8 in 10 Americans back a public option for health insurance

Need a tutorial on money laundering? Here's a fascinating podcast about the scam behind the crazy. Lowest morals in town! It's insaaaaane!



And another podcast from the same source confirms that all your dislike of and dark suspicions about MySpace not only were correct, they reflect a lack of imagination on your part.

MySpace Was Born Of Total Ignorance. Also Porn And Spyware

I remember when JFK and RFK were killed. I was very young when I watched the JFK funeral, but I remember John, Jr.'s salute, and it hit me hard when the son died so senselessly years later. Bobby was shot early in the morning and I remember standing on line to go into my Junior High classroom that day and trying to find someone as upset as I was, but the only response I got was, "Who is he?"

Teddy lived to grow old and to see so much more tragedy. He also had to redeem himself. I know a lot of people will say that he could not and that Mary Jo Kopechne's death overshadows everything else he accomplished. I was unsympathetic to him myself for many years. But sometimes age brings compassion or understanding, or maybe just a realization that we all have crimes to atone. I'd like to think that her memory helped inspire his achievements.

His final, ironic tragedy was that cancer took him before he could achieve his goal of providing health care for all Americans. We need to pass a good bill and name it after him.

Sitting in a car for almost 2 hours + helping to move kid into third-floor dorm room in a building without an elevator + sitting in a car for almost 2 hours = legs that do not want to walk, bend, or do much of anything else

Insurance companies have near monopolies in many states.

Bonus fact: The senior Senator from my state needs a dictionary: He's against a public option because he wants people to have choice.

Special bonus fact: Tom Coburn is a heartless bastard. Apparently, people who can't get health insurance should beg from their neighbors because government "is not the answer." (Except when he "diagnosed" Terry Schiavo from a video tape and got the whole damn federal government involved in a family decision.)

Wow, that was a cracky fun episode of True Blood, after too many episodes that were so lame the only fun was mocking them.

( spoilers )

No show is really grabbing me from a fandom perspective, but I've enjoyed Eureka again this season, although M:TNG-2 and I are ( more spoilers )

Royal Pains is still not managing to be actually good, but Burn Notice delivered again. Series like that owe a huge debt to the supporting characters and Sam and Madeleine are always entertaining.

I want to watch the last season of Chuck. I missed most of it, but M-TNG-1 made me sit down and watch the final episodes when she was home. She has her first crush on an older man, Scott Bakula, and wanted me to explain the "Oh, Boy," references.

Hmm, anything else? Mr. M is fonder of Being Human than I am. I'm waiting for the next season of Dexter for some real fun, and for the Star Trek DVD in November so I can drive Mr. M crazy by watching it over and over. He just doesn't get it.

Tomorrow is my 25th wedding anniversary, and sometime after noon I will be heading off to an undisclosed location with a cute guy who speaks with an accent. Have a great weekend.

A U.S. Senator wants to destroy the Canadian prescription drug system. At least, that's what he seems to be saying.



I believe re-importation will cause the pricing system world-wide that the big drug companies exploit to collapse. Right now the big drug companies are able to charge very different prices in different countries, and of course we pay the highest price of all. If they did that, like they do now, but then we can write off to Canada, and pass certain safety provisions, and get drugs from there - guess what? That system implodes. That system can't survive. So my ultimate goal, in terms of re-importation, is causing that system to collapse, so there's a true, world-wide price for a drug. And that might - wouldn't might - that would increase the cost in Canada, that would dramatically decrease the cost in the US.

Does that theoretical reduction in costs include adult diapers, Dave?

And setting aside the workability of your plan, why is it superior to empowering the US government to negotiate for lower drug prices on behalf of seniors and eventually others?

The former head of corporate communications for a big insurance company says it's the insurance companies that are running the death panels.

"For 20 years, I defended what some might call "death panels," operated by the health insurance industry, which denied health care coverage to people who needed it."



That video is based on the true story of Patsy Bates.

More from Wendell Potter:

Potter, who is from Tennessee, read in a local paper about a free healthcare expedition being held in Wise County, Virginia. He decided to check it out. Walking through the fairground gates, Potter saw hundreds of people waiting in the rain while physicians attended to patients in animal stalls or on gurneys lying on the rain-soaked pavement. Tents had been pitched across the fairground lawns, creating a scene “like something that could’ve been happening on a battlefield or in a war-torn country.” Tears mixed with the rain to cloud Potter’s vision. “What I thought was: ‘Is this the United States?’ It was so remote from my reality. It just seemed impossible.”

..."[E]very person who works for a for-profit company knows that the company has to meet Wall Street’s expectations. Every manager of the company has to pull his or her weight to make sure he and his team are doing all that they can to help the company meet that objective. That includes medical directors. Same with the nurses. They know what the company has to do to meet Wall Street’s expectations and to stay in the good graces of investors...It doesn’t have to be stated directly to them that you will be paid a particular bonus if you deny X number of claims; it’s known, and it’s part of the culture."

For keswindhover

Title: All Wet

Author: Miss Murchison

Rating: G

Disclaimer: All characters are the property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, etc. Only the lame plots and dialogue herein are mine.

Summary: Sequel to my Tara/Anya stories, Resistance is Useless and Sitting on the Dock of eBay. When I left them, Anya was excited about a new money-making scheme. Things are turning out about as successfully as Tara feared. About 1300 words.

( All Wet )

Medicare is a government program.

Bonus fact: One in four Republicans don't know that.

Or not seriously. Because it looks like what was changed was his age, possibly to make it look like he was born when Hawaii was still a territory or to tempt birthers into writing ridiculous articles like this. I saw the story linked on ontd_political and started poking around.

My only excuse for making even a rudimentary effort to look into this is that I'm watching Rachel Maddow and it's something to do with my hands while I listen.

According to the Wayback Machine, the page listed him as 45 on April 10, 2007. There aren't enough saved pages there to show when it changed, but the Spanish page was still correct on November 3, 2007.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070410043022/http://www.myspace.com/barackobama

The current page doesn't appear to be active, but someone signed in yesterday. Hmmm.

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:N3QPK9vVkTIJ:www.myspace.com/barackobama+obama+my+space&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

And why am I paying attention to the freaking birthers? Not to mention My Space.

*really needs to take up knitting or something*

The majority of personal bankruptcies in this country are caused by medical debts.

Bonus fact: More than three-quarters of those people had health insurance at the beginning of the bankrupting illness.

Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States.

The subject gave you fair warning that this will be a ranty post, so if you're still reading you deserve what comes next.

I thought the birthers were bad, but I'm more disgusted with what I've been seeing and hearing from the "deathers" the past few weeks. The lies and distortions were bad enough when they were coming from the fringe, but now we have people like Palin, Gingrich and Grassley "making shit up" and talking about death panels, when they previously supported initiatives like the one to pay for consultations on end-of-live care that they're now pointing to as "evidence" Obama wants to kill grandmas and babies. We cannot have a real discussion because these assholes are more concerned with making the other side look bad and keep the money they get from insurance companies and big pharma than doing what they were elected to do. (And, in Palin's case, bailing on the job in order to whine on Facebook.)

Today I went to a town hall held by my Congressman. He's a progressive, and I went primarily to support him, as did most of the other people I saw there. We arrived too late to get inside, so I filled out a card with my comments and talked to a few people outside. One woman with four small children told me she had no health insurance and didn't want it. "We take care of our own," she said. "You could wind up bankrupt," I told her bluntly, but, I hope, politely. "I've seen it." (True. I've spent a lot of time working with people in financial distress and disability and bankruptcy usually go hand-in-hand.) "That's our choice," she said. I left.

"We take care of our own," made me think of Cain's line, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Who are your "own," ma'am? Your family? Obviously, only those close to you. You have no responsibility to the rest of society, then? Society has enough responsibility for you that if someone in your family becomes seriously ill or injured and you declare bankruptcy, we will step in and I, among, others will pay for your care.

Here comes the really ranty part of the post. (Yes, worse than I've already said.) I don't know this woman's religious beliefs, if any, but I've heard similar statements from people who are convinced nothing terrible will ever happen to them or those close to them. This is a psychological defense against fear, of course, but its consequences can be appalling. One such person approached my quadriplegic brother and told him he was in a wheelchair because he'd let the devil into his heart. If he truly accepted Jesus, he would walk again.

"We take care of our own," is a fine philosophy if we are talking about society promoting the general welfare, as our Constitution says. But when it really means, "screw everyone else," we wind up the way we are now, with an infant mortality rate worse than dozens of other countries, including Cuba, and one of the lowest life expectancy rates in the developed world.

ETA: Thanks to curiouswombat, What the British see when they look at our system. Be sure to check out the statistics at the end of the article.

Congressional town halls must be some alternate universe where "security" has a meaning not reported at dictionary.com.

Eric Kleefeld of TPM reports:

Officer Marcus Gonzalez, who is the the spokesman for the police in Douglas, Arizona, has now filled me in on exactly what happened at that meet-and-greet last week by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) -- the one where somebody dropped a gun.

"Apparently, there was no police report taken, the reason being that it was an accidental drop of a gun," Gonzalez explained to me. "Apparently, a male gentleman that went to the meeting had a gun holstered on his side. And when he sat down, it fell out of his holster."

Police were not called to the scene, but were already there to maintain public order and provide security for the Congresswoman. They immediately looked into this, and it turned out the man owned the gun and was legally carrying it -- like our friend in New Hampshire, he was legally carrying the weapon out in the open, and did not need any concealed-carry permit.

"We're not really conducting an investigation on this, because there's not really an investigation to conduct," said Gonzalez.

I made sure to ask Officer Gonzalez whether the gun went off when it fell. It did not.

I've only visited Arizona once, and I didn't notice any "male gentlemen" wandering around shedding firearms in their wake. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention.

Man carrying gun is let into Obama town hall event

MSNBC just aired footage of the crowd gathering at the Obama town hall meeting on health care that's supposed to start later today in New Hampshire and pointed out one man in a group holding protest signs with a gun in a holster on his hip. Apparently not a law officer, but a civilian.

...important to note, the gun-toting protestor was holding a sign referencing the Jefferson quote: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants." It's a well known quote from one of the archetypal founding fathers. And in itself it's part of the American heritage, something that echoes with Jefferson's always ambivalent and frequently dilettantish attitude toward political violence. But in the context of these townhall excesses and while carrying a firearm at a presidential event, it's quite a menacing statement, in as much as it is about the need to kill tyrants.

WTF?!!?
...The local police tell MSNBC that the man is legally carrying the gun, is nowhere near where the President will be, and is "under constant surveillance."

Dem Congressman's office vandalized with a swastika

Rep. David Scott (D-GA) told Fox News that his district office in Smyrna, Georgia, was vandalized with a four-foot swastika.

"We woke up this morning and my staff called me and said there was a swastika, a Nazi sign, painted on the sign," said Scott. "Which of course is very unfortunate, and I just feel very bad about it -- and really feel bad about the person who did it."

Scott -- who pointed out that he is the only House member to belong to the Blue Dogs, the New Democrats and the Congressional Black Caucus -- had a widely-viewed tumultuous town hall meeting late last week (video at source)

There's more, but I haven't got the stomach to post it. I'm going to try to watch the town hall while I have lunch, but I hope they've got a bulletproof panel between Obama and the crowd.

Not All Socialist Countries are Alike
by Nate Silver

This is Canada:



It's a big, pretty country to our north where they like hockey and talk like that weird uncle of yours from Minnesota.

This is the United Kingdom:



Some people are having trouble keeping these countries straight!

More pictures and the full story here.

I have very mixed emotions about the birther movement. There's anger, because the refusal to believe Obama is a citizen has obvious roots in racism, conscious or not; there's a bit of sorrow that anyone could accept the pile of illogic, bad legal info, and cherry-picked "evidence" that is the Birther Bible; and there's amusement because most of it is just too silly for words, including the fact that their chief spokesperson is named Orly. ORLY?

This article falls into the third category.

A federal judge in D.C. recently dismissed a grand-jury indictment charging President Obama with treason. You may not have been aware that the President had actually been indicted for treason, which normally would be fairly big news. But it appears that this indictment was technically defective because the "grand jury" that issued it had not been convened by a court or prosecutor.

( It was just some guys who got together and decided to indict the President. )

"Sublunary" is a wonderful word. I must use it more often, even if it means writing werewolf fic.