It's not
about being liberal or conservative anymore y'all. That is a hype offered by the fascist whores who want to confuse the people with lies while they turn this country into an aristocratic police state. Some people will say anything to attain power and money. There is no such thing as the Liberal Media, but the Corporate media is very real.
Paul Krugman does us a great service. He simplifies the current Health Insurance reform proposals.
The essence is really quite simple: regulation of insurers, so that they can't cherry-pick only
the healthy, and subsidies, so that all Americans can afford insurance.
Everything else is about making that core work. Individual mandates are a way to prevent gaming
of the system by people who don't sign up until they're sick; employer mandates a way to hold down
the on-budget costs by preventing a rush by employers to drop insurance; the public option a way to
create effective competition and hold costs down further.
But what it means for the individual will be that insurers can't reject you, and if your income
is relatively low, the government will help pay your premiums.
That's it. Any commentator who whines that he just doesn't understand it is basically saying
that he doesn't want to understand it.
[SOURCE:Paul Krugman | new york times | 1
August 2009]
Never underestimate the wiles and motives of the willfully ignorant.
Saturday, 1 August 2009 at 22h 30m 20s
Jonathan Alter Jonathan Swifts the Health Care Status Quo
This is excellent and informative. And funny. Here's a snippet:
I had cancer a few years ago. I like the fact that if I lose my job, I won't be able to get any
insurance because of my illness. It reminds me of my homeowners' insurance, which gets canceled
after a break-in. I like the choice I'd face if, God forbid, the cancer recurs—sell my house to pay
for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in treatment, or die. That's what you call a "post-existing
condition."
I like the absence of catastrophic insurance today. It meant that my health-insurance plan (one of
the better ones, by the way) only covered about 75 percent of the cost of my cutting-edge treatment.
That's as it should be—face cancer and shell out huge amounts of money at the same time. Nice.
I like the "lifetime limits" that many policies have today. Missed the fine print on that one, did
you? It means that after you exceed a certain amount of reimbursement, you don't get anything more
from the insurance company. That's fair.
Napolitano : Gates was improperly arrested, cop broke law.
The law says, unless [a police officer] witnesses a felony…or unless he has a piece of paper from a
judge—a search warrant or an arrest warrant—saying “you can go in that house,” he can’t go in the
house. So when Professor Gates said “no you can’t come in,” and the police went in anyway [the
police] violated the federal Constitution.
This was on Fox news too.
Monday, 27 July 2009 at 23h 19m 48s
How to Get the Job done in Washington
Damn straight. Make 'em an offer he canta refuse.
Monday, 27 July 2009 at 23h 7m 21s
Jon Stewart: most trusted newsman in America
Monday, 27 July 2009 at 22h 44m 39s
To put things into perspective.
“National New Home Sales, on a monthly basis, don’t even add up to half of the total foreclosure
activity in California alone in a single month.”
How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that
there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market
pressures. Some things we just didn’t do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but
it didn’t used to define us. But now it’s becoming all that we are.
Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a “war profiteer” was a bad
thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for
corporations. There are more private contractors in Iraq than American troops, and we pay them
generous salaries to do jobs the troops used to do for themselves – like laundry. War is not
supposed to turn a profit, but our wars have become boondoggles for weapons manufacturers and
connected civilian contractors.
Prisons used to be a non-profit business, too. And for good reason – who the hell wants to own a
prison? By definition you’re going to have trouble with the tenants. But now prisons are big
business. A company called the Corrections Corporation of America is on the New York Stock Exchange,
which is convenient since that’s where all the real crime is happening anyway. The CCA and similar
corporations actually lobby Congress for stiffer sentencing laws so they can lock more people up and
make more money. That’s why America has the world’s largest prison population – because actually
rehabilitating people would have a negative impact on the bottom line.
Read the rest by following the link:
[SOURCE:Bill Maher | Fog City
Journal | 26 July 2009]
Sunday, 26 July 2009 at 18h 37m 47s
Lest you think the long awaited Bull market run has arrived
What's pushing the stock market upward? Mainly, unexpectedly positive second-quarter corporate
profits. But those profits aren't being powered by consumers who have suddenly found themselves with
a lot more money in their pockets. The profits are coming from dramatic cost-cutting -- including,
most notably, payroll cuts. If a firm cuts its costs enough, it can show a profit even if its sales
are still in the basement.
The problem here is twofold. First, such profits can't be maintained. There's a limit to how much
can be cut without a business eventually disappearing -- becoming, in effect, a balance sheet in
space. Secondly, when businesses slash payrolls to show profits, consumers end up with even less
money in their pockets to buy the things businesses produce. Even if they hold on to their jobs,
they're likely to fear that they won't have the jobs for long, which causes them to retreat even
further from the malls.
Friday, 24 July 2009 at 23h 46m 26s
Pollution makes you stupid
A new study published in the journal Pediatrics links mothers' exposure to high levels of
environmental pollutants during pregnancy to a four-point drop in children's IQ scores by age
5.
"We know from many studies that the developing fetal brain is particularly vulnerable to neurotoxic
chemicals," says Perera. "One of the reasons is that it is rapidly developing. The defense
mechanisms present in the adult are not present in the fetus: these include detoxification and
repair enzymes." Exposure to pollution could cause direct genetic damage or epigenetic changes,
which are changes in how genes are expressed.
[SOURCE:Time magazine | Claudia
Wallis | 23 July 2009]