it turned out, were three times as likely to get sick as those who averaged at least eight hours.

Studies have found that mammals that require the most sleep also produce greater levels of disease-fighting white blood cells.