Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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 Eli Lilly & Co. urged doctors to prescribe Zyprexa for elderly patients with dementia, an unapproved use for the anti-psychotic, even though the drugmaker had evidence the medicine didn't work for such patients, according to unsealed internal company  In a sane society there would be prison cells for executives who knowing foist fake medicine on suffering people, but as we all see daily, America isn't a sane society. I'll wager a month's wages that nobody involved in this will ever be prosecuted criminally, but perhaps
And then there's the toymaker Mattel, which will pay a $2.3-million fine for selling toxic playthings for little kids. The Consumer Product Safety Commission says Mattel and its Fisher-Price subsidiary knowingly violated a federal ban on lead paint in toys. "Knowingly" seems to me like a hell of a red-flag word, at least for parents who love their children, but in the very next sentence Associated Press says Mattel and Fisher-Price "deny having willfully violated the ban." And then the subject is dropped. At least twice, Attorney General Eric Holder has said that medical marijuana raids would end. But Charles Lynch, who ran a medical marijuana dispensary in California that was in compliance with the state's laws, was prosecuted by Holder's Justice Department as if he was street scum. The Obama administration wanted Lynch locked up for five years, but a kindhearted judge instead gave him a mere year and a day in prison. Charles Lynch is a hero, a word often overused but certainly appropriate for someone who keeps chemo patients from barfing their guts out and stops AIDS sufferers from wasting away to skeletons. What's the word for someone who imprisons people for such acts? What the holy heck is misfiring in Eric Holder's mind? Why, five months into the Obama administration, are the alleged principles of Barack Obama and Eric Holder not yet applicable? When will we see a smidgen of that change we heard about all last year? We're still waiting for some sign that Michael Mukasey is gone and there's a new and improved era at the Department of Justice, and I'll bet Charles Lynch hasn't noticed any difference since the election. The US Attorney's Office in Nevada (also under Attorney General Holder's purview) has subpoenaed the Las Vegas Review-Journal, demanding that the paper identify readers who posted comments responding to the on-line edition of the paper's coverage of a tax protester's trial. The feds want the paper to provide ""full name, date of birth, physical address, gender, ZIP code, password prompts, security questions, telephone numbers and other identifiers [including commenters'] IP address." While Attorney General Eric Holder remains utterly uninterested in the mountains of evidence of Justice Department corruption during the Bush-Cheney administration, he's found time to freeze bank accounts of on-line poker sites, depriving who knows how many Americans of their winnings. I'm unfamiliar with Peter Lance, or with his book Triple Cross, but it's gotten US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's goat — he's written to the book's publisher, asking that Triple Cross be withdrawn instead of republished. I have long thought that the left-wing's widespread adulation for Fitzgerald is bizarre, as there was certainly nothing impressive in his investigation of a small corner of the Bush administration's criminality (an investigation that led to just one low-level conviction, promptly commuted by President Bush), nor in his actions against Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (which amounted to using press releases instead of legal procedures to have Blagojevich removed from office). To me this call for censorship is strike three, and it's apparent that Fitzgerald is an ass of stellar proportions. After the 20th post-conviction DNA exoneration in Dallas County, TX, the Dallas News interviewed the lawyer who's been handling the bulk of these cases. My main take-away from this is that the procedure wherein eyewitnesses are asked to identify the perps has been almost laughably unreliable, and police need to institute "blind sequential photo lineups [where those showing the photo lineup do not know who the perpetrator might be or even if he's in the lineup]", and "do away with 'showups', where the defendant is brought to the witness for identification, usually immediately after the crime." A federal court has ruled that the Federal Communications Commission can use its regulatory authority to protect small, non-commercial stations from broadcast encroachment by giant corporate concerns. The decision means that low-power FM radio will be allowed to barely continue to exist, amidst the crap and more crap that dominates American radio. When he was White House Legal Counsel, Alberto Gonzales wrote a memo to then-President George W Bush advising him, specifically, to deny that the Geneva Conventions covered al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. That, Gonzales suggested, would help insulate the President from future charges of war crimes. Americans who give a damn about America ought to be pretty dang embarrassed, and pretty dang angry. Legislation that would make it illegal to release evidence of American torture during the Bush-Cheney era, proposed by Senators Joe Lieberman (I-Republican) and Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina), has been removed from the war supplemental bill progressing through the Senate. Not to worry, though, an un-named Democratic aide says that Lieberman and Graham will "attach [the amendment] to every piece of legislation that comes down the pike" until it's passed. John Yoo, the lawyer and law professor who drew up the scrupulously shallow legal justification for the Bush-Cheney administration's torture policies, has been ordered to testify in Jose Padilla's upcoming lawsuit over being tortured. It's the first time, to my recollection, that any of the Bush-Cheney administration's high-level war criminals have even been threatened with being held responsible for their acts. Former American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will soon start having difficulties if he wants to travel internationally, due to his involvement with torture. Or so says Leandro Despouy, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, who seems to have some inside knowledge. Tell me more, Leandro, mine eyes are fluttering with intrigue.
CIA Director Leon Panetta says Former Vice President Dick Cheney is "almost ... wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point" that torture is good and the Geneva Conventions are bad. Well, duh — that's been Cheney's obvious agenda for months, but it's a little jarring to see someone in a high political post willing to speak the truth so bluntly albeit belatedly. Does anyone doubt that Panetta will be this week's piñata for the Republicans? It's been a busy week for Panetta. He's also sent lawyers to court to make sure you never know what happened in the "interrogations" of prisoners.
Bank of America is paying the lawyers' fees for former Countrywide Financial CEO and accused insider trader Angelo R. Mozilo. Do you think BofA would do the same thing if, say, a teller was charged with pilfering from the cash drawer? Why is the American Coal Foundation setting the curriculum at elementary schools? Royal Dutch Shell will pay $15.5-million and admit no wrongdoing, for its role in the murder of Nigerian poet and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Nobody with a triple-digit IQ believes that Shell wasn't directly involved, or that Saro-Wiwa was the only activist killed at Shell's behest, and on the scale of Shell's unimaginable wealth, paying $15.5-million is akin to you paying a buck and a quarter. As the internet hobbles its old business model that made newspapers wildly profitable for generations, it's increasingly evident that the old business model of commercial television will soon face the same challenges, and this piece by Henry Blodget lays out the problems pretty plainly. "As with print-based media, Internet-based distribution generates only a tiny fraction of the revenue and profit that today's incumbent cable, broadcast, and satellite distribution models do. As Internet-based distribution gains steam, therefore, most TV industry incumbents will no longer be able to support their existing cost structures." There's also a big difference, at least for this consumer, between endangered newspapers and endangered television. In exchange for their decades of great profitability newspapers provided something of great value for all those years, genuine journalim that can't be easily replaced. Commercial TV, by contrast, has had occasional accomplishments that could be called art or (decreasingly in recent years) journalism, but for the most part it provides not much more than bearable diversions for wasting time. We're going to be a lot worse off as a society as major newspapers become mere shadows of what they once were, but nobody outside the industry will mourn the passing of American commercial television.
The makers of Rockstar, a caffeinated energy drink, are reportedly sending legally threatening letters to several bloggers who've published information about Rockstar's family link to radio hatemonger Michael Savage — his son and wife own the company, which operates out of the same address as Savage's radio production company. My feelings are only slightly hurt that we haven't received a cease and desist letter yet. Spam King Sanford Wallace might be prosecuted for his latest on-line vandalism. I can't fathom why it's taken so long. This guy has been a known super-spammer with sidelines in spyware and websites rigged to trap visitors as new windows are forced open ad nauseum, and he's been at it for more than a dozen years, yet he remains free and presumably rich. According to Wikipedia, he's been dragged into court numerous times and forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, so presumably his spam and other operations must yield substantially more than hundreds of millions in profits. He's stolen incalculable hours of time from millions of people — why isn't this fellow in jail? President Obama has named Alexia Kelley to be Director of the Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which is, believe it or not, a part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Kelley's appointment is shocking, outrageous, and all sorts of stinky adjectives because she's opposed to abortion and contraception. Takes the breath away, doesn't it? Something called the Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is a government office, and a President who's supposed to be pro-choice appoints someone who's opposed to birth control to run the joint? I was almost going to have sympathy for the editor of this scientific journal, who lost his job after being pranked into publishing a nonsensical computer-generated research paper. But in reading the background, it sure looks like the publishers deserve all the phony papers that pranksters can generate. The US Supreme Court says that judges who've taken huge financial contributions from defendants should recuse themselves from hearing such a case. Sounds like a big duh, right? Well, the vote was 5-4, because the Supreme Court's fabled four fascists — Alito (Bush43 2006), Roberts (Bush43 2005), Scalia (Reagan 1986), and Thomas (Bush41 1991) — disagree. Shake your head and think that one through, and remember, none of these four could have made it to the Supreme Court without the open acquiescence of Democrats in the Senate.
Today was the deadline for the Obama Justice Department to request a full panel hearing of Mohamed v. Jeppesen, the extraordinary rendition case that we won before a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit in April. And sure enough, they asked. ... Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project who successfully argued the case in February on behalf of the plaintiffs, said in statement today:The Obama administration has now fully embraced the Bush administration's shameful effort to immunize torturers and their enablers from any legal consequences for their actions. The CIA's rendition and torture program is not a 'state secret'; it's an international scandal. If the Obama administration has its way, no torture victim will ever have his day in court, and future administrations will be free to pursue torture policies without any fear of
In arguing in federal court in favor of the godawful Defense of Marriage Act, the Obama administration's lawyers might have seriously infuriated some of the gays and lesbians who've been solidly in their base. Fury is the appropriate response. The Supreme Court has declined to hear a case challenging the Bush-Cheney-Obama "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that keeps marching gays and lesbians out of the military. According to this Gallup Poll, most Americans favor ending "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". Most Republicans favor ending "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". Most churchgoers favor ending this stupid policy, and allowing openly gay Americans to serve their nation in the military. Looks to me like the biggest obstacle is President Barack Obama, a man who's said he's a fierce advocate of gay rights, a claim that's starting to sound downright queer. Under the Terrorism Act 2000, there's a long list of locations in England where ordinary acts of
It's always refreshing to remember that America isn't the only nation where freedom has been flushed down the toilet as a cowardly response to terrorism. Thousands of non-existent votes were "counted" in two recent elections, tabulated by two different computerized systems in two different locations. On the air and on his website, a radio right-winger announced that last week's Alabama elections had been rescheduled, and that Republicans should vote Tuesday and Democrats should vote Wednesday. Aside from being one of the oldest pranks in Democracy (it happens just about every November), aside from probably having very little impact and aside from any potential legal questions, why is it that right-wingers always find mocking and monkeywrenching democracy so darn amusing? Hans von Spakovsky has written a lie-filled critique in Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, complaining that the Justice Department under Obama is turning a blind eye to vote suppression and voter intimidation. Von Spakovsky really is a piece of work — he's literally opposed to principles like "one person, one vote", and he was the Bush-Cheney administration's man in charge of suppressing minority and Democratic votes. If you're not familiar with von Spakovsky, click and cringe.
Jeffrey Deskovic spent an extra six years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, because Judge Sonia Sotomayor rejected his plea. It had been filed four days late. If I was in Deskovic's shoes I wouldn't feel terribly forgiving about this, and I do think Sotomayor is a disappointing choice from Obama, but the way appeals generally work, as I understand it, is that an appeals court is generally disinterested in the evidence, and much more interested in judging the procedures. That's the framework they operate in, and that's a factor in the screwed-up nature of justice in America, but if you get the procedures wrong — like filing the paperwork late — that's gonna kill your case, no matter who the judge is. A sixth-grader in Ramona, California was allowed to do a report on Harvey Milk. School officials said she couldn't, but the ACLU was persuasive in urging the school fools to reconsider. The Department of Homeland Security says it's temporarily — temporarily — suspending a Bush-Cheney era rule that deported widows and widowers of US citizens, if their green card applications hadn't been promptly processed. In Ohio, Common Pleas Judge Timothy Horton puts rape victims on the stand and threatens them if they cry. I'm asking you, Ohio — are you willing to put up with this? Lakhdar Boumediene, a charity worker who was held without charges at Guantanamo for 7½ years, says he was tortured repeatedly by American operatives who wanted to know all about his non-existent links to Osama bin Laden. "I thought America, the big country, they have CIA, FBI. Maybe one week, two weeks, they know I am innocent. I can go back to my home, to my home," Boumediene said. Well, I don't doubt the competence of his interrogators and torturers, so I'm sure that he's right, that they did know within days or weeks that he was innocent.
I enjoyed The Colbert Report's week in Iraq as much as any American viewer. The show is usually excellent, and some of Colbert's work in Iraq outdid his usual excellence. Still, it nagged at me all through the week, and I'm double dang delighted that OHollern took the time and trouble to explain why: ... this whole thing feeds into a deep, underlying militarism that pervades our language, outlook, and culture, which in turn enables the US government to persist in vicious and costly imperial follies that will, eventually, bring this country down (if they haven't CNN is getting some well-deserved criticism from one of its founders, Reese Schonfeld, for its bizarre interview with Dr George Tiller's assassin. The impressive accomplishment of Fox News is its creation of "an alternate reality" for right-wing viewers, says arch-right columnist Charles Krauthammer. Where Americans used to understand certain basic facts while disagreeing about policy, Fox News has ripped apart the underpinning of facts, so that now right-wingers can dispute the facts behind every issue, and any presentation of evidence is derided as leftist propaganda, which of course makes any reasonable discussion of policy impossible. It's somewhere between sorry and sad to see Krauthammer describe so clearly what Fox News has done to America, but describe it not as a problem but as something he appreciates and admires. I'm not sure that America faces any problem that's bigger, and I'm increasingly convinced that we're sunk as a nation so long as liars and loons are allowed to dominate the political discourse. Shepard Smith at Fox News decries the angry, hateful tone of much of his daily email, and wonders if maybe just maybe the DHS report on the dangers of the far right-wing might have been solid work after all. This ain't much, but it's by far the closest I've ever heard anyone at Fox News come to accurately describing the Fox News audience. I'll be more than a little surprised if Shep Smith is still working at Fox News in six months. The Los Angeles Times apparently thinks it's pretty dang funny that people are sent to prison for supplying medical marijuana to the chronically ill, headlining this report "Bummer, dude". Picture me not laughing.
Internet hatemonger Hal Turner has surrendered to police in Connecticut, where he's charged with inciting violence by telling listeners to "take up arms" against elected officials. What would Pat Buchanan have to say to get himself fired from MSNBC? Good question. I remember several white pundits who've been fired or reprimanded for making racially insensitive statements, but nobody in the present-day media has made as many offensive statements over as many years as Pat Buchanan, with no firings, no suspensions, and no apologies that I remember. And another offensive statement comes from Buchanan just hours after I typed the above, and we read here that "a prominent white nationalist" will be speaking at Buchanan's upcoming anti-immigrant conference. With Pat Buchanan, the ordinary rules don't apply, I guess because he's so charming and charismatic on the telly? Newsweek altered the on-line version of an already-published interview with Joe Scarborough, at the request of someone on Scarborough's "team", so that you have to read deep in the interview to discover that Scarborough's original claim to fame was defending the killer of an abortion doctor. That's just awfully considerate of Newsweek, don't you think? Associated Press is launching a six-month experimental arrangement by which it'll distribute investigative reports from non-profit groups that fund investigative journalism — ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, and the Center for Investigative Reporting. I'm familiar with three out of four, and they're good guys producing work that, in my reading, has generally seemed fair, responsible, and not politically driven. Presumably, getting distribution through AP will help get their work read by a lot more eyeballs. Sounds like something good could come of this.
I've read lots of praise for Salon editor Joan Walsh, for her handling of Bill O'Reilly in this episode of The O'Reilly Factor, but I couldn't stand to watch for more than about a minute. Why, I wonder, does someone like Joan Walsh, or anyone else with a smidgen of human decency, agree to appear opposite someone like O'Reilly? What's to be gained? Why not say no, when O'Reilly's people call? (Ms Walsh takes a stab at answering these questions.) MSNBC's Contessa Brewer turns to John Ziegler for commentary on this week's celebrity feud (Letterman v. Palin). The person who sent me this clip was impressed by Brewer's handling of Ziegler, but I can't feign respect for any journalist who's willing to turn to Ziegler. If the name is new to you, he's one of right-wing radio's minor league hatemongers, and he "interviewed" Sarah Palin on his show, and MSNBC brought him on to, I guess, interview him about interviewing Palin. It's all "who cares?" stuff to me, "news" that makes no difference to anyone anywhere, and if journalism is supposed to be the balanced presentation of events, as the news corporations pretend it is, then it's the opposite of journalism. But yeah, I did enjoy the clip. What do you think the Washington Times's Wesley Pruden means when he says that Obama is "our first president without an instinctive appreciation of the culture... whence America sprang"? Yeah, I think that's what he meant, too.
Keith Olbermann misses Tim Russert. And I have no problem with that, since they were co-workers and friends and la-di-da, but sweet freakin' jeebers was there ever a more overrated journalist than Russert? Am I missing something? What was the brilliance of Tim Russert? In what sense was his work better or worse or even different from all the other Sunday chatterers? What would happen if a big-city daily gave its reporters a day off, and instead used poets and novelists as reporters? This is how a democracy reacts when a Presidential election is stolen, as the Iranian election seems to have been. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel would be all hunky-dory peachy-keen on Palestine as a demilitarized state. I wonder what Israel's reply would be if the Palestinians said they would agree to an agreement with both being a "demilitarized state?" Israel knows that request is "DOA". It's just another no-starter dodge. Prominent Israeli rabbi Manis Friedman is asked how Jews should treat Arabs. His learned reply: "The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle)". ...
Friedman argued that he is different from Arab terrorists who have used similar language about killing Jewish civilians. "When they say it, it's genocide, not self-defense," Friedman said. "With them, it's a religious belief — they need to rid the area of us. We're not saying that." Religious fanatics are the same the world over; they talk out of both sides of their mouths. The more the Obama administration works to keep super-secret all information on US drone attacks within Pakistan, the more it looks to the world (Pakistanis presumably already know) like it's just an endless series of botched attacks killing ordinary people as they try to go about their lives. In last November's terrorist attacks on Mumbai, my reading of events had been that the police responded about as quickly and heroically as can be expected in such a ghastly situation. From this report in the Indian newsweekly Tehelka, though, it looks like a hell of a mess of inexplicable delays and after-the-fact stonewalling that, in the words of reporter Harinder Baweja, amounts to a cover-up by the Mumbai Police and the government. Khmer Rouge warden Kaing Guek Eav has accepted responsibility for the deaths of several thousand men, women, and children while he was in charge of a prison in Phnom Penh. You want to fry him in canola oil, and that's understandable, but he was a fairly minor player in the killing of 1.7-million souls — what happened to the people who gave him his orders? Good news for Planet Earth, and good news for bicyclists: Bike riders are substantially less likely to be injured while riding, when there are substantially more bike riders. Or at least, that's the tale in New York City, but it makes sense — if there are more bikes, then auto drivers (by far the biggest danger to bicyclists) become accustomed to keeping an eye out for bikes.
The so-called worst-case scenarios that the Obama administration's "stress tests" were based upon are already being left in the dust, and as I remember (but apparently the media has forgotten) the results were pretty obviously rigged anyway, as every bank passed with either flying colors or a B-. So now the big banks are fighting regulatory reform, and several want to pay back their federal billions, so they can pay their executives ridonculous salaries and bonuses without government or media scrutiny. As obvious as it was that the stress tests were rigged it's just as obvious that the banks are nowhere near being out of the swamp, and that any momentary pretense of major American banks being healthy is exactly that — pretense. Please don't mistake my tone for anger, though. I'm just... bemused. All during the Bush-Cheney administration, I kept thinking that the next big scandal would be the one where the American people would shout, Enough! But the scandals were only fleetingly reported, then never mentioned again except by bloggers and little-heard pundits, so the American people still think the Bush-Cheney gang was about bumbling incompetence, when of course they were actually all about the theft of billions, utter inhumanity, war crimes, and the willful dismantling of the planet's ability to sustain human life. And so it goes, same under Obama as under Bush. As the credit crisis ebbs, US lawmakers are increasingly questioning the actions the Fed took to counter the
But not really, of course, not with the kind of questions that really should be asked, 'cuz if they asked those questions Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson would end up in prison.
Big news in the last few days is that Brazil, Russia, India and China are proposing to start converting foreign exchange resources into IMF bonds. This is serious stuff, especially when combined with other actions designed to less their reliance on the US dollar. For example, both Russia and China are increasing the gold reserves. And China is busy establishing bilateral trade agreements which would use the Chinese Yuan instead of the US dollar. Given that during each calendar quarter for an indefinite number of years the US will be attempting to sell ONE TRILLION worth of bonds to finance new debt and roll over old debts (i.e. borrow money to pay the interest), the US is now seen as profligate and unreliable. The clinching argument for this interpretation of the BRIC country moves is this: as the US dollar wanes, so will its military power. So this is a strategic, long-term move. The trick will be in implementing their plans carefully and without undue haste so as not to alarm the US Regime, which would give the US rulers a chance to alter their behavior before Checkmate is announced. Congressman Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) says he took a trip to China where he met with Chinese officials. He says, "One of the messages I had — because we need to build trust and confidence in our number one creditor — is that the budget numbers that the US government has put forward should not be believed." Um, I have my doubts about anything the US government says on almost any topic, but is it appropriate for an American Congressman to be telling the people who basically hold the mortgage on America that America's falsifying the books? And it goes without saying but I'll say it anyway — if some Democratic office-holder you'd never heard of had said such things during the Bush-Cheney administration, it would've been all over the news for days, and he or
And speaking of almost incomprehensible stupidity, right-wing radio stars Hugh Hewitt and Rush Limbaugh are asking Americans to boycott GM. Because, you see, after being bailed out by the Obama administration it's now Government Motors. "I don't know anything about cars," says Ed Whitacre, the incoming Chairman at General Motors. Limiting the ginormous paychecks of bank executives is wrong and "counterproductive", says Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, but reducing the wages, pensions and health benefits of workers at General Motors, Chrysler and their supplier plants is an absolute necessity. Paul Krugman's column last week, exploring the way right-wing outfits like Fox News have brought scary kookiness into the political discourse, was not particularly groundbreaking. It said nothing that non-nuts haven't noticed for years, but it's something said rarely in mainstream media. "And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased." For stating plainly a very serious problem, I expect that Krugman will be ruthlessly demonized, and I would suggest that he hire a bodyguard. Why is Dr George Tiller's alleged killer doing press conferences? No big surprise, but dead doctor George Tiller's clinic will be permanently closed. The terrorists win. They usually do. Also, Operation Rescue is interested in buying the closed clinic, presumably for a fetus museum or a meeting place for future murderers.
In Virginia, state Senator Creigh Deeds has won the Democratic Party's nomination and will run for Governor this fall. My congratulations to Virginia — I don't know diddly about Deeds, but he's not Terry McAuliffe, the slippery fundraiser and backstage power broker who ran Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign last year and chaired the Democratic Party from 2001-05. To understand how scummy McAuliffe is, just think of 2001-05. Bush and Cheney were in charge, war and corruption was everywhere, and Terry McAuliffe was in charge of the opposition party as it did nothing but bend over. As McAuliffe looks for something else to screw up, Virginia has made itself a better place. Palau says it'll take 13 of the 17 Uighurs, Chinese Muslims who've been held at Guantanamo despite their adjudicated innocence. The other four Uighurs from Guantanamo will instead settle in Bermuda, where the first four Uighurs have arrived, and seem to be chipper and optimistic. Their American lawyer says, "We were in a shop with the guys to buy some trousers. Blaring over the radio was talk about these al-Qaeda terrorists. The shopkeeper said, 'Don't mind that. Welcome to the island'. And he gave them each a free baseball hat." Three more prisoners at Guantanamo have been transferred to Saudi Arabia. Forty percent of low-income Americans have no health insurance, says the Department of Health and Human Services. I'm wildly skeptical, as I live in the real world of poverty and almost no-one among my acquaintances has medical insurance. HHS also notes that a third of the un-insured have chronic diseases, for which they're
High school student Jessica Terry used a microscope and an advanced biology class to diagnose her own Crohn's disease. CNN treats this as an amusing human interest story, and I guess it is, but let's ponder it as more than mere amusement. Think about the implications of having medical insurance, as this kid clearly does, seeing doctors time after time for years, taking the tests, and having everyone involved repeatedly miss the obvious diagnosis. Then bear in mind that missing a fairly obvious diagnosis isn't all that uncommon. I've known a few people who've been through this, who had docs and pathologists repeatedly miss such obvious illnesses as gallstones and strep throat, despite having symptoms that fit exactly. I don't know what the solution to this is, but we all know that in ordinary American medical work, doctors and pathologists are under constant time and productivity constraints — and that can't help. Rep Lynn Woolsey (D-California) says that if there's no public option in the health care reform legislation, the House Progressive Caucus won't go along with it. I don't know whether Woolsey has the courage and convictions to deliver on such a boast, but if she does then this is do-or-die. The House Progressive Caucus includes about 80 members, and no health legislation can pass in the House without getting a landslide among those progressive votes. The American Medical Association first announced that it would oppose any shred of a public option in American health care, then revised that position in the next news cycle. Says here that only about one in four American doctors is a member of the AMA, so if you're lucky enough to be able to see a doctor, why not shop around for one who's not a member of the AMA?
Dozens of communities nationwide are at risk from a coal ash spill like the one that blanketed a Tennessee neighborhood last year, but the Obama administration has decided not to tell the public about it because of the danger of a terrorist Looks like more of the Obama administration's much talked about but rarely seen "transparency". In Washington, one "three strikes" prisoner has been released, and he seems to be on a crusade to dissuade young people from a life of crime. Happy deathday, Thomas Paine. Excellent essay honoring the forefather of modern advocacy journalism. A day in the blog universe, submitted for your consideration: Conservative smearmaster Ed Whelan of National Review was criticized by blogger Publius, with good reason and in a firm but civilized manner. Whelan's response was to reveal Publius's previously unknown real-world identity, and Publius's blog has been flooded with racist comments, because that's how right-wingers rally around one of their own. Whelan is a major-league operator so the events here took on larger-than-usual dimensions, but the pattern is familiar. I'm tempted to type that Whelan's a typical Republican, but maybe he's better than that — he later apologized, and it's a fairly real
A Minnesota court has ordered Norm Coleman (ret'd R-Minnesota) to pay Al Franken (D-Minnesota) $94,783.15, reimbursement for a fraction of the costs incurred in the protracted court case over their close Senate election. The state's Supreme Court has yet to decide who won the election, though there's little doubt that it'll be Franken, one fine day. The election, you'll recall, was last November. The Mayor of Phoenix, Phil Gordon, has asked Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to publicly disassociate himself from his neo-Nazi and white supremacist supporters. Arpaio is famous for billing himself as "America's toughest sheriff". He makes cruel and unusual punishment utterly ordinary, he's been the sheriff and Arizona's biggest embarrassment since 1992, and of course, we abhor him. But this particular accusation — at least as described in this coverage — seems a tad exaggerated. In what's described as possibly the largest financial smuggling case in history, $134-billion in undeclared US bonds were found hidden in the luggage of two Japanese men en route to Switzerland via Italy. I have no idea what this means, but — wow.
Ken Pagano, pastor of New Bethel Church in Louisville, is asking churchgoers to bring their guns to church. There will be a handgun raffle, patriotic music and information on gun safety, and Pastor Pagano wants church members to bring canned goods and a friend. What's the friend for? Are they going to shoot the breeze ... or the friend? Kendall Craig Farris, founder of an anti-drug group and author of an anti-drug book, was arrested last week for selling fake drugs to a narcotics cop. Selling fake contraband, please note, is as illegal as selling real contraband. It's a delight, ain't it (and not a rare one) to see a drug warrior ensnared in the preposterous war on drugs. That's an interesting letter to the editor indeed, from a lady who bought her home from the guy who opened fire at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Former President Bush the First says that the right wing's rabid attacks on Sonia Sotomayor are "not right". And I sigh and ever-so-slightly smile. You know, when George Herbert Walker Bush was President, I despised him more than anyone else in my limited understanding of American history and American politics. I picketed against him, organized protests against his absurd attack on Iraq, wrote furious letters to the editor, and in private conversations I often described him as the personification of Evil. I cannot fully describe to you how much I hated the first President Bush. And now, after Bush the Second, Bush the First just seems like a flaky old fuddy-duddy I wouldn't want to spend any time with. Of course, almost anyone looks better compared to the crimes and killings perpetrated by President Bush the Second, but still... In Germany, gay penguins are coming out of the closet at the Bremerhaven Zoo.
Bill O'Reilly is an odd creature indeed. He's OK with gay penguins, says "who cares? ... If they're happy, they're happy. That's my philosophy..." but he's repulsed by the notion of gay humans, and he emphatically maintains that they're perverts who deserve to have their human rights denied. As Pixar plans its 13th movie (its first to feature a female character in the central role) Linda Holmes politely begs that the movie's shero not be a princess. I just gotta say, please and thank you and I hope the people at Pixar are paying attention. White Supremacists are worried about their movement's image. There are a lot of Americans who believe that the FCC's digital switch of TV in America is actually a clandestine plot to install "a two way pipe that lets the government see in as well as they can see out." In Kleberg County, Texas, the godless "hello" greeting has been officially replaced with "heaven-o".
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