Oh crap. Yet more women's health "guidelines" from our corporate culture aimed at reducing costs.

Now, you should only get a Pap Smear every few years and not start till you’re in your 20s.

Under the headline “Negative Effects of Fewer Pap Smears Unknown,” the article reads:

Dr. Donnica Moore, president of Sapphire Women’s Health Group and an obstetrician-gynecologist by training, worried that the new guidelines might keep women who’ve had a normal Pap smear, or no symptoms, away from the doctor.

Massive 2005 takedown of The Moustache of Understanding.

Somebody post or comment on this, please!

That's how bad it is.

No indeed:

With unemployment among blacks at more than 15 percent, the N.A.A.C.P. will join several other groups on Tuesday to call on President Obama to do more to create jobs. ...

In speaking out on jobs, N.A.A.C.P. leaders say they are not trying to pick a fight with the first African-American president. Rather, they say, they are pressing Mr. Obama in an area where they believe he wants to be pressured.

“It’s time [NOW????] for us to really stoke this issue up,” said Hilary O. Shelton, the N.A.A.C.P.’s senior vice president for advocacy and policy. “We’re not so much trying to convince him to do something he doesn’t want to do, but urging him to move forward on an issue we have agreement on.”

Well, you go on believing that.

Ian Welsh:

Last year myself and Stirling both noted that what would be done by banks if they were bailed out is to horde their money, not lend it out cheap, and save it to buy up competitors, make leveraged plays and so on. That is EXACTLY what has happened. Exactly.

During a downturn, if you have money, you don’t want to lend it out for low gains when you can buy up competitors, cheap. You don’t want to lend it out cheap, when you can make leveraged plays off the bottom of a stock and commodity market which is bound to go up because trillions are being poured into it by central banks. You want to take that money, and buy things while they are cheap, not lend it out for 4 or 5% returns, when you can make many many times that.

Why, exactly, governments expect banks who have better ways to make money to act like retail banks who don’t have any other way to make money but lend out at prime +3 or 4 percent is beyond me. They think they’ll do it out of gratitude for being bailed out, or some sort of sense of civic duty? Most politicians may be stupid, venal and corrupt—but it’s that very greed and venality which means they should understand that banks will do no such thing.

Banks will do it only if they are forced to do it. Remove retail banking from investment banking, insurance and brokerage services, and disallow any risky games on the markets for retail banks. Remove all special facilities from non retail banks because Goldman Sachs should not be doing highly leveraged plays with free money from the Federal Reserve. And reinstitute serious leverage limits, not just for retail banks but for everyone.

As for retail banks, if they don’t lend to the public at rates approved of by the Federal Reserve and Congress, they too should lose their access to special facilities. Banks are given the valuable right to borrow money for almost nothing, and to, in effect, print money by lending out money they don’t have. Those are privileges which are given to them in the expectation that they will use them to benefit the economy. If they refuse to do so, they should lose the privileges.

None of this is rocket science. Those of us who predicted both the crisis and what the bungling of the crisis would cause, however, are precisely the people who are not listened to by those in power. Obama is having his jobs summit, and forget nobodies like me, he isn’t even inviting somebodies like Stiglitz and Krugman.

That's because predicting a crisis correctly disqualifies you for Serious work in Versailles. But, seriously, why would it be any different?

CJR quoting Bloomberg:

[WARREN] “I made a decision at the beginning that the experts wrecked this economy and the public has a right to know what’s going on,” she said. “It’s our economy on the line and the experts can’t be trusted. I want everyone to be part of the solution to how we want to change our economic world. If it’s risky or makes me look stupid to someone, so be it.”

Crazy talk!

Edward Harrison:

[T]here is an element of bad faith dealing here. The banks were given TARP funds and other, extensive types of support so they could support the economy via lending. Raising rates to beat the impact of new rules was predictable (the long lead time for implementation of the rules was no accident) but the brazenness of the banks is still remarkable.

Remind you of anything?

Too bad for the insurance industry that phrase was coined by The Residents, because the evidence shows if they adopted it, it could be truth in advertising (via sphere via Angry Bear):

It's federal law: All seriously injured emergency and trauma patients must be given equal lifesaving care, whether or not they can pay for it. But that's not happening, according to a new report. The study, conducted by Children's Hospital Boston research fellow Dr. Heather Rosen and colleagues from three other hospitals, found that uninsured trauma victims ages 18 to 30 are dying at an annual rate 89 percent higher than insured victims with identically severe injuries.

Shit sausage can kill you:

Reid's bill would gradually extend health insurance coverage to nearly all Americans by providing government subsidies to help pay premiums. Starting in 2013, it would ban insurance company practices such as charging more to those in poor health, or denying them coverage altogether.

So, when 45,000 people die each year without care, our Harry favors a "gradual" approach. Of course, there's a bright side:

Here's a link in case the video doesn't work.

  Read more…

"One voice", my sweet Aunt Fanny.

From the awesome Sweet Juniper, a beautiful story about a local gem.

An excerpt:

"While I wait with my notebook, Roy opens the door for a man in a wheelchair who needs a key made. An elderly woman needs a new rubber stopper for one leg of her walker (75 cents) and Ted treats her like she's a Hollywood starlet in a Rodeo Drive boutique. She puts down a few more dollars in layaway towards the crock pot they're holding for her behind the counter.

Maine Owl:

A whole new period of beating drums has emerged from stories of new "plots," the horrendous shooting spree of a madman at Fort Hood that wingnuttia [and Versailles generally] all too easily fits into the rubric of Terror War, and upcoming New York circus trials of tortured suspects that Attorney General Holder announced this week. It's all part and parcel of the fear mongering that has proven so useful in keeping our country a bloodthirsty, revenge-thirsty purveyor of violence not just since 9/11, but for decades.

I don't mind telling you that I'm tired of it. War is making us broke, hated, and subject to blowback. It's time for new approaches that begin with standing down the foreign occupations, and the machinations of Terror War on all fronts.

If only... If only....

John Calvin and James Madison.

Cue the wanking:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is open to having coffee with former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, whose new book about the 2008 presidential campaign is stirring controversy.

“I absolutely would look forward to having coffee,” Clinton said from Singapore Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

No one could ever have predicted! From the NYT :

Drug Makers Raising Prices Before Reform

In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992.

And I sure will have a lot of trouble paying for those drugs on my credit card that--thanks to the convenient lag in implementing credit "reform"--now has 29 % interest!

Not sure why the embed code doesn't work. Here's the link. It's well worth a listen.   Read more…

Wired:

The Treasury Department wants more than $500,000 to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, a fee an attorney on the case suggested Tuesday might be one of the largest bills of its kind.

“I have not seen one that has been larger,” said Noah Wood, a Missouri attorney suing the government to comply with his nearly four-year-old FOIA request.

[...]Still, the government wants Wood to pay $522,886 for the records. The original tab was more than $26,000, but after some revisions in what Wood was seeking, the government upped the ante — even though not all information sought would be forthcoming, according to the bill.

Eye of the Storm:

now first of all the legal approach to these cases has been an insane tissue of contradictions. so: the opponents of a civilian trial say: 9.11 was an act of war, not a crime. well then, he is a prisoner of war or an alleged war criminal and must under treaty be treated as a prisoner of war or an alleged war criminal: treated according to the geneva conventions and tried in the hague, for example. but no: he's not a soldier, not a general: terror is not war (these same people say during a different three-minute slice): he's not in uniform; does not represent a state. now this combination of assertions (for short, p and not-p) is why we can do exactly anything we feel like to him at any time, for example, waterboard him hundreds of times over a period of months, or torture him continuously for years. that is, as any logician will tell you, anything follows from a contradiction.

Here:

Education

* Bank Street College of Education

Industry

Gambling & Casinos

Haw.

McClatchy's Sacramento Bee:

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District sued Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and 45 other financial firms Thursday in Sacramento federal court for allegedly rigging bids in bond-derivatives markets and defrauding the utility.

SMUD joined at least six city and county governments in California that already have filed similar lawsuits arising from a federal investigation made public in 2006. Many other public entities around the country have joined in lawsuits seeking class-action status.

Not a dead Polish economist but a live Yale professor. I tend to resist totalizing theories, but the peroration caught my eye:

Andrew Sorkin:

Many of the most senior members of management on Wall Street now consider themselves “survivors,” as if they were cancer survivors or something. That’s the word they use. While many of them are self-aware enough to politely nod at the notion that they received help and were part of the problem, they seem reluctant to acknowledge they were “rescued” or “saved.” There are probably a few exceptions, so I shouldn’t paint them all with the same brush, but on the whole, that was the takeaway.

I recognize that that answer will only increase public outrage. But it is true.

Funny. I guess I'd see it differently; the banksters aren't "cancer survivors"--

Why? His vote in favor of The Insurance Industry Profit Margin Protection Act of 2009.