Archive for June 2009
Not the Health Care Co-ops They Had in Mind
By Tom Sullivan
ourfuture.org June 17, 2009
Efforts continue in the Senate to water down any public health insurance option included in comprehensive health care reform, regardless of what 83% of the American public wants.
First it was the trigger provision designed never to be pulled, like that floated by Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME). Last week, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), proposed creating non-profit health insurance cooperatives. Politico dubbed it “a potential game changer.” Jacob Hacker called it Conrad’s co-op cop-out.
Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, supported the co-op proposal, saying, “I am inclined, and I think the committee is inclined, toward a co-op.” Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley, the panel’s senior Republican, said, “If it can be presented… as an entirely private-sector operation and is like co-ops we know generally in the Midwest, I think it’s got some possibilities.”
Fine. Here is one possibility we could see and, given the abandonment of single-payer and what looks like a systematic effort to sabotage the public option, a co-op that a growing number of Americans would gladly join:
Obama a Very Smooth Liar
By John R. MacArthurJune 17, 2009 “The Providence Journal” — It isn’t quite fair to call Barack Obama a liar. During the campaign he carefully avoided committing to much of anything important that he might have to take back later. For now, I won’t quibble with The St. Petersburg Times’s Obamameter, which so far has the president keeping 30 promises and breaking only six.
And yet, broadly speaking, Obama has been lying on a pretty impressive scale. You just have to get past his grandiloquent rhetoric — usually empty of substance — to get a handle on it. I offer a short, incomplete list, which I’m sure others could easily enlarge.
Senators held stock in bailed-out banks
 Clearly with campaign contributions now a euphemism for graft, Senators no longer have any concern about consequences from conflicts of interest.
Senators held stock in bailed-out banks By Reid Wilson and Kevin Bogardus TheHill |
| Senators who oversee the $700 billion Wall Street rescue package held stocks in many of the banks bailed out towards the end of last year, according to financial disclosure reports released Friday.
According to the reports detailing senators’ finances in 2008, nearly half of the members of the Senate Banking Committee had holdings in financial institutions that have taken funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The panel has jurisdiction over the bailout fund and other relief efforts directed by federal regulators to save the nation’s financial system. |
Greenwald: Tribalistic self-absorption
In which Glenn Greenwald skewers the “American exceptionalism” delusion of endless rights to exploit and “if we do it it’s not really bad– I want I want I want!”:
It’s a defining attribute of early adolescence to be incapable of seeing the world through any lens other than total self-centeredness, self-absorption and empathy-free self-obsession. If you watch for it (principally though not only) in right-wing discourse, you will see that this is really the central theme animating most of what they write: My group is superior. My group (political, national, religious, ethic, gender) is victimized and treated unfairly. The misery and suffering my group inflicts on far less powerful groups is irrelevant and always justifiable. Even those societies we bomb, occupy, devastate and destroy — even those we lock in cages without trials — are the ones victimizing us. They never advanced beyond the adolescent stage of tribalistic self-absorption and it’s amazing how completely that lies at the core of most of what they believe and argue.
Pirate Party Wins and Enters The European Parliament
The Piracy Party has won a huge victory in the Swedish elections and is marching on to Brussels. After months of campaigning against well established parties, the Pirate Party has gathered enough votes to be guaranteed a seat in the European Parliament.
Health Alert! Pharmacy machine prints labels that fade away
by Claudia
A new automated machine in use by thousands of pharmacies across the country uses labels that fade to blank even when kept away from the light.
The machine is made by Parata in NC. The model recently installed in my pharmacy is the Parata Max http://www.parata.com/fill/index.php . It fills prescriptions for the 200 most popular drugs automatically, and claims it makes no mistakes. All sounds ‘ok’, right? Well this machine also requires users to buy supplies from them. And those supplies include thermal paper labels.
If you’ve ever saved a thermal paper receipt, you know that they fade away to blank even if kept in a fairly dark place. See the possible danger to health and safety from prescription labels that fade to blank????
After this happened to my husband’s new prescription, I questioned the pharmacy manager. He acknowledged the problem and also told me our small town has a number of pharmacies who have also purchased this new machine. (He’s alerting them).
Many drugs look alike. So how many hundreds of thousands of people are out there who may be taking over-dosages, or skipping important meds because they can’t read their labels? I can’t count on my large chain drugstore or Parata to fix this design flaw fast enough. I’m hoping you will help get the word out.
Check your labels! If they smear or begin to fade, complain loud and clear. And demand that your pharmacy cover each label with a large piece of clear tape, which will keep them readable. Check the meds of your elders and nearest and dearest too! Pass the word!
Even though this Parata machine may dispense the right pill in the right numbers, it’s the label that might kill you.
Conspiracy nuts, Carnies and Misfits
By Claudia
If you think for yourself, you are probably used to being marginalized and have also become frustrated and grouchy. Choose this as a way of life and your nearest and dearest will probably think you are something of a head case.
Traditionally, such people become mystics, scam artists and hermits. The mystic figures it all doesn’t matter anyway, rises to a point light years above his own head and counts on the Universe to make things right. The scam artist, seeing so many sheeple flocking all over, figures why not shear a few as he passes by. The hermit, hating the brainwashed hordes cluttering up the place, heads for the margins where she can breathe without recourse to a vomit bag. Read the rest of this entry »
Depravity in Minnesota
A rabbi from Minnesota casually advocates mass murder: a fuzzy-wuzzy genocidal maniac with a Facebook page and a connection to Bob Dylan. His kill-em-all attitude reflects that of many others who keep their views hidden and open their checkbooks to buy American complicity.
This should be a lesson to anyone who thinks “fundamentalism” of any kind is not just another term for depravity.
From Haartez.com:
Like the best Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis, Manis Friedman has won the hearts of many unaffiliated Jews with his charismatic talks about love and God; it was Friedman who helped lead Bob Dylan into a relationship with Chabad.Friedman argued that if Israel followed this wisdom, there would be “no civilian casualties, no children in the line of fire, no false sense of righteousness, in fact, no war.”
But Friedman, who today travels the country as a Chabad speaker, showed a less warm and cuddly side when he was asked how he thinks Jews should treat their Arab neighbors.
“The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle),” Friedman wrote in response to the question posed by Moment Magazine for its “Ask the Rabbis” feature.
”I don’t believe in Western morality,” he wrote.
Chris Hedges: Hold Your Applause
Did they play Barack Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in the prison corridors of Abu Ghraib, Bagram air base, Guantanamo or the dozens of secret sites where we hold thousands of Muslims around the world? Did it echo off the walls of the crowded morgues filled with the mutilated bodies of the Muslim dead in Baghdad or Kabul? Was it broadcast from the tops of minarets in the villages and towns decimated by U.S. iron fragmentation bombs? Was it heard in the squalid refugee camps of Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians live in the world’s largest ghetto?
The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz
In the link below an academic Israeli blogger discusses a leading historian of Jewish philosophy, Simon Rawidowicz, who suppressed some of his own writings about the eviction of Palestinians from their lands in 1948. That suppressed chapter is now published in a new book: David N. Myers’ “Between Jew & Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz”.
“May there not have to be among Jews in coming generations those who will call to justice the generations of the gatekeepers of the state who locked the gate to former residents of the land – and who thereby opened, through this closing, the door to their defamers and persecutors in surrounding countries. It is in your hands, guides of the current generation in the state, to safeguard those who will come after you from the verdict of that future day of retribution. May it not come, but if it does come, what will be the price that the children of ours sons and daughters will pay?”
