Clipmarks | Moliticon's clips

Demos Faltering On Public Option Healthcare

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:51:07 GMT

clipped by: Moliticon

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Liberal Democrats warned President Barack Obama on Monday that a retreat on support for a government-run health insurance plan could endanger passage of major healthcare reform in Congress this year.

Howard Dean, a former Democratic National Committee chairman and a vocal supporter of an overhaul, said the public option was vital to any reform of the costly and complex U.S. healthcare system.

Clip Source: abcnews.go.com

Six members of the Senate Finance Committee -- three from each party -- have been negotiating a reform package that would feature member-controlled non-profit cooperatives instead of the government-run plan.

Clip Source: abcnews.go.com

Republicans were pleased by signs there might be a shift on the issue, although some questioned whether the co-ops would be another form of a public plan.

Tags: public option, healthcare, senate, house

The Murtha of All Pork

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:03:30 GMT

clipped by: Moliticon

Clip Source: www.washingtonpost.com

Members of the House ethics committee, who are investigating a pattern of lawmakers steering federal funds to generous defense contractors, are all set to have their pet military projects funded by the same committee whose activities they are probing.

"At the same time the committee is investigating the ties between lobby shops and earmarks and appropriators, they are actually playing the game themselves," said Steve Ellis, of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. "It's hard not to see some conflict of interest in that."

President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have been encouraging House leaders to remove the billions of dollars of unwanted military projects from the measure.

Clip Source: www.washingtonpost.com

"You've got the FBI looking and grand juries apparently empaneled here," Baran said. "If there is something really wrong, it will come out in the form of an indictment."

Tags: murtha, gates, ethics, defense, pork

Seriously. Take A Nap. Consider A Nursing Home.

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:50:03 GMT

clipped by: Moliticon
clipper's remarks: OMG

Clip Source: www.dailykos.com

Twitter is a tool that can produce some sad, sad results in the wrong hands. Witness Chuck Grassley over the weekend, via Think Progress:

The "time to deliver" line that he's up in arms about was from President Obama's weekly address in which he proclaimed it was "time to deliver" on health care. And the "you got nerve" part has to do with the Obama family taking in the sights of Paris. Going out on a limb, I'm going to guess it was date night that sent him over the edge

Surely there should be some sort of stand-in-the-corner timeout for such silliness on Twitter? Forevermore, I'm going to think of the senator as Chuck "I'm no NAIL" Grassley.

What Senator Grassley meant, his spokesperson tells me, was that he would greatly appreciate it if Obama would "let the legislative process work" and show a bit more "bipartisan" spirit.

Umm. Okay. Whatever you say.

Tags: grassley, healthcare, iowa, twitter, obama

He Doesn't Even Understand His Own Insurance

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:26:29 GMT

clipped by: Moliticon
clipper's remarks: Charles Grassley has been a Senator from Iowa for a loooooong time. He has successfully delivered a lot of "pork" to Iowa. (Funny when you think about it.)

He is an idiot. You can thank him for Medicare Part D and the vilification of Anita Hill to get Justice Cretin Thomas appointed to the Supreme Court.

Clip Source: www.blogforiowa.com

[Video]

Grassley Tells Iowan "Go Work for Federal Government" for Affordable Insurance

Tags: grassley, senator, iowa, healthcare

Can't Get Enuf Of That Grafty Stuff

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:51:38 GMT

clipped by: Moliticon
clipper's remarks: (Cont)
What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out a bait-and-switch, replacing a true public option with something meaningless. For the record, neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs.

Yes, some of the balking senators receive large campaign contributions from the medical-industrial complex — but who in politics doesn’t? If I had to guess, I’d say that what’s really going on is that relatively conservative Democrats still cling to the old dream of becoming kingmakers, of recreating the bipartisan center that used to run America.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

America’s political scene has changed immensely since the last time a Democratic president tried to reform health care.

The question now is whether we will nonetheless fail to get that change, because a handful of Democratic senators are still determined to party like it’s 1993.

the fundamental fact is that we can afford universal health insurance — even those high estimates were less than the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts. Furthermore, Democratic leaders know that they have to pass a health care bill for the sake of their own survival. One way or another, the numbers will be brought in line.

neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs.

Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska initially declared that the public option — which, remember, has overwhelming popular support — was a “deal-breaker.”

Tags: healthcare, insurrance, government, senate

Mark Sanford SC Governor On Affair Trail

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:40:28 GMT

clipped by: Moliticon
clipper's remarks: Power corrupts. Not sometimes. Always.

Clip Source: hosted.ap.org

His family did not attend the news conference, and his wife Jenny Sanford said she asked the governor to leave and stop speaking to her two weeks ago.

Questions about Sanford's whereabouts arose early this week. For two days after reporters started asking questions, his office had said he had gone hiking on the trail.

Excerpts of e-mail exchanges

One from the governor read: "I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night's light - but hey, that would be going into sexual details."

Sanford, a former three-term congressman, was elected governor in 2002. He has more than a year remaining in his second term and is barred by state law from running again.

Jenny Sanford

whose family fortune comes from the Skil Corp.

has been central to Sanford's political career.

Tags: sanford, governor, republican, morality, absence

Twitter Revolution

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:10:12 GMT

clipped by: Moliticon

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Political revolutions are often closely linked to communication tools.

1. Twitter Is a Tool and Thus Difficult to Censor

Twitter aspires to be something different from social-networking sites like Facebook or MySpace: rather than being a vast self-contained world centered on one Web site, Twitter dreams of being a tool that people can use to communicate with each other from a multitude of locations, like e-mail.

2. Tweets Are Generally Banal, but Watch Out

“The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful,”

3. Buyer Beware

Nothing on Twitter has been verified.

4. Watch Your Back

5. Twitter Is Self-Correcting but a Misleading Gauge

Twitter is a community, with leaders and cliques.

Twitter is a certain kind of community — technology-loving, generally affluent and Western-tilting.

6. Twitter Can Be a Potent Tool for Media Criticism

Twitter can rally protesters against governments, its broadcast ability can rally them quickly and efficiently against news outlets

Tags: twitter, iran, media, technology

Court Sanctioned Okeechobee Pollution

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:10:04 GMT

clipped by: Moliticon
clipper's remarks: The U.S. sends tens of millions of dollars a year to Africa and developing countries to help them prevent drinking water contamination. It is ironic that, at the same time, the U.S. EPA is legalizing contamination of drinking water supplies here at home.

Clip Source: unearthed.earthjustice.org

A disappointing decision by the federal appeals court in Atlanta will legalize pollution in many American drinking water supplies, and we have the former Bush administration to thank for it.

For years, the district has been disposing of contaminated runoff from urban areas and industrial-scale sugar and vegetable farms by "backpumping" its untreated waters from drainage canals into Lake Okeechobee.

Toxic algae outbreaks in the lake in recent years have been transferred into rivers along with lake water, causing massive fish kills, covering the water with toxic green slime, and making it unsafe even to submerge an unprotected hand.

Instead of cleaning up the water, the water district appealed. U.S. Sugar Corp., the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency joined the case on the side of the polluters.

The Bush administration rule doesn't just affect Florida. It endangers drinking water reservoirs around the United States

Tags: okeechobee, bush, drinking water, algae, epa

Budget Woes Bonanza For GOP?

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 13:47:35 GMT

clipped by: Moliticon
clipper's remarks: (Cont)
But some economists warn that any short-term economic improvement will probably resemble the "jobless recovery" of the early 1990s, given the loss of jobs in the manufacturing, construction, retail and other sectors. Democrats were trounced in midterm elections two years after Clinton took office, partly because the economic recovery then underway had not significantly reduced unemployment.

"There's a potential there that the seemingly out-of-control fiscal situation in Washington could galvanize the public," Edwards said. "The question is whether the Republicans will be smart enough to take advantage of this."

Clip Source: www.washingtonpost.com

"The reckless fiscal policies of the past have left us in a very deep hole," Obama said last week. "And digging our way out of it will take time, patience and some tough choices."

But Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said, "The second five years is where we're on a completely unsustainable course."

Clip Source: www.washingtonpost.com

"Everything that the White House does concerning this deep recession contains an element of gambling because no one has been here before," said Robert B. Reich

Those concerns about spending and deficits are not confined by U.S. borders.

Geithner traveled to China this month to assure leaders there

Traveling in Germany this month, Obama responded to Chancellor Angela Merkel's concerns that U.S. spending could lead to global inflation and undermine the stability of U.S. debt.

Obama and his advisers hope that by the 2010 elections, the stimulus spending, the bank rescues and other measures will have pushed the economy into recovery.

Tags: gop, budget deficit, obama, healthcare

No More "Free" Internet

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:27:11 GMT

clipped by: Moliticon
clipper's remarks: (Cont)
Inevitably, Diller said, the “base model” of the Internet will be paid, at the end of the chaos. The forms will include not just subscriptions and individual one-time purchases, but rapid-fire micropayments and other mechanisms.

The early examples: Amazon’s “one-click” system, where a customer enters billing address and credit card information in advance. Then, a button on the screen for a shopping cart is pressed once and the purchase or purchases associated with that cart are confirmed, billed, paid for and delivered.

Clip Source: blogs.zdnet.com

The days of the free Internet will draw to a close over the next five years, according to the chairman and chief executive of IAC, the interactive services company which operates a collection of more than 30 Internet sites which produce $1.5 billion a year in revenue.

The only missing link, according to Barry Diller, who cut his teeth building up over-the-air and cable TV networks: a good billing system, akin to Amazon’s “one-click” button or the Apple iPhone’s slick downloading of paid applications.

So far, news, content and service suppliers were “afraid of not being dinosaurs and slapped everything up on the Internet for free,’’ he said, in an interchange with BusinessWeek media columnist Jon Fine.

At that point, television, radio and prior media founded on scarcity, like limited spectrum whose use is overseen by governments, “will be run over by this much more open, much much less controlled (medium) that is not based on scarcity, but based on unbelievable plenty,” Diller said

Tags: diller, cable, newspapers, media

Obama Walks The Healthcare Road

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:35:30 GMT

clipped by: Moliticon
clipper's remarks: (cont)
Much of the evidence suggests that the more doctors, more drugs, more tests and more therapies given to patients, the worse they fare -- and the unhappier they become, said Donald Berwick, president of the independent research group Institute of Quality Improvement.

Clip Source: www.washingtonpost.com

In his drive to rein in skyrocketing health-care costs, Obama is increasingly focused on wasteful medical care that does not extend life and may actually be harmful. Today's town-hall-style meeting, his first as president to promote health reform, is intended to spotlight one city's strategy for squeezing out waste without hurting quality.

What Obama is likely to hear in Green Bay is testimony to the value of digital records, physician collaboration, preventive care and transparency, say those most involved in Wisconsin's innovative approach.

For more than a decade, the New Hampshire researchers have documented and mapped wide variations in the cost and types of care given to American seniors through the Medicare program, concluding that spending more on health care has not resulted in better health.

As the single largest purchaser of care, the government "could use that leverage to focus on keeping people healthy rather than lots of technology-based treatment of disease

Tags: health, obama, quality, reform

Haters On The Rise

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:47:58 GMT

clipped by: Moliticon
clipper's remarks: (cont)
Last November, 37-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero, a 16-year resident of the U.S., was attacked while walking near his home in Patchogue, New York. Prosecutors say a group of seven teens taunted Lucero with racial slurs, beat him, and fatally stabbed him in the chest. The reason? According to prosecutors they were “beaner hopping”: attacking Hispanics for sport. All of the defendants have pled not guilty.

Clip Source: www.msnbc.msn.com

“Right across the board, extremist groups are thriving right now,” says Mark Potok, Director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.

The SPLC has been tracking hate groups for almost 30 years. In its spring 2009 Intelligence Report, they found that 926 hate groups are currently operating in the U.S., an all-time high. These groups include the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, racist skinheads and Black separatists.

Potok attributes this rise in hate groups to the recession, the election of the nation’s first black president, and the immigration debate.

“We’re looking at a kind of perfect storm of factors that really favor the continued growth of these groups,” he says.

“These groups have really successfully exploited the immigration issue,” Potok says. “For them it’s ‘brown skin people are coming into this country to destroy us.’”

“The long arc of history really does bend towards justice. What we are seeing I think is a backlash to real and significant social advance.”

Tags: hate, immigration, obama

Color Me Yellow

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 21:58:19 GMT

clipped by: Moliticon
clipper's remarks: “If we don’t have rumors, what do we have as journalists?” he asks. “You have press releases. So maybe there is some honor in printing rumors.”

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

AT 2:56 in the morning on May 5, a headline flashed on Gawker, the New York gossip site that also carries a smattering of Silicon Valley buzz. It was tentative in its phrasing: “Could Apple Buy Twitter?”

rumor was groundless

reported it anyway. “I don’t ever want to lose the rawness of blogging,” said Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch and the author of the post.

Mr. Arrington and the other bloggers see this not as rumor-mongering, but as involving the readers in the reporting process. One mission of his site, he said, is to write about the things a few people are talking about, “the scuttlebutt around Silicon Valley.” His blog will often make clear that he’s passing along a thinly sourced story.

That drive to compete with the so-called mainstream media is what’s behind his strategy. He doesn’t have the luxury of a large staff to confirm everything, so he competes where he has the advantage. “Getting it right is expensive,” he says. “Getting it first is cheap.”

Tags: blogs, rumors, news, gossip

Estrogen Threat To Fish

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:37:26 GMT

clipped by: Moliticon

Clip Source: www.scientificamerican.com

Exposure to estrogen puts fish at greater risk of disease and premature death, according to a new federal study.

Scientists have not targeted the source of estrogen, but many suspect it stems from certain pollutants and drugs in waterways.

For the new research, USGS scientists injected largemouth bass with estrogen in laboratory tests. They discovered that the fish produced lower levels of hepcidins, proteins that regulate iron and may be a first line of defense against disease-causing bacteria, fungi and viruses.

Male fish with the capability to develop immature eggs inside their sex organs were first found in a West Virginia stream in 2003, raising fears that there were endocrine disruptors in the water that scientists were not finding in repeated water tests.

Clip Source: www.scientificamerican.com

Environmental groups have asked U.S. EPA to ban chemicals used in many household detergents that are linked to endocrine disruption and gender changes in fish. One chemical, nonylphenol, imitates estrogen.

Tags: pollution, fish, epa

Twitter And Facebook Repugnant to IT

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:26:34 GMT

clipped by: Moliticon

Clip Source: blogs.zdnet.com

Why Does IT Hate Facebook and Twitter?

Both Facebook and Twitter offer potential marketing value for organizations and Facebook in particular has a deep foothold into businesses today. Yet, IT still remains suspect of the applications. Perhaps that’s because these are consumer application and IT is never thrilled with security and availability of consumer applications. Twitter, for example, has been the subject of Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks that allowed site owners to acquire the Twitter profiles of their visitors.

Regardless, as marketing departments embrace blogging and micro-blogging, IT must find a way to close the gap around these applications. If these applications truly pose a threat to the organization then IT should provide corporate sanctioned versions of these applications, as was done with IM and file transfer.

Tags: twiiter, facebook, my space, linkedin