The bottom line is that we have no protections against the arbitrary and discriminatory policies of the health insurance companies.I wonder when President Obama will live up to his many promises on health care reform, and work to require Health Insurance Companies to cover pre-existing conditions.
The Democratic Party should not support this man's run for office. We should all support a challenger. Perhaps Joe Sestak?At several other points, Specter did lay out areas in which he had "diverged materially from the Republican line," including raising the minimum wage, the stimulus package and abortion rights. But he went to great lengths to insist that he did not, as reported, tell Democratic leadership or the White House that he would be a loyal party member.
"I did not say," he told host David Gregory, "I would be a loyal Democrat. I did not say that."
Fuck that! We are not "falling in line" if Obama replaces a liberal judge with a mushy centrist who will collapse on essential issues such as consumer rights, gay rights, women's rights or human rights. The President will find that as he continues to adopt Bush administraiton positions, he will begin adopting the popularity of the former President as well.But the process to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter could pump new oxygen into national debates over abortion, immigration, minority rights, limits to privacy and other matters that often animate large grassroots organizations, which have been comparatively quiet in recent months.
"There's no doubt these debates are coming back," said Matt Bennett, vice president of the centrist Democratic group Third Way. They might create more noise than suspense, he said, because there is little doubt that the Democratic-dominated Senate will confirm Obama's eventual choice. Liberal activists will "fall in line" even if they are not entirely satisfied with the administration's progress on their pet issues, Bennett said.
Authorities executed the 23-year-old woman Friday in northern Iran without informing her lawyer or allowing the family to be present, said the lawyer, Mohammad Mostafaei. She was 17 at the time the crime was committed, in 2003.An innocent girl took the fall for her boyfriend. He gets 10 years, she is killed.
...The prisoner executed Friday, Delara Darabi, initially pleaded guilty to killing her father's cousin, but later retracted her confession and said her boyfriend carried out the killing. She told a judge that she had initially confessed because her boyfriend told her that, as a minor, she would not be executed and she could save him from being put to death, her lawyer said.
Her boyfriend, who was 19 at the time of the killing, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for complicity in murder.
...Mostafaei said the court did not seriously consider his arguments in the woman's defense.
For example, he said, Darabi was left-handed, while all the evidence suggests the crime was committed by someone who was right-handed.
The lawyer said Darabi called her parents just moments before the execution. He quoted her as saying, "Oh, Mother, I see the hangman's noose in front of me. They are going to execute me. Please save me."This is murder, plain, simple, brutal. The US State Department (contact info) should call Iran out on this. Iran deserves to be shamed in front of the international community.
Justice David Souter, who was among the most active questioners in defense of the Voting Rights Act, said Coleman's claim seemed "to deny the empirical reality" of the contemporary instances of bias Congress documented in the states.And quite the empirical reality there is. Take Voter ID laws, for example:
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested by her questions that she, too, believed the law was necessary to prevent backsliding in voting rights. Similar sentiment was expressed by the two other liberal justices, John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer.
Texas is considering such a law. Unfortunately, these types of laws typically adversely affect the poor, people of color, people with disabilities and the elderly. Some estimates suggest that the number of eligible voters without acceptable identification is as high as 12 percent.Note that Coleman, the attorney arguing against the Voting Rights Act, is representing a district in Texas. Voter ID legislation is one of many scurrilous tactics employed by the right wing to suppress votes. And this is done precisely because a legal avenue opened up:
So what do the conservative judges say?The U.S. Supreme Court has said that states may require identification other than a voter registration card. That doesn't mean Texas should. It would be wrong to make voting more difficult for law-abiding citizens without good reason. Having enough votes to do it isn't a good reason.
The more conservative justices appeared to strongly believe the law has run its course. Chief Justice John Roberts said of Congress' repeated renewal of the 1965 act: "At some point, it begins to look like it's going to go on forever."Just what universe does Justice Scalia live in?
Justice Antonin Scalia said that much of the evidence of government bias against black people and other minorities was documented "a long time ago."
Defending the law were Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal and Debo Adegbile of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.16 thousand pages of testimony!Both lawyers emphasized the difficulty of bringing individual voting bias cases and said Congress wanted to ensure that unfair policies could be caught before they took effect.
Katyal said Congress compiled 16,000 pages of testimony and determined that its work in this area was not done.
this insane "we've got them right where we want them" whining from the right and the pseudo-libertarians sems desperate to imply that Democrats are inherently just as big a pile of screw-ups as Republicans, so naturally they're going to crash and burn just as badly as... umm... they did.Ha!It's like a bunch of arsonists telling firemen as they rush into a building "you guys suck. That building is totally on fire."
Obama is so obsessed with batting down his domestic “enemies” that it doesn’t matter if America’s real enemies are strengthened in the process. What was Obama’s goal in releasing the CIA torture memos, against the advice of his top terrorism and intelligence advisors?There isn't even a trace of self-awareness or accuracy to be found. While Bush did attack political enemies domestically (and enemies of choice internationally) at the documented expense of our national security, Obama has focused his energy on solving problems directly and at their source. The CIA torture memos were already public.
Citizens engaged in a grassroots Tea Party movement clearly are perceived as a bigger threat to Obama than evil forces intent on destroying America.The Tea Party "movement" has been funded and organized by all the usual players intent on using astroturfing strategies to fake grassroots support for an otherwise unsustainable politics. It is clear that the so called PUMA movement is a part of that right wing strategy.
The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits.The cruelty towards these animals and alarming lack of health concerns are quite apparent. But how they treat the refuse from these pigs is nothing less than startling (emphasis mine):
Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs' immune systems.
When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.
Just how toxic is this stuff? Fucking scary as hell, you go in you don't come out toxic (emphasis mine):Smithfield's holding ponds -- the company calls them lagoons -- cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.
Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as "overapplication." This can turn hundreds of acres -- thousands of football fields -- into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.
The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker's cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker's older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker's father dived in. They all died in pig shit.That can't be good for the people stuck living nearby, can it?
People who breathe the shit-infused air suffer from bronchitis, asthma, heart palpitations, headaches, diarrhea, nosebleeds and brain damage. In 1995, a woman downwind from a corporate hog farm in Olivia, Minnesota, called a poison-control center and described her symptoms. "Ma'am," the poison-control officer told her, "the only symptoms of hydrogen-sulfide poisoning you're not experiencing are seizures, convulsions and death. Leave the area immediately." When you fly over eastern North Carolina, you realize that virtually everyone in this part of the state lives close to a lagoon.At least they aren't feeding pigs dead pigs:
Millions of factory-farm hogs -- one study puts it at ten percent -- die before they make it to the killing floor. Some are taken to rendering plants, where they are propelled through meat grinders and then fed cannibalistically back to other living hogs.That's just begging for prions to spread.
Is this the novel virus that will kill millions around the world, as pandemics did in 1918, 1957 and 1968?Is this an example of irresponsible fear-mongering on the part of the AP? Can we get away with sweeping statements as long as they are framed as questions?The short answer is it's too soon to tell.
This is a cruel joke at the expense of the American people. We voted - heavily - for change. We voted in people we expected to uphold the law, human rights, and our constitution. Instead we've gotten mollycoddled fopdoodles with all the bravery of an icterine soaked whelp with its belly up and throat exposed. Spineless just doesn't begin to describe the kind of people who abandon respect for the rule of law and the people literally tortured through it for the sake of respect from an opposition so entrenched against you they speak of revolution at a moderate tax increase for the wealthiest Americans. You may was well succor a brick wall in hopes it will bend out of the way when you attempt to run through it.At a meeting of top Democrats at the White House Wednesday night, President Obama told Congressional leaders that he did not want a special inquiry, which he said would potentially steal time and energy from his ambitious policy priorities, and could mushroom into a wider distraction by looking back at other aspects of the Bush years.
The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and other top Senate Democrats endorsed Mr. Obama’s view on Thursday, telling reporters that they preferred to wait for the results of an investigation by the Senate intelligence committee expected sometime “late this year.”
Mr. Obama's agenda should be derailed if this is the true face and heart of it. The President would do well to find the courage to take to heart the words of Fox News anchor Shep Smith:“I don’t think there is a division among Democrats,” Mr. Reid said. “Justice must be served. Retribution should not be a part of what we’re talking about.” He said that it was premature to act without facts to be provided by the intelligence committee. “They will make a public report,” he said. “I hope that it will come toward the end of this year.”
But Ms. Pelosi, at a news conference attended by many youngsters visiting the Capitol for Take Your Child to Work Day, reiterated her position – shared by many of the more liberal Democrats in the House – that a panel should be named to investigate the Bush administration legal memos that allowed waterboarding and other harsh techniques.
The division between top Democrats threatened to open up a debate that would distract from Mr. Obama’s agenda one way or another.
We are America! We do not fucking torture!AMEN.
Right. Especially during the civil war. We endorsed secession heartily.We as a nation have endorsed secession all along. Think of all of the secession of the countries and the republics from the Soviet system. We were delighted. We love it.
Sign the Petition here.Real Virginians are hurting. Instead of providing relief to families and businesses, the Republican-dominated House of Delegates turned their backs on us. Last week, following the lead of gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, they rejected $125 million in federal money aimed at stimulating our economy and helping struggling Virginians. Stand up for displaced workers and our tax money: Tell lawmakers to go back to Richmond and do the right thing.
Where was this criticism when Bush was in office?Name a major political story broken by a White House correspondent. A thorough debunking of the Bush case for Iraqi WMD? McClatchy Newspapers' State Department and national security correspondents. Bush's abuse of signing statements? The Boston Globe's legal affairs correspondent. Even Watergate came off The Washington Post's Metro desk.
Here are some stories that reporters working the White House beat have produced in the past few months: Pocket squares are back! The president is popular in Europe. Vegetable garden! Joe Biden occasionally says things he probably regrets. Puppy!
While the bubbly and brilliant 69-year-old professor is a darling of Democrats, Warren has become the scourge of conservative Republicans, who question her panel’s exploration of more-liberal approaches such as nationalization and bank liquidation.They better step the hell off. Do these fuckers honestly think we are going to take their word over Warren's? She's the definition of a political outsider:
Financial services lobbyists, who’ve long disliked Warren for highlighting predatory lending and abusive credit card fees, argue that she’s using her post to push her own, anti-industry agenda.
“A number of people wonder if this is the new Warren commission or the congressional oversight panel,” said Wayne Abernathy, executive director for financial institutions policy at the American Bankers Association. “It’s looking more like the former than the latter.”
Warren, who proudly calls herself an “outsider’s outsider,” is comfortable announcing those kinds of very uncomfortable figures, even if that means taking some political punches.While they represent the epitome of corruption, greed, and insiders consolidating power and wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of all. Republicans and Clinton-style new-Democrats de-regulated like bunnies, and the banks stepped in with irresponsible levels of greed and fiscal blindness. And now we have the current financial crises.
“I’ve never held a government job, and I’m not looking for a government job after this,” she said. “I’m not out there trying to go and find my next landing spot.”
Since then, Democrats have jumped on an idea that Warren first proposed two years ago, introducing legislation that would create a Financial Product Safety Commission charged with overseeing new consumer lending and investment products. Warren argues that a commission modeled after the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which oversees the security of toys and small appliances, would have kept the subprime mortgages that sparked the current recession off the market in the first place.Because in Wallison's view, innovation only comes with predatory financial products.
“It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house,” Warren wrote in Harvard Magazine last May. “But it is possible to refinance your home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting your family out on the street — and the mortgage won’t even carry a disclosure of that fact.”
President Obama backed the proposal on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” last month, using the toaster analogy to explain the idea.
The commission idea is opposed by conservatives and financial services firms, who argue it would prohibit innovation and impose unnecessary additional regulations on financial services companies.
“We wouldn’t be able to invest in anything the commission didn’t decide was absolutely safe for us,” said Peter Wallison, co-director of the American Enterprise Institute’s program on financial policy studies. “There wouldn’t be any innovation and there wouldn’t be any new ideas.”
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M - Th 11p / 10c Clusterfu#@k to the Poor House - Goldman Sachs' Connections
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Ian is absolutely right. The title of his post is "Obama’s Refusal to investigate torture tells us that America is a land of men, not laws". I'd go further. Obama, in refusing to prosecute the anyone from the former administration for the laws they clearly broke, is actively assisting in the breakdown of the rule of law.I don’t think America stands for anything particularly noble at this point. I’d be happy to be convinced otherwise, so if commenters have ideas, I’d like to hear them.
I should add, on the original question I’m willing to bet that within a couple years we’ll find out that whatever he may have said about stopping torture, torture has continued and will continue under the Obama administration. Less of it, doubtless, but still torture.
"I'm not sure if it's good to have freedom or not," Chan said. "I'm really confused now. If you're too free, you're like the way Hong Kong is now. It's very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic."
Chan added: "I'm gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we're not being controlled, we'll just do what we want."
Chan's comments drew applause from a predominantly Chinese audience of business leaders in China's southern island province of Hainan.
"He's insulted the Chinese people. Chinese people aren't pets," Hong Kong pro-democracy legislator Leung Kwok-hung told The Associated Press. "Chinese society needs a democratic system to protect human rights and rule of law."
Another lawmaker, Albert Ho, called the comments "racist," adding: "People around the world are running their own countries. Why can't Chinese do the same?"
In less than two years there have been four brutal teenage deaths resulting from homophobic bullying. Just last week Carl Walker, an eleven year old in Springfield, Massachusetts , who never actually identified as gay, hung himself with an extension cord from the 3rd floor landing of his home. This was after his mother repeatedly implored his school to do something about the homophobic bullying he experienced. Last summer a transgendered teenager, Angie Zapata, was brutally murdered in Greeley, Colorado. Last February Eric Mohat, a 17-year old student from Ohio, who also never identified as gay, committed suicide after being repeatedly harassed with anti-gay epithets such as "fag" and "homo." His school went to trial last month as a lawsuit was filed by his parents, not because they want the school's money, but because they want to know why the school didn't respond to several requests for action. Also, last year, Lawrence King, a fifteen year old who identified as gay, was shot in the head twice in his English class. He died a few days later.This homophobia isn't just appearing out of nowhere, and we need to stop dancing around the issue. When nutjobs proclaim you cannot follow your faith, that you are going to hell, that you are a crime against nature, how the fuck will that not have an impact? How will the flocks of these so called houses of God (who is supposed to be LOVING) treat gay people when they view them as satanic aberrations?
The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad
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The report makes no claim that veterans at large would seek out extremist groups, or would cause violence. It just makes the fairly logical conclusion that extremist groups who might be seeking to cause violence, but don't have the skills, may seek out those who do have military training in addition to the usual profile of the types of people they seek out.Of course violent conservative extremists are trying to recruit from the military, they are after their skills.
So far I'm liking blogger just a little more, in terms of how customizable it is.
The editor is buggy, but then, wordpress has the same problem. Its just a matter of choosing which quirk you want to encounter. Either way, you'll be going into html mode sooner or later.
That is, if you rock out with formatting.
Oh no I am quoting myself, is that poor form?
So the blockquote button in the editor utterly failed. Is it because I'm using Opera?
