Tuesday, September 22, 2009

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Trita Parsi: Will the focus at the UN be on Ahmadinejad's Human Rights Abuses? Top
When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad comes to the UN this week, his biggest fear will be that the visit will be marred by international condemnations over election fraud and the massive human rights abuses taking place in Iran under his watch. If he has his way, however, the international media may forget about the killings in Iran and focus on his provocative Holocaust comments instead. Mindful of the horrific human rights abuses that have taken place in Iran in the aftermath of the stolen elections, and the continuing protests and resistance by ordinary Iranians, one would think that Ahmadinejad's lack of internal legitimacy would be the natural topic of conversation. But Ahmadinejad is not a man of limited resources. He knows how to deflect the attention of the media and he is a master of changing the subject. And he knows all too well how to push the buttons of Western audiences. So it is not a surprise that after having been relatively quiet about the Holocaust for almost two years, Ahmadinejad suddenly decided to question it once again just a few days before landing in New York. At the Friday prayer sermons on September 18, Ahmadinejad called that the Holocaust "lie." His calculation seems to be as follows: Just as before, Western journalists will focus on the controversy around his Holocaust denial, while neglecting about the abuses and violations that are taking place in Iran on a continuous basis. The controversial Holocaust comments will overshadow everything else and will be the focus of not only Western media, but also the protests in New York as well as the statements and comments by European officials. At a minimum, it may help Ahmadinejad portray the situation as such to his audience in Iran. Ahmadinejad can handle the scorn of world leaders and the Western media with his questioning of the Holocaust, partly because his own constituency of hardliners in Iran sees eye to eye with him on this issue. And partly because ordinary Iranians may be displeased and embarrassed by his comments, but in the midst of the repression they face in Iran, are preoccupied with more immediate concerns. Indeed, when European diplomats walked out on Ahmadinejad in Geneva during the racism summit earlier this year, many ordinary Iranians felt insulted by the act even if they rejected with Ahmadinejad's comments. What Ahmadinejad cannot handle, however, is extensive and relentless focus on Iran's human rights record. Criticism against Ahmadinejad on these grounds by world leaders could do irreparable damage to Ahmadinejad's standing inside Iran, particularly as Iranian of all walks of life continue to defy his rule. It would show that the world is not indifferent to the systematic and lethal abuses taking place in Iranian prisons. It would show that the world cares not only about Ahmadinejad's provocative rhetoric, but actually also about the well being of the Iranian people. Ahmadinejad cannot handle a walkout at the UN over his election robbery and human rights abuses. So if delegates at the UN General Assembly walk out on Ahmadinejad on Wednesday, the decisive issue will be on what grounds they did so. Will it be over his Holocaust denial or over his stealing of an election and torture of his own people? Ahmadinejad's preference is clear. He has used the tragedy of the Holocaust for political gain before. The question is if the world will walk into his trap again. More on Barack Obama
 
Jerry Fowler: President Obama Must Address Sudan at the UN General Assembly Top
By Jerry Fowler, president, Save Darfur Coalition; Haggag Nayel, secretary general, Arab Coalition for Darfur; and Dismas Nkunda, co-chair, Darfur Consortium While President Barack Obama will speak to a number of pressing global issues when he addresses the U.N. General Assembly tomorrow, one topic he cannot neglect is Sudan. The President should seize the opportunity to build international support for policies to protect the human rights of all Sudanese and promote lasting peace in the country. The stakes are significant. Sudan is the largest country in Africa, surrounded by nine other states which are, in one way or another, affected by its instability and insecurity. It is a bridge between the African and Arab worlds and a key to the balance of both. As leaders of advocacy coalitions in the United States, Africa and the Arab World, we see Sudan as a test of the Obama administration's strategy of multilateralism and America's ability to use its influence to champion human rights, resolve conflicts, and prevent mass atrocities. Sudan has experienced conflict for years, including decades-long civil war between the North and South and extreme and targeted violence that American officials and others have termed genocide. The U.S. government helped end the civil war by pressing the Government of Sudan to agree to a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) with the leading Southern rebel group, the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M). Since the CPA was signed in 2005, violence has been reduced in the South and the possibility of normal life has returned to many conflict-affected areas. A return to full-scale war, threatens, however, as the peace partners argue daily over the agreement's implementation. Stability in the South also has suffered from recent inter-ethnic clashes and attacks by the Lord Resistance's Army that have directly targeted civilians. But while the fire in the South has been temporarily extinguished, the international community continues to neglect the suffering of Darfur. Today, nearly three million people remain in camps for internally displaced persons, unable to go home because of intimidation from government-supported militias, land occupations, banditry and a chaotic mix of intermittent violence between various armed groups. Displaced and refugee women face a constant threat of systematic rape by fighters from these groups, and more than 1.8 million civilians in need have limited or no access to humanitarian aid because of insecurity. United States diplomacy was a tremendous asset in the negotiation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. This administration must play a similar role in promoting peace. The United States has a unique capacity to bring together the significant actors in the African Union and Arab League, or rally the diplomatic support of key powers like the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Egypt, and China. This administration has the responsibility to leverage that capacity for peace. President Obama should focus the international community to support a credible and inclusive Darfur peace process and the full implementation of the CPA. The administration must also push for free and fair elections in 2010, and fully back the self-determination referendum for South Sudan scheduled for 2011. These are the political solutions necessary to end current conflict in Sudan and prevent an explosive wave of new violence. If managed poorly, however, they could also trigger a return to war. While focused on long-term solutions, the President should at the same time push for the protection of civilians, internally displaced persons and human rights defenders persecuted for trying to protect victims of rights violations. This month, President Obama should also build international consensus on the set of policies necessary to encourage Khartoum to change its behavior and commit to the process of peace and state building. To that end, he should call on Darfuri rebels and Khartoum to commit immediately to negotiations and ask international leaders to join him in urging the Sudanese government to implement concrete structural reforms envisaged by the CPA. Such reform would include real implementation of the interim Constitution of Sudan, including the Bill of Rights, and the elimination of all legal provisions - in particular the national security laws - that contradict international human rights standards. Finally, President Obama should focus the attention of the G-20 members gathered in Pittsburgh on the significant issue of Sudan's foreign debt. The $34 billion Sudan owes to other nations (most of which are members of the G-20) and multilateral institutions present an ideal opportunity to unify the world's strongest economies around a common platform of economic influence. Debt relief for Sudan should be conditioned on concrete and lasting progress on peace in Darfur and implementation of the CPA. By adopting this approach, President Obama would be carrying out his inaugural offer to repressive regimes of extending a hand - but only to those willing to "unclench" their fists. Re-ignition of conflict would be catastrophic for Sudan's people and the entire region. Full-scale war and descent into chaos would also represent a dramatic and costly failure for the United States and the international community. Refugee flows and violence would upset the tenuous stability in Chad, Uganda, Kenya, the Central African Republic and Ethiopia - and gravely harm Egypt's national security. The potential human costs to such a regional conflagration are incalculable. Responsible American leaders can focus the international community to prevent failure in Sudan -- the time and place for that leadership is September 23rd in New York. And no one is more suited to do this than President Obama. More on Darfur
 
David Horton: Cover up that chimp Top
I blame creationism for everything I don't blame corporate media for in my ongoing attempts to come to terms with what is wrong with the world of the 21st Century. But something I hadn't previously put on the creationist list was oppression of female women. Fundamentalist religious oppression of women, yes, of course, just a tautology, but here I'm focusing on the creationist and women. If you really understood that humans, male and female humans, have equally evolved from male and female earlier humans, and they in turn equally from male and female great apes, then the idea of oppressing the female portion of Homo sapiens sapiens would strike you as both laughable and obscene, depending upon mood. But then I saw a creationist questioning the other day how the first "male dog" that evolved could have found a mate, so the depths of incomprehension are truly great. These are people who believed that a "god" created woman, demanded that their bodies be totally covered (could have created them ready made with a covering, but hey, mysterious ways, right?) in order not to inflame the sexual desires of men which he had created to be totally uncontrollable, ready to be set off at the merest distant glimpse of female lock of hair, ankle, hand, eye (again, mysterious ways), I mean, yeah, you set out to create a sexually reproducing organism and that's the way you would do it. But at what point in an evolutionary development from apes to humans does the need to cover up the possessors of two X chromosomes arise? And at what point in the social development from hunter-gatherers to early farmers to city states does human nature suddenly evolve from one that deals quite comfortably with near nudity (male and female) in Australia and Africa and South America to one that doesn't in the Middle East? In Victorian times it was the Christian fashion to cover the legs of furniture with draped fabric in order not to excite the menfolk (LEGS, get it?) and I don't know how we drifted away from this very good procedure, which should certainly be reinstated, as a matter of urgency. But I would like to take it further. I think all the female great apes should be completely covered up with fabric. It will not only stop the uncontrollable impulses of the great ape males, but prevent any impure thoughts among the human males that see them. God should have seen to this himself with an edict somewhere in the good book, but I guess he just forgot, a lot on his mind telling people not to use their god-given impulses in relation to sex and food, but to follow strict recipes in both. And equally unaccountably the fundamentalists, following so blindly the letter of the laws, have apparently not noticed the temptations of the female great apes. So, ever helpful, I have taken it upon myself to make the suggestion. Don't thank me. Just doing my job of pointing out where creationism diverges from reality. Everywhere. But I converge on reality on The Watermelon Blog . More on Women's Rights
 
Sally Kohn: Death Bonds: Watch Big Banks Make A Killing (Literally) Top
You'd think some profiteering schemes are too sick even for Wall Street. But think again. Wall Street is hoping that health care reform fails so not only will insurance company profits and salaries rise but big banks can get in on the business. Goldman Sachs and other bailed out banks are putting big bucks into death bonds . When their last sub-prime mortgage scam went bust, we lost our houses. This time, we'll lose our lives. If insurance companies get their way and the quality of American health care continues to decline, the value of "death bonds" --- life insurance policies bought from the sick and elderly that increase in value the sooner the policyholders die --- will skyrocket. It's not sick enough private health insurance CEOs are making millions by putting profits before patients, cutting care and denying claims left and right. Now Wall Street wants in on the scam. Check out this video where I take to Wall Street to ask executives and average folks what they think about this latest gruesome scheme from the big banks. And please sign the petition to tell Goldman Sachs to stop selling death bonds. Goldman Sachs took $10 billion of our taxpayer money in bailouts and paid out $11 billion dollars in bonuses just a few months later. And now they're using our taxpayer money to bet that more Americans will die. This is the kind of raw, sick profiteering that we must put an end to. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein said in a speech on September 9, 2009 : "As an industry, we need to do a better job of understanding when incentives begin to work against the public interest rather than for it and take action to redress the balance." If selling death bonds and betting on a bigger profit the more Americans die isn't against the public interest, I don't know what is. Please join me in telling Goldman Sachs: Death to Death Bonds! And spread the word about this unconscionably evil scheme. http://www.nodeathbonds.com/ More on Health Care
 
Nancy Hopkins: Breaking the Gender-Merit Link Top
The notoriously liberal state of Massachusetts has never had a female senator in its roughly 220-year existence, a deficit that may persist unless we stop saddling women with a higher burden to prove that they are qualified. This year, in a special election to replace Ted Kennedy, we have a woman running for the office. Not just any woman, but Attorney General Martha Coakley, a highly qualified woman whose entire life has been dedicated to public service. Yet already we see media stories linking her gender to her merit. Last week the Boston Globe published an op-ed by Yvonne Abraham titled "Merit over Gender" and PolitickerNY had an article by Steve Kornacki titled "The Martha Coakley Story" . What's wrong with these articles? Why are they examples of the unconscious gender bias in the media that keeps women down? I'll start with the "Merit over Gender" piece. Why is it that when someone suggests gender diversity as an asset of a job candidate, the reply is often "Oh no, I'm only interested in merit". Yet name some other quality needed for the position, and the idea of merit is assumed, not questioned. Take for example the selection of Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. Some people said, "we need a judge from the Midwest in order to have a more balanced and diverse bench." I never heard anyone recoil in horror and reply "Oh no, I'm only interested in merit. " One assumes, of course, that it would be a meritorious candidate from the Midwest! Obama wanted a candidate with "empathy". Did anyone believe he wanted a person with empathy but no merit? They might have disagreed with the need for empathy, but they never suspected that empathy precluded merit. So why do people jump to the conclusion that if a woman is running, we have to worry about her merit. Linking these two things plays right into the stereotype that is what gender (and race) bias is - namely that women (blacks) really are inferior. Otherwise, why would the subject even come up? Linking merit to gender perpetuates an unconscious bias that has no basis in fact. Stereotypes applied to groups spill over to taint our judgment of individuals who belong to that group. I've seen the exact same thing in college admissions. Colleges often proudly announce that their students come from every state in the US. I've even known of people who consider moving so their kids will have a better chance of getting into a prestigious college. I have never heard anyone question the importance of having a college class that is diverse geographically. But say you want to take gender or race into consideration and whoa - listen to the howling, "Can't have that. It's only merit that matters". What about Kornacki's snarky-toned piece about Coakley? Maybe I'm being oversensitive on this one but to me the tone is decidedly negative. And what is Coakley's crime? Too ambitious! Imagine a woman wanting this job and planning how to get it and getting in ahead of the guys. And you know what other crime she has committed? Being female. That gives her an unfair advantage in the race according to Mr. Kornacki. Excuse me? Recall the data in sentence one above. I don't' see that women have had much of an advantage running for office in Massachusetts! My friend has coined a phrase for this phenomenon, saying that a female candidate being examined through an unconsciously sexist lens is being "Hillaried." During the Democratic primary, women watched in amazement that morphed into disgust, as Hillary Clinton was subtly and not so subtly bashed relentlessly by the media for the sin of being female. The worst kind of female: an ambitious one. It wasn't just the disgusting primitive media stuff - the nutcracker, the cleavage, the tears - but the more subtle bashing that many of us believe brought her down unfairly. And we can see that its already happening to Martha. And here's the worst thing about both articles: Both writers should be taking the view that "Eureka!" we finally have a woman who can become a senator in Massachusetts. It's about time and God bless her. She can put an end to the embarrassment of being a state that has never had a female Senator. Why aren't we down on our knees saying, "Thank you Martha, and how can we help? " The US ranks about 70th in the world in terms of female representation in its central government. The Senate has a paltry 17% women. How embarrassing is that? And how can we help change the world and make it better if we can't be leaders in this area? As Nicholas Kristof has brilliantly written in the NYTimes - women's rights are the human rights issue of our time. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has brilliantly declared, women's equality worldwide is the answer to many of the world's most serious problems. How can we not be begging Martha Coakley to run, showering her with money, and saying, "Thank you Martha for helping the US be a leader in equal rights in the 21st century!" More on Sonia Sotomayor
 
Jared Bernstein: For Whom the (Trading) Bell Tolls: Reforming Wall Street to Protect Main Street Top
In the heat of the debate about the need to fundamentally reform the way financial markets operate, both here in America and abroad, one crucially important point risks getting lost: the stakes for the middle class. Too often, debates like these end up with the regulators on one side and those whom they would regulate on the other. When the debate is focused on obscurities like over-the-counter derivatives and accounting standards, it becomes that much easier for the rest of us to tune out and let the vested interests fight it out among themselves. But when it comes to reforming our financial system, sitting this one out would be a big mistake. If we get this wrong, the damage will reverberate far beyond Wall Street. It's all too easy to see why failing to reform our financial system could be so devastating to the middle class. Just look around: the origins of this Great Recession were the unchecked excesses and reckless behavior in the financial industry, as easy money and flimsy underwriting gave rise to a massive housing bubble. When the bubble burst, the financial structure supporting this expansion turned out to be a house of cards, and as that house collapsed, the shock waves were felt not just on Wall Street, but around the world. So how exactly do these troubles in our financial system affect middle-class families? Lots of ways--and none of them good. Most immediately, there are tons of middle-class jobs associated with residential housing, from construction to furnishings to real estate, and many of these jobs have been lost. (Employment in residential construction and contracting, for example, is down one million jobs off of its peak). Next, most middle-class homeowners, for whom homes are their most valuable asset, have taken a big hit to their wealth, with home prices down over 30% . The huge spike in foreclosures--another symptom of the bust--is a major contributing factor here: studies show that when a home is foreclosed, the price of nearby homes can fall as much as 9%. Then there's the impact of the credit crunch on business activity, on loans, and once again, on jobs. As much as it sometimes seems as if Wall Street and Main Street exist on different planets, they're intimately connected. Whether it's a loan for a home, a car, or a college education--or just credit for a small business to keep its shelves stocked--the credit freeze born of the collapse of the housing bubble is a chill that continues to be felt throughout this nation. What starts as a risky derivatives trade in the boardroom of a New York skyscraper can all too easily end up as a distressed conversation around the kitchen table in a middle-class home in Wisconsin. And there's another crucial piece of fallout from all of this bubble-driven speculation, one that has been particularly damaging to the middle class: financial bubbles are associated with income growth bypassing low- and middle-income families and accumulating at the very top of the income scale. Before the crash, in 2007, the wealthiest 1% of households received 23.5% of all income, the highest share on record going back to the early 1900s. But there was one ominous exception: 1928, the year before the crash that began the Great Depression, when 23.9% of the income went to the top 1%. That bubble didn't end too well either, as you may have heard. And while the top was surfing the big wave, the middle class was treading water and the poor were drowning. Despite years of economic growth and solid productivity in the last economic expansion, the median income went nowhere and poverty rose. Incredibly, according to Census Bureau data, real median household income in 2008 was about $1,000 lower--that's right, I said lower--than it was a decade before. For all of these reasons, President Obama is proposing the most significant overhaul of the financial system since the 1930s. From the perspective of middle-class families, the reforms we've proposed have a clear mission: to create and enforce common-sense rules of the road that will ensure we're not back here again a few years from now. For example, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency we've proposed would, if created, enforce fair rules to eliminate the misleading terms, hidden fees, and exploding interest rates that some banks use to pad their profit margins at the expense of ordinary Americans. This kind of abuse is a big problem for middle-class families. During the housing bubble, banks and mortgage lenders routinely drew families into mortgages they didn't understand and couldn't afford. Some of these mortgages looked affordable at first, but their interest rates skyrocketed after a few years; others gave homeowners the option of interest-only payments for the first few years, without mentioning that this "option" had a good chance of leaving the homeowner with an underwater and unaffordable mortgage a few years down the road. The Consumer Financial Protection Agency would also regulate the practice of charging exorbitant hidden fees on credit and debit cards. For years, rather than seeing genuinely transparent competition on price and service, we've seen banks seeking to profit from credit card lines by burying fees in the fine print. For example, banks will make $27 billion this year just from the overdraft fees they charge on debit cards. We want to stop the practice of charging misleading or abusive hidden fees so that consumers know what they'll be paying and can choose the product that offers the best price and terms. Another key aspect of reform is to prevent what's come to be known as "systemic risk." One reason we ended up in the mess we're in is that financial institutions around the world became tightly linked, owing huge sums to each other in contracts built on massive amounts of debt and supported largely by the assumption that home prices could defy gravity forever. Those links meant that the failure of one financial institution could threaten the entire system. President Obama's reform plan puts regulation in place to oversee these linkages and to ensure that the financial system borrows and lends responsibly instead of relying on excessive leverage to take on huge risks in search of huge profits. Still, even with these safeguards, it's important to be prepared in case we once again find a major financial institution on the brink of collapse. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, we faced a similar problem: when one bank failed, there were runs on other banks, creating a destructive domino effect. To deal with this problem, Congress created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. And for years, the FDIC has successfully prevented bank runs by efficiently shutting down failed banks while guaranteeing that the customers' deposits (up to $250,000) will be safe even if the bank fails. But in the case of today's big "non-bank" financial institutions, like Lehman Brothers or AIG, we don't have these same options. Our reform plan introduces a crucial new function that would let regulators safely shut down troubled financial institutions without endangering the financial system, a function called " resolution authority ." This proposal would help deal with the problem of financial institutions that are "too big to fail" by making sure that regulators can allow any institution to fail, but in a way that incurs minimal costs to taxpayers and doesn't cripple the system. The President summed this all up eloquently : "Though they were not the cause of the crisis, American taxpayers through their government took extraordinary action to stabilize the financial industry. They shouldered the burden of the bailout and they are still bearing the burden of the fallout - in lost jobs, lost homes and lost opportunities." In other words, the debate over financial regulatory reform must not be an isolated debate solely involving regulators and traders. The outcome of these reforms must not be ceded to the lobbyists fighting for the status quo. These are kitchen table, wallet, pocketbook, and lunch-pail issues, directly linked to the prosperity of the middle class. Every day that stock markets open for trading on Wall Street, they ring the opening bell . Remember this: when it comes to financial regulatory reform, ask not for whom that bell tolls. It tolls for thee. Jared Bernstein is Chief Economist to Vice President Biden, and Executive Director of the Middle Class Task Force Cross-posted from the White House blog, The Briefing Room . More on Economy
 
Gail Mellow: The American Graduation Initiative: Something Even The Banks Should Bank On! Top
A year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, there is still widespread concern and healthy skepticism as to whether or not the financial industry has learned its lesson following the economic meltdown. If the banking industry's opposition to legislation that would reform the private student loan system is any indication, the lesson is being willfully ignored. Earlier this year, President Obama proposed an overhaul of the lucrative role banks play in the student loan industry that would save taxpayers approximately $87 billion. These savings would then be used to expand the Pell Grant Program, the federal financial aid program for students. This change would provide an additional $75 billion in college scholarships for the neediest students. As importantly, there would also be $12 billion allocated for the nation's community colleges. Community colleges now enroll almost half of all undergraduate students, but spend a fraction of what is spent on four year college students. President Obama characterized community colleges as an "essential part of recovery in the present, and our prosperity in the future." The proposed program, the American Graduation Initiative, would enable community colleges to innovate and expand successful programs that improve educational and employment outcomes. It is designed to get more students to complete a degree, especially one in a high job growth area. It would also fund forward-thinking strategies to increase graduation rates and develop new online, open-source courses as educational pathways for students. In the first major federally funded community college construction project since the Johnson Administration in the 1960s, some $2.5 billion would be earmarked to build new classrooms and laboratories to meet rising enrollment. The American Graduation Initiative is historic in scope, and could have an impact as great as the GI Bill did in helping get Americans a college degree and transforming our country. The overarching goal is to graduate an additional five million Americans by 2020. At a time when our economy is dependent on a labor force that demands educations beyond the high school level, American competitiveness depends upon our success in educating our citizens. Indeed, business and professional leaders are unanimous in proclaiming that a college-educated workforce is critical to sustaining our nation's progress and prosperity -- and to maintain world preeminence -- in the 21st Century. Enrollment is skyrocketing at community colleges across the country as more and more people realize their value and quality. Community colleges attract traditional aged students who like the convenience and low cost, workers who have lost their jobs or fear losing them, veterans who need a new start in civilian life, and those who want to upgrade their ability to survive in this tough economy. For the first time ever, community colleges from Florida to California have had to shut their doors to students because of enrollment increases. So, the American Graduation Initiative is a truly necessary program for our country - money in the bank so to speak. But, let's not send this money to the banks. Incredible as it may seem, the very same industry that has taken billions of dollars in bailout money from the federal government is not ready to loosen its grip on the cash cow that is the private student loan industry. Big bonuses still thrive in the financial industry, while individuals who need money to amend mortgages or go to college are still hoping for some stimulus money to reach the real people. In fact, quietly but effectively the banking lobby in D.C. is visiting Congress to oppose the legislation that would provide the funding for enhanced student financial aid and the American Graduation Initiative. It seems obvious that banks, and other private lenders, have only their own self-interest in mind. They seem to play by the standard of "heads I win, tails the taxpayer loses." They collect hefty fees on loans that are, in essence, risk-free because the government guarantees repayment up to 97 percent. Last week the House passed the legislation that would end this subsidized loan program. The Senate has not scheduled its hearings and vote and will come under heavy pressure to dilute the student loan changes. Let's change the odds for the working families in our country. We would be better served by putting the billions that would be saved under the President's plan in the hands of taxpayers, by giving students more loans and investing in our public community colleges. As President Obama said when he proposed the American Graduation Initiative: "Time and time again, when we placed our bet for the future on education, we have prospered as a result." Congress should take the odds. For me, it's a sure-fire bet. Dr. Gail O. Mellow is president of LaGuardia Community College (of the City University of New York) and co-author of Minding The Dream (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. 2008) More on Banks
 
Avelino Maestas: The Unemployment Benefits Extension Explained By OC User nancym Top
The House today is set to vote on an extension of unemployment benefits. The comment threads on bills related to the issue have long been a valuable resource for people seeking information on unemployment benefits. For example, with huge interest in the House health care reform bill , the legislation generated 1,500 comments. By comparison, the page for H.R. 3548 has more than 2,500 comments. Its predecessor, H.R. 6867 , had more than 57,000 comments. The community that has built up around these bills is a "community" in the truest sense of the word: the people know one another, there's some infighting (and trolling), but generally individuals can find a sympathetic crowd who are knowledgeable about the issue and willing to help. In the spirit of that community, I thought I would use comments from the H.R. 3548 thread as the core of this blog post. In particular, I'll single out nancym , who has done a remarkable job of tracking the legislation, contacting lawmakers and committees, and keeping her fellow users informed. To begin, nancym writes that the legislation is being considered under "suspension of the rules," which she describes : What's important is that all those bills on the list that are brought to the floor are brought up together under "suspension," the key part of that definition being "to dispose of non- controversial measures expeditiously." I.e., All these other relatively unimportant bills that the Speaker considers are simply a matter of paperwork and little discussion because most will agree to pass them are brought up in clusters to save time for more important bills. HR 3548 is squeezed into this batch under suspension because it is the fastest way to get this bill out of the House, AND it would seem that the Speaker's estimation is that the bill would face little opposition in the House. Furthermore, according to suspension rules, the time for argument is limited, as well is the opportunity for amendments. So this cannot be dragged on for days of debate. Also the amendments rule indicates that the only way an amendment would be made to this bill that would include more states is if the person bringing the bill to the floor to propose suspension of the rules ("the manager"--not sure if this would be McDermott or some head of committee or someone else) proposes the amendment, OR if the committee has already built an amendment into the version coming out of committee. We know that the bill is likely to easily pass the House, but just what does it do? The short of it: provides an additional 13 weeks of unemployment benefits for workers who have been out of a job for extended periods of time, and whose benefits about to expire. But which workers will qualify? Nancym to the rescue, this time with a comment on the legislation itself : This refers to the [Insured Unemployment Rate] written into the original [Emergency Unemployment Compensation] bill. So any state over 8.5% [Total Unemployment Rate] OR any state over 6% IUR would qualify for an extra 13 weeks. That is why press reports and Rep. McDermott's own press release list Pennsylvania as included in the list of states this will help immediately. So, states with very high rates of unemployment will benefit from this bill. She narrows the scope even further: What they MEANT to say is that 300,000 people will run out of benefits by the end of September. All those people AND anyone exhausting benefits, either now, earlier, or anytime later until the provisions of the bill expire will receive 13 extra weeks if their state qualifies in an extended benefit period. This bill is basically an extension of Emergency Unemployment Compensation provided in the stimulus bill adopted at the beginning of the year. According to nancym, this extension also pays for itself : The actual bill is a bit open-ended; I don't see a cutoff date, though that may be indicated in the original bill for which this is essentially an amendment. The cutoff mentioned in the bill is just that we each get only one shot at the 13 weeks (in this bill at least). The bill gives that to anyone in a state that gets into that EB period, even though the funds are EUC. But of much interest to legislators is the fact that the bill pays for itself with an ongoing tax on employers that's existed for 30 years but was about to expire. So the bill is "deficit-neutral." Thanks to nancym, we now know the following: The legislation will provide extended unemployment benefits in 26 states (those with TUR of 8.5% or greater, and Pennsylvania, with an IUR greater than 6%. Individuals who have exhausted their unemployment benefits will be eligible for an additional 13 weeks of benefits. The House will quickly approve the bill today. She also writes that the next step (after the Senate approves H.R. 3548) for those out of working and requiring an extension would be H.R. 3404 , which would extend many of the benefits through 2010 : Right now they are trying to plug a small hole in a giant dyke that might be about to burst. Hopefully they will change this bill by the time it gets to final passage. But even if it doesn't change, there is pending legislation in HR 3404 and in the Senate that will be needed to extend these entire programs into 2010, for which they need more time to debate because of the billions needed to pass them. It's being put through via an emergency process to cover the projected 1.5 million who will be exhausting benefits in the states that have the most dismal rates. I agree it's not fair at all, and hopefully they will change it. But if they had added more, it can trigger concerns about more spending which could hold up the legislation. Some states will actually qualify later this year or early January if things keep getting worse, so even though these states are not included now, they are eventually covered by this law if the rate goes to 8.5 (or 6 insured rate). Now, a lot of this information is available elsewhere on the Internet, but I can't help but think that nancym and the other incredible users like her are using OpenCongress to spread the word about these types of bills for a reason. We strive to bring all of this information into one place, and give people the tools to organize around and issue and engage with their elected representatives easily. It seems to be working in this particular situation. If you're interested in participating in OpenCongress, please sign up or shoot me an e-mail: avelino@opencongress.org.
 
Subway Yearbook Photos: Improv Everywhere Takes Pics On The 6 Train! (VIDEO) Top
For their latest stunt, the good people of Improv Everywhere installed a photography studio on the 6 train ad started taking yearbook photos of all the passengers. They told their new-found clientele that the MTA had hired them to photograph its riders and put together a book. Most people were thrilled at the free offer. WATCH: More on Video
 
All The Single Babies! (VIDEO) Top
Ok, yeah, we're over the "Single Ladies" parodies too, but we couldn't resist this one. A tiny tiny baby person is so engrossed in the video that he or she (no idea on the gender and the name is 'Cory' which doesn't help) starts dancing along! Sadly enough this baby is better on his or her feet than I am to this day. WATCH: Get HuffPost Comedy On Facebook and Twitter! More on Funny Videos
 
Michael T. Klare: The Era of Xtreme Energy: Life After the Age of Oil Top
Cross-posted with Tomdispatch.com . The debate rages over whether we have already reached the point of peak world oil output or will not do so until at least the next decade. There can, however, be little doubt of one thing: we are moving from an era in which oil was the world's principal energy source to one in which petroleum alternatives -- especially renewable supplies derived from the sun, wind, and waves -- will provide an ever larger share of our total supply. But buckle your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride under Xtreme conditions. It would, of course, be ideal if the shift from dwindling oil to its climate-friendly successors were to happen smoothly via a mammoth, well-coordinated, interlaced system of wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and other renewable energy installations. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to occur. Instead, we will surely first pass through an era characterized by excessive reliance on oil's final, least attractive reserves along with coal, heavily polluting "unconventional" hydrocarbons like Canadian oil sands, and other unappealing fuel choices. There can be no question that Barack Obama and many members of Congress would like to accelerate a shift from oil dependency to non-polluting alternatives. As the president said in January, "We will commit ourselves to steady, focused, pragmatic pursuit of an America that is free from our [oil] dependence and empowered by a new energy economy that puts millions of our citizens to work." Indeed, the $787 billion economic stimulus package he signed in February provided $11 billion to modernize the nation's electrical grid, $14 billion in tax incentives to businesses to invest in renewable energy, $6 billion to states for energy efficiency initiatives, and billions more directed to research on renewable sources of energy. More of the same can be expected if a sweeping climate bill is passed by Congress. The version of the bill recently passed by the House of Representatives, for example, mandates that 20% of U.S. electrical production be supplied by renewable energy by 2020. But here's the bad news: even if all these initiatives were to pass, and more like them many times over, it would still take decades for this country to substantially reduce its dependence on oil and other non-renewable, polluting fuels. So great is our demand for energy, and so well-entrenched the existing systems for delivering the fuels we consume, that (barring a staggering surprise) we will remain for years to come in a no-man's-land between the Petroleum Age and an age that will see the great flowering of renewable energy. Think of this interim period as -- to give it a label -- the Era of Xtreme Energy, and in just about every sense imaginable from pricing to climate change, it is bound to be an ugly time. An Oil Field as Deep as Mt. Everest Is High Don't be fooled by the fact that this grim new era will surely witness the arrival of many more wind turbines, solar arrays, and hybrid vehicles. Most new buildings will perhaps come equipped with solar panels, and more light-rail systems will be built. Despite all this, however, our civilization is likely to remain remarkably dependent on oil-fueled cars, trucks, ships, and planes for most transportation purposes, as well as on coal for electricity generation. Much of the existing infrastructure for producing and distributing our energy supply will also remain intact, even as many existing sources of oil, coal, and natural gas become exhausted, forcing us to rely on previously untouched, far more undesirable (and often far less accessible) sources of these fuels. Some indication of the likely fuel mix in this new era can be seen in the most recent projections of the Department of Energy (DoE) on future U.S. energy consumption. According to the department's Annual Energy Outlook for 2009 , the United States will consume an estimated 114 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs) of energy in 2030, of which 37% will be supplied by oil and other petroleum liquids, 23% by coal, 22% by natural gas, 8% by nuclear power, 3% by hydropower, and only 7% by wind, solar, biomass, and other renewable sources. Clearly, this does not yet suggest a dramatic shift away from oil and other fossil fuels. On the basis of current trends, the DoE also predicts that even two decades from now, in 2030, oil, natural gas, and coal will still make up 82% of America's primary energy supply, only two percentage points less than in 2009. (It is of course conceivable that a dramatic shift in national and international priorities will lead to a greater increase in renewable energy in the next two decades, but at this point that remains a dim hope rather than a sure thing.) While fossil fuels will remain dominant in 2030, the nature of these fuels, and the ways in which we acquire them, will undergo profound change. Today, most of our oil and natural gas come from "conventional" sources of supply: large underground reservoirs found mainly in relatively accessible sites on land or in shallow coastal areas. These are the reserves that can be easily exploited using familiar technology, most notably modern versions of the towering oil rigs made famous most recently in the 2007 film There Will Be Blood . Ever more of these fields will, however, be depleted as global consumption soars, forcing the energy industry to increasingly rely on deep offshore oil and gas, Canadian oil sands, oil and gas from a climate-altered but still hard to reach and exploit Arctic, and gas extracted from shale rock using costly, environmentally threatening techniques. In 2030, says the DoE , such unconventional liquids will provide 13% of world oil supply (up from a mere 4% in 2007). A similar pattern holds for natural gas, especially in the United States where the share of energy supplied by unconventional but nonrenewable sources is expected to rise from 47% to 56% in the same two decades. Just how important these supplies have become is evident to anyone who follows the oil industry's trade journals or simply regularly checks out the business pages of the Wall Street Journal . Absent from them have been announcements of major discoveries of giant new oil and gas reserves in any parts of the world accessible to familiar drilling techniques and connected to key markets by existing pipelines or trade routes (or located outside active war zones such as Iraq and the Niger Delta region of Nigeria). The announcements are there, but virtually all of them have been of reserves in the Arctic, Siberia, or the very deep waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. Recently the press has been abuzz with major discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico and far off Brazil's coast that might give the impression of adding time to the Age of Petroleum. On September 2nd, for example, BP (formerly British Petroleum) announced that it had found a giant oil field in the Gulf of Mexico about 250 miles southeast of Houston. Dubbed Tiber, it is expected to produce hundreds of thousands of barrels per day when production begins some years from now, giving a boost to BP's status as a major offshore producer. "This is big," commented Chris Ruppel, a senior energy analyst at Execution LLC, a London investment bank. "It says we're seeing that improved technology is unlocking resources that were before either undiscovered or too costly to exploit because of economics." As it happens, though, anyone who jumped to the conclusion that this field could quickly or easily add to the nation's oil supply would be woefully mistaken. As a start, it's located at a depth of 35,000 feet -- greater than the height of Mount Everest, as a reporter from the New York Times noted -- and well below the Gulf's floor. To get to the oil, BP's engineers will have to drill through miles of rock, salt, and compressed sand using costly and sophisticated equipment. To make matters worse, Tiber is located smack in the middle of the area in the Gulf regularly hit by massive storms in hurricane season, so any drills operating there must be designed to withstand hurricane-strength waves and winds, as well as sit idle for weeks at a time when operating personnel are forced to evacuate. A similar picture prevails in the case of Brazil's Tupi field , the other giant discovery of recent years. Located about 200 miles east of Rio de Janeiro in the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean, Tupi has regularly been described as the biggest field to be found in 40 years. Thought to contain some five to eight billion barrels of recoverable oil, it will surely push Brazil into the front ranks of major oil producers once the Brazilians have overcome their own series of staggering hurdles: the Tupi field is located below one-and-a-half miles of ocean water and another two-and-a-half miles of rock, sand, and salt and so accessible only to cutting edge, super-sophisticated drilling technologies. It will cost an estimated $70-$120 billion to develop the field and require many years of dedicated effort. Xtreme Acts of Energy Recovery Given the potentially soaring costs involved in recovering these last tough-oil reserves, it's no wonder that Canadian oil sands , also called tar sands, are the other big "play" in the oil business these days. Not oil as conventionally understood, the oil sands are a mixture of rock, sand, and bitumen (a very heavy, dense form of petroleum) that must be extracted from the ground using mining, rather than oil-drilling, techniques. They must also be extensively processed before being converted into a usable liquid fuel. Only because the big energy firms have themselves become convinced that we are running out of conventional oil of an easily accessible sort have they been tripping over each other in the race to buy up leases to mine bitumen in the Athabasca region of northern Alberta. The mining of oil sands and their conversion into useful liquids is a costly and difficult process, and so the urge to do so tells us a great deal about our particular state of energy dependency. Deposits near the surface can be strip-mined, but those deeper underground can only be exploited by pumping in steam to separate the bitumen from the sand and then pumping the bitumen to the surface -- a process that consumes vast amounts of water and energy in the form of natural gas (to heat that water into steam). Much of the water used to produce steam is collected at the site and used over again, but some is returned to the local water supply in northern Alberta, causing environmentalists to worry about the risk of large-scale contamination. The clearing of enormous tracts of virgin forest to allow strip-mining and the consumption of valuable natural gas to extract the bitumen are other sources of concern. Nevertheless, such is the need of our civilization for petroleum products that Canadian oil sands are expected to generate 4.2 million barrels of fuel per day in 2030 -- three times the amount being produced today -- even as they devastate huge parts of Alberta, consume staggering amounts of natural gas, cause potentially extensive pollution, and sabotage Canada's efforts to curb its greenhouse-gas emissions. North of Alberta lies another source of Xtreme energy: Arctic oil and gas. Once largely neglected because of the difficulty of simply surviving, no less producing energy, in the region, the Arctic is now the site of a major "oil rush" as global warming makes it easier for energy firms to operate in northern latitudes. Norway's state-owned energy company, StatoilHydro , is now running the world's first natural gas facility above the Arctic Circle, and companies from around the world are making plans to develop oil and gas fields in the Artic territories of Canada, Greenland (administered by Denmark), Russia, and the United States, where offshore drilling in northern Alaskan waters may soon be the order of the day. It will not, however, be easy to obtain oil and natural gas from the Arctic. Even if global warming raises average temperatures and reduces the extent of the polar ice cap, winter conditions will still make oil production extremely difficult and hazardous. Fierce storms and plunging temperatures will remain common, posing great risk to any humans not hunkered down in secure facilities and making the transport of energy a major undertaking. Given fears of dwindling oil supplies, none of this has been enough to deter energy-craving companies from plunging into the icy waters. "Despite grueling conditions, interest in oil and gas reserves in the far north is heating up," Brian Baskin reported in the Wall Street Journal . "Virtually every major producer is looking to the Arctic sea floor as the next -- some say last -- great resource play." What is true of oil generally is also true of natural gas and coal: most easy-to-reach conventional deposits are quickly being depleted. What remains are largely the "unconventional" supplies. U.S. producers of natural gas, for example, are reporting a significant increase in domestic output, producing a dramatic reduction in prices. According to the DoE, U.S. gas production is projected to increase from about 20 trillion cubic feet in 2009 to 24 trillion in 2030, a real boon for U.S. consumers, who rely to a significant degree on natural gas for home heating and electricity generation. As noted by the Energy Department however, "Unconventional natural gas is the largest contributor to the growth in U.S. natural gas production, as rising prices and improvements in drilling technology provide the economic incentives necessary for exploitation of more costly resources." Most of the unconventional gas in the United States is currently obtained from tight-sand formations (or sandstone), but a growing percentage is acquired from shale rock through a process known as hydraulic fracturing. In this method, water is forced into the underground shale formations to crack the rock open and release the gas. Huge amounts of water are employed in the process, and environmentalists fear that some of this water, laced with pollutants, will find its ways into the nation's drinking supply. In many areas, moreover, water itself is a scarce resource, and the diversion of crucial supplies to gas extraction may diminish the amounts available for farming, habitat preservation, and human consumption. Nonetheless, production of shale gas is projected to jump from two trillion cubic feet per year in 2009 to four trillion in 2030. Coal presents a somewhat similar picture. Although many environmentalists object to the burning of coal because it
 
Beck: Only "Small Minority" Of Obama Protesters Fueled By Racism Top
Glenn Beck told Katie Couric that he doesn't believe the majority of anti-Obama protesters are fueled by racism, according to a transcript of their interview obtained by the Huffington Post. In an interview for Couric's 7PM webcast, @katiecouric — excerpts of which are to be aired on the "CBS Evening News" tonight — Beck says that he believes only a "small minority" of people in this country "hate based on color." "I think people see things, a larger percent, but still in the minority...through the prism of color," Beck said. "But generally not through the hatred of color." Beck, of course, has been at the center of a firestorm and an advertiser exodus over his comments that President Obama is "racist" and "has a deep-seated hatred for white people" on "Fox & Friends" this summer. A transcript of the excerpt appears below. Excerpts from Couric's interview with Beck will appear on the "CBS Evening News" at 6:30 ET, and the full interview will air at cbsnews.com/katiecouricwebshow at 7PM ET. COURIC : Do you think any of the animosity that we've seen over healthcare or the stimulus package or the auto bailout, do you think any of it is fueled by racism? BECK : Any of it is a large-- statement. I think that there are people of all color that hate based on color. I think that is such a small minority-- in this country. I think people see things, a larger percent, but still in the minority. See things through the prism of color. But generally not through the hatred of color. COURIC : So you think there could be people who are racists who are participating in some of these things, but for the-- BECK : Here's the va-- COURIC : --vast majority-- BECK : -- vast majority of people on both the left and the right are people who are tired-- they're tired, Katie. Do you have time sto-- what-- how much time we're spending on politics in our lives. Do you have time for it? I don't have time for it. In my real life I don't wanna be doin' this. I don't wanna be thinking about this all the time. My wife looks at me at midnight and says, "Honey, turn the computer off." I'm like, "I know, I know. But I gotta finish--" it's insane. Look how much politics are eating up, sucking out of-- do you know-- do you think we could be energy-- free if we used the same amount of time and effort and money that we do on politics? You're darn right. The average person is tired. They're tired. And they've also come to a point to where they no longer see our children or our children's children having the kind of opportunity and life that we have. Because we've spent ourself into oblivion. Both sides have done it. It's gotta stop. More on Glenn Beck
 
Conservatives Turn Their Sights On Health Care Reform's Most Obvious Provision Top
Democrats are bracing themselves for a new line of conservative attack against a provision in the health care legislation once considered so non-controversial that it was endorsed by several major Republican officials. On Tuesday, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) described the health care legislation being considered by the Senate Finance Committee as a "stunning assault on liberty" due to a provision that would require individuals to buy insurance. Earlier in the week, the individual mandate also came under attack when Tim Phillips, who heads Americans for Prosperity, described it as an assault on individual liberty. "When you have health care, that's a choice that impacts yourself," Phillips told MSNBC's Hardball . "Drivers' insurance impacts other drivers you may have accidents with." The attacks have confounded Democrats in and out of government, who noted quickly that mandating coverage was, until recently, a relative given when it came to health care reform. "It's f--ing ludicrous," said one health care reform activist, who noted that when Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) asked committee members to air their disagreements with an individual mandate during a meeting on May 5 , no one chimed in. Indeed, for months it was presumed that a relatively ironclad deal was in place: in exchange for the government mandating coverage, private insurance companies would agree to cover individuals with pre-existing conditions. The arrangement was all but blessed by prominent figures from within the GOP ranks. In mid-August, the ranking member of the finance committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), announced that the way to get universal coverage is "through an individual mandate." "That's individual responsibility," the senator told Nightly Business Report. "And even Republicans believe in individual responsibility." Months earlier, Grassley told Fox News that there wasn't "anything wrong" with mandates even if some may view them "as an infringement upon individual freedom." "But when it comes to states requiring it for automobile insurance the principle then ought to lie the same way for health insurance," Grassley added. "Because everybody has some health insurance cost and if you aren't insured there aren't free lunches." Grassley wasn't alone. His fellow Republican Senator John Thune (R-S.D.) recently told reporters that while he was conflicted on a mandate, it was "something I guess that I would take a look at. There -- there are good arguments on behalf of getting everybody in the -- in the pool," he said. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney made an individual mandate a staple of the health care overhaul he pursued for his state. "For the uninsured who can afford insurance but expect to be given free care at the hospital, require them to either pay for their own care or buy insurance," he wrote in Newsweek . Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, himself a doctor, told Fox Business Network that consumers should "be responsible to paying for" their insurance. If they can't afford it, he added, "there are going to be taxes, excise taxes, user taxes on companies like Aetna, on individuals." Meanwhile, six current Republican Senators - Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Bob Bennett (Utah), Mike Crapo (Idaho), Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) - all have sponsored legislation (Sen. Ron Wyden's 2009 "Healthy Americans Act") that includes an individual mandate. So why at this juncture has the individual mandate come under attack - enough to create concern within the Obama White House and Dems on the Hill? Health care reform advocates say that it is largely due to political opportunism on the part of Republicans. But sloppy legislating on the part of Democrats can also be blamed. Richard Kirsch, National Campaign Manager for Health Care for America Now, argued that the GOP clearly senses "a vulnerability for Democrats" on the topic. But the problem was that there were serious concerns that the legislation didn't include the subsidies needed to make mandated coverage more affordable -- a concern that even Barack Obama raised during the course of the Democratic primary, he noted. "If you assume that the legislation will provide for affordable coverage for people than the individual mandate will not become a huge lightening rod," Kirsch said. "But if you are worried about federal spending levels and are therefore are not providing affordable coverage then it will become a political lightening rod." Baucus (D-Mont.) has tried to remedy the situation by halving the penalty on families who decline to buy coverage and increasing the subsidies to those middle-class families purchasing insurance. But Kirsch insists that, without the ability to choose a government run option, consumers - and by extension the politicians who represent them - will turn sour on the mandate. "We did a poll in Maine and in 91 swing House districts," said Kirsch. "We found that if we asked people if they supported a requirement to buy health insurance they said no. But if we said, 'Do you support a requirement coverage between private and public?' they said yes." "Conservative democrats are going to be attacked from the right on the mandates but what makes the mandates popular is the public option." More on Health Care
 
Jack Hidary: Live Blogging from CGI Top
Obama about to speak - Matt Damon, Àshton Kutcher in the house A well-coiffed Bill Clinton opened the 5th Clinton Global Initiative. He noted that with the economic crisis there was a possibility of throwing a party with no one showing up, but in fact more leaders are attending this year than any previous CGI Bill Clinton brings on Matt Damon and Gary White with water.org to announce a new commitment to provide clean water in Haiti - to cover 50,000 people over 3 years. Giving Back Circle - CGI brings performance onto the stage with three students from Kenya. The students give a verbal accounting of how the program has affected their lives. Clinton now brings on the panel including: Muhtar Kent, Chairman and CEO of Coke Michelle Bachelet, President of Chile Kevin Rudd, PM of Australia Mike Duke, President and CEO, Wal-mart G20 Kevin Rudd argued for the expansion of the G8 to the G20. The expansion brings in the emerging markets and will provide a more effective platform to address global crisis. Water neutrality Muthar Kent noted that Coke is the first large company to commit to water neutrality by 2020. They use 300 billion liters of water every year and they commit to return a equal amount to the earth every year.
 
Joel Judd: Corporate Tax Loopholes Cost Colorado Billions -- Let's Close Them Top
Colorado has billions of dollars in corporate tax loopholes that we must close. They are welfare for corporations that cannot stand up to even the most cursory review: They produce few if any jobs They reward companies that are anti-union and do not provide decent benefits They don't work We need tax policies that produce jobs not just line the pocketbooks of a few industries who hire big time lobbyists to support their pet loophole. Tax credits are kind of the default position that many legislators come up with when they talk about economic development. They are sold as panaceas when all they truly are is expensive placebos. Times are tough. We are faced with cutting mental health programs, raising tuition, cutting medical services for the poor. Yet we have plenty of dough for corporate welfare that simply does not work. It's like giving your kid $5 to mow the lawn and giving the $5 whether the lawn is mowed or not. I asked the recipients of these corporate welfare chits to show me some proof they work. The next study I see showing they work will be the first. Here are some loopholes I want to eliminate and my ideas on ways the money might better be spent: Colorado has a lot of natural gas. Once it's sucked out of the ground and shipped to Ohio or Missouri power plants it's gone forever. When the gas is "severed" from the ground, we charge the driller a "severance" tax. We allow the driller to subtract or deduct most of its local property tax. As a result we have a lower effective severance tax rate than almost every other state. After we drop that property tax deduction, we'll still have one of the lowest severance taxes, but most years we'll have an additional $300 million in revenue. Your employer withholds taxes from your paycheck. That makes sure you pay your taxes. Out of state business partners and S corporation shareholders don't have anything withheld. Some pay their taxes anyway. We ought to collect from the rest. Before the company mails their check out of state, we need to withhold from them the same as from you. Right now Colorado is closing mental health facilities in Denver and Grand Junction. We've cut the rate we pay for health care to those indigent who qualify for Medicaid. We've cut the Health Care Services Fund. It pays local clinics to treat sick poor Coloradoans and keep them from jamming up our emergency rooms. We now tell sick poor Coloradoans, "No care for you." For the first time, downtown's Stout Street Clinic has a wait list of more than 400 mentally ill Coloradoans. In January we'll start work on the budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1, 2010. It looks like dropping revenue require us to cut services another $500 million. We'll cut mental health more, cut K-12 education and worse -- unless we close some of these loopholes. Now, just as in Washington we have: Democrats who if you say something is anti-business even if completely untrue they hide for cover and don't come out and Republicans who might do the right thing if they get enough calls, letters and e-mail urging them to do so. Please help me end big corporate welfare in Colorado. Contact your Legislator regardless of party. Here's a link to easily find out your Legislator: http://www.votesmart.org/ . Tell them to vote to close the corporate welfare loopholes; Write a letter to the editor, post a comment on one of the blogs and let others know why this is important. What this is about is fundamentally the kind of state we want to live in. I prefer a state that does everything possible to help the weakest amongst us. I would support tax credits if they actually produced jobs and helped people. I will fight like heck to eliminate those that come at the expense of our seniors, our children, those with disabilities. My voice will be raised for those without a voice on this issue. Thank you. For more information contact me at joeljudd.com . Feel free to send a copy of any correspondence you send or comments you post or letters to the editor you write. More on Taxes
 
Tamara Conniff: The Dalai Lama Brings Freedom Song to Memphis: Day One Top
The secret service has to wait for the ducks at the Peabody Hotel to make their grand red carpet entrance to the lobby fountain before they can do one more security check on the Dalai Lama's floor. Once secure - half the agents headed to the airport, while the others joined the Memphis police at the Tom Lee Park overlooking the Mississippi River. The river is Memphis. It's the river that made Memphis one of the largest port towns and brought together music styles upstream and down stream to birth the Blues and the Memphis sound. The river was also an escape route and spelled freedom for many slaves. The river is the first place the 14th Dalai Lama went on his first trip to Blues City to receive 2009 International Freedom Award from the National Civil Rights Museum. On hand to welcome him were Memphis Mayor Myron Lowery and Shelby County Mayor AC Wharton, Jr. They awkwardly held Tibetan scarves to present to His Holiness. The 74-year-old Dalai Lama is spry like a young man. He has a mischievous smile, bright eyes, and an infamous sense of humor. His robes marked a sharp contrast to the many suited federal agents surrounding him (as a high profile religious leader in exile, when the Dalai Lama visits the United States, it is the government's responsibility to ensure his safety). He immediately put the two mayors and onlookers at ease with his smile. After recieving the key to the city and a proclamation making him an official citizen of Memphis for his devotion to civil rights, the Dalai Lama bowed and smiled. In broken English he expressed his belief in "human value" and "human affection," stating that affection and compassion can reach beyond issues of race, economic status, or any other dividers. "Compassions change our perception," he said. The National Civil Rights Museum is housed at the Lorraine Motel, the assassination site of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. At the mention of Dr. Kings name, the Dalai Lama gets very quiet and pensive. It is to pay homage to Dr. King that he made his long journey to Memphis. "I never met him, but I admire him very much," he said. His Holiness shares a key value with Dr. King in his civil rights movement to free Tibet - non-violence. 2009 marks the 50th anniversary since the Dalai Lama was forced to flee Tibet and form a government in exile in India. Controversy follows him - especially now that China has emerged as a superpower and is a vital trade partner, many U.S. businesses are afraid to align with the most famous Buddhist for fear that China will retaliate. Beijing condemns the Dalai Lama for promoting autonomy in Tibet, which China took over in 1950. In fact, U.S. presidents have been cautious when dealing with the Dalai Lama. President Obama has yet to meet with him, and to date has only sent an advisor to discuss the U.S. policy on Tibet. During his stay, the Dalai Lama will give a public speech on "Developing Peace and Harmony." In addition a concert will be held in his honor, presented by The Missing Piece Project, featuring Tibetan musicians, singer/songwriter Matt Nathanson, country artist Joe Nicols and headliner Natalie Cole with the Memphis Symphony. Before leaving the Mississippi, he bestowed a special blessing on the river with two Tibetan scarves. He smiled and looked at his fellow monks and said, "This is how we bless our rivers in Tibet. This is our river too." More on Tibet
 
Nikolas Kozloff: Zelaya's Honduras Return: Salvaging Democracy Will Be Tricky Top
Manuel Zelaya, the ousted leader of Honduras who was overthrown in a right-wing military coup in June, has made an incredible political gamble: yesterday he returned to the troubled Central American nation in a bid to reclaim the reins of power. In the capitol of Tegucigalpa some Zelaya supporters gathered in front of the United Nations building where they believed the former president was holed up. However, there was no confirmation that Zelaya was indeed inside. Later however the President appeared smiling on the balcony of the Brazilian embassy. Since taking power the coup regime has clamped down on social movements with an iron grip -- indeed about 1,500 people have been jailed for political reasons. Hopefully an agreement can be reached without further loss of life, Zelaya will be returned to power and respect for human rights can be restored. It's unclear however how this political crisis will unfold. On two previous occasions when Zelaya attempted to return to Honduras clashes between the army and the president's supporters resulted in the deaths of several people. Needless to say, the coup government has declared a 15-hour curfew in Tegucigalpa. In the event that the coup regime crumbles the U.S. and Latin American left will rejoice -- before he was toppled Zelaya championed progressive reforms such as a raise in the minimum wage. The ex-President also brought Honduras into the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas or ALBA, a reciprocal trade agreement spearheaded by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. A Zelaya regime would be infinitely more preferable than the present government. However, even if Zelaya returns to power the road to democracy will be fraught. Honduras is a corrupt and politically unstable place which has become a media free-for-all in recent years. While the coup government has clamped down on the media [ see my previous July piece on my personal blog entitled "Honduras: Latin American Media Battle Continues" ], Zelaya was no pushover either in his day. Indeed, since the coup took place progressives have tended to gloss over some of the more questionable dealings of the former regime. In 2007 Zelaya -- a member of the wealthy landowning elite who only recently underwent a political conversion of sorts by adopting some progressive policies -- ordered all the country's TV and radio stations to carry government propaganda for two hours every day. Taking measures against the media was necessary, Zelaya argued, because it had provided unfair coverage of his government and had sought to exploit political and social problems like violent crime so as to boost profits. Such a charge was not without merit: in 2006 there were 3,118 homicides in Honduras, certainly a lot but only enough to earn the country third place in Central America within this category. The media however did its utmost to encourage the perception that the murder rate was increasing despite the fact that the number of homicides in 2006 was 3% lower than in the previous year. In a rhetorical flourish, Zelaya said that he was in a "fight with no quarter given" with the country's media owners who presided over "an oligopoly." He remarked that media barons exhibited a conflict of interest as they were invested in the telecommunications sector, construction, housing and banking. "The information which gets to the Honduran people is influenced by interests that distort the news," he added. Media magnates, Zelaya said, represented "powerful economic groups motivated by self-interest to exploit political and social problems to provide grist for their mills." Again, there was certainly more than a grain of truth in Zelaya's statements: in Honduras as in many other Latin American countries, media ownership is concentrated in the hands of powerful bankers and politicians. But while the Honduran media was certainly in need of reform, Zelaya's remedy was to simply take over the airwaves for his own political benefit. In his all out war on the media establishment, Zelaya declared that TV and radio outlets would be compelled to broadcast interviews with him as well as government ministers. In seeking to justify his position Zelaya claimed that it was imperative to counteract misinformation about his government. The main journalists' union protested the decision, comparing it to measures carried out by former military governments in Honduras. Zelaya's decision was entirely legal and fortunately the President scaled the measure back shortly after it went into effect. It's possible however that the government's heavy handed approach encouraged a climate of fear and intimidation for local journalists. Inter Press Service (IPS) -- hardly a right wing media outlet -- reported in 2007 that Dagoberto Rodríguez, the news director of Radio Cadena Voces, was warned by the police that sicarios or hitmen wanted him dead. Since 2005 Rodríguez's station had been harassed for its reporting on government corruption and staff received anonymous telephone threats. Fearing for his life, Rodríguez fled the country. "I never expected to abandon my country this way, because the only thing I have ever done is journalism," he said. "But the levels of intolerance of criticism and of freedom of speech, and the growing lack of safety in Honduras, have forced me to leave," he added. Rodríguez fled the country 12 days after the murder of another journalist, Carlos Salgado, who hosted a radio program called Fríjol, el terrible which mixed humour and news. Salgado was shot by two unidentified gunmen as he left the offices of RCV, an independent radio station which does investigative reporting. The hitmen shot Salgado at close range at least seven times before speeding away. Rodríguez believed that Salgado's murder was linked to the latter's reporting on official corruption. For progressives there's more to give one pause. Take for example Zelaya's handling of the ALBA trade agreement before he was ousted from power. IPS cited an investigation by local newspaper El Heraldo which revealed receipts for a total of $284,000 allegedly distributed by the government to 38 social and political leaders. The figures reportedly received the funds in exchange for their support for ALBA and for carrying out protests in Congress prior to ALBA ratification. Concerned about the report in El Heraldo , Zelaya allegedly tried to bribe one of the newspapers reporters in an effort to halt the investigation. The journalist told IPS that "when I asked (Zelaya) to comment on our investigation, he looked at me and said: 'I'll give you 500 lempiras (19 dollars) for you to stop talking.' Then he called his guards and said to them, 'pay this guy,' and took out a 100-lempira bill (five dollars), at which point I told him to show me some respect." It's unclear whether this particular sensational story could be true. However, after the Attorney General's office initiated an investigation into the ALBA matter Zelaya's presidential chief of staff confirmed that the government had indeed provided the funds. The official remarked "we contributed those resources in response to a request from social groups and for a good cause that will bring huge benefits for Honduras." One member of a local labor confederation told IPS that his organization had received the government money "as aid." Yet another union official declared that "this new scandal should call the social and popular movement to reflection. It's not ethical but it happened. This is an old practice that has existed under many governments, and nobody has done anything to put a stop to such irregularities because there are a lot of interests involved." Zelaya should be restored to power to serve out his term and the coup leaders overturned. As recent history has shown however, Honduras is a politically fragile country displaying deep seated corruption. Whether right or left, future governments will have to contend with this problematic legacy. More on Honduras Coup
 
Chicago Tourism: $11.8 Bilion Came From Over 45 Million Tourists In '08 Top
More than 45 million domestic and international tourists visited Chicago in 2008 and spent $11.8 billion, according to the latest figures from the Travel Industry Assn. of America. Those visitors generated about $656 million in tax revenue for the city and state, and contributed to 132,000 local jobs.
 
USDA Mortgages: Why The Department Of Agriculture Is In The Housing Game Top
In the grand scheme of the $1.89 trillion residential real estate market, the USDA program- founded in 1949 to spur home sales and development in rural areas- is still a blip. But since the financial crisis, the program has exploded in size.
 
Jane Shure: Women's Dislike For Michelle Obama Reveals Middle-School Mentality Top
Syndicated columnist Susan Estrich recently pondered about why so many women admit to not liking Michelle Obama. Mind you, many of these referenced women are Democrats, so party politics don't seem to be a significant factor. Estrich asserts that race may play a role but not a major one, because these same women like her husband, our president. I'm not surprised. In fact I'm glad that the cat's out of the bag. While we've made tremendous progress, sexism is alive and thriving in America. It's particularly painful when the discrimination -- unconscious or conscious -- comes from women. Some of us get stuck in that competitive mode of middle school development, comparing ourselves to others and judging them (and of course, ourselves) for a host of insignificant factors. It's such a waste of our energy to disparage and criticize others, yet the dynamics of women's relationships often have these elements that end up pitting us against one another. I've heard so many fabulous women express being afraid to claim their smarts and talents because of fear of being deemed "uppity" or "conceited." How often do we fear someone else thinking "she thinks she's so much better than me/us," and use that fear to hold ourselves back? I certainly know I have. I also know the opposite -- those ways that my women friends (and clients in my psychotherapy practice) have helped me hold fortitude to not capitulate to these kinds of worries. Their encouraging words have assisted me in countering the internalized intimidations. Instead, I take a deep breath and speak my mind, then graciously practice saying "thank you" when I receive a compliment. It hasn't always been that way, for sure not. I remember a number of years ago when I was honored by Philadelphia magazine by being named a "Top Doc for Women." Uncomfortable with being singled out amongst an excellent group of colleagues, I downplayed the honor so much so that, when a young female client sat across from me excited by her therapist being selected for this short list, I found myself pushing my hands toward her, actively dismissing its value. It wasn't until I noticed her face holding my gaze, continuing to express her excitement that I thought, "Stop, claim this, let it be a fun thing...she sees it that way and the message you are giving her is 'dismiss your accomplishments, don't make a big deal out of those opportunities to take the limelight.'" I don't know if she knows it to this day, but that young woman, who deeply struggled with her own self-worth, greatly helped me break out of the bounds of my own internalized sexism -- those ways that I had accommodated to the messages from the culture to act demur and reluctant to feel proud of myself and voice it. If sexism has us putting other women down, just because, then the anti-sexist act would be to support and encourage other women, just because. Because that's how we get healthier, stronger, more productive...and let's face it, when that happens, everyone benefits. For more, click on http://janeshure.com/blog More on Michelle Obama
 
Fox News Ratings Remain Strong Into Fall Season, #3 Network On Cable Top
Fox News continues to be a ratings magnet, even as the fall season has returned to TV. For the week of September 14-September 20, the cable news outlet averaged 2,606,000 total viewers in primetime, enough to rank third among all cable channels. ESPN came in first with an average of 4,491,000 total viewers, and USA placed second with an average of 3,327,000 total viewers. It marks the 37th consecutive week that Fox News has placed in the top five cable channels in primetime. CNN placed 24th with an average of 817,000 total primetime viewers, while MSNBC placed 25th with an average of 813,000 total primetime viewers. In total day, Fox News placed fourth with an average of 1,405,000 total viewers, behind only Nickelodeon (1,819,000), ESPN (1,636,000), and USA (1,423,000). Nick at Nite rounded out the top five with an average of 1,203,000 total viewers, while CNN placed 21st (552,000) and MSNBC placed 29th (389,000). More on Fox News
 
Carly Fiorina Launches "Worst Political Website Ever" Top
Hey kids! Look who got a website! Carly Fiorina, that's who! And she wants to be Governor of "Carlyfornia" because Barbara Boxer has become an evil, nocturnal cat, or something? Anyway, this is the "still under construction" website of Fiorina's gubernatorial campaign. There's scant mention of much beyond extending to the world the awesome opportunity to receive email or text updates on her daily "plans and activities." What goes unmentioned are career highlights that include her love of offshoring jobs ( "There is no job that is America's God-given right any more" , said Fiorina, in a clarion call well-suited for these economic times), her obfuscatory promotion of Ireland's corporate tax rates , her comments on Senator John McCain's business acumen that got her disappeared by the McCain campaign and her brave criticism of Saturday Night Live and Tina Fey -- a show that McCain routinely goes on and a comedienne with whom he willingly appeared. Even with all of that, "Carlyfornia" is really the most insufferable thing she's ever done in her life. Jack and Jill Politics' Baratunde Thurston has presented his own critique of the "worst political website ever" in the form of this video! WATCH: So there you have it. I'll tell you what, though! I think the Fiorina campaign hasn't just been doing work on their website. A year ago, there was a whole dedicated section on Wikipedia that detailed the then-Hewlett Packard CEO's disastrous decision to merge with Compaq . NOT ANYMORE! [Would you like to follow me on Twitter ? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here .] More on Video
 
GM Recalls About 2,400 Workers Top
DETROIT — General Motors Co. will go to 24-hour operations at factories in Kansas, Michigan and Indiana to handle an expected increase in demand and to make up for production lost from a large-scale factory consolidation announced earlier in the year. The automaker says it will add a third shift at its Fairfax plant in Kansas City, Kan., in January. That will be followed in March or April by third shifts at factories in Delta Township, Mich., near Lansing, and Fort Wayne, Ind. About 2,400 production workers will be recalled as a result of the added shifts, and another 600 will be recalled at parts factories across the country, said Tim Lee, group vice president for global manufacturing. The increases announced Tuesday, coupled with other production increases unveiled during the summer, will allow GM to raise North American production from about 1.9 million vehicles this year to 2.8 million in 2010, Lee said. The increase also is necessary because of an expected sales increase next year and because GM's inventory of cars and trucks was at a record-low level of 378,000 at the end of August, said Mark LaNeve, vice president of U.S. sales. The Fairfax plant makes the midsize Chevrolet Malibu, Saturn Aura and Buick LaCrosse, while Delta Township makes the Buick Enclave, GMC Acadia and Saturn Outlook large crossover vehicles. The Fort Wayne factory makes pickup trucks. GM says in a statement that Fairfax will get all production of the Malibu when a midsize car factory in Orion Township, Mich., closes Nov. 25. It will be converted to a small-car plant and reopen in 2011. Delta Township will get production of the Chevrolet Traverse large crossover when the Spring Hill, Tenn., factory that now makes the vehicles closes, also on Nov. 25. That plant will go on standby in case demand increases. Fort Wayne will add production of heavy-duty versions of the GMC Sierra and Chevrolet Silverado pickups that are being made in Pontiac, Mich. That factory is to close at the end of September, the company said in a statement. Lee said GM will not hire new workers to staff the additional shifts. Instead, the company generally will first offer the jobs to workers at the plants that will be closed. After that, they will be offered to workers in the region and then across the nation, he said. GM, under its contract with the United Auto Workers union, will pay to move workers from other cities, he said. Although the company's dealer inventory is low now, it will take a minimum of three months to add the shifts because workers must be moved and because machinery must be disassembled and moved from Spring Hill and Pontiac, the company said. "This is a massive move for us in terms of the transference of people," Lee said. GM's September sales have been slow following the end of the government's Cash for Clunkers program, LaNeve said. The company, though, predicts an increase in total U.S. sales from 10.5 million this year to 11.5 million to 12 million next year, he said. Currently GM has about a 40-day supply of large crossover vehicles, a 52-day supply of Malibus and a 60-day supply of Silverado pickups, according to Ward's AutoInfoBank. Jeff Schuster, executive director of forecasting at J.D. Power and Associates, said GM has a low supply of many models and should have 1.5 to 2 times what is now on dealer lots. The low inventory, combined with an expected uptick in sales starting next year, means the production increase is justified, he said. "They've got some successful vehicles now. The new products are doing well," Schuster said, adding that it's reasonable to assume GM will pick up a share of any increase in overall U.S. sales. Brian Fredline, president of the UAW local at the Delta Township crossover plant, said the increase at his factory is not just due to the closure of the Tennessee plant. "It's because we have increased demand for our product," he said. "We build a world-class vehicle and the marketplace is responding to it." Workers at the plant, while unhappy that Spring Hill is closing, are happy to get the additional work, Fredline said. "It creates job and income security for our UAW workers," he said. "Any job and income security in this economic climate is a good thing." GM plans to move tooling for the Traverse from Spring Hill later this year, and hopes to begin build Traverses, which are similar to the GMC and Saturn crossovers, by January of next year. About 800 workers will be recalled at Delta Township, 900 in Kansas City and 700 in Fort Wayne, Lee said. Last month GM announced it would add shifts at factories in Ingersoll, Ontario, and Lordstown, Ohio, mainly in the fourth quarter. The Ontario plant makes the brand-new Chevrolet Equinox and GMC Terrain crossover vehicles, both of which get 32 mpg on the highway. Lordstown makes the Chevrolet Cobalt small car, GM's highest mileage vehicle at 37 mpg on the highway. Production also was to be boosted at other North American factories, including those that make the Chevrolet HHR small wagon, the Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon midsize pickups, the Chevrolet Camaro muscle car, Buick LaCrosse sedan and the Cadillac SRX and CTS Wagon. (This version CORRECTS in 7th graf the year in which an Orion Township, Mich., factory will reopen from 2010 to 2011.)
 
Two Weeks Later, NEA Weighs In On Yosi Sergant Demotion Top
It's not quite what you'd get from a rapid-response war room, but roughly two weeks after the National Endowment for the Arts demoted communications director Yosi Sergant, the agency is getting its side of the story out. NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman sends the following statement to HuffPost: As chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, I would like to clarify the issues concerning an August conference call in which an NEA employee participated. Here are the facts. Fact 1: The former NEA Director of Communications helped organize and participated in an August 10th conference call to introduce members of the arts community to United We Serve and to provide them with information on how the Corporation for National and Community Service can assist groups interested in sponsoring service projects or having their members volunteer on other projects. Fact 2: The former NEA Director of Communications acted unilaterally and without the approval or authorization of then-Acting Chairman Patrice Walker Powell. Fact 3: This call was not a means to promote any legislative agenda and any suggestions to that end are simply false. Rather, the call was to inform members of the arts community of an opportunity to become involved in volunteerism. Fact 4: Some of the language used by the former NEA Director of Communications was, unfortunately, not appropriate and did not reflect the position of the NEA. This employee has been relieved of his duties as director of communications. Fact 5: This call was completely unrelated to NEA's grantmaking, which is highly regarded for its independence and integrity. Artistic quality, excellence and merit are the guidelines for decision-making; favoritism or political affiliation plays no role in NEA grantmaking. Fact 6: The NEA is a successful, independent federal agency that has supported the best of the arts and arts education for nearly 45 years. We take our responsibility to the American public very seriously and are committed to upholding this public trust. Although my time here has been brief - in fact I arrived at the agency on August 11th the day after the conference call - I am proud to lead the National Endowment for the Arts, proud to work with its capable and energetic staff, and proud to play a role in enhancing the quality of life for the people of our great nation.
 
Teens Texting Mom: Wuz4dina? Top
Teens and texting is a subject that's often discussed in pathological terms. They're texting in class! They're sexting! They're running up $5,000 bills! They need thumb therapy! But texting isn't always bad. In some families, it's become a primary form of communication between parents and children. In fact, one of my favorite texts from kids is the earth-shattering query "Wuz4dina?" Yes, the finest technology offered by the 21st century is being used to pose the question hungry children have been asking since cavemen roasted mammoth bones over a fire: "What's for dinner?" Psychologist Thomas W. Phelan, author of "Surviving Your Adolescents: How to Manage and Let Go of Your 13-18 Year Olds," says one of the biggest problems with teens is getting them to communicate at all, so if they're willing to text their parents, we should embrace the trend. "Instead of seeing the whole text thing as an enemy, see it as an ally," Phelan said. "I've had parents say to me, `I can't talk to my son very well face to face.'" But if the kid is willing to use texts as a medium, go for it. "My philosophy is, `Stay in touch.' E-mail, cell phone or text – it makes no difference to me," Phelan said. Debbie Heisler Bastacky, a librarian who works outside of Baltimore, says her kids have a habit of texting her when they're standing right next to her. "They text me when we're out visiting a place where they're bored and they want to go home," she said. "I'll get a text saying, `Can we leave now?' or `This is soooooo boring. Let's go home.' They don't just text me once. They text me every three minutes until they get a response." Sometimes texts can even provide parents with peace of mind. Teens don't always check in or answer their cells, but they might just reply to your "R U OK?" text to show they safely reached their destination. Texts are also more discreet than phone calls, so kids can check in unobtrusively with parents without risking the ridicule of peers. If cell reception is spotty or the teenager is in a noisy place like a party or concert, texting may be the best way to communicate. Leslie Palma-Simoncek of Holmdel, N.J., says that when her teenage sons see their favorite metal bands perform, she likes to get texts assuring her they haven't been swallowed up by the mosh pit. But deciphering texts is not always easy for uncool old people, aka mom and dad. One of the first texts I got from my son a few years back seems obvious enough now, but at the time, I was befuddled. His message, seemingly sent out of the blue, consisted of one letter: "K." K? What could that possibly mean? A colleague asked if the text might be in response to something I'd asked my son to do. In fact, I had left him a cell phone message earlier that day reminding him about a school assignment. My colleague gently explained that "K" stood for "OK," as in, "I got your message, I will take care of it." "It's too much trouble to type the O?" was all I could sputter in response. Phelan says one reason texting may scare parents is that "the power and knowledge has been inverted." In other words, kids know more about this than we do. "One way to strengthen your relationship is to let the kids show you how to do it," Phelan said. "Let them teach you." If you care to try learning the lingo on your own, several Web sites will instantly translate undecipherable text messages. Scrolling through the text glossary offered by the mobile phone company LG at was a revelation to me. I learned terms like "MOS" – "mom over shoulder" – and "MEH" – which is not an acronym but an expression of apathy, as in "who cares, whatev." http://LGDTXTR.com At you can even have your old-school mom-speak translated into a cool text message. "When are you going to clean your room" becomes "Wen RU gunA clean yr rm." http://www.lingo2word.com But I won't be sending that message any time soon, because I can already imagine the response: "MEH." ___ Beth J. Harpaz is the author of several books including "13 Is the New 18."
 
Patrick Duffy And A Crab Watch 'America's Next Top Model' (VIDEO) Top
Whoohoo! Patrick Duffy and the crab are back just two weeks after their last installment! At that point the pair they were arguing over whether or not Patrick could be the next American Idol . Shel Krab told Duffy he was too old and atonal. Now they're arguing over whether or not Patrick is a serious actor or just a pretty face. "How many shower scenes did you do in 'Dallas'?" He asks pointedly. Apparently, the crab is still angry that Duffy referred to him as a "character actor" aka funny looking. "Hollywood doesn't appreciate talent unless it comes in a pretty package." In the end they band together to mock the girls of "America's Next Top Model" instead of each other, but we're still left wondering if the pair couldn't use a little couple's therapy. (FOR THE LAST FOUR INSTALLMENTS OF PATRICK DUFFY & THE CRAB CLICK HERE .) WATCH: Get HuffPost Comedy On Facebook and Twitter! More on Funny Videos
 
Mike Doyle: Rosemary's Maybes: Losing My Connection with Classic Horror Films Top
Ever since I became an official Netflix couch potato , I've been spending my evenings popping one Hollywood back-catalog movie after another into my nifty new Blu-ray/DVD player. The mail-me-a-movie service is a godsend for ADDers like me. I almost never see first-run films -- the idea of sitting quiet and still in a room full of strangers for an hour and forty-five minutes is too much for my restless psyche to bear. The joy of my new-found ability to plop on my futon in the comfort of my own apartment and progressively watch my way through a list of movies any human being should have seen by now tells me Netflix has an untapped market in anyone on drugs starting in Adder- or Rita-. So I've been getting caught up with movies you've likely seen before, many times, and/or a long time ago. I particularly enjoy suspense and horror "classics". Flip on the original Halloween , the original The Fog , Poltergeist , anything Hitchcock, and I'll be there with popcorn before you have time to put down the remote. So when I got the Netflix email telling me Roman Polanski's 1968 mega-hit Rosemary's Baby was on its way, I was particularly excited. At the time, Roger Ebert gave the film adaptation of Ira Levin's 1965 devil-worship novel four stars . Movie fans on Rotten Tomatoes rate the film 98% fresh even today. Even one of Marina City's couch ladies told me how scary a film it was. So it took a while for me to figure out why I was bored out of my mind watching it last night. All two hours and 16 ponderous minutes of it. This morning I awoke to two reasons wobbling around my noggin. For starters: maybe the shock value of first-of-their-kind movies pales over time? In his period review, Ebert applauds the way the movie's persistent telegraphing of a "horrific" and "inevitable" conclusion brings the audience along for a frightening ride. I doubt he'd write the same review today. In 1968, the mere idea of a woman being raped by a creature from hell so that a coven of witches could steal her baby and raise it as the anti-Christ would be inducive of shudders. But forty-one years of graphically violent splatter movies since then have reduced the power of such images to shock much of anyone anymore. Having seen it all time and again, Polanksi's persistent early plot giveaways just made Rosemary's Baby seem predictable to me. A groggy woman tied to a bed and pounced on by a figure covered in red scales in the second reel? Yeah, I'm pretty sure she's giving birth to Satan's son somewhere before the credits roll -- as Rosemary, or course, did, while I waited around another hour for something unexpected to happen. (The same thing happened to me watching 1973's The Exorcist for the first time in the 1990s -- head spinning, green vomit, and subliminal shots of demonic shapes weren't going to make a Clinton-era cable-watcher rush from his living room in fright the same way they made Nixon-era moviegoers rush from theaters.) My second noggin-wobbling reason was the real clincher for me, though: maybe you just have to be Christian to really be scared by movies like Rosemary's Baby (or The Exorcist , for that matter)? And in particular, Roman Catholic? Whether in 1968 or today, ominous religious ideas like hell, Satan, and demonic possession have the power to give pause to individuals whose personal beliefs give credence to them. The adult Buddhist in me watched these themes flit through Rosemary's Baby and yawned. Having been raised Catholic, I could clearly understand how as a child I would have been terrified by a move that played upon the religious beliefs that my family believed in. Believing in a wholly different view of the universe today, however, reduced the move to an overly long exercise in camera angles for me, rather than an engaging evening. While I'm on the subject, why do religious thrillers always seem to revolve around Catholic cosmologies? You can count Jewish, Lutheran, Mulsim, and Buddhist thrillers on one hand, but you can swing a cat and hit a theater showing a movie that features something coming up from hell and dragging off someone holding on to a cross, saying a "Hail Mary", and praying to a saint for dear life. In a country with a Protestant majority, for that matter. Why is that? For fullest disclosure, I have a healthy spirituality, have a close relationship with my concept of God, and respect the multitude of religious traditions that guide the people closest to me and those with whom I share the planet. But I'd pay money to see Hollywood make a horror film that acknowledged a wider religious cosmology than the one blessed in Rome. It can't just end with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom . Vesak Terror Train , anyone?
 
Ilene Angel: Preaching to the Choir: Obama on Sunday Morning Television Top
It's not the first we've seen of President Obama on health care reform, and it definitely won't be the last. In a Sunday morning media blitz, the president answered questions in his familiar measured and reasonable manner. On This Week with George Stephanopoulos , when confronted with the notion that a health insurance mandate for the American people amounted to a tax, the president seemed slightly miffed, noting that mandatory car insurance in most states isn't viewed that way. He has a point. Most of us look at mandatory auto insurance as protection against potential calamity, and it begs the question why there is such resistance to viewing health insurance that way. The bigger question is about the demographic reached on Sunday morning political news shows. Aren't those of us who watch these shows in lieu of attendance elsewhere already discerning enough to contemplate differing points of view? And are we the intended audience or are we the choir that President Obama is preaching to on this subject? I, for one, didn't have to be sold on health care reform. I don't have to be sold on a public option or lowering costs or even filling the donut hole that affects seniors on Medicare, though I am not a senior. So what was the point of these appearances? Well, perhaps it was to give the naysayers continuous and credible opposition. After all, if the president of the United States wants to come on your TV show, are you really going to say no? I found the most interesting question and answer also coming from This Week with George Stephanopoulos , though it wasn't meant to be directed at health care. When the president was asked if he had any similar surprising reactions to President John F. Kennedy's meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in which Kennedy "had his clock cleaned" by the Soviet leader, Obama said that his biggest and most humbling surprise had come not from a foreign leader, but from the American people. My translation: He can't believe that we're stupid enough to resist the kind of change that would actually benefit us. His genuine surprise at that may be the most naive thing I've heard him say to date. Even I could have told him that. We like the idea of change more than the actuality of it. Even those who stand to gain the most from improved health care, like the state of South Carolina, for instance, let the fear-mongering stand in the way of genuine progress. Former president Jimmy Carter suggested to the surprise of many that the vitriol in the protests of last weekend were at least partially racially motivated. This sparked denial and outrage from the always-inclusive right led by Rush Limbaugh and fidgety discomfort from the left. I don't really know how you can look at posters of Obama painted as an African witch doctor as anything other than racist, but maybe that's just me. On the Sunday morning shows the president tried his best neither to dismiss racism nor give it too much emphasis, but I say that when an eighty-five-year-old white man who has lived in the south all his life and has been diplomatic enough to bring warring factions in the Middle East to the table is telling you racism is alive and well, we shouldn't doubt it. I applaud Carter's candor and outspokenness on the subject. I live in the south. While we don't know if the president's visibility in the media is going to increase public support of his health care goals, at least it is keeping the discussion alive and ongoing. And in our uniquely American climate of short attention spans, that is quite an achievement. More on Health Care
 
Spc. Beyshee Velez, U.S. Soldier, Charged With Murder In Iraq Base Death Top
BAGHDAD — A U.S. soldier has been charged with murder in the slaying of a civilian contractor on an American base in Iraq, the military said Tuesday. Spc. Beyshee Velez of Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, was charged Monday in the Sept. 13 shooting death of a contractor who worked for Houston-based KBR at Camp Speicher in the city of Tikrit, a military statement said. The 31-year-old suspect faces dishonorable discharge and a maximum sentence of life in prison if found guilty. He is being held in Hawaii pending the outcome of the trial. He was also charged with assault and fleeing arrest. Velez is assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 7th Field Artillery Regiment, 3rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division. The military statement gave no other details and said the investigation into the shooting was ongoing. The slain KBR employee, 27-year-old Lucas Vinson, was from Leesville, Louisiana. Authorities told Vinson's family that he was shot three times after offering a ride to an American soldier who flagged down his vehicle on the base, according to his mother. Vinson had worked in Iraq for five years before returning to Louisiana for a time. He returned to Iraq last year with KBR. He worked on the base with his father and uncle. KBR is the primary support contractor in Iraq, providing troops with essential services, including housing, meals, mail delivery and laundry. The U.S. military makes wide use of contractors in Iraq for security, technical support and supply functions. According to an AP count, 1,396 civilian employees of U.S. government contractors have been killed in Iraq since the war began in March 2003. More on Iraq
 
Obama: Patriot Act Surveillance Law Should Stay Top
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration promised Congress on Tuesday to negotiate stronger privacy protections for Americans under terrorism surveillance but insisted on retaining current authority to track suspects and obtain records. Liberals on the House Judiciary Committee were left unsatisfied, clearly wanting the administration to go further and pledge to curb what they consider abuses of the Bush administration. They repeatedly insisted that the law be rewritten to require better justification for wiretaps and subpoenas, and Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., even compared the Obama administration's position so far with that of the Bush administration. "You sound like a lot of people who came over from DOJ (the Department of Justice) before," Conyers told Todd Hinnen, deputy assistant attorney general. Congress is starting to consider changes in three expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act, a counterterrorism law initially passed after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. These three provisions require the government to seek permission from a special foreign surveillance court for subpoenas and surveillance. The Bush administration, while using the court, also had the National Security Agency – without warrants – eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for terrorist activity. That program ended before Bush left office. Hinnen told a Judiciary subcommittee, "We are ready and willing to work with members on any specific proposals" that would provide "effective investigative authorities and protects privacy and civil liberties." Conservative lawmakers want to reauthorize the expiring provisions without changes, insisting the statute helped prevent attacks. "All of this hyperbole" about trampling civil liberties "has not been borne out in litigation. I don't feel we should break something that doesn't need fixing," said Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., R-Wis. Conyers launched a tirade against a Bush administration incident described in a heavily redacted report from the Justice Department inspector general. The report said that in 2006, the FBI twice asked a special foreign surveillance court for an order seeking "tangible things" in a counterterrorism case. The court denied the request both times, citing the danger to First Amendment rights. The FBI then skirted the court's refusal and continued the investigation using three National Security Letters, which are basically subpoenas not approved by a court. When Hinnen initially said he could not discuss the case, Conyers railed that news stories described the incident and asked whether the Justice Department official was questioning the inspector general's account. Hinnen responded that abusive policies have been fixed since the Obama administration took over. Three provisions of the Patriot Act are expiring. They provide: _Roving, court approved wiretaps that allow surveillance on multiple phones. Law enforcement is not required to ascertain that a suspected foreign terrorist is actually using the phones being tapped. _That businesses produce "any tangible things" at the FBI's request. _Authority to conduct surveillance against a so-called "lone wolf," a non-U.S. citizen engaged in terrorism who may not be part of a recognized terrorist group. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., asked Hinnen why the administration couldn't conduct some of its surveillance and subpoena requests under criminal laws that provide better protections to those under investigation. Hinnen responded that secret grand jury material later becomes public in a criminal prosecution. In a counterterrorism operation, where prosecution may not be the goal, the classified material would remain secret, he added. Kenneth Wainstein, former assistant attorney general in the National Security Division, said it was important to continue the expiring provisions that were "born of the harsh lesson of 9/11." "They have been effectively incorporated into our counterterrorism operations with due regard for privacy and civil liberties and with extensive oversight" by the nation's foreign surveillance court and Congress, he said. Michael German, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said Congress needs to "restore effective checks on executive branch surveillance powers and to prohibit unreasonable searches and seizures of private information without probable cause ... "
 
Jordan Hoffman: Going Barefoot Top
Chinese Medicine began as a medicine by the people and for the people. In our lore, there is the image of the barefoot doctor traveling to local villages to give care to those in need. People would come from all around when word got out. The doctor would tirelessly treat any and all who came. For many, this was their only access to the health care they needed. Last year, I saw a piece on 60 Minutes about Remote Area Medical (RAM), a non-profit organization founded by Stan Brock, well-known as the co-host of the popular 1970's TV show Wild Kingdom . RAM has been delivering health care services to remote areas around the world for the last 25 years. The piece was done in large part as a reflection of the current health care system in this country. No longer were only "other" places considered "remote areas." Now, right here at home, right here next door is where the need can be just as great. So when I heard that RAM was coming to LA for their first foray into a large urban environment, I had to go barefoot and volunteer. For 8 days, from August 11th to the 18th, RAM took over the Forum in Inglewood. Last Thursday in the pre-dawn light, as I pulled into the parking lot for the first of my two 6am to noon shifts, there was a long line of people waiting to get in. Many had camped out in front the night before. And many would come back later in the week for more care. I had flash backs to when, as a child, I had come here to see the Lakers play, to see U2 perform, and I even saw rodeos. This is a building that at one time represented the flash of LA, the glitz and glam of Hollywood, it was new and fresh, exciting and jubilant; it was the "Fabulous Forum." Now, it felt like a creaky old dinosaur, antiquated, functional but not well-suited to meet a new demand in a new time. It felt like our health care system. With all the talk today in the media about health care reform, there are those that say we have the best health care system in the world. If this is true, then the definition I am choosing to use is the one I saw on display all last week: dedicated medical professionals, sincerely and earnestly caring for those in great need. By the people, for the people. Physicians, dentists, ophthalmologists, OB/GYN's, hundreds of support volunteers, and now acupuncturists teamed up to offer free care to all those who came--most being uninsured or under-insured. According to volunteer coordinator Jean Jolly, in total 14,561 services worth $2.8 million were given by 3,827 volunteers to 6,344 patients (1). That's almost 800 people a day!! And more could have been treated had there been enough medical volunteers. It is hardly surprising that the demand was far greater than the supply. From the start of my shift, I had a steady flow of patients. Many came for pain-related conditions. And many had a long list of lifestyle-related health issues common in an underserved population: high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, coronary artery disease, and high cholesterol. But one thing was uniformly present in all the patients I treated: a lack of options. Much of what these hard-working people suffer from is preventable through better food choices and nutrition and lifestyle education. But they are surrounded by fast food as the least expensive way to feed their families; they have income that is too low to afford their own private primary care physician so they instead use the local ER for such needs, where doctors are so overwhelmed by the volume that they have no time to educate their patients about prevention of disease. Something must change. Though I am not sure what that "something" is, I do know a few things: Education is the silver bullet. With education, come options. With options, comes choice. And an empowered and knowledgeable patient is their own best judge of how to care for themselves and their family. As the saying goes, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." So much of what we, as a population, from the wealthy to the poor, walk around suffering from is preventable with a good diet and exercise. With even the smallest changes, over time, our medical needs will decrease along with our costs. And we will begin to transform our disease care system into an actual health care system. We, as a nation, are only as healthy as our sickest neighbor. To see homeless people sleeping on the street amidst all the wealth in this city is saddening. That RAM could have stayed open for another 8 days and still not met the demand is shocking. Health and wealth are inextricably intertwined. Health is not merely the absence of disease; but rather it is the ability to adapt to new environments. The health of our country is today being challenged to adapt to the profound need to change how we care for our citizens. Yet, taking the first step does not require monetary wealth. Rather, it requires a wealth of spirit. Do I feel compassion for those who are in need? Do I see myself as their kin? Do I want to help? In my time with RAM last week, I'd like to think I helped a few people in need. Perhaps I planted a few seeds of change in some of my patients' minds. And perhaps, if only for a moment, for as long as their pain subsided, I was able to introduce another possibility to them, that there is another choice, another option. That they are not alone in their struggle to live without pain. That for at least those 8 days, they had someone to lend a helping hand. More on Health Care
 
Harry Johns: HBO "The Alzheimer's Project" Emmy Awards Top
As 78 million American baby boomers age, the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease will skyrocket. Economically, it has the potential to bankrupt an already fragile health care system. Socially, we have yet to overcome much of the stigma associated with it. In terms of basic knowledge and research, Alzheimer's is progressive, it is fatal and there is currently no cure for it. Despite these sobering facts, great progress is being made in the discovery of Alzheimer causes and treatments. This progress must continue. To ensure that critical research funding becomes and remains a priority, we must all raise awareness about this disease. We must hear from ever more Alzheimer advocates, including people living with the disease, their friends and family, public servants, celebrities and the entertainment industry. This year HBO Documentary Films and First Lady of California Maria Shriver were on the forefront of this awareness effort with "THE ALZHEIMER'S PROJECT." The Alzheimer's Association would like to applaud and congratulate all those involved in the creation of these films on winning two Creative Arts Emmy awards. "The Memory Loss Tapes," which shadows seven individuals living in various stages of Alzheimer's, won for Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking; and "Grandpa, Do You Know Who I Am? with Maria Shriver," which captures what it means to be a child or grandchild of someone with Alzheimer's, won for Outstanding Children's Nonfiction Program. Both of these films revealed the realities of Alzheimer's disease, sparking conversations in living rooms nationwide and at more than 110 Alzheimer's Association community screenings. Shriver, who served as an executive producer on the series and is a passionate voice for her own father and all those living with the disease, deserves special recognition. In addition to "THE ALZHEIMER'S PROJECT" and numerous other advocacy activities, Shriver has testified before Congress as a compelling witness of the physical, emotional and financial devastation of this disease. Shriver's presence at Alzheimer's Association events from candlelight vigils to galas is felt and appreciated by the 5.3 million Americans living with Alzheimer's and their 10 million caregivers. Yesterday, September 21, 2009, was World Alzheimer's Day and the Alzheimer's Association would like to thank all Alzheimer's Champions committed to the fight against Alzheimer's. An American develops Alzheimer's every 70 seconds. Now is the time to follow the lead of Shriver and all of the partners in the HBO documentary by joining the cause at www.alz.org . Harry Johns, President and CEO of the Alzheimer's Association More on Health Care
 
Nathaniel Frank: What Can Stop the Gay-Bashing in the Military? Top
The Associated Press reported today that another gay service member was abused by the military across several years of service to his country. Petty Officer Third Class Joseph Rocha, a sailor trained to work with military dogs in the Navy's anti-terrorism, force protection, and explosive detection operations, was brutalized for more than two years at his base in Bahrain after his refusal to hire a prostitute raised suspicions that he is gay. The abuse included hog-tying Rocha to a chair and pushing him, bound, into a dog kennel full of feces, as well as humiliating him by repeatedly forcing him to simulate oral sex with another man while on being videotaped. Rocha told me that, while hazing was common in his unit, the activities he was forced to do were a direct result of the perception that he was gay, including being told by his military leadership, on videotape, to act more effeminate, speak with a higher voice, appear more "Queer," and make his sounds and gestures more realistic (one begins to wonder at how "straights" in the Navy get their thrills). He said it was the "most disgusting, degrading thing that I've ever been made to do." The military is a big place, and there are always bad apples in any large institution. Could that be the source of the abuse suffered by Rocha? In the aftermath of other abuse scandals such as Tailhook, the military eventually called for heads to roll, if only to perform accountability to the rest of society. It was a gesture meant to convey that the military understood and agreed that the behavior was unacceptable. But Rocha's case is not about bad apples. The military doesn't even think that what happened was wrong. In fact, the military leader who oversaw and perpetrated these acts against Rocha, Chief Petty Officer Michael Toussaint, was promoted following the incident to Senior Chief, even though the military was fully aware of all that happened. Toussaint was implicated in other incidents as well, including handcuffing a female sailor to a bed and forcing her to simulate lesbian sex with another woman, also while on video. One of the women later committed suicide. Now that the incident is getting some press , however, and following the letter by Rep. Sestak, the Navy is doing a different dance, telling the AP that these incidents "do not reflect who we are as a Navy." Cmdr. Cappy Surette assures us that "The Navy is now looking into the handling of this situation more carefully." Now, that is, that it's been caught. Some say that episodes of anti-gay harassment like this one are exactly the reason not to lift the ban. They say this shows the military is not ready to handle gays in their midst. But this is nonsense. Everyone knows gays are already there, and can't ever be fully kept out. They have been not just serving for centuries but are increasingly serving with the full knowledge of their peers. Two thirds of deployed service members say they know or suspect gays in their unit, and three quarters say they're "personally comfortable" around gays, notwithstanding the illusion of fierce military resistance that conservatives try to whip up around this issue. More to the point, driving harassment underground by forcing gays into the closet is the worst possible option. Lifting the ban would allow those who are threatened by anti-gay harassment to confront their perpetrator or inform authorities without fear of retribution. Research shows clearly that writing discrimination into law or policy encourages the kind of misbehavior that Roche and others have now, predictably, endured. "Don't ask, don't tell" singles out gay people as an "unacceptable risk" to the military. It is especially insidious because it makes gay people eligible to serve while simultaneously calling them a threat. It says to heterosexuals, "gays are serving with you but they are a danger to your mission." It's no wonder many are used as a punching bag. What is the answer? Rep. Patrick Murphy, an Iraq War veteran and former professor at West Point, is spearheading the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" in Congress. This is a brave mission for a young, Catholic, heterosexual representing a moderate district in Pennsylvania. But the effort will not succeed overnight. President Obama, however, has the power, through a 1983 "stop-loss" statute passed by Congress , to halt all discharges immediately by executive order, giving Congress time to debate the issue. As his political capital flies out the door in an all-out effort to reform healthcare, the likelihood that Congress will end "don't ask, don't tell" before the 2010 mid-term elections is quickly plummeting. This is not an academic debate, and the lives of people like Joseph Rocha should not be held hostage to politics. The cleanest, quickest way to lift the ban and protect all our service members and their national security mission, is for the commander-in-chief to lead the way.
 
Kevin Grandia: The Global Climate Wake Up Call in Photos Top
Everyday people around the world gathered at events yesterday to send the message to political leaders to Wake Up on the issue of climate change. The Global Wake Up Call saw 2682 events in 134 countries yesterday and here are some of the amazing photos, you can find the entire collection of over 3400 photos here. Vienna, Austria Plettenberg Bay, South Africa India Sydney, Australia Beirut, Lebanon Harare, Zimbabwe Wageningen, Netherlands London, England Mumbai, India Bogota, Columbia More on Sustainability
 
Matt Spangler: A Doctor's Healthcare Reform Roadmap: A Father-Son Interview Top
Like many others in the country I have been closely following the national debate on Healthcare.  It is one of the defining moments of this Presidency and my generation.  The tough decisions we make now will only become increasingly important as our health gets worse and our tax brackets get higher. In my business I believe strongly in leveraging category experts to solve big problems and I think its highly applicable here.  There are plenty of voices shouting to be heard in this debate and they come at all angles; right tp left, political pundits to insurance industry mouth pieces, media savvy commentators to medical professionals. The key in gauging the best voices are finding those with the experience, honesty, intelligence, accomplishment and objectivity to provide the best path regardless of their personal convictions. My father, Dennis Spangler, is a doctor. An amazing one actually. He put himself through medical school, was named top internist during his residency, has published over 45 original articles in professional medical journals and has built up the Atlanta Allergy & Asthma Clinic to the largest allergy and immunology practice in the Southeast serving as its Chief Medical Office of the for the past 16 years. He retires next year after a highly distinguished career helping thousands of people to live happier, healthier lives. Throughout his life he has balanced career with family and outside pursuits. He has raised two children and celebrated 37 years of marriage to his wife.  He has taught himself to speak fluent French and become a stained glass window artist. He is a wine expert at the sommelier level, an illustrator and part-time horticulturist with a specialty in orchid growth and breeding. In his early 50s he struggled with a life threatening heart illness and needed extensive medical care giving him a unique perspective on the patient side of the healthcare debate. His oncoming retirement and smart fiscal history help assure his objectivity as the current healthcare reforms will have little or no effect on his future bottom line. For all these reasons I felt he was a perfect expert to contribute to the debate, so I took the opportunity that every son should take, and sat down with my father to discuss this important topic. It was my hope that he could provide some focused clarity to the discussion. In the name of transparency, he voted for Obama in this past election, but for George W Bush the previous 2 elections -- so if anything he is a political conservative.  In this case, I doubt his political ideals will get in the way but I'll let the readers be the judge of that. ---------------- Matt: Reading the NY Times and the the White House websites and reading the general feedback on blogs and other national news sources this is clearly a hot button topic with Americans, but lets begin with what you think is the single biggest problem with the current healthcare system today. Dennis: From a medical community standpoint on a local and national level among physicians there is certainly a consensus that there are problems with the existing system, there is no doubt about that. The major problems are the continued rising costs, but also the difficulty of obtaining individual health insurance if you're not employed by a business that provides healthcare. Secondly, the issue of pre-existing illness issues when looking at getting individual health insurance outside of a business, so I'd agree with President Obama that some changes need to be made but where the government runs into problems is that they are choosing this opportunity to try and reinvent the while, and I believe strongly that they don't need to. Much of the current rhetoric that is being discussed around things like the co-op model, where a finite amount of healthcare is offered to a finite amount of individuals is actually available under the current system we have (HMOs). You just have to look a little deeper. What we need to do is allow insurance companies to bid contracts across state lines on a national basis. What Federal government could and SHOULD do is develop a single central government agency for oversight and allow insurance companies like Blue Choice, United, Cigna, whoever...to offer a variety of contracts on a national basis for individuals to purchase. Then when consumers go to this main agency they see a wide variety of choices. They would be on the same website and anyone across the country could look at it and decide what best meets their needs. This nationalization would bring down the cost significantly, eliminate pre-exising condition issues, allow for bulk pricing and reduce a overhead for the insurance companies because you would no longer have to sustain local insurance hierarchies from inter-state policies and local agencies. This would make it easier for smaller companies and individuals to get substantial discounts on their insurance because they would be added to the poop of individuals from the companies with large # of employees. One of the keys to this system though, is that they need to require everyone to purchase a policy thereby eliminating exclusion due to preexisting conditions and diluting the negative impact of high users by combining them with thousands of low users.  Matt: What do you mean by requiring everyone to purchase a policy. How does that manifest itself in your desired system? Dennis: Well, for any insurance to work everyone has to participate. If the healthy individuals in the country don't participate and only the sick individuals participate then its still gonna be incredibly expensive. Its the same with life insurance. You have people in their 20s buying life insurance and contributing money through their whole lives. Its not cashed until later and they use those funds to support the people passing away. That money then works for the purchaser tax free so it is there for them when they need it. To make any kind of insurance work where there is no pre-existing insurance for a good part of the country, you have to have everybody participating. What's happening today is that a half of the uninsured people have elected not to purchase insurance, they have the money, but they are healthy and they're young and they don't feel they need it and they don't see the risk. The problem with that is if that person has an accident - like you did - they could have no insurance and can't pay their bill. The system then has to somehow support that cost. If we say every person is required to pay for SOME level of insurance and can't pay their bill they at least have some sort of high deductible plan that covers catastrophic incidences. All the rest of the healthy people in the country will have been paying some small amount towards the support of that coverage and the ones buying insurance are no longer paying higher premiums to cover this shortfall. Matt: I'm in that boat right now. I am on my own consulting and while I've looked at plans recently and can afford them, I am healthy and have delayed signing onto a monthly insurance plan. Dennis: There are millions more out there like you who are healthy and have the money but still don't purchase insurance. Matt: So you're proposing a minimum requirement that every single person in America pays for some sort of insurance. Dennis : Yes. Which could be subsidized by the Federal government on some sort of pro-rated basis. NO ONE should be able to get insurance for free. Period. Why? Because when you get it for free, you don't appreciate it and you abuse it. You don't have to pay much. If you don't make much money it might be $10 per month. But everyone needs to pay something. Matt: Ok, and secondly you believe strongly in some sort of nationalized healthcare system, whether or not this is called a "government run" health system, it will be a single system for every insurance company across state lines. 1 national entity that has oversight over all the private insurance companies. Dennis: Well, not necessarily oversight per se. I see it more as a holding company. They would be the central collection agency that the insurance companies bid to and within that framework there would be some sort of HMO option. When the government talks about the co-op system, what they want to do is give a newly formed organization a finite amount of money and they are supposed to take care of a finite number of people. Why reinvent that system. If they want to put everybody thats on Medicare and Medicaid into a coop, lets just put them in an HMO and bid it out. Let the HMO that gives you the best price be the one that does it. That way they compete against themselves and it uses the existing system rather then creating an entirely new system that is gonna take years to set up with no previous experience to guide the process. We can just use the system we have in place now and it would run better. Matt: But what you're also alluding to is that the current privatized system is ineffective? Dennis: Its not. I've worked in it long enough to know its not perfect, but its effective. As an example..the Federal government just announced that they found a physician in Texas that after 5 years had overcharged millions of dollars on claims for his office. Trust me, Blue Choice would have found that guy in 5 months. It took years for the government to figure it out because there is a natural inefficiency that occurs when its not the money of a private business he is swindling but rather government money. Even though they run medicare, the government is not the most efficiently run organization and it is influenced by politics.  What you're talking about is the physical expense of medical insurance and that gets to the biggest aspect of this that the government and everyone else is ignoring, except for a few of the smartest people out there and that is the United States is in a poor state of health. If you look at government records from the CDC 20-25 years ago, approximately 5% of the population of the uS was excessively obese. Today it is about 30-35% and that's "morbidly obese" and that does not talk about another 30% that are obese. We are seeing as physicians diseases that I have never seen before. Adult onset diabetes in children. We have never seen that. Why? Becuase these kids are excessively obese and obese people get all kinds of diseases, whether its high cholesteral or hi blood pressure or heart attacks at younger ages...the list goes on and on. The major reason we have high insurance costs in this country is because we have hgh use. Period. That is the single biggest problem. We have patients in the 20s, 30s and 40s that have chronic diseasese that have never had those before. Chronic disease mean consistent doctor visits, drug use and hospitalizaitons with a group of patients that never need that service before. High use is expensive. I don't care if its free or not, its expensive. Its strictly numbers. if want to cut the cost of healthcare in this country, its not the insurance you have to address, its the lifestyle of the American population. Matt: So what do you propose? Dennis: Education and stricter government intervention where it will make a difference such as removing all high-caloried foods from public schools. Mandated physical education programs and education on healthy eating. And beyond that, there needs to be greater incentives for acheiving a healthy lifestyle. You take care of yourself and you get an insurance discount. Why did people stop smoking as much? Because cigarettes cost almost $5 a pack.? Why did SUV consumption and driving habits improve recently? Because gas was at an all time high. This American people have proved time and time again that the only way they can be swayed to act is based on the monetary incentive. We need to figure out a way to incentivize the American population to get healthier. They would save money, feel better and live longer. Either that or resign ourselves to the fact that we're gonna spend a ton of money taking care of a population that wants to use drugs and medical care to address the consequences of their poor lifestyle choices. Matt: This is indeed the case that many have been promoting, and its getting tougher to ignore. I'll read a quote from an August 2009 article in the NY Times . "The promise of the system is undeniably alluring: whatever your ailment, a pill or a procedure will fix it. Yet the promise hasn't been kept. For all the miracles that modern medicine really does perform, it is not the primary determinant of most people's health. J. Michael McGinnis, a senior scholar at the Institute of Medicine, has estimated that only 10 percent of early deaths are the result of substandard medical care. About 20 percent stem from social and physical environments, and 30 percent from genetics. The biggest contributor, at 40 percent, is behavior. Today, the great American public-health problem is indeed obesity. The statistics have become rote, but consider that people in their 50s are about 20 pounds heavier on average than 50-somethings were in the late 1970s. As a convenient point of reference, a typical car tire weighs 20 pounds. A recent article in Health Affairs estimated its annual cost to be $147 billion and growing. That translates into $1,250 per household, mostly in taxes and insurance premiums." Knowing all of this would you support the "fat tax" as many more progressive physicians have proposed? Dennis: Well, they backup my prevention argument with the statistics but I don't believe you will ever get a fat tax passed. There is too much prejudice involved in that debate. Instead I feel we should look to the discount model of other industries like auto insurance. We have mentally established this phenomenon in the American mindset. If you're a safe drive you get deep discounts, if you have alarm systems you get a discount on insurance for your house. Why don't we have a healthy discount? Its a matter of reward not penalty. Motivate people to make healthy choices by offering substantial rewards and discounts. There are others who are starting to come forward with similar ideas. There was an article written in the Wall Street Journal by John Mackey, president of Whole Foods , where he expressed his 8 step plan for improving the system and I felt this was the most intelligent and closely aligned plan to mine that we had seen during the current debate. Matt: Is there anywhere in Canada or the UK that you think is doing it well. Dennis: Lining up for care in Canada is the biggest concern. People were waiting for an average of 23 hours for major health care there. American citizens will not put up with waiting lists after having the options we've had. Everyone needs to understand that the best care, delivered 24 hours a day / 7 days a week AND inexpensively is not possible. We have the first two, Europe has the second two. No one has all three. We will have to give up something to lower the costs. Matt: John Stossel reported in a piece that most of the advancements in the US healthcare system come because companies are seeking a profit. Government is responsible for only 4% of the drugs created. Is this true across the board? Dennis: There is no doubt about it. If we want cheaper new drugs, then offer longer patents and simplify the
 
David Helvarg: Bad Acid Trip Top
On September 17 President Obama's recently established Ocean Policy Task Force issued its first report suggesting areas where federal action on our public seas can and should be improved. Some of the areas like coastal pollution and industrial overfishing are familiar while others, such as ocean acidification, are threats that have only now begun to emerge More than 40 years after Woodstock it's the ocean that's on a bad acid trip. It's been scraped raw, emptied out, overheated, poisoned and abused, not a good time to be ingesting dangerous chemicals. Normally carbon dioxide isn't considered a dangerous chemical compound to the sea or to us, but rather a natural part of the chemistry of life. At 225 parts per million in the atmosphere this greenhouse gas, along with methane and water vapor, has created an exceptionally stable and temperate climate over the past 10,000 years a period that has also seen, not coincidentally, the rise of modern civilization. But since the industrial revolution over 150 years ago humans have been adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas along with the burning and logging of forest lands that also adds to the carbon load. Today carbon dioxide has grown from a pre-industrial 225 to 385 parts per million in the atmosphere and still climbing at .5 percent a year, a rate of change 100 times faster than at any time over the past 650,000 years. A doubling of pre-industrial CO2 almost every rreputable climate scientist now warns will have catastrophic consequences for the present mix of life on the planet. Some (inspired by author/activist Bill McKibben) are advocating a concerted campaign to actually try and roll back atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million though that would require the kind of technological innovation and societal mobilization that hasn't been seem since World War Two. Unfortunately we're still treating the climate crisis like the invasion of Grenada. At the turn of the 21st century climatologists were having problems with their computer models even in the wake of the hottest years and decades in recorded history. Given the increased emissions of industrial carbon dioxide it appeared the atmosphere should be heating up even more rapidly than it was. Then around 2003 and 2004 testing confirmed that about 30 percent of human generated C02 was being absorbed by the ocean, computer glitch solved. The only problem is when carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater it forms carbonic acid increasing the acidity of seawater and decreasing the ability of shell forming critters including various forms of algae, plankton, corals, oysters, clams, sea urchins and sea stars to pull calcium carbonate out of the water to build their homes and skeletal structures. Some have called this the osteoporosis of the sea. Since cold water can also holds more CO2 than tropical seas the consequences are becoming more evident in the polar regions where migratory Gray Whales spend their summers furrowing the muddy bottom of the arctic sea feeding on tiny shelled marine anthropods while walruses feast on nearby clam beds. Reduced calcium carbonate will likely mean less whale and walrus chow just as melting ice means less polar bear and ringed seal habitat. So little is known about what's going on with ocean acidification however (and research funding is still so limited) that scientists can't agree if the ocean is now so saturated with anthropogenic carbon that it can't absorb much more and the atmosphere will soon start heating up even quicker than it already has or if the acidification and ocean warming will continue so that by the end of the century it will look more like it did millions of years ago - an ocean full of jellies and bacterial mats with fewer bony fish, shellfish, corals and mammals. That's what my friend Dr. Jeremy Jackson of Scripps Institution of Oceanography calls the rise of the slime and that's why some people look at the state of the seas and essentially give up. Me, I figure we can't know if it's really too late to turn the tide or not. All we can be certain of is if we don't try we lose. More on Barack Obama
 
Oliver Noble: "Reinventing Ritual" at the Jewish Museum Top
The Jewish Museum's Reinventing Ritual exhibit features 58 artists imagining religiously ordained commandments and age-old customs in light of current cultural and political realities. Curated by Daniel Belasco [full disclosure: a former Heeb Magazine associate editor], the exhibit very much reads much like a good magazine, combining the weighty with the light, embracing tensions and contradictions rather than attempting to reconcile them and provoking -- not for provocation's sake, but for ends that are not always easily ascertained in one viewing. While the works in the show were produced from the 1990s to present day, the exhibit harbors larger intentions than merely reflecting the latter period. Alix Mikesell (American, b. 1966), Embrace , 2003, silver and plastic reflector. The Jewish Museum, New York, Purchase: Contemporary Judaica Acquisitions Committee. Nearly every artistic medium is accounted for in this exhibit -- a collection ranging from comics to installation to sculpture to film to jewelry. Many of the pieces -- such as a menorah made out of metal piping by Joe Grand, or a set of mezuzahs made from recycled materials by Alix Mikesell -- tend toward the typically twee Jewish object art. Others such as "Mouth to Mouth," a collection of thousands of ingestible gel caps each containing passages from Leviticus, are more obfuscating. While artists Johanna Bresnick and Micheal Cloud may pass their gel caps off as a metaphor for the "assimilation of spiritual knowledge through the flesh," it's hard to look at their piece without also thinking of phenomena like placebo effects and Münchausen syndrome. Rachel Kanter (American, b. 1970), Fringed Garment , 2005, cotton fabric, cotton thread, cotton floss, fusible webbing. The Jewish Museum, New York, Purchase: Dr. Joel and Phyllis Gitlin Judaica Acquisitions Fund. In "Fringed Garment," Rachel Kanter weaves a prayer shawl from a kitchen apron. Kanter's piece is less an indictment of the custom of wearing the prayer shawl than a reinterpretation that she feels more comfortable in. "When I wore Tallit for the first time, it felt uncomfortable, as if I were wearing my father's overcoat," the artist explains in an accompanying video. "If I wanted to wear a tallit, it should be made just for me." Tamara Kostianovsky (Argentinean, b. Israel 1974), Unearthed , 2007, clothing, embroidery thread, metal hooks. Courtesy of Black and White Gallery, New York. Aesthetic efforts like these resonate nicely with more dissonant moments like "Clothed," a full-scale, butchered cow carcass by Tamara Kostianovsky, which was made from the artist's own clothing. Because Kostianovsky uses clothes, the markers of culture and style, in lieu of flesh, the animal takes on a new persona. Kostianovsky elaborates in the exhibition catalogue: "My hope is that the reflection and careful examination of the act of animal killing will instill a visceral empathy that will in turn make us question current military approaches, social injustices and the way 'fleshy clothed bodies' are treated around the world." With one eye always fixed on the outside world, the exhibit is hardly an insular exercise in aesthetics. The works seem to suggest ways that religious ritual may increasingly come to interact with a more sustainable and harmonious future, where identity is increasingly connected to action. Reinventing Ritual is a bold conversation about the Jewish future. Who would have thought it would have happened on the Upper East Side? "Reinventing Ritual" will be on view from now to Feb. 7, 2010, at New York City's Jewish Museum.
 
Frank Schaeffer: When Freedom Is a Dirty Word Top
On what had to be one of the most disheartening media appearances I've ever made -- in terms of my usual shtick as an author and commentator -- I was just on Court TV yesterday. Court TV was fine. The case we were talking about made me want to throw up. I was commentating on Oregon v. Carl and Raylene Worthington , involving Christian fundamentalist parents who refused to give their child medical care on the basis of their trust in faith healing. (I was invited because as a former Religious Right leader -- long since departed from that shadow land -- they thought I'd bring an "inside" perspective.) The Worthington's fifteen-month-old little girl died surrounded by her parents and other members of their congregation praying for healing. No one called 911. As far as I'm concerned they used their daughter the way Islamic suicide bombers sometimes use children to carry their bombs. When right-wing evangelical Christians say they fear government death panels and a "takeover of medicine" by the federal government it seems strange to me that what they fear the federal government might do would be to save people like this child's life. So much for the "pro-life" community. I just wish the government really would take over health care , and for that matter remove children from any family that is crazy enough to deny care to a minor. And while they're at it they should curb the rights of redneck loons to carry loaded weapons into public meetings. In fact it's time to roll back the extremes of freedom in freedom's name. The religious right, the gun-carrying paranoids all have one thing in common: they are taking a libertarian/religious view to an extreme that will unhinge this country. It's time to make certain types of freedom a dirty word. Here's the case as it was laid out for me by the folks at Court TV: Carl and Raylene Worthington are lifelong members of Followers of Christ, a controversial religious group which doesn't believe in using medical doctors. (Children have died in this group before who needed medical care.) On March 2, 2008, their 15-month-old daughter Ava died at home after she developed pneumonia. The Worthingtons were indicted by a grand jury for not providing adequate medical care. On Sunday, March 2, 2008, 15-month-old Ava Worthington took her last breath at approximately 7:15 p.m. as her parents, Carl and Raylene Worthington, along with a host of members of the Followers of Christ Church, prayed for her recovery. The "healing," which took approximately 45 minutes, began sometime near 6:00 p.m. According to the Worthingtons and church members a short time later, (estimates range from 15-30 minutes), Ava died in the master bedroom of the family home. Following church practices, the infant was anointed and the county medical examiner's office was called to report the death. In July of 2009, Clackamas County Circuit Judge Steven Maurer today announced the verdicts in the trial of Carl and Raylene Worthington. They both faced manslaughter and criminal mistreatment charges. Raylene Worthington was acquitted of both charges; Carl Worthington was convicted of a criminal mistreatment charge. How can this happen in America? Make no mistake about it, there is a scarily large subculture within our society that, in terms of its "life values," is utterly hypocritical. At the recent so-called Values Voter Summit (September 22, 2009) held by the top Republicans and their Religious Right supporters where were the protests against bad parenting? Where were the speeches against gun-toting nuts? Nowhere. Because the Religious Right is not religious or conservative: they are nihilists. Call 911 for that child? No! Arrest someone for carrying a loaded weapon to a presidential meeting place? Don't tread on me! I have rights! Every day the "family values" religious extremest chip away at actual family values , and not just when they're letting little children die of neglect in the name of God. The evangelical/fundamentalist America within the ordinary everyday decent caring America is largely responsible for banning, effectively curtailing or harassing and minimizing effective sex education in our schools. This leads directly to a far higher incidence of abortion. This same group has now turned its collective will against reforming our health care system in a way that would give women and children an opportunity to have access to family care that would not just reduce the incidence of abortion but the incidence of mortality in everything from childhood diabetes to lacking prenatal care. If ever a case pointed to the fact that we need government intervention in the curtailing of our insane levels of "religious freedom" the Worthington case is a perfect example. It's time that all American children "belonging" to fundamentalist extremists come under the care of the state. It's time that all children are guaranteed an education wherein they will be taught facts rather than religious mythology. It is time to look at child-hurting homeschoolers and demand a curriculum that is fact-based. With the Republican Party in the grip of the Religious Right it did everything in its power to turn the case of Terri Schiavo into a circus fraught with political "family values" overtones. Where were they as baby Worthington died -- killed by faith in God? Thousands of children in this country are raised in everything from polygamous child-abusing religious communes to homes where medical care is denied because of "religious freedom." Tens of thousands more are beaten according to the teachings of James Dobson and his pro-corporal punishment family intimidation manuals. Where is the law? Religious freedom means freedom to worship in the Church of your choosing and -- after your're 18 -- to believe anything you want. Before you're 18, society should protect you. Freedom in the hands of fools is becoming a dirty word. It is time to reconnect with reality and real family values, free from abusive religion. em>Frank Schaeffer is the author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and the forthcoming Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion (Or Atheism)
 
Andy Worthington: 9/11 Trial At Guantanamo Delayed Again: Can We Have Federal Court Trials Now, Please? Top
On Monday, following a request from the Obama administration, Army Col. Stephen Henley, the military judge in the proposed trial by Military Commission of five men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks -- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Mustafa al-Hawsawi and Walid bin Attash -- agreed to the government's proposal for a 60-day stay in the proceedings, to give the administration more time to decide what it wants to do next. The Military Commissions, established by former Vice President Dick Cheney in November 2001 and revived by Congress in 2006, after the Supreme Court ruled them illegal, were frozen for four months by President Obama on his first day in office, and then frozen again four months later, and the request for this third delay -- apparently just for two months this time, until November 16 -- cannot disguise the fact that Congress is struggling to establish new rules for the Commissions in an attempt to iron out problems with the much-criticized trial system, and that the administration is struggling with a decision about whether to proceed with the Commissions, or to put prisoners forward for trials in federal courts instead (as happened in June with a solitary "high-value detainee," Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani , whose trial in New York is scheduled to begin in September 2010). Last week, the government was spurred to action by lawyers for Ramzi bin al-Shibh, whose mental competence to stand trial has been disputed by his lawyers since pre-trial hearings began last year. In what Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald described as "a 71-page broadside against the war court created by the Bush administration," bin al-Shibh's lawyers described the court as "not a legitimate judicial proceeding but a political show trial" ( PDF ), prompting a 30-page response from the Justice Department, in which Assistant Attorney General David Kris argued that the lawyers' claim of "constitutional defects in the Military Commissions Act are without merit" ( PDF ). Despite the fact that Kris had been put forward to prevent the planned resumption of pre-trial hearings at Guantánamo this week, while government lawyers continue their deliberations regarding the Commissions' future (and partly, I suspect, because the last two outings were so disastrous), he appeared, in summer, to deal a major blow to the continuing rationale for the Commissions. In Congressional testimony ( PDF ), he conceded that one of the mainstays of the charges in the Commissions -- providing material support for terrorism -- should be dropped because there was a "significant risk" that, on appeal, judges would not regard it as a legitimate war crime. Critics were quick to remark that this appeared to rule out two of the Commissions' only three verdicts -- in the cases of David Hicks and Salim Hamdan , who were both convicted solely on the basis that they provided material support for terrorism -- but while these arguments continue behind the scenes (and lawyers for the third man, Ali Hamzi al-Bahlul, appeal his conviction and life sentence last November, in a trial in which he refused to mount a defense), Kris told the court only that the government was seeking a 60-day delay in the 9/11 cases because "a decision might be made to prosecute [bin al-Shibh] in federal court." For the purposes of justice, it must be said, these developments are good news. Scarcely in its history has the United States entertained such a shabby and shamelessly politicized travesty of justice as the Military Commissions, which stumbled from one embarrassment to another in their long and almost entirely unproductive history during the Bush years. Moreover, although President Obama has managed to secure some support from within his administration -- and within the Senate -- for his ghoulish proposal to bring the Commissions back from the dead for a second time, the House of Representatives has, to date, refused to endorse the changes to the Military Commissions Act that have already been approved by the Senate, and, as Carol Rosenberg explained, "has given no indication when or if it will take up the matter." This is another good sign, because, although the proposed changes, which include a ban on the use of evidence obtained through coercion and restrictions on the use of hearsay as evidence, convinced the politicians in Congress (largely the same people who passed the hideously flawed Military Commissions Act back in 2006, which introduced "material support for terrorism" as a war crime in the first place), experts with a far greater understanding of the inherent problems of the system queued up over the summer to tell various Senate and House Committees why the proposals were a bad idea, and also why they were doomed to fail. I wrote at the time about the testimony of Adm. John Hutson , about the testimony of Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld (the prosecutor who resigned after seeing first-hand how the Commissions were incapable of delivering justice), and about the testimony of Maj. David Frakt , a military defense attorney in the Commissions, who reminded a House Committee of the trial system's fatally flawed origins, and who spelled out, with unassailable clarity, why federal courts are more adequately equipped than the military to handle the limited number of genuine terrorism cases at Guantánamo. These were not the only critics. Others included Denny LeBoeuf, Director of the ACLU's John Adams Project, who provided a detailed analysis of the Commissions' failings based on her observations of the pre-trial hearings in the 9/11 trial, and on a forensic dissection of the weaknesses in the Senate Committee's legislation ( PDF ), and in a recent article on the release from Guantánamo of Mohammed Jawad , I included excerpts from the testimony of Col. Peter Masciola, the Commissions' Chief Defense Counsel. Col. Masciola explained how the Commissions' Convening Authority -- a post still held by Susan Crawford , a close friend of both Dick Cheney and his right-hand man, David Addington -- is an "untenable and inherently conflicted role." As he described it, drawing from bitter experience, without a radical review of the Convening Authority's role, which is not addressed in the Senate bill aimed at reviving the Commissions, it will remain a job for a political appointee with prosecutorial functions, who is also responsible for providing -- or, as Col. Masciola demonstrated, mostly refusing to provide -- the defense teams with any of the resources needed to do their job. Recently, I also came across another damning document confirming the unsuitability of Military Commissions for cases related to terrorism. Just three weeks ago, the National Institute for Military Justice (a non-profit organization established in 1991 to advance the fair administration of military justice and foster improved public understanding of the military justice system) produced a report, "NIMJ Reports From Guantánamo" ( PDF ), in which a number of observers reported on their visits to Commission hearings between October 2008 and January 2009. Two accounts were particularly noteworthy. In the first, Jonathan E. Tracy, NIMJ's Assistant Director (and a former member of the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps) noted that, "while the lawyers and judges all operated professionally and seemed eminently qualified, there is no escaping the fact that the commissions are ad hoc proceedings with little or no legal precedent on either substantive or procedural issues," and that "the system contains several inherent flaws that make for lopsided justice, no matter how qualified the defense counsel." Tracy observed proceedings in the cases of Omar Khadr (the Canadian who was just 15 years old when he was seized) and Mohammed Kamin (at best, a minor Afghan insurgent) and he was appalled, in particular, by what he perceived as the persistent refusal of prosecutors to provide discovery to the defense "in a timely manner " -- if at all. After also revealing his dismay that questions about Kamin's mental competency were subjected to an "inadequate investigation," he concluded, "It was very apparent that the defense counsel in both cases face a daunting challenge getting access to evidence to which they are entitled. The tactics used by the government and their cavalier dismissal of charges of unfairness damage the credibility of the commissions." In the second account, Diane Marie Amann, a law professor and former Assistant Federal Public Defender, reported on her observation of pre-trial hearings in the cases of the 9/11 co-defendants in December 2008 , and was shocked to note that, when it came to questions of self-representation, "not even the participants who are members of the bar were fully cognizant of the rules that governed the proceedings." She also noted that, because the case involved difficulties raised by the use of "waterboarding or other harsh methods of interrogation," the trial would "benefit from the certainty of precedent. Yet precedent is something utterly lacking in the military commissions." After also noting complaints from the prisoners regarding the poor quality of the interpreters (which she compared unfavorably to her recollections of interpreters in federal court), Amann concluded that nothing she had seen eased "the core concern" that had troubled her for several years: "specifically, that the post-9/11 military commissions are unlikely to afford fair trials to the defendants who appear before them." So bring on federal court trials, please -- in which "material support for terrorism" is a genuine crime, as opposed to an invented war crime -- and let's give the Commissions the burial they deserve, in a grave marked, "Cheney's Wretched Dreams." As Reuters explained on Monday, Navy Capt. John Murphy, the Commissions' chief prosecutor, told journalists at Guantánamo on Sunday that "Federal prosecutors in New York, Washington and Virginia are vying to try the accused plotters of the September 11 attacks if their cases are moved into U.S. civilian courts." Adding that the courts in question are Washington, the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, and the Eastern District of Virginia, Capt. Murphy also explained, "They are working with us in a joint review of these cases and it is our collaboration that will ultimately make its way in written reports that go up to the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense to make a decision." He also said that he "still hopes" to try 65 of the remaining prisoners in trials by Military Commission, but conceded that some of the 65 had "already been indicted in U.S. federal courts," although he "would not say how many." After four years of research into the stories of the Guantánamo prisoners, I have profound doubts that viable cases can be established against as many as 65 prisoners -- unless the administration is really determined to pursue Taliban foot soldiers in the courts, rather than al-Qaeda terrorists -- but it was refreshing to hear that Capt. Murphy was talking so openly about the possibility of federal court trials. As Maj. David Frakt explained in the one-man demolition job that he conducted on the Commissions during his testimony to a House Committee in July, "Among the over two hundred detainees still at Guantánamo, there are perhaps a few dozen who have committed serious offenses. I have yet to hear any compelling reason why any of these men could not be prosecuted under existing law in Federal Court. As the recent report by Human Rights First conclusively demonstrates [ PDF ], the federal courts are open, and have a long track record of successful prosecutions of terrorism cases." More crucially, as Maj. Frakt also explained: The reason that the military commissions failed -- indeed, the primary mistake of the entire "War on Terror" -- was the pervasive abandonment of the law by the prior administration. We must not repeat the mistakes of the past and continue to cut corners. We must remember that this war is ultimately a war about ideas and values. True American values guarantee justice and fairness for all, even for the vilified and unpopular. If there are terrorists and war criminals to be tried, let's do it the old-fashioned way, in a fair fight in a real court with untainted evidence. America is better than the last eight years. It is time to prove it to the world, and to ourselves. Note : For more NIMJ documents relating to the Commissions, visit the website here . Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and maintains a blog here . More on Barack Obama
 
Nabil Fahmy: A Clear Path Forward For the UN on Nuclear Disarmament Top
This week, President Obama will chair a UN Security Council meeting on nuclear nonproliferation. Over the years, the Security Council has spent many hours debating this issue, but this speech has the possibility to mark a new beginning. In April, the U.S. president called for a nuclear free world in a keynote speech in Prague. At the time, many dismissed the remarks as the dreamy notions of a young administration with little national security experience. But President Obama's speech was not a lone shot in the dark. Several months earlier, four Cold War era American elder statesmen - Henry Kissinger, William Perry, George Shultz and Sam Nunn - had issued a similar call. There is a new consensus forming around the nuclear issue and a new willingness for countries to act. For years, the nuclear debate revolved around those few countries that had nuclear weapons and those - equally small in number - trying to get them. Today, the security paradigm for the nuclear world has altered. The imminent threat no longer comes from a handful of superpowers, but the potential for the acquisition of nuclear weapons by unstable regimes and non-state entities. This reality affects us all. This status quo is not acceptable. However, the international consensus required to resolutely address this challenge was significantly eroded over the previous decade because of the setbacks to the global non-proliferation regime. Despite the limited progress achieved in reducing overall nuclear inventories between the US and Russia, the previous decade saw the increased reliance on nuclear weapons, especially with regards to the United States defense posture. Little if any progress was achieved in ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty or negotiating a cessation of fissile material for nuclear weapons use. Perhaps most significantly, the Middle East continues to pose the most serious challenge to global non-proliferation. Israel remains the one country that is not a full party to any major non-proliferation treaty, and Iran's continued drive towards nuclear acquisition threatens to seriously destabilize the regional security order, with broader consequences for global security. Additionally, there are multiple concerns about nuclear weapons falling into the hands of non-state entities in the region. When President Obama takes the stage to address the UN Security Council, he should seize the moment to turn the world's attention to this crisis. He must go beyond highlighting the issue's urgency and provide a clear path forward. The UN Security Council can play a key role in changing how the world deals with the nuclear issue, and the moment is ripe to act. Nuclear issues are already high on the international calendar. This year, United States and Russia are sitting down to the table to discuss a revised START agreement. In 2010, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is due for review. And next year, President Obama has committed to resubmit the Comprehensive Test Ban Treat for ratification. It is time for the United Nations to do its part. At a minimum, the United Nations should seek: A resolution calling for a nuclear weapon free world by 2030 and the creation of an expert group to present a roadmap for that purpose by 2010. To ensure its credibility this roadmap has to include benchmarks toward reductions to less than 1000 warheads for any nuclear weapon states. A legally binding resolution under chapter VII of the UN Charter prohibiting the use of nuclear weapons against non nuclear weapon states party to the NPT. The creation of regional nuclear free zones and a coordinator to lead the effort. A move to assure non-nuclear weapon states that their right to peaceful nuclear technology will be preserved and unhindered by political issues as long as they are fully compliant with their safeguard agreements. Nuclear non-proliferation is a defining issue of our time. The deliberations of the Security Council this week should fire the starting gun on how the international community will address this issue for the next decade. Ambassador Nabil Fahmy is the Dean of the School of Public Affairs at the American University in Cairo and Chair of the Center for Nonproliferation studies in the Middle East. He was until recently Egypt's Ambassador to the United States. More on Barack Obama
 
Cantor To Uninsured Woman With Tumors: Get "An Existing Government Program Or Find Charity" Top
At the Richmond Times-Dispatch "public square" forum yesterday, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) fielded open questions from his constituents on the health reform debate for the first time this summer. Patricia Churchill relayed a story about a close family member who recently lost a high paying job and her health insurance. Churchill told Cantor that her relative was dying of stomach tumors and needs an operation as soon as possible. Cantor responded by suggesting that Churchill's relative should seek "existing government programs" or find charity.
 
Al-Qaida Video Predicts Obama's Fall By Muslim Nation Top
CAIRO — Al-Qaida has released a new 106-minute long video to mark the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks and predicted the fall of President Barack Obama at the hands of the Muslim world. The Arabic-language video, released on militant Web sites Tuesday, featured a review of the events of the past year and testimony from several leading al-Qaida figures. Similar long messages have appeared on previous anniversaries. Al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri concluded the two part message by telling Obama that "God willing, your end will be at the hands of the Muslim nation." The video also ennumerated the progress of various jihadi movements around the world. Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden issued his own separate message Sept. 14. More on Middle East
 
Celebrating Elephant Appreciation Day (PHOTOS) Top
September 22nd is Elephant Appreciation Day, and what better way to celebrate than by checking out photos of these magnificent creatures. Be sure to vote for the photo that captures your full appreciation! Get HuffPost Green On Facebook and Twitter! More on Animals
 
Matt Taibbi: "Mortgage Market Was A Giant Criminal Enterprise" Top
The court ruled that the electronic transfer system used by the private company MERS, a clearing system for mortgages, similar to a depository, that is used for about half the mortgage market is fundamentally unreliable, and any mortgage sold and/or transferred through MERS can't be foreclosed upon, at least not in Kansas.
 
Southeast Floods Soak Region, Causing Evacuation And Deaths Top
AUSTELL, Ga. — Neighborhoods, schools and even roller coasters at Six Flags over Georgia were awash in several feet of murky, brown water Tuesday, and officials found a ninth storm victim who had been swept away from her car a day earlier. Georgia officials warned worried residents to wait for the floodwaters to recede before checking out their damaged homes, and in Tennessee, a retirement center was evacuated. Torrential Southeast rains soaked the region for days, knocking motorists from cars and splitting at least one mobile home. A Tennessee man who jumped in the floodwaters was still missing. Washed-out roads and flooded freeways around metro Atlanta caused commuters headaches and hundreds of residents sought refuge in shelters. About 120 residents of a Tennessee retirement center were evacuated by boats and trucks and others were ferried from low-lying neighborhoods and motels in a Chattanooga suburb as two nearby creeks continued to rise. Georgia emergency officials said they were confident those in immediate danger had been evacuated, but were concerned about residents attempting to return to their homes too soon. "We had people who were out safely but decided they wanted to get back in danger," said Charley English, head of Georgia Emergency Management Agency. Gov. Sonny Perdue asked President Barack Obama to declare a state of emergency in Georgia and urged residents to stay away from flooded areas. Officials were beginning to assess the damage and did not provide a financial estimate. "I want to plead with you to give these waters time to recede," Perdue said. "Rescuers are putting their lives at risk to try to get someone out who foolishly drove through rushing waters." The skies were clear and even sunny in parts of Georgia on Tuesday. Most of the rain eased overnight, but some residents in some areas woke up to new flooding. In west Atlanta, resident Garrett Nail and several neighbors worked several hours to clear a tree that had blocked a road to their community. "It was troubling at first. There was no power. We knew people had to get to work, school, doctor's appointments," said Nail. "We were left with two options. Help ourselves or wait on the government. We obviously decided to help ourselves." State climatologist David Stooksbury said the ground was saturated and unable to absorb the large amounts of water. "It just takes time for that water to work through the system," he said. About 12,000 Georgia Power customers were without power. Scattered outages were also reported in North Carolina. Over 300 people were being helped at shelters across the Atlanta and north Georgia region, according to Red Cross officials. One of the largest shelters was at the Cobb County Civic Center, where Shirley Jones joined others sitting on green cots, chatting about the fate of their homes. Around them, children played games, oblivious to the destruction. "When I saw the water rising, it brought back bad memories," said Jones, who lived in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. The 72-year-old had moved to the area two months ago. Jones said rescue efforts this time went much more smoothly. A boat retrieved her from a family member's house. Before being evacuated, Cordell Albert and her husband Christopher moved their valuables to the second floor of their Powder Springs home. The couple waded through knee-deep water before a raft picked them up. "I feel lost," she said. "I feel homeless." Seven people have died in Georgia since Sunday night, including a toddler swept away from his father's arms after a swollen creek ripped apart their trailer home. The eighth victim, a 22-year-old Alabama man, drowned when a pond's rain-soaked bank collapsed beneath him. In Chattanooga, Tenn., Sylvester Kitchens, 46, was still missing two days after betting onlookers he could swim across a flooded ditch next to his house. Several others who died were motorists whose cars were overtaken or trapped by fast-rising floodwaters. After several days of steady rain that dropped up to 20 inches in one place, forecasters said there was a chance of more light showers. Days of downpours and thunderstorms saturated the ground from Alabama through Georgia into eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, just months after an epic two-year drought in the region ended following winter rains. As Tuesday rush-hour began in Atlanta, Interstate 20 west of the city was closed in two spots by water spilling over the major artery for suburban commuters. Portions of at least two other freeways in the metro area were also closed, as was I-75 in Houston County in central Georgia. Hundreds of roads and bridges were under water or washed out, including 17 bridges on state and interstate highways. ___ Associated Press writers Greg Bluestein, Johnny C. Clark, Errin Haines and Dionne Walker in Atlanta, and Bill Poovey in Chattanooga, Tenn., contributed to this report.
 
Insurance Industry Sends Further Recommendations To Baucus Top
The health insurance industry's largest professional association sent a letter to Sen. Max Baucus with "recommendations for strengthening" his health care reform bill, reports Talking Points Memo. Karen Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, who signed the 13-page letter, wrote that the industry does not back Baucus's plan to raise money by imposing taxes and fees on health care companies. Ignagni also said that the bill's proposed system of co-operatives would "only result in a slower march to a government-run plan." Read more, including Ignagni's letter, here. -- Jenna Staul More on Lobby Blog
 

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