Wednesday, September 23, 2009

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Gavin Newsom: Let's get our priorities straight Top
With the upcoming University of California walkout, we asked our Facebook community recently how the impending UC and CSU cuts were affecting them. The response was overwhelming: Stephanie from SF State needed only two classes to graduate with her bachelor's degree. But one of the courses was eliminated -- graduation will have to wait until next year. A mother from the East Bay worried that her daughter couldn't enroll in a single class she needs and is about to lose her student status, her financial aid, and health insurance. Sarah from UC Davis saw her tuition increase almost ten percent, while her mother, a state employee, just took a 15 percent pay cut. UC Berkeley will be eliminating approximately one out of every ten courses this coming year. UC San Francisco will potentially have to reduce their faculty by fourteen percent because of the recent cuts. UCLA has reduced support to research centers by fifty percent. UC Irvine has completely stopped admitting students into their education program. All across the state, we are choking off opportunity for hundreds of thousands of young Californians to build a better life for themselves and a better future for California. And it's our fault. We've allowed our system of governance to de-fund and de-prioritize higher education, putting our state's economic future in jeopardy. Let me be clear: I favor fully funding the UC system. Cannibalizing our state's future through cuts to education is the exact opposite of the kind of reform and long-term thinking we need from our leaders in Sacramento. But the current resource-constrained situation forces us to make difficult choices about our shared priorities. We must protect our environment, provide universal health care and invest in infrastructure development. And therein lies our statewide dilemma. We have a system in California that discourages thoughtful budget and financial planning, requiring a two-thirds majority every year to pass a budget that paralyzes our state. We have a complex web of ballot initiatives that further complicates the process. Walkouts like the one currently planned will become more frequent unless we undertake systemic reforms and truly take California in a new direction. We need to convene a constitutional convention and get serious about changes to the system. Until we do, we're jeopardizing our ability to be competitive in the global economy. Preparing our children for success in the 21st century necessitates investment in higher education not cuts to it. In San Francisco, we have a robust rainy day fund. We drew down on our reserves to make sure not a single teacher in San Francisco was laid off when the recession hit. We created a partnership between SFSU, the school district, and the city to guarantee a college education to every public school 6th grader who wants one. And if their families can't afford tuition, we help with that too. We operate with a limited budget in San Francisco, just like the state. But we managed to keep teachers in the classroom and promise every student a chance to go to college. We didn't raise taxes - we reformed the budget process and used resources in a smarter way. It's time to shake up the system that's put our state in this mess. We need come together to fundamentally rethink how we govern California.
 
Milton Bradley Apologizes After Suspension Top
MILWAUKEE — Suspended Cubs outfielder Milton Bradley has apologized for behavior that led to general manager Jim Hendry's decision to banish him for the rest of the season. Bradley says he was driven to bring a championship to Cubs' fans and expected to have a great year when he signed a $30 million, three-year contract in the offseason. But Bradley struggled and was booed loudly at Wrigley Field while hitting .257 with 12 homers and 40 RBIs. He says his frustration and disappointment caused him to act in a way he regrets. The Cubs suspended Bradley on Sunday, and Chicago had won three in a row heading into Wednesday's action. More on Sports
 
G20: Biggest Challenge Facing Rich Nations In Pittsburg Will Be World's Poor Top
BOSTON -- As G20 leaders snake their way to Pittsburgh from all corners, they face very different circumstances from 12 months ago when the possibility of financial and economic catastrophe was all too real.
 
Chris Weigant: The Forgotten War Top
No so very long ago, Afghanistan was known as "the forgotten war." While America's attention was largely focused on Baghdad, many forgot our military was even in another country. But these days, Afghanistan is hard to miss in the headlines. Rumors are swirling over what President Obama will do there -- increase American troops, draw down troops, keep the same troops (it depends on which headlines you read) -- and how he will change our strategy and goals. Talk of "failure" is rampant, except that now it is not coming from the anti-war crowd, but instead from the Pentagon. President Obama needs to get out front on this issue, by beginning to talk about our newly-forgotten war: Iraq. If you're scratching your head over that last statement, allow me to explain. Obama is going to face some criticism over Afghanistan, no matter what he says or decides on the issue. The criticism will come from different directions, depending on what he does decide, but it will come nonetheless. If he decides to boost troops (the media really should say "boost troops further than Obama's already boosted them," but they usually omit that part), then he will face heavy skepticism from anti-war Democrats, and possibly from some budget-conscious centrists or Republicans. If Obama decides to pull troops out, he will face more than a little bit of pushback from Republicans. If he decides to keep everything the same, he'll likely face pushback from everyone, including the Pentagon. No matter what course Obama charts, there are going to be people convinced it is the wrong one, you can bet on that. Which is why Obama needs to start talking about Iraq in the midst of this debate. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it's not. Iraq and Afghanistan are tied together by the thread (more than a thread, but that's how the metaphor bounces, so to speak) of the American military. We have troops in both places. Lots of troops. Troop decisions in one place affect the ability to make decisions in the other. A "zero-sum" situation, if you will. And President Obama needs to announce a troop withdrawal framework for 2010 in Iraq. This will change the entire discussion about troops and about Afghanistan, in several significant ways. For the sake of discussion, let's say Obama announces that 25,000 or 30,000 more American troops will be heading to Afghanistan. But at the same time, he announces that next year we will begin pulling out 70,000 troops from Iraq in a safe and coordinated manner. This muddies the waters, no matter where you stand on Afghanistan. Those who want all of America's troops home (next week, preferably) will criticize Obama for his Afghanistan strategy, while praising his moves on Iraq. And vice-versa, for those on the other side of the argument. The whole raging debate over the "timetable for withdrawal" which took place during the campaign is largely over. President George W. Bush signed just such a timeline, right before he left office. Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki got pretty much everything he wanted out of this agreement, including a hard deadline (the end of 2011) for all U.S. troops to be out of his country. Note that that says all troops, and not "combat" troops. That is the deadline for our withdrawal. That is the timetable. We have met the first milestone on this timetable, when we pulled all of our troops out of Iraqi cities at the beginning of the summer. But we still really haven't started to leave, yet. A few thousand troops got rotated out, but we still have somewhere around 130,000 soldiers in the country -- around twice what we currently have in Afghanistan. Obama, during the campaign, liked to talk about withdrawing a few thousand of these troops "every month or so" after he took office. This, to a large part, has not begun. The stated reason is to provide security for the upcoming Iraqi national elections due to take place at the end of this year. Assuming this election is relatively peaceful (which may be a premature assumption, I admit), then once it is over it will be time for those soldiers to start packing up the old kit bag and returning home. Now, much was made during the election about a "precipitous timetable for withdrawal," but anyone in their right mind knows that this will be a gigantic operation, involving enormous numbers not just of men and women but also of all the hardware involved as well. Decisions will have to be made as to what vehicles and other equipment will be brought back home, what will be left for the Iraqis to use, and what is cheaper to destroy or junk rather than spend money shipping it home. In other words, it will involve a lot of planning. That planning needs to be talked about before it happens. And the end of the year is right around the corner. Meaning the time to talk about it is now. President Obama should take the reins of this horse and begin this conversation. This doesn't mean, of course, that he is going to have a fully-developed plan to talk about right away. But he can start becoming a lot more specific about what he intends to do about Iraq in the next two years. When asked about Iraq recently, he merely pointed out "we have to be out by the end of 2011," but didn't take it any further. Obama would do himself a world of good politically if he started talking in much more concrete terms about how this pullout will be achieved. Obama should begin by saying something like the following: "Our goal -- which could change if the situation on the ground changes, of course -- our goal is to bring 70,000 troops home over the course of the next year. I will be speaking with the Pentagon about coming up with a plan to safely withdraw five or six thousand soldiers each month next year. I think that pace is realistic, and that security can be maintained while hitting that pace. We need to have all our troops out in a little over two years, so we simply must begin planning for it now in order to have a timely and safe withdrawal." Of course, the actual number can be different (I just picked 70,000 randomly), as long as it has a lot of zeros in it. If Obama tossed this out into the media shark pit, the conversation on troop levels would change overnight. Instead of focusing solely on Afghanistan (after largely ignoring it for years), the discussion would shift to include what is in danger of being labeled our "newly-forgotten war" in Iraq. This introduces nuance to the argument of where best to station American military personnel. It would also give Obama's base a much-needed boost, in fulfilling campaign promises made on the subject. He's already fulfilled one campaign promise on Afghanistan by almost doubling our troop presence there since he came to office. He may be ready to increase this level even further (again, depending on which headlines you believe). So it's not like he's being inconsistent on Afghanistan. But he should also start fulfilling his promises on withdrawing our troops from Iraq. It's time, Mr. President, to start bringing our troops home. From one war, at least.   Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com   More on Afghanistan
 
Bob Cesca: The Impeachment of President Obama Top
If the Republicans ever manage retake Congress, they will absolutely try to impeach President Obama. And it'll be based upon a supremely ridiculous charge such as, say, the president refusing to nourish our crops with a sports drink instead of water. Okay, so maybe the Idiocracy example is over-the-top, but if we follow the current trajectory of far-right attacks to their logical yet insane conclusion, it makes sense in a very eerie way. Have you seen the television commercials solemnly defending our right to poison our kids with "juice drinks and soda?" There you go. I've been following the Republican descent into the realms of the bizarre for some time now , and it wasn't until the "czars" thing broke that I became convinced that if they retook Congress the Republicans might try to impeach the president. The grounds for both the impeachment and the language used to sell it will likely be fabricated by either Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. I mean, 100 Republican members of Congress have signed onto Rep. Jack Kingston's cartoonish czar bill . 100 House Republicans out of 177 have attached their names to a bill that was essentially invented as a television bit by Glenn Beck without any regard for the fact that "czar" is a nickname invented by the press, and that every president -- all of them! -- has employed policy and political advisers within their administrations. But it functions as an effective Beck attack because he knows his audience isn't bright enough to distinguish "czars" from "communists." By the way, not to be out-crazied by his House colleagues, Senator Ensign introduced an amendment to the Finance Committee healthcare reform bill called "Transparency in Czars." This might as well be "Transparency in Hobbits" because it's just that ludicrous. Nevertheless, there's a growing conventional wisdom in the press alleging that both sides of the political spectrum are equally guilty of wackaloon attacks and conspiracy theories. Granted there might be one or two very fringe exceptions but this is otherwise a false equivalency written by the establishment media as part of their self-conscious effort to seem balanced. The distinction is that any "fringe" attacks from the left during the Bush years weren't mainstreamed and legitimized the way the wingnut attacks are today, even though the fringe attacks from the left turned out to be mostly accurate. On the right, we're hearing about communist takeovers, birth certificates, Oval Office dress codes, teleprompters, death panels, czars and a return to segregated buses. During the previous administration, on the other hand, the left insisted that Iraq didn't have WMD. This turned out to be true. The left insisted that there wasn't a connection between Saddam and 9/11. Also true. The left alleged that George W. Bush was incompetent. The rest of the nation caught up with the left when Katrina slammed into New Orleans, shattering the levees while Bush was eating cake with John McCain. Some, but not all, of the left thought Bush had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks. It's a matter of record that he knew an attack might be imminent based upon the famous PDB titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." So that one was partially true. The left also accused the administration of using illegal wiretaps, torture and other human rights violations. All true. Did Bush have business connections with the Bin Laden family? Yes. Did 100 Democratic members of Congress co-sponsor a bill calling him out for it? Of course not. And throughout the Bush years -- no matter how accurate the left's "fringe" attacks might've been -- liberals were marginalized and laughed off by the establishment press, ignored by certain leaders in our own party and attacked as unpatriotic by the Republicans. Sean Hannity, Tom DeLay and Bill O'Reilly, who are all busily ripping the current president an array of new holes, actively accused the left of undermining the troops because we were criticizing the commander-in-chief during wartime. Ah yes. They abandoned that one faster than Newt Gingrich abandons sick wives, didn't they? As for the name-calling, it's to be expected given its long and distinguished history in American politics. (Teddy Roosevelt once called Howard Taft a "puzzle-wit." Fightin' words!) But again, it's a matter of who's doing it and in what context. Yes, some people on the left were guilty of violating Godwin's Law and compared Bush and Cheney to Nazis. But in terms of the ideological spectrum, it's far more likely that a conservative, reactionary, corporate-friendly administration engaged in secret detentions, eavesdropping, torture and endless war might have fascist tendencies. On the other side of the coin, I don't know when Nazis suddenly began to embrace biracial, liberal children of African immigrants, but if I missed this development then bravo Nazis! You're doing better than South Carolina! Of course I'm kidding, South Carolina. Maybe. Yet on the right, we have legitimate politicians, talkers and writers accusing President Obama of being everything from a fascist to a communist to a foreign usurper -- as if all of those accusations are somehow interchangeable. In other words, on the left there were fringe protesters ballyhooing the "Bush is a Nazi" thing, but on the right, everyone from cable news people to members of Congress are questioning whether the president was even born in the United States. Fortunately, no Republican members of Congress would stoop so low as to compare President Obama to Hitler -- oh wait. Correction. Congressman Gohmert did exactly that back in July on the Alex Jones radio show no less -- Alex Jones, who makes Glenn Beck and Michael Savage appear centered. All of this is all set against the backdrop of the infamous Republican Southern Strategy: a well-known tactic from the GOP playbook employing racially-suggestive code language and imagery for the sole purpose of consolidating white support by stoking racial resentment. This is nothing new, and so it's a little strange and nearsighted of the very serious Sunday morning television people to laugh off racial connotations in right-wing attacks against the president, given the Strategy's prevalence in Republican politics. Pat Buchanan, the official cable news grampy, practically invented it. Later, Lee Atwater laid out the semantics like so : Republicans "can't say 'nigger' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff." In the present day context, Atwater might've been happy with dog-whistles like "ACORN" or "community organizers" or "third world" or "exotic." So some of these Republicans need to drop the "who me?" act. Credit where credit is due: at least Rush Limbaugh, the de facto head of the Republican Party, is honest about his racial dog-whistles and epithets. Calling for segregated buses in order to protect white kids from violent black kids in "Obama's America" is pretty obvious, no? In light of what happens on his show for three hours a day, it's remarkable that there's such denial coming from the press. (The Obama administration has no choice but to deny it, or else they'll only succeed in feeding it.) Ultimately, this is how the Republicans will likely proceed with an attempted impeachment of the president should they manage to take back Congress next year. If precedent is any indicator, they'll likely concoct some sort of ridiculous charge torn from a Beck or Limbaugh transcript, while generating public support for it using a Brundlefly hybrid of the Southern Strategy and neo-McCarthyism. And why not? It's exactly what they're doing now. Vice President Biden said this week that the administration's agenda would be crushed if the Republicans manage to take back Congress. He's right, but I think it'd be worse than that. Much worse. The 1990s will seem quaint by comparison, and it's clear that no matter how ridiculous the charges, the media will devour the spectacular drama while simultaneously excusing their behavior using false equivalencies and overcompensating with right-leaning conventional wisdom. Of course, I hope I'm very, very wrong on this one. Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog! Go! More on Glenn Beck
 
Garrett Johnson: Just How Corrupt are the Bank Regulators? Top
There are regulatory agencies with good reputations, and then there are agencies with bad reputations. There are bad ideas, and then there are criminally bad ideas. That's why it is so disturbing to see a regulatory agency with a good reputation like the FDIC propose a criminally bad idea . (AP) -- Regulators may borrow billions from big banks to shore up the dwindling fund that insures regular deposit accounts. The loans would go to the fund maintained by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. that insure depositors when banks fail, said industry and government officials familiar with the FDIC board's thinking, who requested anonymity because the plans are still evolving. The FDIC's fund has fallen to 0.22% of insured deposits, far below the Congressionally mandated level of 1.15%. For whatever reason, the FDIC is looking to avoid another taxpayer bailout, but their solution would compromise the integrity of the FDIC. It's hard to count the number of ways that this idea fails, so I'll just touch on the most obvious ones. 1) Where would this money come from? Why from the same big banks that the taxpayer just bailed out. So while the taxpayer bought toxic assets at face value that private investors wouldn't touch except at a steep discount, the banks will now loan that money back to the taxpayer...at interest. 2) Of course the banks support this idea. Instead of paying a fee to insure themselves (like you and I would), they get to loan money to the FDIC and collect interest on it. It's another taxpayer bailout. 3) Speaking of insurance, this loan from the banks would amount to self-insurance . Writing insurance on yourself is a highly-lucrative business, especially when you can charge interest to the supposed insurer who you are supporting! Insurance is supposed to work the other way around -- you are supposed to pay into a pool to cover the risk of loss that some people in the pool might suffer. Who would have thought that a government agency would actually contemplate paying the insured party for the coverage on their own risk? In a world where we had a rule of law this would be identified instantly as what it is: rank, outrageous fraud . 4) And then there is the worst part of this proposal - the conflict of interest. Can we really expect the FDIC to effectively regulate the banks that have loaned them money so that they can do their job? Of course not. It's the same conflict of interest that got pushed the rating agencies into putting AAA ratings on subprime loans. It has the appearance of collusion. The FDIC has a number of problems, some of which were demonstrated with the IndyMac failure that cost taxpayers $10.7 Billion. The FDIC correctly identified problems with IndyMac's business model back in 2002 , yet failed to act. However, collusion with the banking industry is totally new territory for the FDIC. On the other hand, collusion is very familiar territory for the SEC . Judge Rakoff, Merrill Lynch, and the SEC Our story starts on December 8, 2008, shortly before Merrill Lynch was taken over by Bank of America. Bank of America shareholders had already approved the merger. Merrill gave out $3.62 Billion worth of bonuses, or 22 times the size of the AIG's bonuses that caused such a stir. 36.3% of the money came from TARP funds and only employees making over $300,000 were eligible for the bonuses. Merrill's Compensation Committee determined executive bonuses before the disastrous Q4 earnings had been calculated. This was a departure from normal company practices. Bank of America was aware of Merrill's intentions to award huge executive bonuses, but failed to tell its own shareholders prior to the vote. In fact, on August 3 they had released a proxy statement that Merrill wouldn't pay year-end bonuses before the takeover without consent. Eventually the SEC was shamed into action. After months of investigation the SEC decided that it had built its case and approached Bank of America with a settlement offer that basically amounted to a slap on the wrist. But then something amazing and unprecedented happened: the sitting judge, Jed Rakoff, demanded accountability and disclosure . The judge wondered immediately why, given the "serious questions" raised in its complaint, the SEC wasn't going after more facts. If BofA and Merrill conspired to lie to shareholders about bonuses that had been agreed to when the merger was signed, then why isn't the SEC trying to figure out who is responsible? "Was it some sort of ghost? Who made the decision not to disclose [the bonuses]?" said Rakoff. Judge Rakoff called the settlement a "contrivance", which allowed the SEC to appear to be a regulator, but doing nothing substantially. The SEC was only asking for a $33 million fine and didn't seek to punish any executives, or even to release their names. At least one Merrill executive got a bonus larger than $33 million. The SEC responded to Judge Rakoff with what amounts to a "the dog ate my homework". The SEC, in a court filing on Monday, said BofA's alleged failure to disclose bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch employees before the companies merged was largely the work of attorneys who advised the banks. The regulator said it was constrained by the fact that the bank had not waived attorney-client privilege. Judge Rakoff wisely rejected this pathetic excuse and instead dug his heels in further. Responding swiftly, the judge questioned why the S.E.C. did not insist that Bank of America waive attorney-client privilege before striking a $33 million settlement. He also questioned whether bank executives -- or the outside lawyers -- should be charged in the case. "If the company does not waive the privilege," the judge wrote in his order, "the culpability of both the corporate officer and the company counsel will remain beyond scrutiny. This seems so at war with common sense." The judge added that the filings Monday by the S.E.C. and Bank of America raised more questions than they answered, and set a deadline of Sept. 9 for both parties to come back with fuller explanations of who should be held accountable for the bonus disclosure decision. So this is where we continue to stand: a federal judge preventing bank regulators from avoiding doing their job, and a major TARP bank refusing to disclose information about criminal fraud. Faced with the embarrassment that would be caused by withdrawing the lawsuit, and thus cause people to question the existence of the agency, the SEC has been forced to look tough and take the case to court . That doesn't necessarily mean a trial will occur. Even as it prepares, the agency could still appeal Rakoff's order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. The SEC on Monday left this option open. Will the SEC start doing their job effectively? That seems highly unlikely. Remember these are the same people who failed to investigate Bernie Madoff despite receiving six "substantive complaints that raised significant red flags" about Madoff's operations. Providing further embarrassment for the SEC, Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin on Wednesday released a transcript of a 2005 telephone call during which Madoff coached a potential witness about fooling federal regulators, saying "you don't have to be too brilliant" to get away with it. Last week New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo jumped into the SEC/BofA saga. Cuomo subpoenaed five Bank of America board members concerning the merger with Merrill. However, Cuomo isn't limiting his investigation to just the executive bonuses issue. The shotgun marriage between Bank of America and Merrill Lynch has the Federal Reserve's fingerprints all over it. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Department chief Henry Paulson pressured Bank of America Corp. to not discuss its increasingly troubled plan to buy Merrill Lynch & Co. -- a deal that later triggered a government bailout of BofA -- according to testimony by Kenneth Lewis, the bank's chief executive. Mr. Lewis, testifying under oath before New York's attorney general in February, told prosecutors that he believed Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke were instructing him to keep silent about deepening financial difficulties at Merrill, the struggling brokerage giant. Why would the Fed want these bank executives to keep quiet? A safe guess would be that they didn't want the Bank of America shareholders to get spooked and kill the deal. Thus we see that Judge Rakoff might have opened a huge can of worms that leads to some of the most powerful people in Washington, including the Treasury . Our Savior - The Guys Who Created This Mess The keystone of Obama's proposed banking regulations is to strengthen the power of the Federal Reserve. They would be the ones in charge of detecting and dealing with "systemic risk". There are several problems with that idea. First of all, these guys couldn't detect the housing bubble even at its peak. Ben S. Bernanke does not think the national housing boom is a bubble that is about to burst, he indicated to Congress last week, just a few days before President Bush nominated him to become the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. Secondly, it is the easy money policies of the Fed that allowed the credit bubble to exist in the first place. To give them more power is just another example of rewarding failure. Also, the Fed has been conducting enormous bailouts of Wall Street, putting the taxpayer at risk, without consulting with Congress beforehand. These include controversial bailouts of Bear Stearns and AIG. Much like the SEC and Bank of America, the Fed has refused to disclose information that the public deserves to know. With no government body acting in the interests of the citizens of this country, a private body, Bloomberg News, filed a FOIA lawsuit to force the Federal Reserve to disclose details of its Wall Street bailouts. On August 25, a federal court ruled in Bloomberg's favor. So far the Fed has not acted. They have until the end of the month to appeal. Because of the Fed's attitude that it can give out trillions of dollars of taxpayer dollars without any oversight whatsoever, Congress has pushed back on the Obama Administration. Bills to audit the Fed for the first time ever, HR 1207 and S 604, are getting traction in both houses of Congress. The Obama Administration has since realized that they hadn't done their due diligence, and requested a public review of the central bank's structure. The Federal Reserve flat out turned down Obama's request . (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve Board has rejected a request by U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for a public review of the central bank's structure and governance, three people familiar with the matter said. The Obama administration proposed on June 17 a financial- regulatory overhaul including a "comprehensive review" of the Fed's "ability to accomplish its existing and proposed functions" and the role of its regional banks. The Fed was to lead the study and enlist the Treasury and "a wide range of external experts." The hubris of the Federal Reserve is beyond tolerance, although it shouldn't surprise much. After all, the Federal Reserve membership and governance is largely made up of current and former Wall Street bankers, and we've seen just how arrogant they can be. All the current proposals by the Obama Administration and before Congress for regulating the banking industry involve giving the regulators more power and streamlining the process. This ignores the most obvious observation that the regulators aren't enforcing the current laws anyway. So why would giving them more power change anything? Does that mean that there is no good solution? On the contrary, there is an easy solution that is proven to be effective. The problem is that absolutely no one in Washington is considering it: roll back the financial deregulation. I'm not just talking about the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. We also need to roll back the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, and the Depository Institution Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. If we did all of that we would fix the Too-Big-To-Fail problem, the predatory lending problem, the usury rates that banks charge, and even tackle the out of control derivatives products. We would even break the control that Wall Street has over our politicians. Could it happen? The status quo would never let it happen without a fight. It won't happen unless the people of this country take to the streets and force it to happen. The people of this country can take back this economy and this democracy, but they have to want to. More on Banks
 
Dan Agin: History Revisited: Psychosis of a Psychiatrist Top
The tendency of any generation is to imagine its uniqueness, engage in a pretense that nothing existed before it and nothing will exist after it. Of course it's a fallacy, and a fallacy that's often dangerous. No generation is alone, and many of the problems that plague us were discovered long ago and not merely yesterday. So consider a story out of 19th century psychiatry. In the 19th century, an essential dichotomy in psychiatry was a split between understanding mental illness with an apparent biological etiology and understanding mental illness without any apparent biological etiology--with the latter case posing the question of whether a biological etiology existed undetected or did not exist at all. What caused madness? No one really knew. At the present time, more than one hundred years later, the issue is still in debate. But four generations back they knew so little compared to us that their debate was too easily clouded and distorted by smoke and mirrors. They had their confusions, particularly in the second half of the 19th century. And yet if confusion reigned in psychiatry during the 19th century, the intellectual debate was really only a footnote to the human tragedies of mental illness. People were just as bedeviled by mental illness as we are--and with no medications that really were of any help. To twist a quip, theories come and theories go, but madness remains. Four generations ago, people had their tragedies as we do, and as in our own time the tragedies of mental illness could be the most devastating. Also as in our own time, psychiatrists then were as vulnerable as they are today to mental disorders. Of the tragedies associated with mental illness, few are more ironic than the madness of a psychiatrist. Victor Kandinsky (1849-1889) (uncle of the painter Wassily Kandinsky) was a physician and well-known research psychiatrist who went mad in his prime. Maybe his most important contribution to neuroscience was his detailed description of his own state of mind during his mental illness. Kandinsky was born in a small village in Siberia on March 24, 1849. His father was a merchant whose home served as a local cultural salon for musical and literary parties. Victor had two cousins afflicted with what is now diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia, both cousins with long-term asylum residence. We know little about Victor's childhood and adolescence, except that he was an only child with a normal birth, and his mother's pregnancy was also normal. Victor had no significant physical problems during his life, and he did not smoke tobacco or drink alcohol. At the age of fourteen he left Siberia to live in Moscow, and there he gained entry into a well-known high school and graduated with honors. He then entered Moscow University Medical School. He graduated in 1872 and began practice as a general physician in one of Moscow's hospitals. Kandinsky became a prolific researcher and published many journal papers on various medical subjects. His colleagues described him as diligent, meticulous, absorbed in his work, modest in his private life, gentle and sympathetic. Beginning at the age of twenty-seven, Kandinsky served three years in the military as a physician, including a year during the Russia-Turkish War of 1877-1878. He served on a battleship as the ship's physician, and in that period, in May, 1877, he became mentally ill, was sent to a psychiatric hospital as a patient, and remained in the hospital eleven months. In the hospital, he fell in love with one of the nurses who treated him, and after his recovery they married. Kandinsky (with his wife) spent the next months abroad on leave, but in October, 1878 he returned to Russia to be readmitted to a psychiatric hospital with an apparent deterioration of his mental illness. In 1879 he was discharged from military service due to his mental condition, and in 1881 he moved to St. Petersburg to work as a psychiatrist in a psychiatric hospital. He worked there eight years until his suicide in 1889. Kandinsky and his wife apparently had a good marriage. They wanted children but never had any offspring. His wife was greatly devoted to him, and after his death she arranged for the publication of his scientific papers and two books--and then she committed suicide herself. What's there to say about the double suicide of a man and his wife barely entering maturity? Intellect seems helpless to grasp it. Madness won out. According to the people who knew Kandinsky, his illness first appeared in 1877, when he was twenty-eight. Already that year there was a suicide attempt: on the battleship during the war against the Turks he jumped into the sea to kill himself. According to Kandinsky's own description of his illness, this first episode lasted two years. In a research paper on hallucinations after the episode, Kandinsky wrote: "To my sadness, during two years I suffered from insane hallucinations ... I felt various and abundant hallucinations in all my senses except taste. The most frequent and vivid were visual, tactile, and common sensibility hallucinations." Kandinsky reported that in the beginning of his disorder there were only delusions, no hallucinations: "In the first months of my malady there were no hallucinations. This period was generally characterized by intense but chaotic intellectual activity ... a lot of ideas that ran speeding but not in the right course, experienced as forced and false." Kandinsky wrote that during the acute phase of his illness he experienced the common symptoms of "mental automatism": imagined telepathy, reading and broadcasting thought, enforced speaking, and enforced motor movements. He described his disturbances in visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile perception. His mood would vary from mania to depression, with depression predominant and often including thoughts of suicide. On the day he committed suicide, Kandinsky went to the hospital where he worked, obtained a large amount of opium from the pharmacy, returned home and swallowed several grams of the opium--a lethal dose. He continued writing as the opium took effect, and wrote his last words describing his condition: "I'm not able to write more because I can't see. Light! Light! Light!" Kandinsky diagnosed his own illness with the psychiatric terminology of his time: primary insanity (insanity not secondary to organic cause) and paranoid hallucinatoria--descriptive labels without biological content. As a patient, he would now be classified as afflicted with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder--also descriptive labels without biological content. With his illness and suicide, Kandinsky illustrated the vulnerability to madness of even the people who studied it--and their ignorance of causes. When Kandinsky died, the human brain was an enigma--and the enigma is still with us. We like to think we know so much, but we really don't know much at all. We remain children in the garden of knowledge. One hundred and twenty years after the death of Victor Kandinsky, mental illness still confounds us, a continuing and devastating plague. We are not alone in history.
 
Twitter Spam: Phishing Scam Steals Twitter Passwords Top
According to Mashable.com , a new worm and phishing scam is spreading on Twitter. The message could come from the hacked accounts of "friends you trust" with a short message ("rofl this you on here?") and a URL leading to a replicated Twitter login page, asking for your account info. If you enter your username and password on this page, you will be infected, and your account used to pass on the worm. Mashable offers the following instructions if you're hit: If you're one of the unlucky ones to be fooled by this worm, make sure you change your password. Also delete any tweets or DMs that have the link. If you can't log into your account, reset the password and contact Twitter Support. This is not the first worm or phishing scheme to make its way around the Twitterverse. Last January a similar phishing attack was causing trouble -- a direct message would be sent to your account with a tease "hey! check out this funny blog about you..." and a link. As Mashable put it : "We advise you don't." In general, the best way to protect yourself is: if you are ever asked to re-login to Twitter after clicking on a link, do not do it. More on Twitter
 
Mike Elk: Key Senators, Krugman Call for Tariffs on High-Carbon-Footprint Imports Top
Speaking Tuesday on a Campaign for America's Future conference call , Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown said that the climate change legislation will not get 50 Senate votes if it does not place a tariff on imports that have unacceptably high carbon footprints. For example, Chinese steel mills produce three times as much carbon emissions as American steel mills As a large body of research has pointed out, most of these savings come from weaker environmental standards and not labor costs, since labor accounts for less than 10 percent of the price savings. U.S. steel companies spend around twice as much per ton of steel to control pollution than does the Chinese steel industry. Chinese industry is expending only about 3 percent of its capital expenditure budget on pollution control equipment, far less than the 17 percent the U.S. industry averaged for the last few years as it was improving its environmental controls. China and many other countries are able to make cheaper products because they cut corners on environmental costs. The U.S. steel industry is the most sophisticated and efficient of steel producers, so advanced that when a group of bloggers toured a steel mill during Netroots Nation, we weren't allowed to take pictures out of fear that competitors could steal trade secrets from the photos. However, the American industry can't compete with nations like China and India who are allowed to cut costs dramatically by poisoning the air and the water at levels that are threatening to us all. To enact strict emissions regulations domestically and not force other countries to do the same would be a tragedy for the American economy as industry would flee for these countries. For this reason, a group of 10 Democratic senators -- including Brown, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Evan Bayh of Indiana and Al Franken of Minnesota -- sent a letter to President Obama that said they would not vote for any legislation that does not include tariffs on products with unacceptably high carbon footprints . As the Senators argued in their letter : We must not engage in a self-defeating effort that displaces greenhouse gas emissions rather then reducing them and displaces U.S. jobs rather than bolstering them. Indeed, if the U.S. adopts agreed-upon climate terms and other countries do not live up to their end of the bargain, we will see companies close factories in the U.S. and ship them to countries that allow unlimited harmful pollution. As we have seen in the instance of the Chinese tire import issues, countries have again and again allowed big multinationals to violate their treaty obligations in the name of profits. By putting tariffs on products with unacceptably high carbon footprints, we can effectively combat global warming as many environmental organizations have advocated . Even Paul Krugman, a typical defender of free trade, called for similar tariffs in a must-read piece entitled " the Empire of Carbon ." Krugman dismisses those that cry that a tax on carbon dioxide is protectionism by saying: As the United States and other advanced countries finally move to confront climate change, they will also be morally empowered to confront those nations that refuse to act. Sooner than most people think, countries that refuse to limit their greenhouse gas emissions will face sanctions, probably in the form of taxes on their exports. They will complain bitterly that this is protectionism, but so what? Globalization doesn't do much good if the globe itself becomes unlivable. Furthermore, globalization doesn't do much good if the global economy becomes unsustainable. Manufacturing is the backbone of any economy. If you don't make something, you are forced to borrow until you can't borrow anymore. With credit markets frozen, the American economy has reached that point we can no longer borrow and are unable to buy the world's products on credit. We have seen that unemployment and poverty have risen around the world as a direct result of the global economic imbalance. Leaders of the labor union federations from the 20 countries have called on their leaders to make the economy more sustainable in their "Pittsburgh Declaration." According to their report, unemployment is slated to double over the next 18 months in the industrial countries, and continue to rise with rates over 10 percent well into 2011. Additionally, over 200 million workers worldwide will be pushed back into extreme poverty. Creating a system of global trade that is sustainable and allows all countries including the United States to flourish is necessary for a global economic recovery. To do this, we must enact strong laws that don't allow one country to cheat the other by polluting their way to low prices. Some argue that such measures, such as putting a tariff on products with a high carbon footprint are protectionists and harmful. However, as Steelworkers President Leo Gerard argues today in a must-read New York Times piece defending the decision of his union to call for enforcement of trade laws on tire and paper imports: "Anybody who believes we have a rule-based system, but we shouldn't enforce the laws, they're the ones jeopardizing the global trading system." Without a commitment to live up to -- and a precedent of enforcing -- agreements, any climate change treaty signed at Copenhagen or at future summits won't be worth the paper it is printed on. In the wake of the China tire-import decision, we have heard a lot of rhetoric falsely labeling it as the beginning of a trade war. It is not. What is really happening is that workers around the world are engaged in an effort to protect themselves from the harmful effects of pollution and an unsustainable economy that hurts us all. More on G-20 Summit
 
Tamara Conniff: The Dalai Lama Proclaims Himself a Feminist - Day Two of Peace and Music in Memphis Top
The Dalai Lama smiled mischievously and said, "I call myself a feminist. Isn't that what you call someone who fights for women's rights?" The comment was made during his International Freedom Award acceptance speech, which was presented to him by the National Civil Rights Museum. His Holiness' message is always one of compassion, harmony, warm-heartedness, inner peace and civil rights. During the awards ceremony, which took place in the Peabody Hotel ballroom, he said women are by nature more compassionate because of their biology and ability to nurture and birth children. He therefore called on all women to lead and create a more compassionate world, citing the good works of nurses and mothers. Interestingly enough, there are feminist groups who would claim this kind of biological stance has lead to discrimination against women in the workplace. The Dalai Lama went on to add with his infamous sense of humor that "some feminists have too much emotion, that I don't like." Again, there are some feminist groups that would certainly agree with him on that point as well. (I would love everyone's comment on this subject!) Following the Freedom Award's luncheon, the Dalai Lama gave a public speech on "Developing Peace and Harmony" at Memphis' Cannon Center, one of many events sponsored by the Missing Peace Project. Many see the Dalai Lama as youngsters may see the Wizard of Oz before lifting the curtain - a fact the Dalai Lama himself addressed. He said some people come to hear him speak out of curiosity, some think he has some kind of miracle power or ability to heal the sick, some think he will bestow a wise and important message. "I have nothing to say that is that special," he said with a laugh. As far as healing power, he said, it's "nonsense." In fact he had complicated surgery last year to remove his gallbladder, which he proclaimed, "Is proof I have no healing power!" The Dalai Lama's powerful message is common sense. He does not preach religion. "Whether you believe this religion or that religion, we are all the same human beings." He preaches self-awareness and compassion. In broken English he said, "We need to work together. We need to protect the planet. With fear, harmony is impossible. We need trust. Trust is the basis of compassion. Distrust brings fear. Fear brings violence. Fear brings loneliness and depression. We all come from the same place. We are all brothers and sisters." This year marks the 50th anniversary since the Dalai Lama was forced to flee Tibet under China's takeover and form a government in exile in India. When asked if China and the exiled Tibetan government will ever reach a peaceful understanding, the Dalai Lama became quiet for a moment. "The Chinese and the Tibetans, we are the same human beings...our faith in the Chinese people was never shaken...We need more patience, determination. The Tibetan spirit (in Tibet) among the young is strong. The problem is (Chinese) government censorship and misinformation." Grammy winner Natalie Cole was on hand to introduce his Holiness prior to the public speech. "Deep down inside us, all we want is inner peace," she said. Cole is set to give a headlining performance during the Missing Peace Concert honoring the Dalai Lama, which will also feature the Memphis Symphony, Tibetan musicians, and special guests singer songwriter Matt Nathanson and country artist Joe Nicols. Rebekah Alperin, who produced the Missing Peace Concert along with Chantel Sausedo, and Missing Peace Project founder Darlene Markovich, organized the Dalai Lama's visit to Memphis. Alperin and Sausedo are also working on a worldwide documentary capturing the Dalia Lama's mission of peace, which will be released in 2010. "We all come from the same mother," the Dalai Lama said. "That creates the basis for compassion." More on Tibet
 
Postal Worker Stole 3,000 Netflix DVDs Top
SEPTEMBER 22--A postal worker who stole more than 3000 DVDs mailed by Netflix to its customers pleaded guilty yesterday to federal theft charges.
 
Ted Johnson, Maegan Carberry, Teresa Valdez Klein: Infotainment Rules: Should Letterman, DeLay & Ferrell Dominate Discourse? Top
Today, we talk the politics of culture (or is it cultural politics?), starting off with our President. How much should Obama be seen and heard as he runs the country? After Bush kept to himself most of the time, we've got a president who hits all these talk shows on one Sunday morning, and then hits late night with David Letterman (same questions, same answers, same blah). Maegan makes a smart observation - Obama is being very generic in his outreach, and that's why it's not making much of an impact. If he was reaching out online, or at least appearing on Fox News, wouldn't that have been more notable? It is interesting to watch Letterman these days, who is becoming subtly more political. Could Letterman be reaching for some of Jon Stewart's magic? After all, when was the last time Dave won an Emmy? That also brings up the new video from Will Farrell, FunnyOrDie.com, and MoveOn.org , which steps into the health care debate by mocking how much reform could harm health care executives. Do these videos have any real impact, beyond the 1.5 million views? When was the last time Ferrell changed your mind about anything, other than the dangers of babies as landlords? Speaking of danger, the Hammer is loose! But this time, instead of knocking heads in Congress, Tom DeLay is shaking his hips on Dancing with the Stars. The reviews are, ahem... who the hell cares? It's shocking and amazing, and the guy's still under indictment in Texas. Wait until Sarah Palin shows up for the finale! Fingers crossed! While DeLay wasn't in attendance, last week saw the Values Voters Summit in DC, with Carrie Prejean as the keynote speaker . She, um, well, condemned the "intolerance" of the gays and liberals that led her to lose her crown as Ms. California (no irony there) and stated that God had chosen her for this new role in politics. Of course, Teresa validly points out how Prejean was not stripped of her crown for political reasons, a fact that's been glossed over by Prejean herself. It extends the "forgetting reality" theme of the GOP, but then, we all love a little escapism. Just next time, instead of spurned beauty queen, can we stick with robots fighting each other? Finally, we touch on the Yes Men and their wonderful fake New York Post that they handed out this week. They have a new documentary coming out in a few weeks, The Yes Men Fix The World, but do these types of stunt documentaries really change anything? Like the Ferrell video, are they only for the converted? Listen to the show here , subscribe to the iTunes podcast , or use the Blog Talk Radio player: Wilshire & Washington, the weekly Blog Talk Radio program that explores the intersection of politics, entertainment, and new media, features co-hosts Ted Johnson, Managing Editor of Variety; conservative blogger Teresa Valdez Klein ( www.teresacentric.com ), and liberal blogger Maegan Carberry ( www.maegancarberry.com ). The show airs every Wednesday at 7:30am PST on BlogTalkRadio.com. More on Miss California
 
Dan Dorfman: A $250 Billion Blunder? Top
"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook,'' American philosopher William James said. Conrad Gann, the president of West Coast liquidity tracker TrimTabs Investment Research, figures investors ought to heed those words about knowing what to overlook -- especially so when it comes to their seemingly desperate craving for corporate bond funds in a quest for fatter returns than the paltry payouts they receive from money-market mutual funds. It's a significant financial issue since many investors are in a quandary. While many are being sorely tempted by a revitalized stock market -- up nearly 60% from its March lows (as measured by the S&P 500) -- many others, stung by vicious losses in their equity holdings, are far more concerned about preservation of assets and generating juicier returns without taking on sizeable risk. Corporate bond funds, far less volatile than stocks and up this year 11.7%, would seem to fit the bill for the more conservative-oriented investor. The numbers dramatically illustrate the investor's love affair with corporate bond funds. This year, for example, they have snapped up an estimated $250 billion of such funds, more than 20 fold the $9.2 billion they've poured into equity funds. Much of this cash infusion into corporate bond funds is coming from money being yanked out of those puny-yielding money-market funds. The problem here is love affairs die fast on Wall Street and Gann figures investors this one could wind up on the rocks. He feels investors are playing with fire in making such a switch, noting they're ignoring the threat of a significant risk -- a swing to higher interest rates, which could send net asset values of corporate bond funds plunging. In other words, this year's $250 billion of investments in such funds, of which an estimated $26.4 billion has come so far this month, could be a blunder of major proportions, Gann suggests. Typically, he notes, with a bull market in equities, you would expect investors to channel money into equity funds, not corporate bond funds. The fact they're acting in a contrary fashion is a message that many of them are still running scared, he says. Laurence Ames, a strategist at Los Angeles-based MCR Associates agrees. Numerous economists expect Ben Bernanke & Co. to keep interest rates low and avoid any new hikes, given the shakiness of the economy. Ames disagrees, arguing that the present deflationary environment is bound to take on inflationary tones in wake of the heavy money printing to beef up the economy. "Inflation," he says, "is not a question of if, but when, and the fear of a new inflationary spiral is one of the reasons we've seen the recent spurt in the price of gold to above $1,000 an ounce," he points out. The precarious position of the greenback, coupled with the need to fortify it, is viewed as yet another catalyst that could prompt the Federal Reserve to push interest rates higher, placing corporate bond funds in jeopardy. Another reason is to stem any substantial sale of dollars by Asian countries and an unwillingness to buy more. China, for example, holds more than $800 billion worth of U.S. Treasuries and it's thought unlikely that it will buy any more, in turn putting upward pressure on rates. To Ames, "there's a real danger bonds could be ticking time bombs." Money manager Joan Lappin of Gramercy Capital Management also hoists warning flags that corporate bond funds may not be as bullet proof as investors think. "We know," she says, "that the escalating U.S. budget deficit will require the U.S. Treasury to issue to issue more and more Treasury bonds in the weeks and months ahead. To lure future buyers, rates will have to rise." Accordingly, she observes, "bonds just don't seem to be a logical investment at this time." John Wayne once said "courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway." When it comes to corporate bond funds, investors are clearly not scared to death. But if rising interest rates are indeed on the horizon, many conservative investors could become scared pretty quickly and they'll regret ever saddling up. The bottom line here: If you're a bondholder, keep close tabs on the interest rate chatter. There could come a point when it's time to get out of the saddle. Write to Dan Dorfman at Dandordan@aol.com .
 
Glenn Beck Boiling Frog VIDEO: Did Beck Just Kill A Frog? Top
Holy shit. Did Glenn Beck just kill a poor little frog, on national teevee? Yes! Or...no, maybe it was faked! Or maybe it was real, and Beck is now having to pretend he faked it? Or not! WHO KNOWS. This is what you get with Glenn Beck, fighting the phantom "OLIGARHY" with his wacky "morning Zoo" stunts of yesteryear ! This afternoon, Glenn Beck had been fulminating on topics, varied and sundry, including how awful John McCain is, for liking Theodore Roosevelt. He was building to some sort of point, decrying Republicans and Democrats, saying, "You can support Democrats, who are basically socialists, or you can support Republicans, who are basically old Democrats." No, I wasn't really able to make sense of that either. But then Beck's attention turned to the old frogs-in-boiling-water metaphor. "You know the old saying, if you put a frog into boiling water, he's going to jump right out, because he's scalding hot, but if you place the frog in lukewarm water and gradually raise the temperature, it won't realize what's happening and die?" Yes! I have heard that old saying, because I, too, have encountered homeless paranoiacs at the Port Authority Bus Terminal! Anyway, that's when Beck apparently palmed a rubber frog, and began building to his crescendo: Barack Obama has galvanized the country, because of the sheer size of the bills he's proposed, and the number of the bills, the urgency he's placing on the bills. He's forced us to think! And get involved! We have -- not like John McCain, been boiled slowly -- we have been tossed quickly into boiling water, and don't forget what happens! What happens when you throw 'em in! When you throw 'em in, frogs into boiling water! [throws frog in, nothing happens] Okay...forget the frog. [pause] I swear I thought they jumped right out. But they don't. What just happened? By all appearances, Glenn Beck had murdered a frog. But he quickly offered, "Forget about the Republicans, because most of them are fake. Forget about the Republicans, because most of them are fake. And forget about the frog, because it was fake!" Oh! Okay! So the only thing that was murdered was Beck's metaphor, in which his hyper-informed viewers were capable of jumping out of boiling water. In case you were wondering, everything you have heard about the frogs-in-boiling-water fable is biologically and zoologically incorrect : Professor Doug Melton, Harvard University Biology Department, says, "If you put a frog in boiling water, it won't jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot -- they don't sit still for you." So do not try this at home. Do not try anything you see on the Glenn Beck show at home. [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 Glenn Beck
 
Bradley Burston: Has Israel Become Dependent on Terrorism? Top
It is a sickening thought. It is one that many in Israel have had to live with for months. One they have kept inside, silenced, some for reasons of guilt, others out of sympathy, superstition, or denial: Despite everything, despite international denunciation unprecedented even by the standards of past Israeli operations, despite mind-reeling devastation of residential areas and unconscionable loss of life among Palestinian civilians, could the winter invasion of Gaza have actually been a success? The suggestion was put forward this week in a Washington Post opinion piece headlined "Israel's Gaza Vindication." The Monday column was written by Jackson Diehl, who covered the first intifada as the paper's Jerusalem bureau chief, and who early in the Gaza war had called Cast Lead "Olmert's final failure." Diehl noted that while a number of Israel's stated -- and patently unrealizable -- aims for the war went unaddressed, two crucial elements of the postwar reality were cause for distinct Israeli satisfaction: a precipitous drop in Palestinian rocket launchings against the Negev, and a considerable rise in the strength of Hamas blood rival, Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Israel's defeat in Gaza has widely been portrayed as a foregone conclusion. During the war, Time magazine's cover was headlined "Why Israel can't win." An accompanying article asked darkly "Can Israel survive its assault on Gaza?" Diehl's article argues that Israel has done far more. "The point," he writes, "is that Israel has bought itself a stretch of relative peace with Hamas, just as its costly 2006 invasion of Lebanon has produced three years of quiet on that front. From the Israeli perspective, a respite from conflict is the most that can be expected from either group -- or from their mutual sponsor, Iran." The idea that the very brutality of these wars is what caused them to succeed, raises a number of extremely uncomfortable questions for Israelis. There is little question that a intentionally ferocious military offensive was the object of Israeli strategic planners, even if real efforts were made to reduce civilian casualties. Is this the meaning of victory here? Is resort to extreme force the only way to defend Israeli civilians against rocket attacks north and south? If this is how you win, what does this say about us, and our future? What does this say about the enemies we face, and the viability, durability and credibility of any peace agreements forged between the sides? Was it, in fact, the bludgeon of overwhelming military force that has kept the borders quiet north and south? If not, one must ask, why else have the rockets stopped? What else has changed? Not occupation, not settlement activity, certainly not Palestinian affection for Israel as a neighbor. The issue, at a time of relative quiet vis a vis armed Palestinian groups, raises other questions as well. To what extent has terrorism itself proven a failure, has it begun dying out, and if it is, will Israel be capable of an appropriate response? Earlier this month, a number of analysts marked the eight anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with assessments that Al-Qaida was in decided retreat. Time ran headlined a story by Tony Karon headlined "Why Osama Bin Laden failed." The Guardian , meanwhile, reported that Al-Qaida faced a recruitment crisis. Perhaps most significantly, a recent Pew Global Attitudes poll found "Support for suicide bombing in freefall among Muslim publics." Of the nine Muslim publics polled, support for suicide bombings was far the strongest among Palestinians, with 68 percent calling it often or sometimes justified [a decline of only two percentage points in the last two years], and only 17 percent ruling out bombings altogether. Yet the fact remains that Palestinian terrorism, whether borne by Qassam or suicide bomber, has decreased dramatically. At the same time, terrorism, whether real or not, remains central to Israel's explanations of many of the most morally problematic of its policies, including the siege of Gaza and restrictions on the movements and commerce of Palestinians in the West Bank. For the right, the specter of terrorism has become the primary, at times, the only argument against territorial compromise in the West Bank. So reliant has Israel become on terrorism as the underpinning of its policies, it remains to be seen if its reflex dependency on Palestinian violence can be replaced by a world view appropriate to a Holy Land uncontaminated by terrorism. May this be a year in which we have a chance to find out. May this be a year in which Palestinians have the steadfastness and the strength and the shrewdness to resist the temptation to launch attacks, and may Israel have the might and the wisdom and the ability to change course, to keep from launching military adventures when the other side is, for whatever reason, holding its fire. More on Barack Obama
 
Paula Crossfield: Obama's Chief Agricultural Negotiator Nominee a Pesticide Pusher Top
The industrial agriculture complex has been doing back flips for the last few weeks, first because of the ascendance of Blanche Lincoln (ConservaDem-AR) to the high throne of the Senate Agriculture Committee, where she promises to pinch climate legislation (or at the very least shove it aside until next year) and push a southern Big Ag agenda in the Senate for rice and cotton interests. Now, the White House has announced Islam A. Siddiqui, current Vice President for Science and Regulatory Affairs at CropLife America (you will remember the organization as the one that sent the First Lady a letter admonishing her for not using pesticides on the White House garden) as nominee for Chief Agricultural Negotiator, who works through the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to promote our crops and ag products abroad. Why does it matter if the Vice President from the trade association representing pesticides and other agricultural chemicals takes over the Office of Agricultural Affairs at the USTR? Well, because that office, according to the USTR website "has overall responsibility for negotiations and policy coordination regarding agriculture." That means he would oversee the office dedicated to: Free Trade Agreements (FTA) and World Trade Organization (WTO) Development Agenda (Doha) negotiations on agriculture, operation of the WTO Committees on Agriculture and on Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Measures, agricultural regulatory issues (e.g., biotechnology, cloning, BSE, nanotechnology, other bilateral SPS issues, and customs issues affecting agriculture), monitoring and enforcement of existing WTO and FTA commitments for agriculture (including SPS issues), and WTO accession negotiations on agriculture market access, domestic supports and export competition, and SPS matters. The Chief Agricultural Negotiator is essentially a 'spokesperson' for American agriculture (perhaps the 'bad cop' to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack's 'good cop') who is in charge of selling our agricultural products abroad -- products of a synthetic agriculture that is dependent on too many oil inputs, too much water and a stable climate to persist as the norm into the future. Here is an official job description for the Chief Agricultural Negotiator from the website Progressive Government : The Chief Agriculture Negotiator for the United States conducts critical trade negotiations and enforces trade agreements that relate to U.S. agricultural products and services. Also works to expand the access for America's farmers and agricultural producers to overseas markets and is responsible for directing all U.S. agriculture trade negotiations anywhere in the world . This includes multilaterally in the World Trade Organization (WTO), regionally in the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and bilaterally with various countries and groups of countries such as Australia, Central America, Chile, Morocco, and the South African Customs Union. The ambassador also resolves agricultural trade disputes and enforces trade agreements, including issues related to new technologies, subsidies, and tariff and non-tariff barriers and meets regularly with domestic agricultural industry groups to assure their interests are represented in trade . He or she also coordinates closely with U.S. government regulatory agencies to assure that rules and policies in international trade are based on sound science . What might a former employee of CropLife think is sound science? And what might his agenda be for expanding our markets abroad? I'm sure Siddiqui is already a regular at agricultural industry meetings, and will be ready and willing to say just what they'd like to hear. (Before CropLife, Siddiqui also served in the Clinton administration under former Ag Secretary Dan Glickman, the Ag Secretary best known for taking part in the sign-off of GM seeds as 'substantially equivalent' to other seeds, thus an argument for why they should not be labeled.) Here is a little bit more about CropLife from Sourcewatch : The image [the pesticide industry] presents is one of a hi-tech, efficient, responsible, and green industry that is already thoroughly regulated to assure the safety of its products. While the industry quietly pursues an anti-regulatory agenda to assure no pesticides would be removed from the market, its trade association claims its aim is to "promote increasingly responsible, science-driven legislation and regulation." ... In March 2004, CropLife poured funding into a campaign to defeat a Mendocino County ballot initiative - known as Measure H - that would make the country [sic] the first to ban genetically engineered crops. In the lead up the the vote CropLife contributed over $500,000 - more than seven times that of the initiative supporters - to defeat the proposal. Despite the massive campaign against the initiative, the bio-tech industry suffered a humiliating defeat. The measure passed by a margin of 56% to 43%. In other words, the Obama administration has chosen someone from an organization dedicated at all costs to chemical-based agriculture to represent our trade interests abroad. This in the name of selling more Round-Up and GM seed, as well as siphoning off our excess commodities to China for their growing CAFO industry, all for our own short term economic interests. Originally published on Civil Eats
 
Ann Medlock: A Near TED Experience Top
I'm a TED addict. Diving into TED.com eats untold hours of my life. For a busy, curious human, what's not to like about TED? The talks are 18 minutes max, all of them given by amazing meritocrats. Their subjects range from the incredible data-bubble system of Hans Rosling to Elizabeth Gilbert's fine idea that we need to get back to artists having a genius on-call, (as in a working muse), instead of calling frail humans "geniuses" themselves. A few weeks ago I was asked to talk at TEDxPugetSound, one of the many regional "franchises" that are now springing up. I signed on for the September date with perhaps unseemly speed and enthusiasm; I may well have said, "Hell yes." I was alloted 10 minutes to talk about "Global Heroes." Not so bad; some speakers got only 8 minutes, or 4. And so to work. I don't have an ounce of the common fear of public speaking. Writing about real heroes far and wide has been my core work for 25 years. I've been a professional speechwriter. I've given speeches myself for years. How hard could this be? Answer: Very. Speakers are given the TED Commandments, which writer Amy Tan called a prescription for a near-death experience. Said rules include: Be personal. Be vulnerable. Make people laugh/cry. Do something the audience will remember forever. Say something you've never said before. Share an idea that could change the world. Do not pitch for your company or organization. Do not go over your allotted time. Do not read. Rehearse and be spontaneous. {Italics added, with a "yeah-right" laugh.] Uh. Well. Sure. OK. If that's what it takes to be TEDish, I'd give it a go. Day of the talk, I drive into Seattle, the words of my 10 minutes running in my head. I know I've incorporated many of the Commandments. I'm certainly not doing my usual speech, which is way longer, not about me atall, and which I do from a combination of crib notes, reading and ad-libbing. (My favorite thing is the usual Q & A afterward. Being truly spontaneous is fun. For me, anyway.) I've assembled stunning photographs of the people I'll be talking about, pulling them in from far and wide. I seem to remember the good stuff I've written for this gig, despite the fact that memorizing is not my thing. I can't even give you one of my own briefest poems without reading it. Arriving at the conference, I find that my wonderful pictures are in place but the TED-style head mikes aren't working; I'll have to use a hand-held. With a slide-changer remote in the other hand, that pretty much kills any natural gesturing. (Head mikes are the best, and I'm spoiled.) I'm up early in the program. The speaker before me gives an enormously polished talk that I recognize from his website is what he always says. But what he always says is really good stuff. I hear my intro and am quite sure that I don't know one word of my talk--I should go up there and do my usual text. But it's too late now. On stage, gadgets in both hands, I look into lights so bright there's no connecting with anyone in the house. But boy can I see the big digital clock counting down in the blackness at the back of the room. The words start coming from somewhere and I'm off and running. With what I think is 3 minutes more material, I see 2:20 remaining on the clock and start editing in my head. One minute and 17 seconds later, I'm closing. Damn. I didn't have to cut quite so much. But I'm done, people are clapping, and I'm looking forward to the winebar at the break and to hearing the other speakers--it's a great lineup. One of them is Ed Viesturs, a legend for climbing all the world's tallest mountains--without oxygen--and living to tell the tale. Listening to him, I consider the fact that I've just done a public-speaking echo of his climbing feats. I have climbed Mount TED, without notes. I can do this, and live to tell the tale. But I'm buying my own head mike. More on Technology
 
James Altucher: 12 Ways The World Could Be Destroyed Top
I live and breathe Wall Street. I don't mean that metaphorically, like, "Oh, I love stocks so much I live and breathe Wall Street." No, not at all. I actually live on Wall Street. When I look out my window I see the New York Stock Exchange. And I trade all day. I write articles and books in between trades. And in between writing I try to do various deals. And when I walk outside I'm within feet of guys in machine guns, traders talking on their cell phones, tourists snapping pictures, and the huge US flag that adorns the front of the Exchange. And I worry. Very wealthy people don't like to worry. They like to focus on the intrigue of their love lives, or they like to play with their new and plentiful toys. So they outsource their worry to me. "James," one of my investors said to me, "I made the money. Now you protect it." We live in a world of nightmares. Every day those nightmares attempt to come to the surface of our reality and stir up some trouble. But understanding these worries, the myriad ways the world could end, and hedging against them (or betting against them) is the way to turn the fear into greed, the nightmare into a dream. Help me out here. I'm going to list some of the ways the world could end. At least the ways the world could end that people are actually worried about. If you can think of any more, please put them in the comments. Over the next few weeks/months/years I'm going to dissect in this blog the realities of these worries and see how we can make some money because of them. Some Ways the World Could Be Destroyed 1. Pandemic . We're all mini-experts on Swine Flu now. And here's what we know about flu pandemics: The second wave is much deadlier than the first. And guess what: the second wave is about to start any second. 2. Terrorism on US soil. The other day a coffee cart vendor who used to work on Wall Street got arrested for planning bomb attacks at various locations in NYC. This is really unpleasant for me since I love getting coffee and a donut at the carts. I spoke to a terrorism specialist who works for the government in an undisclosed location (I begged her to tell me where but she refused). She said, "Eventually its going to happen." 3. Financial collapse. In October, 2008 we came really close. Some Nobel Prize winners think that was nothing compared to what's about to hit. 4. The world is running out of oil . The US "peaked" in 1970. Saudi Arabia probably peaked in 2005. What happens when oil hits $20 a gallon? 5. Methane gas is the worst greenhouse gas . What happens when the gas sitting under the continental shelf starts to get released into the atmosphere, causing temperatures to shoot up 10 degrees. Nobody talks about this particular gas because the solutions are much harder to develop. 6. We run out of clean water . Right now over 50% of hospital beds worldwide are filled with people sick from dirty water-related illnesses. The supply of water never changes, but the population is urban areas is going to double and triple in the next few decades. Major metropolitan areas will simply have no clean water. 7. Nuclear terrorism. Its not that hard to make a dirty bomb. I'll show you how in this blog. Its not even hard to make a nuclear bomb. I'll show you that here as well. Stay tuned. 8. Major hurricanes . What happens when a Category 5 hurricane hits New York City? Don't laugh. We might be overdue. 9. Nuclear terrorism, part II (because I can't get enough of it). Warren Buffett once told me (well, he was on CNBC and told many people), "Over the next 100 years there is a virtual certainty of a nuclear warhead exploding on a populated area." How will it happen? What will be the result on the world? On you? 10. Volcano . The largest volcano in the world is at Yellowstone National park. If that erupted it would probably wipe out most of the continent. And its about 30,000 years overdue. Can we detect it and stop it? 11. Nanotechnology gone awry. This isn't science fiction anymore. I don't want someone saying "mistakes were made" when the entire planet is enveloped by gray nano-goo. Who are the players and what are they doing to protect us? 12. The human race is going extinct? Why are all the kids getting peanut allergies? When I was a kid nobody ever dropped dead from eating a peanut. The human race is losing its ability to fight off auto-immune diseases. Lets start with this list. I have more and I want to hear from other people. Over the next few posts I'll start exploring the realities of the above. Maybe there's a little bit of fear here, but trust me there's also some greed. If the world doesn't end then I think there's some money to be made. More on Financial Crisis
 
Milton Bradley's Mom: He Would Play For Cubs Again Top
The mother of banished Chicago Cubs outfielder Milton Bradley said her son would consider returning to the team if it will have him back. More on Sports
 
Susan J. Demas: Could Barack Obama Make a David Paterson Move in Michigan? Top
By now, everyone's heard that President Barack Obama (unsuccessfully) asked New York Gov. David Paterson to step aside because the White House doesn't feel he can win. There's a fear that he'll drag the party down with him in 2010, especially in down-ballot congressional races. So the question in Michigan is: Will the president play here, too? The White House has signaled it plans to play hard in state races beyond New York, already getting involved in Virginia and Colorado. Michigan Lt. Gov. John Cherry is the frontrunner in 2010 for the state's top job, as Gov. Jennifer Granholm is term-limited. She also leaves a hard legacy to overcome, with 63 percent disapproving of her job performance. Cherry has been the LG for seven years and previously served as Senate majority leader. But there are serious problems with his candidacy. Paterson is down 17 points in general election polling and a whopping 46 percent in a primary. Could it really be that bad for Cherry? Actually, yes. In a May Detroit News poll, Cherry only scored 9 percent in the Democratic field. When given a choice of candidates, U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Lansing) lead him by 35 points. The good news for Cherry is that Stabenow has said she's not running, but she's not endorsing him , either. In an August poll by the Democratic firm Denno-Noor, Cherry only scored 19 percent with Stabenow absent from the field. House Speaker Andy Dillon (D-Redford Township), who has not decided to run, received 7 percent. Republicans have a strong, six-person field and there's a lot of pessimism about Cherry's chances among Democrats right now. Still, conventional wisdom says that Dillon, a moderate Democrat, can't win, especially after alienating unions over a health care pooling idea that's upped his statewide profile. Cherry has strong statewide institutional support and plenty of Democratic interest groups. But what if the White House is a wild card? The president knows how to read polls. There is serious concern in Michigan that Cherry could hurt the chances of two freshman congressmen, Gary Peters (D-Bloomfield Township) and Mark Schauer (D-Battle Creek) -- who only won by 2.3 percent. Joe Biden said just this week that if the GOP makes big congressional gains in 2010, the Obama agenda is finished. The Dems would like to flip the state Senate, which has been firmly in Republican hands for 25 years. With Cherry at the top of the ticket, that could be a harder task. And although the Democrats hold a 24-seat advantage in the state House under Dillon's leadership, there are still worries that the GOP will make significant gains next year. The White House could decide to bet on Dillon under these circumstances and quietly ask Cherry to bow out. That doesn't mean it will work any better than it did with Paterson, but it sure makes the race interesting. Consider the fact that Dillon was an early Obama backer, whereas Cherry and Granholm were two of Hillary Clinton's biggest supporters until the end of the bitter primary fight. Dillon has ties to the White House through a former staffer and has talked with the administration about his health care proposal. It's interesting that Biden and administration officials like Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood have showered Granholm with praise at public events. But even though Cherry has been there, too, they've barely acknowledged him . As the poster child for the economic collapse, Michigan is not a state the White House wants to lose its grip on. Obama will have to decide if it's possible to keep the Great Lakes State blue by backing John Cherry. More on Barack Obama
 
Bill Sparkman: Tragic Details About Census Worker Found Hanged Top
William Sparkman was a 51-year-old single father who once battled cancer while he held down two jobs and pursued his teaching degree, according to a March 2008 article profiling the Kentucky man. Sparkman, a census bureau worker and substitute teacher was found dead a little more than a week ago. The word "Fed" was scrawled on his body, according to a law enforcement source . Kentucky TV station WYMT reported Sparkman's death on Sept. 15. The 51-year-old Sparkman had recently beaten the odds in an often fatal form of cancer. That was while he spent two years earning a teaching degree while holding down two jobs. Watch WYMT's report:
 
Evelyn Leopold: Gaddafi: Verbal Hijacking of UN General Assembly Top
In a world filled with long-winded political leaders bereft of content, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi excelled in a performance of his own. Only a few blocks from Broadway, Colonel Gaddafi rambled on for more than an hour and a half, shuffling through his notes, tearing out pages of the U.N. Charter and shaking his hands in anger in a stream of consciousness in the UN General Assembly. He chastised the United States throughout the speech for stirring up conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and trying to destabilize the Taliban, which he said were not responsible for Al Qaeda's terror bombings. Yet he professed admiration for President Obama, saying, "I would be happy if America was governed by him forever." But Gaddafi said no one "could guarantee" how the United States would be led after Obama left office. His speech followed the organized address of President Obama, who was interrupted 11 times by applause. Many leaders then left the hall to greet Obama in a side room, prompting UN General Assembly President Ali Abdussalam Treki (also a Libyan) to delay the opening of Gaddafi's speech by 10 minutes. Crowds Out Sarkozy Gaddafi's extended speech forced other world leaders, such as French President Nicholas Sarkozy, to speak to a near empty hall through a gala lunch in an attempt to make up lost time. A large part of Gaddafi's first-ever address to the General Assembly was to castigate the 15-member UN Security Council, "The Security Council did not provide us with security but with terror and sanctions," he said adding that it did nothing to stop what he described as "65 wars" since the world body was founded in 1945. "It should not be called the Security Council but the Terror Council." While most nations believe the Security Council is unrepresentative, dominated by the World War II victors, Gaddafi wanted it reduced to an executive implementation body, peopled by such bodies as the African Union (of which he is chair) and others. Instead resolutions by the 192 member General Assembly should be binding rather than those of the Security Council. This would mean an island state with 100,000 people would carry the same weight as China or India. Israel for once got off relatively easy. Gaddafi referred to it for "massacres" in Lebanon and Gaza and then called Jack Ruby an Israeli. Ruby, a Jew, was the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Gaddafi, who is 67 years old and came to power in a coup 40 years ago, remembered all the events he despised in his youth -- the death of Dag Hammarskjold, the second UN Secretary General, killed in a plane crash in 1961 (which he thought might be a conspiracy), the British-French-Israeli attack against the Suez Canal in 1956 and the 1950-1953 Korean War, among others. Wearing a rust-colored toga-like robe, a black hat and a jeweled black pin of Africa, Gaddafi, like other world leaders, was given a 15-minute time slot, which he pretended did not exist until someone handed him a note minutes before he ended. (Only the US president, as representative of the host country, is allowed to speak longer and Obama went for 40 minutes.) Jetlag In one of his more bizarre diversions, Gaddafi said the United Nations headquarters building should be moved out of New York to a safer city in Europe or elsewhere to avoid terrorist attacks -- and because leaders arrived in the city with jetlag. "All of you are asleep. All of you are tired, "he said. "I wake up at 4 am before dawn because in Libya it is 11 in the morning." But Gaddafi, who is staying in a tent in Bedford, NY , on a Trump property, did not refer to the bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 that killed 270 people -- except in a reference to past sanctions against Tripoli. A magistrate in Scotland last month released Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, convicted in the bombing after he was diagnosed with fatal prostate cancer. He was greeted by thousands of cheering Libyans upon his arrival, infuriating the families of the US victims. On Thursday, Gaddafi, whose country is a member of the Security Council, attends a summit-level session on nuclear non-proliferation, chaired by Obama. Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters earlier that the leaders were asked to speak no more than five minutes. "And we expect no less from President Gaddafi should he come," she said. More on United Nations
 
Soren Gordhamer: Is it Taking Over? Study: People Tweeting from Cars and Toilets Top
I use and greatly enjoy the social network, Twitter. It is a very simple and direct way to stay in touch with people and to share and find good content. There is a place for it in many people's lives, but it is somewhat concerning when it takes over our lives. The folks at Mashable recently reported on a study by Crowd Science that reveals some alarming and telling information on how much tweeting and similar activities can begin to infiltrate more and more parts of one's life. The study reports: "One-in-ten Twitter users (11%) admitted to accessing social media while driving during the preceding 30 days, compared with just 5% of other social media users. And 29% of Twitter users said they had accessed social media from cars at some point in the past, compared with 13% of non-users."
 Twitter users seem particularly immersed, with 17% users reporting in the last 30 days using social media from a toilet or washroom, compared to 12% of non-Twitter users. It is one thing, of course, to engage on a social network and use it, quite another when it starts using us, such that our attention is increasingly lost in our gadgets. It reminds me of the following Zen story: A renowned martial artist once went to visit a Zen master. The martial artist had spent years mastering his skills such that he was the toughest samurai in the land. He was an amazing swordsman and legendary for his ability to fight numerous attackers. When he met the Zen master, the samurai talked about all the powers he had developed in his life, how he could defeat a hundred men in battle, jump on buildings, and perform other extraordinary feats. He then looked at the Zen master and said, "I have told you all the powers I have gained. You are well-known as a great Zen master, but what can you do? What powers do you possess?" The Zen master took a deep breath, and then responded, "I only have one power: When I walk, I just walk. When I eat, I just eat. When I talk, I just talk." The issue is not with the technology, but how we use it. We can either do so skillfully and effectively, or use it habitually such that it becomes an addiction, distancing us from people and hindering our work. Few us will renounce social networks, but we can find a balance with them, and follow the Zen lesson relevant for our time: "When driving, just drive; when pooping, just poop; and when tweeting, just tweet." Though difficult in our time, doing so may not only help decrease the stress and sense of information overload we may feel at times, but could just save someone's life, since when driving we will have our attention where it should be: the road. *** Soren Gordhamer works with individuals and groups on living with greater mindfulness and purpose in our technology-rich age. He is the author of Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connected (HarperOne, 2009). Website: http://www.sorengordhamer.com More on Twitter
 
Mackenzie Phillips To Oprah: My Father "Tried To Make It A Romance" (VIDEO) Top
Mackenzie Phillips told all to Oprah on Tuesday. She said she and her father John had a longterm consensual incestuous affair, that began with a drug-fueled rape. Her book "High on Arrival" also details it . The last time he touched her was when she found out she was pregnant, ten years into their sexual relationship, and she had an abortion . But prior to that, when they were in a hotel in Hawaii while out on tour, Mackenzie says her famous dad wished aloud that they could run away together and raise Bijou and Tam (Mackenzie's younger half-siblings with whom she shares her father) and Shane (Mackenzie's son) as their own. She talked about her repulsion at his attempt to romanticize their relationship, "You begin to love your captor, and I felt great love for my father. The moment that he tried to make it a romance, all the sudden, it was like being shot into present time." That was the beginning of the end. She wound up pregnant, not knowing who the father was. WATCH: Get HuffPost Entertainment On Facebook and Twitter!
 
Lady Gaga's Bloody Look Hits Milan Runway: Gross Or Groundbreaking? (POLL) Top
Lady Gaga has started the world's weirdest trend: fake blood. Following the songstress' guts -y VMA performance September 13th, the look popped up on the runway at Milan Fashion Week on Wednesday. See photos and tell us what you think below. Lady Gaga: Milan Fashion Week: Follow HuffPost Style on Twitter and become a fan of HuffPost Style on Facebook ! More on Fashion Week
 
Indiscreet Tweets: How 140 Character Limit Can Mess With Your Sex Life (NSFW VIDEO) Top
What if you were limited to 140 characters not just on Twitter but in your regular life? Would it cause all sorts of embarrassing situations in the workplace? Probably, but it probably wouldn't end as well as this video imagines it to. WATCH: Get HuffPost Comedy On Facebook and Twitter! More on Funny Videos
 
Green Schools: Is Your Child's School Flunking the Environment? Top
You'd think schools would be role models for good behavior now wouldn't you? Oh sure they might talk a good game about the importance of recycling paper and protecting polar bears, but are they walking the walk? More on Green Living
 
Gail McGowan Mellor: Erasing the Doughnut Hole for All Seniors -- A Senate Revolt Against Big Pharma Brewing! Top
A rebellion against the pharmaceutical mega-corporations, which charge Americans more for drugs than they charge the citizens of most other countries for the same medications, bubbled up 9/22/2009 in Senator Max Baucus' crucial Senate Finance Committee. An amendment offered by Senator Ben Nelson [D-FL] would reportedly lower the health care reform bill's cost by an additional $86 billion without reducing services -- in the process allowing Congress to save all 44 million seniors from the dreaded "doughnut hole" (a huge gap in Medicare reimbursement into which 12% of them fall each year) and still have $30 billion left over. Yet Sen. Nelson's suggestion was simple: revert to the previous law that had reimbursed the pharmaceutical costs of low-income seniors at Medicaid rather than at the higher Medicare prices. Because Medicare does not cover all medical costs, seniors must carry costly private supplemental insurance. Low-income seniors are however "dual eligible," receiving not only Medicare but Medicaid help with additional costs. Until five years ago, all low income seniors paid Medicaid rather than Medicare prices. In 2004, Bush's Part D Medicare Prescription Drug Plan raised the amounts paid for low-income seniors' medications to Medicare levels. The government reimburses a great deal of that, giving big pharmaceutical corporations a windfall and costing the taxpayers an estimated $43 billion arguably unnecessary dollars. The Nelson amendment would restore the practice of paying the pharmaceutical corporations Medicaid prices for drug benefits to the poor -- automatically reducing taxpayer costs for Part D reimbursement by $86 billion dollars over ten years. Not only would the eight million low-income seniors still get the medications they need, but part of the money saved could be used to permanently close the "doughnut hole" for all seniors, with $30 billion left over to pay for other reforms. It set off a firestorm in the committee. As several Democrats immediately signed on as co-sponsors, most committee Republicans glowered, one Democrat insisted that the Congressional Democrats support President Barack Obama's purportedly hands-off approach to the pharmaceutical corporations; and the crucial swing vote, Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine, sat quietly listening. Senator Jay Rockefeller [WV-D], a scion of one of the nation's wealthiest families who represents one of the nation's poorest states, calling the amendment "a dream come true," saying that the proposal "should be astoundingly popular and deservedly so." Equally enthusiastic, Senator Chuck Schumer [NY-D] agreed that the Nelson amendment ought to please everyone, since it would fill the doughnut hole, help pay for reform "AND does not reduce services in any way...How often do we side with an interest group and how often do we side with the average citizen?...It's hard to imagine an argument against it that could be made publicly." Senator Chuck Grassley [IA-R] however immediately made one. He said the big pharmaceutical corporations would retrieve any lost profit by raising prices on the privately insured and, he said without explaining, "on children." Tom Carper [D-DE] argued that "we made a deal" -- the Obama administration had negotiated with Big Pharma and the pharmaceuticals were therefore willing to lower their prices by $80 billion to help pay for reform. He argued that Congress had no right to override that by "doubling" the amount of discount it wanted from Big Pharma to $160 billion. Making a strong distinction between the executive and congressional branches, mammoth corporations and people, Rockefeller said, "You are talking about a deal that somebody made with pharmaceuticals....nothing sacred about that deal.... I'm talking about a deal we failed to keep with seniors....they're paying premiums and receiving no service" when in the doughnut hole. Carper insisted that hospitals accounted for 30-40% of healthcare costs, and were taking only $150 billion in reductions while the pharmaceuticals accounted for 10% of costs and were being asked for $180 billion in reductions. Schumer of New York responded that in his state, 85% of the hospitals were operating in the red, burdened with last-minute saves of people without insurance -- who tend to be workers and desperately ill when they get to a hospital, an estimated 45,000 of them dying unnecessarily each year. Senator John Kerry [D-MA] added that 50% of hospitals are nonprofit. "What percentage of the pharmaceuticals are non-profit? It's a stunning argument we're hearing here." It will continue in committee into next week and soon hit the Senate floor. More on Max Baucus
 
Lori Pottinger: Not-So-Muddy Waters Put Millions at Risk Top
More evidence that dams really are a dirty business. The world could see an epidemic of "Hurricane Katrina" destruction from storms if dam builders persist in bottling up more rivers. Most of the world's major river deltas are sinking, thanks in large part to dams withholding land-building sediments, a new scientific study reveals. The authors estimate that the subsidence is increasing flood risk for half a billion people. Hundreds of scientists from dozens of federal labs and universities around the US were involved in the study, which looked at 33 major deltas (24 of which were found to be sinking). A BBC report says the scientists calculate that "85% of major deltas have seen severe flooding in recent years, and that the area of land vulnerable to flooding will increase by about 50% in the next 40 years as land sinks and climate change causes sea levels to rise." MSNBC reports: "The flooding will increase even more if the capture of sediments upstream from deltas by reservoirs and other water diversion projects persists and prevents the growth and buffering of the deltas, according to the study." I work to protect the rivers of Africa. Many of the continent's river deltas have already suffered from a loss of silt. Two of Africa's higher-risk rivers for subsiding deltas are the Nile and Zambezi, the continent's second and fourth largest rivers. Both have already suffered dramatic silt-deprivation from large dams, with more dams on the way to "seal the deal". Before the Aswan Dam was built, the Nile's annual floods deposited 4 million tons of nutrient-rich sediment in Egypt, supporting agriculture and delta fisheries. Instead of supporting a rich (and protective) delta, the sediments are now filling the reservoir and decreasing its storage capacity. Downstream, farmers are forced to use about a million tons of artificial fertilizer a year as a substitute for the naturally deposited nutrients from the annual flood. Today, the Sudanese government is finishing up the destructive Merowe Dam on the Nile, a project that has forced thousands of farmers off their riverine farms into harsh desert resettlement camps. Upstream, Ethiopia is building a handful of dams on its highly silty Nile tributaries, including the Tekeze Dam, which experts believe will silt up so fast as to make the project quickly unviable. The Zambezi's major dams have also led to a shrinking delta. Scientists report that some 11,322 acres of wetlands and coastal barriers have been lost between 1986 and 2000 - an average annual rate of wetland loss of 424 acres a year. When the Cahora Bassa Dam was built in 1973, its managers decided to fill it in one flood season, going against recommendations to fill over at least two years. This huge drop in river flow led to a 40% reduction in the coverage of mangroves, greatly increased erosion of the coastal region and a 60% reduction in the catch of prawns off the mouth due to the reduction in nutrient-rich silt. Mozambique appears to be getting hit with more and stronger tropical storms in recent years, making those protective wetlands that much more important. Yet the nation wants to build another large dam, Mphanda Nkuwa, downstream of the huge Cahora Bassa dam. Healthy rivers are important for so many reasons, and climate change will only make their gifts that much more important. It's certainly harder to argue to "protect the silt" than it is to, say, Free Willy or save the whales -- but perhaps that is what we need to do to get it through the heads of those now arguing that climate change calls for more hydropower. Perhaps we could form a radical river-silt protection movement: "Dirt First! And dams last. " More on Sudan
 
Andy Plesser: Video: AOL CEO Tim Armstrong Rules Broadway During Advertising Week Top
NEW YORK -- Despite the gloom around the advertising and media world, we found Advertising Week and its many events has upbeat. I caught up with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong on Monday evening outside the tent AOL erected in Times Square for a  big advertiser event.         AOL has made a big move to New York in recent month and Armstrong told me that the company "wants to be a big part" of the City.  At the AOL event , I ran into veteran New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott who seemed surprised by the AOL press event and reception and all the buzz.  I asked him about his impressions of this year's Advertising Week -- he said that given the problems with the industry, it was amazing that Advertising Week took place at all this year. David Kiley of Business Week ran into Armstrong at the event. We have a bunch of video from Advertising Week, including a good deal of exclusive Yahoo! interviews.  Stay tuned to the purple channel. This video was originally published on Beet.TV
 
Amy Novogratz: New Charter for Compassion Website to Launch Sunday Top
This Sunday, as part of the three-day World Peace Through Personal Peace Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, His Holiness the Dalai Lama will join TED Prize winner Karen Armstrong for the official launch of the Charter for Compassion website, www.charterforcompassion.org . Using the website as a starting point, they will call on the world to begin the world-wide, grass-roots movement to restore compassion to the center of religious, moral and political life. TED will live-stream the Sunday afternoon discussion on compassion, free to the public, at http://www.ted.com/webcast/watch/event/peacesummit Compassion, as Armstrong explains, is not the feeling of good will or pity. Instead, she writes in an editorial co-authored with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to be published this week, "it is . . . the principled determination to put ourselves into the place of the other [that] lies at the heart of all truly religious and ethical systems." The Charter for Compassion website will explain the principles that have guided the Charter's creation and its writing, and will offer website visitors ways to put those principles into action by hosting events organized around the Charter's official launch on Nov. 12. We are hoping website visitors will sign up to host events and encourage their friends, colleagues and religious leaders to do the same. During this weekend's World Peace Through Personal Peace Conference, Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama will receive the Fetzer Institute Prize for Love and Forgiveness for their inspiring commitment to advancing humanity's understanding of the power of love, forgiveness and compassion. The recipients will be awarded $100,000 each to support their work. Unfortunately, the Archbishop has had to cancel his appearance for personal reasons. Armstrong and Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, will lead the Sunday afternoon discussion on compassion with the Dalai Lama. The session will begin at 1 p.m. PDT, with a musical interlude, after which Armstrong will speak and introduce Robinson. They will then be joined by the Dalai Lama's fellow Nobel Laureates, Betty Williams, Mairead Maguire and Jody Williams. The afternoon conversations will be live-streamed here. A 2008 winner of the TED Prize, Armstrong has been working to establish a document that would bring attention back to the principles of universal justice and respect that are central to all the world's great religions. Each faith has its version of the Golden Rule, she explains -- always treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself -- and those "others" include all the peoples of the Earth, not just our own familiar community, religious congregation or group of friends. Achieving such a goal is not a hopeless pipe dream, Armstrong says. "The great sages who promoted the Golden Rule," she writes in the editorial, "were nearly all living during periods of history like our own, when violence had reached a terrifying crescendo." Combating that violence and creating a genuine climate for peace through compassion will enable all of us to shape the world's future in a positive direction. During the Charter-writing period, people of all faiths, from around the world, contributed their ideas, suggestions and stories. A Council of Conscience, made up of fourteen renowned religious thinkers and leaders, then wrote the final version. The Charter for Compassion will officially launch on Nov. 12, 2009, and is, as Armstrong and Archbishop Tutu explain, "above all a summons to creative, practical and sustained action to meet the political, moral, religious, social and cultural problems of our time."
 
A McDonald's Is Never More Than 107 Miles Away Top
Saying McDonald's ubiquitous in the contiguous 48 states is kind of redundant. But blogger Stephen Von Worley has come up with a nifty and shocking calculation for the farthest distance any hamburger-loving American could be from the Golden Arches. (Hat tip to BuzzFeed ) The answer? 107 miles. Here's Von Worley on the exact spot in the U.S. where you'd be farthest from a Mickey D's: "Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald's, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!" Check out the story on Von Worley's blog . Get HuffPost Business On Facebook and Twitter !
 
Lisa Earle McLeod: Incivility: The Root Cause Is Lack of Empathy Top
Outbursts in Congress, cursing on the tennis courts, and grabbing the mic from a young award winner; everyone is lamenting our loss of civility as more and more public figures continue to behave badly. To quote my grandmother, "I think someone has forgotten their manners." It would be easy to go off on a rant about the disrespectful Congressman, the angry athlete or the scene-stealing rapper, but these people are not acting in a cultural vacuum. Is it any wonder that the gentleman from South Carolina felt free to shout at the President of the United States when talk-show hosts win ratings with smear campaigns and candidates routinely engage in character bashing? We might express shock over a female athlete screaming the "F" word at an official, but we've long tolerated shouting and cursing in sports. There have been numerous male tennis players who routinely berated officials. Their bad tempers became almost a joke, and their angry outbursts were often considered part of their strategy. And if you think swearing is limited to the athletes, try attending a college football game. You'll be treated to thousand of drunks, shouting curses at the refs, the opponents and sometimes even their own coach and team, if they don't like the way the game is going. As for the rapper, is it any surprise that someone from an industry that routinely disrespects women with nasty lyrics and dog-chain-collar costumes thinks nothing of stealing a young woman's moment in the limelight? It's kind of hard to imagine why a man would behave gallantly when so many of his peers are being rewarded for being rude and obnoxious. Maybe I am turning into my grandmother, but this rudeness hurts my heart. The simple solution is to criticize the individuals and to treat them as exceptions that should be shunned. But this is a teachable moment for all of us. Rudeness isn't the real problem. The root of the problem is loss of empathy, and we've been given a golden opportunity to remind the world what it looks like. Instead of focusing on how awful the offenders actions were, we ought to be asking people to think about what it feels like to be on the other end of uncivil behavior. How would you feel if you were a line judge, trying to do your job in the game you loved, and a player practically accosted you, cursing at you on national television? What would it be like to be a young woman winning one of the biggest awards of your life and have someone grab the microphone right out of your hand? And yes, even the President deserves a little empathy. Criticizing policy is fair game, but how would like to be doing the hardest job in the world and have one of your colleagues treat you with less respect than he does the guard who walked you in? So what's the solution? It's simple. Take a calming breath, think before you speak, and be nice. The recent rash of rudeness is merely a symptom of a larger problem; we've forgotten that other people are human beings, too. They may get in our way in traffic, sing songs we don't like, make questionable calls on the line, or feel differently about health care than we do, but they're human beings, and they're just as deserving of respect as we are. When we lose our empathy, we've lost our humanity, and if we lose that, we've pretty much lost everything. So mind your manners, people. If you wouldn't want your grandma to hear it, then don't say it. Lisa Earle McLeod is an author, syndicated columnist and inspirational thought-leader. A popular keynote speaker, Lisa is principal of McLeod More, Inc., a training and consulting firm specializing in sales, leadership and conflict management. Her newest book is The Triangle of Truth: The Surprisingly Simple Secret to Resolving Conflicts Large and Small (Jan 2010 from Penguin Putnam). www.LisaEarleMcLeod.com More on Barack Obama
 
Census Worker Hanged: Bill Sparkman Found With "Fed" On Body Top
WASHINGTON — The FBI is investigating the hanging death of a U.S. Census worker near a Kentucky cemetery, and a law enforcement official told The Associated Press the word 'fed" was scrawled on the dead man's chest. The body of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old part-time Census field worker and occasional teacher, was found Sept. 12 in a remote patch of the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky. The Census has suspended door-to-door interviews in rural Clay County, where the body was found, pending the outcome of the investigation. Investigators are still trying to determine whether the death was a killing or a suicide, and if a killing, whether the motive was related to his government job or to anti-government sentiment. Investigators have said little about the case. The law enforcement official, who was not authorized to discuss the case and requested anonymity, said Wednesday the man was found hanging from a tree and the word "fed" was written on the dead man's chest. The official did not say what type of instrument was used to write the word. FBI spokesman David Beyer said the bureau is helping state police with the case. "Our job is to determine if there was foul play involved – and that's part of the investigation – and if there was foul play involved, whether that is related to his employment as a census worker," said Beyer. Beyer declined to confirm or discuss any details about the crime scene. Lucindia Scurry-Johnson, assistant director of the Census Bureau's southern office in Charlotte, N.C., said law enforcement officers have told the agency the matter is "an apparent homicide" but nothing else. Census employees were told Sparkman's truck was found nearby, and a computer he was using for work was found inside it, she said. He worked part-time for the Census, usually conducting interviews once or twice a month. Sparkman has worked for the Census since 2003, spanning five counties in the surrounding area. Much of his recent work had been in Clay County, officials said. Door-to-door operations have been suspended in Clay County pending a resolution of the investigation, Scurry-Johnson said. The U.S. Census Bureau is overseen by the Commerce Department. "We are deeply saddened by the loss of our co-worker," Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said in a statement. "Our thoughts and prayers are with William Sparkman's son, other family and friends." Locke called him "a shining example of the hardworking men and women employed by the Census Bureau." ___ McMurray reported from Lexington, Ky.
 
Tamra Davis: How To Make a School Lunch Top
A school morning is usually a pretty hectic time in any household. Ours can be nice and mellow or crazy and chaotic. Getting four people awake, fed, dressed and out the door on time is a challenge. Add to that, making a school lunch, and you can tilt over the edge. Unless, you are well prepared and have a simple method to follow. Luckily I have a husband/partner that will help me in the AM but there are many times during the school year that I am on my own. I do have a priority in my house and that is I want my kids to be healthy and if I give them the right food I am headed consistently toward that goal. I've wanted to do a show on school lunches for a while. It's such a hot topic right now and it should be. A few years ago I watched a British TV show hosted by Jamie Oliver where he went into the London public school system and tried to change it. The challenges that he faced were huge! From spending less than 1 dollar on the whole lunch, to getting something actually prepared in a current day cafeteria kitchen, to most of all, trying to get the kids to eat healthy food when they are used to chicken fingers and french fries. Well I hope we in America are ready to face that challenge. Childhood obesity has hit critical numbers (1 in 3 African American, 1 in 4 Latin and 1 in 5 Caucasian children are reported to be obese by the CDC). The crazy thing is it's not like we have to invent a cure for cancer to cure this epidemic. It's caused by what the children are eating and the amount of exercise they do. It's that simple. As a parent I can control what I feed my kids. That's my responsibility. I know that if a child is in poor health they will not function well at school. A diet that is high in fat, sugar and salt makes it really hard for a body to function efficiently. I know there are a lot of people talking about changing the food in the public schools and we must do this. Alas, in the meantime I have found it necessary to make sure my kids get a healthy and delicious lunch that will give them the nutrition they need to focus and have fun in school, and so we make it ourselves. In the morning before school I can make sure they eat a nutritious breakfast. I came up with the Lego food pyramid to teach my son Davis about eating a well balanced diet. He was having a problem with his digestion and the doctor said he was eating too many starches so I tried to talk to him about the food pyramid. He was 5 and had no idea what I was talking about. The current food pyramid online is hard to understand so I made him one out of Legos. He got it in less than 5 minutes. Every kid I have shown this to really begins to understand how it's important to eat a balanced diet and what a food group is. We can look at a plate of his food and choose the Legos that correspond. I use it myself in meal planning for the kids. It's the basis of how I build a lunch for them and it should really help you too. First make sure you have all the right equipment. 1. Lunch Box . You need a lunch box that your kid can open and one that they like. I used to buy them vintage ones on eBay and that's cool but you really have to pay attention to the latching device. A simple fall can pour a lunchbox contents all over the floor or street. Zippers work the best for us and also Velcro sacks are pretty good. It's best to make sure they are insulated. Because that's the second item. 2. Ice Packs . A lunch box can be a dangerous place. Harmful bacteria can start to grow after less than 2 hours with perishable food. I thought I was all safe because we don't eat meat, but even eggs, cheese and mayonnaise can put your child at risk. Use an ice pack and if you want, freeze a yogurt squeeze or a juice box and add that to the lunchbox for extra protection. Your child's lunch box probably sits on a shelf in 70 degrees for 3-4 hours before it's consumed. 3. Reusable Containers . Use reusable containers when packing up the lunch box. This will save you! If you buy in bulk that can start to really cut down on the cost of all those little bags of food and all the trash they accumulate. When we went to Point Dume Elementary they banned items in your lunch box that had to be thrown away and you had to use the school supplied containers and lunch box. It was fantastic! Also, invest in a stainless steel drinking bottle and use that as your child's beverage container. You can fill it with water or half water and half with juice and save big on all those juice box items. This is really where an environmental practice can save you money. What do you put in the Lunch? This is so personal depending on your kids likes, but try not to let them limit your creativity. If you keep offering them new things, they try new things. If you only offer them the same thing they will only eat the same thing. My sister always asks me what I'm putting in the kid's lunch box. Mostly us moms (and dads) just need some inspiration. We might have forgotten that the kids like quesadillas. Try to keep them interested in food. We use the basis of the food pyramid and build the lunch from those items; Protein - main course usually also gets the Grain category Fruit and Vegetable - one serving each Dairy - one item or if they are dairy free use a soy or other substitute Sweet and Savory - one cookie or homemade item and some pretzels or crackers Beverage - water, coconut water, juice and water mixed. Refreshing and not too sugary In addition to the show above, which has a bunch of ideas for what to put in to the school lunch I am attaching a card I made up that is filled with tips and recipes. Maybe you can print this out:
 
Malou Innocent: "Should More Troops Be Sent to Afghanistan? NO!" Top
As outlined in a new Cato study, Escaping the "Graveyard of Empires": A Strategy to Exit Afghanistan , the United States should narrow its objectives in the region and decrease troop levels as soon as possible. The United States has drifted into an amorphous nation building mission with unlimited scope and unlimited duration. Our objective must be narrowed to disrupting al Qaeda. To accomplish that goal, America does not need to transform Afghanistan into a stable, modern, democratic society with a strong central government in Kabul, nor does it require the U.S. military to pacify and forcibly democratize the entire country. Today, we can target al Qaeda where they do emerge via airstrikes and covert raids. The group poses a manageable security problem, not an existential threat to America. Yet, as I mention here, policymakers tend to conflate al Qaeda with indigenous Pashtun-dominated militias. America's security, however, will not be at risk even if an oppressive regime takes over a contiguous fraction of Afghan territory; if the Taliban were to provide sanctuary to al Qaeda once again, it would be easier to strike at the group within Afghanistan than in neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan. Beltway orthodoxy tells us that America's security depends on rebuilding failed states, but that logic ignores the fact that terrorists can move to governed spaces. Rather than setting up in weak, ungoverned states, enemies can flourish in strong states because these countries have formally recognized governments with the sovereignty to reject foreign interference in their domestic affairs. This is one reason why terrorists find sanctuary across the border in Pakistan. [Note: 9/11 was planned in many other countries, Germany and the United States included]. Committing still more U.S. personnel to Afghanistan undermines the already weak authority of Afghan leaders, interferes with our ability to deal with other security challenges, and pulls us deeper into a bloody and protracted guerilla war with no end in sight . This post originally appeared on The Hill's Congress Blog , September 23, 2009 More on Afghanistan
 
Janice Taylor: Insomnia Cookies: 25 Tips to Better Sleep Top
As a Weight Loss Coach and a 50 pound big-time-loser, I fully understand that sleep plays a crucial role in our obtaining and maintaining our healthy weight and on our general well-being, so I'd like to share some vital information with you now as well as 25 bite-sized and delicious tips to better sleep! A recent study conducted by the Harvard Women's Health Watch reports that sleep difficulties visit 75% of us at least a few nights per week. A short-lived bout of insomnia is nothing to worry about. However, the bigger concern is for those who suffer from chronic sleep loss, because they are likely to be affected in numerous areas: 1. Sleep helps the brain commit new information into memory; therefore lack of sleep can impair learning and memory. 2. Chronic sleep deprivation affects the way our bodies process and store carbohydrates, and alters the levels of hormones that affect our appetite : leptin (an appetite regulating hormone), and higher levels of ghrelin (a hormone produced by the stomach that sends the 'I'm hungry, feel me' signal to the brain.) (leptin and ghrelin) 3. Those who are sleep deprived are more likely to be irritable, cranky, impatient , and are all in all moodier than those who sleep! 4. Sleep disorders have been linked to hypertension, increased stress hormone level and irregular heartbeats. Now that we know how important it is to get the proper amount of sleep, here 25 tips that can help you to get a good night's rest! 25 Bite-Sized and Delicious Tips to Better Sleep from the Our Lady of Weight Loss Snooze Factory 1. Relieve Stress Daily. People who are stressed-out are more likely to suffer from insomnia. It's important to explore various types of exercise, meditation, and/ or yoga so that you find the one that best helps you to relax. Have fun exploring. 2. Exercise. Follow a consistent exercise (or movement) program. It will increase your energy levels during the day, improve your mood and help to regulate your sleeping patterns at night. Remember - even 10 minutes here and there throughout the day adds up to a restful night's sleep. 3. Exercise in the morning or afternoon. For many, working out within 3 or 4 hours of sleep can make it harder to fall asleep. 4. Light snacks . Eating a heavy meal too close to bedtime can interfere with sleep. Instead, if you are hungry, have a light snack but avoid protein-rich and caffeine containing foods and beverages. 5. Stop eating all together at least 3 hours before sleep . This will prevent heartburn, indigestion and energy boosts from the food. A good weight loss rule anyway. You've got to stop at some point, no? 6. Natural Root . Valerian root and Melatonin seem to be the most effective supplemental sleep aids. Always discuss dosage, risk and effectiveness with your doctor before taking. 7. Aromatherapy. Lavender and chamomile scents can be soothing and relaxing. Perhaps in spray form, or scented candle. Also, vanilla 'kills' appetite. 8. Eat at regular intervals during the day. This will keep your blood sugar levels even, thus keeping you alert all day and ready to sleep at night. And bonus, it will keep your 'hunger' in check, so that you don't go off the deep end, into that vat of chocolate that's calling your name! 9. Write it out. Before bed write down all your thoughts in a journal without judgment. Stream of consciousness. Let it rip and roll. It will help clear your mind, as you can close the book on the day. It works! 10. Turn off the lights . It can be difficult to sleep with the lights on. You might even want to wear a sleep mask (I have a leopard one!). Be sure to close the blinds, shades, drapes! 11. Sleep schedule. Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, including weekends. Your body will get into its automatic rhythm. 12. Put the clock where you cannot see it. Clock watching can create anxiety. 13. For a light late night snack, try dairy products . Milk contains the sleep inducing amino acid, tryptophan. (Go organic, please! So that the milk is coming from a healthy cow ... Eat Healthy: Be Political!) 14. Avoid tobacco. Tobacco products contain nicotine, a stimulant. You shouldn't be smoking anyway (sorry, but for goodness sake!). 15. Don't oversleep. Too much of a good thing can actually make you more tired. 16. Think positive. People who focus on the positive tend to sleep better and experience better health in general. Remember: thoughts are like the clouds; they float in and out - you don't have to attach to them! 17. Do not hit the snooze button . Simply get up. Get up! GET UP! 18. Plan for a healthy 7 to 8 hours of sleep every night. Set your mind as you climb into your comfy bed. 19. Nap wisely. No more than 20 minutes. But do nap if you can! 20. Limit caffeine during the day. Try for less than 1-2 cups of caffeinated beverages during the day. 21. Schedule some down time every day. Stretch, take a hot bath, read. Stare into space! 22. Add white noise and/or wear ear plugs. Most people can't fall asleep when things are too loud. Sometimes even the crickets are screaming. 23. Drink in moderation. Alcohol may help you fall asleep, but it will likely wake you in the middle of the night. 24. Rule out medications. If you are taking medication, ask your doctor about its side effects. 25. Check the thermostat. If it's too hot or too cold, it may be difficult to fall asleep. That's for sure!!! Spread the word ... not the icing, Janice ------------------------------------ Read more from Janice on her Beliefnet.com weight loss blog or visit Our Lady of Weight Loss and Janice Taylor Living ! More on Wellness
 
Eric Dane, Rebecca Gayheart Sex Tape Lawsuit: Gawker Sued Over Video Top
Dane and Gayheart filed a lawsuit today in L.A. County Superior Court, claiming Gawker.com had not only unlawfully posted almost 4 minutes of the private video that was shot behind closed doors, but "maliciously" distributed the video and included nude shots of the fabulous threesome -- the third wheel was former beauty queen Kari Ann Peniche.
 
Arianna Huffington: Israel Diary: Shimon Peres on Peace, Obama's Tough Love, and Working in the Shadows Top
JERUSALEM -- It's hard to spend any time with Israeli President Shimon Peres and remain pessimistic about the possibility of peace. "I'm 86," he told me, "and at a moment in my life when I have no personal agenda. I'm not interested in money. I'm not jealous of anyone. My only agenda is my country. I feel freer than I've ever felt before -- and with this freedom I can be most effective. At my age I don't want a suntan. I like being in the shadows." But from the shadows he can influence all the players in the sun. "I meet regularly with Netanyahu and talk to him all the time," said Peres. "He asked me to meet with President Obama before he did and prepare the ground. I talk with Abbas and Fayad a lot too. We've never had better leaders to deal with. Fayad is an economist; he understands the importance of producing real results for his people." I met with Peres at Beit HaNassi, the official presidential residence in Jerusalem (which is being given a green makeover). I had brought him my book on fearlessness, so our meeting began by talking about fear and the role it plays in undermining peace efforts. The conversation quickly turned to what great role models of overcoming fear our parents had been: my Greek mother, who hid Jewish girls in the Greek mountains during the German occupation and had to confront Nazi soldiers who came looking for them; his Polish father, who had volunteered for the Royal British Army, and was given shelter by Greek monks, who fed and hid him for two years. Peres' father was eventually captured and forced into hard labor at a concentration camp near Auschwitz, where one of his jobs was to take dead bodies out of the camp. At great risk, he and another prisoner used this position to help a few condemned prisoners escape, hidden among the dead. The family eventually made its way to what would become Israel. "I remember my father in later years," Peres told me, "singing Greek songs he had learned from the monks to his grandchildren." Peres is a powerful storyteller -- and the tale of his father's war experience has more cliffhangers than an old Saturday matinee serial -- so I felt almost sorry that I had to drag him back to the prosaic world of tripartite talks in Washington. "It was an important first step," he said of yesterday's meetings, "because, as leaders, the main problem that both Netanyahu and Abbas face are their own people asking, 'Why are you giving away so much?'" And, indeed, this morning the Israeli papers featured comments from Israeli politicians calling the summit "a shameful farce" and accusing Netanyahu of "humiliating Israel." Danny Danon, a member of the prime minister's Likud Party, said : "The summit proved that the peace process is not a Hollywood movie." On the other side, Abbas was accused by Hamas' leaders of "stabbing Palestinians in the back." "You are going to be criticized," said Peres. "But you have to give things away. Indeed, you must have the courage to keep giving things away. But we need to understand that the leaders' rhetoric is often for domestic consumption. So when Abbas makes statements that are difficult for Israelis to hear, I choose to judge him not by his rhetoric but by his actions." "The path to peace is never perfect," he continued. "Too many critics demand perfection. But what we are trying to achieve is to allow people to stay alive so they can dream of perfection. Better an imperfect peace than a perfect war." Given this clear preference for an imperfect peace, what, I asked, is the best way for Israel to deal with Iran? Meir Dagan, the director of Mossad, has said that Iran will not be in possession of a nuclear weapon for several years. So, I asked the president, why are Netanyahu and Ehud Barak pushing the U.S. to enforce sanctions by the end of the year that may lead to military action? What is the urgency? "We are not planning military action," he told me. That is the same thing Russian President Medvedev recently said that Peres had told him, an assertion that Israel's deputy foreign minister quickly disavowed, saying: "Medvedev may have misunderstood or misinterpreted. But, categorically, Israel is not taking any option off the table, as nobody should." But it was clear that what Medvedev reported is what Peres believes. "Sanctions are the best way we can help our Iranian brethren to build the pressure from within," he told me. "The Iranian people are way ahead of their leaders in power. Ahmadinejad is a throwback to the middle ages. He would have been at home presiding over a 12th century Inquisition. What's happening in Iran is that the Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah is now being devoured by its children." In Iran, it is the children's children -- today's young people -- who represent the best hope for a break with a barbaric regime. In Israel, Peres sees education and innovation as the key to his country's future. "Our brains," he told me, "are our only real resource. We have 100,000 cows in Israel but we produce more milk than Ethiopia, which has four million cows. Technology is what makes a difference. So, for us, it's all about science and education. That's why I want to turn the army into a university. I want to turn camps into campuses. We need to educate our soldiers, not just train them." But, I countered, brains without heart and empathy are never enough. After all, Germany in the 30s was a highly educated country. "Yes," he replied, "and we need to express our empathy in practical terms. That's what we are trying to do through the Peres Center for Peace. We've brought 5,500 gravely ill Palestinian children and their mothers to be treated in Israel. We've also trained Palestinian doctors in -- and provided equipment for -- fighting cancer." There is an enormous amount of philanthropy in Israel but the horror of what happened to civilians, especially children, in Gaza continues to overwhelm the good that's been done. I asked Peres whether Obama's tough love approach will, in the end, benefit Israel by helping to end the stalemate. "If there is love," he told me, "it's never really tough. But you must have love. At the end of the day, you have much more influence through generating goodwill than through applying pressure." Clearly, this is the strategy Shimon Peres has chosen for this final chapter of a remarkable life on the world stage that started when David Ben-Gurion handpicked him at age 24 as his deputy minister of defense and which he now hopes to conclude by doing everything he can -- in public but especially "in the shadows" -- to make real his mentor's vision of an Israeli state peacefully co-existing next to a Palestinian one. More on Barack Obama
 
Warren Buffett's Goldman Sachs Investment Nets Him $3 Billion Top
It's 12 months later and Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway is $3 billion richer. One year ago today, on September 23, 2008, with the financial world still reeling from the collapse of Lehman Brothers just days before, Buffett stunned Wall Street with a massive vote of confidence for Goldman Sachs. More on Goldman Sachs
 
James Lamond: Obama's UN Speech and American Leadership on Nuclear Disarmament Top
Today, in his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly, President Obama called for a new era of global engagement based on "mutual interests and mutual respect," listing four pillars for a safer world: non-proliferation and disarmament; the promotion of peace and security; the preservation of our planet; and a global economy that advances opportunity for all people. The president's emphasis on non-proliferation and disarmament is a continuation of his efforts to restore American leadership on one of the most pressing challenges we face as a country and world. The risk from nuclear weapons remains one of the greatest threats to American and international security and due to the nature of the threat, it is only through international agreements and engagement with the international community that the threat can be addressed. And because of America's unique position in the world, especially regarding nuclear weapons, we hold a special responsibility in leading the efforts to reduce and eliminate them. In his first major address on nonproliferation in Prague, President Obama recognized that American leadership is essential to spur this international effort. He said: So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. I'm not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly -- perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. Today, he echoed this promise, setting forth an ambitious agenda for the United States on nonproliferation: America will keep our end of the bargain. We will pursue a new agreement with Russia to substantially reduce our strategic warheads and launchers. We will move forward with ratification of the Test Ban Treaty, and work with others to bring the Treaty into force so that nuclear testing is permanently prohibited. We will complete a Nuclear Posture Review that opens the door to deeper cuts, and reduces the role of nuclear weapons. And we will call upon countries to begin negotiations in January on a treaty to end the production of fissile material for weapons. I will also host a Summit next April that reaffirms each nation's responsibility to secure nuclear material on its territory, and to help those who can't -- because we must never allow a single nuclear device to fall into the hands of a violent extremist. And we will work to strengthen the institutions and initiatives that combat nuclear smuggling and theft. In stark contrast, neoconservatives and conservatives in Congress have attempted to derail efforts at international engagement. Sen. Jon Kyl and neocon Richard Perle wrote an op-ed this summer, during President Obama's meeting with President Medvedev, where they said, "There is a fashionable notion that if only we and the Russians reduced our nuclear forces, other nations would reduce their existing arsenals or abandon plans to acquire nuclear weapons altogether." Yet a recent bipartisan Council on Foreign Relations task force, chaired by William Perry and Brent Scowcroft, disagrees and advocates for exactly the type of engagement and global leadership that President Obama is providing: The start of a new administration presents a fresh opportunity to reenergize international dialogue and cooperation on best security practices that would reduce the risk of loss of control of nuclear weapons or materials. Strategic discussions with other nuclear-armed states would also provide the United States with the necessary insight and foresight to determine how best to shape U.S. nuclear policy. In his speech, the president outlined a number of challenges that the world faces, and as he said, so far "the magnitude of our challenges has yet to be met by the measure of our action." The proliferation of nuclear weapons is one of the most dangerous and frightening of these challenges. Yet it also one the challenge that through American global leadership and international cooperation can be addressed. Today the president took a major step in that direction. More on UN General Assembly
 
John Wellington Ennis: Entrapping ACORN Top
ACORN, an umbrella organization of community groups that serves poor people in major cities across the country through housing, legal advocacy, family services, and higher wages, has lost all federal funding , after decades of working for low-income, disadvantaged Americans. That the House of Representatives has moved swiftly on anything is stunning in and of itself. More stunning, this is in response to a single independent report by conservative activists, with no follow-up investigation, no hearings, not even being provided a copy of the full, unedited video tapes shot by conservative activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles at a couple of ACORN offices. This is serious stuff here . This is not a game of gotcha, of cheap political points, of practical jokes -- not when this is money that helps in many real ways in impoverished communities around our country. It is vital to assess how this backlash was accepted so quickly in light of videos that were from someone whose films are funded by conservative backers , videos that misrepresented ACORN through editing and not disclosing other failed attempts at their desired response, which may well have been dubbed over, if O'Keefe would dare to release the unedited tapes in their real context to prove otherwise. A significant reason that this ACORN backlash has moved through Congress like Montezuma's Revenge is that this particular hidden camera stunt had the ring of "child prostitution" in it, which most politicians of either party would run from rather than dispute its irrelevance. "Anyone defending ACORN is for child prostitution" is an immediate fallacious meme. It's not like we're talking about the Catholic Church here, who still gets federal funding. Noteworthy is that there have not been any previous allegations between child prostitution and ACORN. In this weekend's LA Times , O'Keefe himself asserts that this ruse had nothing to do with prostitution , importing underage sex workers, or tax help for starting up a business. "Politicians are getting elected single-handedly due to this organization," he said. "No one was holding this organization accountable. No one in the media is putting pressure on them. We wanted to do a stunt and see what we could find." That's what this is really about: the elections, and the threat that has been hyped tirelessly that ACORN is in some way stealing your vote. Before I digress into the long campaign to smear ACORN because of its successful voter registration, I don't want to be accused of changing the subject to the elections. O'Keefe clearly stated that is what these stunts were about from the beginning. There is much to dispute in O'Keefe's quote. There is no evidence whatsoever that politicians are getting elected "single-handedly" by ACORN, and it is a wild exaggeration. Many claims of voter fraud are made, few instances ever occur. What has been distorted is that these allegations surround voter registrations, not actual votes, and that ACORN has regularly flagged forms that were incomplete, duplicate, or unverifiable. By law, anyone collecting voter registration forms has to turn in all that are used, even if they know the forms will not be processed. Far-fetched is the idea that no one in the media has been putting pressure on ACORN. That O'Keefe would even think ACORN could elect politicians single-handedly is because of FOX News' rampant coverage and conflation of ACORN conspiracies and allegations, to the extent that John McCain worked it into his stump speech by the end of the 2008 presidential election. The red herring of voter fraud as an excuse to deny others the right to vote is a well-worn claim. Voter suppression, specifically using the fear of "voter fraud" to advance voter suppression, is a topic I have explored and documented in-depth in my documentary Free For All! which you can see online for free right now. I also produced a video about ACORN with Video the Vote focusing on the fraud of voter fraud . David Iglesias, a Republican U.S. Prosecutor for New Mexico, investigated allegations of voter fraud throughout the state at the urging of Republican leaders, and when he found no evidence and would not prosecute falsely, he was fired, as asserted by David Iglesias in his testimony before Congress and emails recently declassified from Karl Rove . But again, I don't want to be accused of dodging the issue -- I am just looking to rebut the persistent falsehood which directly affected this kid's motivation to punk a community organization into losing millions of dollars to help the poor. O'Keefe is comparable to the FBI informant who brought down the Bronx terrorist plot -- only that there would not have been any actual plot were it not for this FBI informant actively recruiting mentally challenged Muslims from mosques for this plot, which apparently involved entrapping people who were dumb enough to listen to him. O'Keefe could well have actually attempted to show something about ACORN's voting registration controversies -- by speaking to registrants who admitted falsifying voter registration forms, or following up on who registered and who voted, or even interviewing ACORN directly. But none of those would have involved a minister's daughter dressing slutty, so you can't really blame him. So it came to pass that in this effort to dispute voter registration that Giles and O'Keefe conceived of the worst sounding scandal they could invoke, and traveled the country to ACORN offices across the country to find someone to take their time to humor them in the improv game of "Yes, and." And they eventually found some clueless ACORN employees, people far too eager to offer good customer service than employ any common sense. A couple of workers comply with O'Keefe's outlandish inquiry for underage brothels in dispensing tax advice. The well-publicized clips are shocking enough, and have been exploited as much as any couple of minutes of video can be. Glenn Beck taunted other networks for not covering it. Even Jon Stewart bunted on it, as if his guest interview were Sistah Souljah. As a potent testament to Stewart's "Most Trusted Newsman" gatekeeper status, the House next day voted to cut all federal funding for ACORN. It is worth noting here that what transpired on O'Keefe's videotape were conversations about hypothetical situations -- not actual prostitution, no actual crime, and not proof of an agency-wide policy or program involving prostitution or illegal immigrants. In fact, O'Keefe's experiment proves this -- that several other ACORN offices would not be ensnared by their absurd scenario, and turned away these provocateurs. One office in Philadelphia filed a police report because they were alarmed by the pair. Ironically, the only thing illegal in some of these tapes is that O'Keefe is filming illegally . States like California and Maryland have strict consent laws about surreptitious recording, which is why the news and entertainment industries have long figured out workarounds for hidden cameras. (Hint: Vegas.) As the crankosphere raves over how the Media didn't uncover this, it is worth pointing out that not only are the tactics against the standard of journalism, the lack of disclosure and misrepresentation pushes this expose well out of the range of journalism and in to the realm of entrapment. As it was, O'Keefe had to misrepresent a conversation where a woman stated up front that their inquiry was illegal, but played along because she figured it was a gag. Another misrepresentation by FOX was the breathless uproar about a woman who joked that she had killed her husband -- well after it was established that her husband was alive, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and others kept repeating the ridiculous claim for another day, demanding an investigation, since they obviously didn't have the resources as a major news network to confirm that this guy was alive. Nor is this O'Keefe's first foray into being the Tucker Max of conservative hacks. He pulled a stunt on Planned Parenthood entrapping receptionists and donation reps into conversations where he said he wanted to kill off black people, while his compatriot Lila Rose called and claimed to be underage to see if the clinics would report statutory rape. (Lila Rose just recently called for abortions to be held in public squares to create the mass gross-out that would therefore make them all illegal.) In a detailed response from Bertha Lewis and Steven Kest : O'Keefe has a sordid history of preying on receptionists and other front-line service workers for respected organizations. In 2008 he pulled a similar stunt on Planned Parenthood when he and another female colleague secretly recorded phone conversations with staff who handle fundraising calls at a few of the organization's affiliates. During the calls, O'Keefe pretended to be interested in setting up funds for low-income women in need of health care. Once the conversation hit a comfortable stride, O'Keefe would change his tune and explain, in explicit language, that his real intent was to target women of color in an effort to control minority populations. The audio recordings were edited in an attempt to make it appear that Planned Parenthood was complicit in accepting donations for racist purposes. O'Keefe's intent then, as it is now, was to entrap an organization whose mission he is ideologically opposed to, and masquerade his efforts as investigative journalism rather than the propaganda videos they are. And in college, O'Keefe showed women their place with his video wit, as reported by Media Matters : As a Rutgers University undergraduate, O'Keefe videotaped a classmate distributing to a Women in Culture and Society lecture a handout that emphasized that a "good wife always knows her place." And most tastefully of all, O'Keefe drove around posing as a Publisher's Clearing House van offering big checks to people, only to taunt them that the money is what was going to bank bailouts. Black people sure are suckers for that one! Do not-so-subtly racist or sexist stunts count as courts of law? Shouldn't there be a requirement that they at least be funny, besides mean for the sake of mean? Is this same adolescent accountability accepted by defense contractors, when Blackwater and its owner Erik Prince are implicated in murder ? He just keeps getting contracts . Rep. Darrel Issa from San Diego sent out a letter bragging of cutting ACORN's money for all of us, then asked us to give him money . San Diego has had political scandals that have led to actual convictions, not simply recordings of speculative conversations. Isn't it time to slash San Diego's federal funding? All of this is not to get off subject, though. Whatever angry conservatives want to insist the subject is. It is natural for many to shirk away from defending ACORN in light of this footage. But this particular exchange is not just cherry-picked -- it was planted, nurtured, and harvested, the latest to take down an organization that empowers the numbers that vote Republicans out of office. More on Glenn Beck
 
Stanley McChrystal: No Rift With Obama Over Afghan Strategy Top
WASHINGTON The senior American commander in Afghanistan on Wednesday rejected any suggestion that his grim assessment of the war had driven a wedge between the military and the Obama administration, but warned against taking too long to settle on a final strategy. More on Afghanistan
 

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