Telegraph:

Here's something rather rotten from the State of Denmark. Its government yesterday unveiled official research showing that two-year-old children are at risk from a bewildering array of gender-bending chemicals in such everyday items as waterproof clothes, rubber boots, bed linen, food, nappies, sunscreen lotion and moisturising cream.

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Mel Watt, from NC's 12th district, is leading the charge this time. Coincidentally, I'm sure, Bank of America headquarters is also in his district.

If you disagree with this, I suggest you let Mr. Watt, and anyone who has not cosponsored this bill know.

Bloomberg:

Representative Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who has called for an end to the Federal Reserve, said legislation he introduced to audit monetary policy has been “gutted” while moving toward a possible vote in the Democratic-controlled House.

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I think "Department of all the Damn Gall" is an understatement.

AP:

The Food and Drug Administration has allowed drugs for cancer and other diseases to stay on the market even when follow-up studies showed they didn’t extend patients’ lives, say congressional investigators.

A report due out Monday from the Government Accountability Office also shows that the FDA has never pulled a drug off the market due to a lack of required follow-up about its actual benefits — even when such information is more than a decade overdue.

When pressed about that policy, agency officials said they have no plans to get more aggressive.

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Reuters:

On the auction block in Detroit: almost 9,000 homes and lots in various states of abandonment and decay from the tidy owner-occupied to the burned-out shell claimed by squatters.

Taken together, the properties seized by tax collectors for arrears and put up for sale last week represented an area the size of New York’s Central Park. Total vacant land in Detroit now occupies an area almost the size of Boston, according to a Detroit Free Press estimate.

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Didn't want to let this one slip by:

In other healthcare news, the watchdog group Media Matters has revealed one of CNN’s regular on-air commentators is on the payroll of America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry lobbying group opposed to the current healthcare reform efforts. Until yesterday, CNN had never acknowledged Alex Castellanos’s affiliation. Media Matters revealed that Castellanos’s consulting firm, National Media, recently placed over $1 million of TV advertising for America’s Health Insurance Plans. Castellanos’s company has also done work for the Federation of American Hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry group PhRMA, and the HCA Sunrise Hospital.

McClatchy:

Sex trade is thriving in Costa Rica

Translation:

Economic crisis forces women to sell their bodies in Costa Rica

The happy double entendre talk--"a stimulus effect on Costa Rica's famous sex-tourism industry", "popular prostitution hot spots", "Costa Rica's position as an international hub for prostitution" eventually gives way (perhaps the reporter got his rocks off and decided to do his job) to some harsh realities:

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Once again I want to day how delighted I am to see HCAN join the Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care in direct action against health insurance parasites.

So what did Cigna management do over its summer vacation? Well, on August 7 John Murabito dumped 13,500 shares of Cigna. On August 14 Peter Larson dumped 3,500 shares and dumped another 998 on August 31. On August 14 Edward Hanway dumped 183,693 shares. A lot of stock dumping on August 14, anyone with any ideas as to why that might have been?

While some of us spent September advocating for single payer, the board of directors of Wellpoint spent the month relieving themselves of the stock of a company that they apparently believe is poorly management.

On September 2 John Cannon dumped 15,380 shares of Wellpoint. That same day Lori Beer dumped 197 shares. The next day Larry Glasscock dumped 13,000 shares and another 13,000 shares on September 17. On the 9th of September, Sheila Burke dumped 9,920 shares, and another 3,200 on the 14th. Kenneth Goulet observed the anniversary of 9/11 by dumping 22,000 shares and dumped another 3,377 on the 14th. On the first of October, Martin Miller dumped 238 shares of Wellpoint.

iSinglePayer iPhone App Censored by Apple

PALO ALTO, CA –Apple, Inc. has censored an iPhone application promoting health insurance reform in the United States.

iSinglePayer, an iPhone application that advocates for single-payer health care reform was rejected from the App Store by Apple because it is “politically charged.” The application displays charts and bullet points about single-payer health care systems, and it allows users to call members of congress. iSinglePayer even calculates your local congressperson using GPS, and displays the amount of money donated to each congressperson from the health sector.

Today's Huffington Post has an article alleging the Medicare and Social Security are Ponzi schemes.

As the Democrats busily work on plans to make us all captive consumers of the private health insurers, the rich are cutting loose from the system. While we'll be stuck in costly Exchanges, the rich will be moving on toward their own privately reformed health system. Welcome to the world of concierge medicine.

I applaud your principles of health care reform, Mr. President. I know you're aware that the average American is under an unsustainable burden. I know you've read the letters and emails and heard the accounts told in the town halls of the horrible things our current system imposes on our citizens.

With this I agree:

Finally, our health care system is placing an unsustainable burden on taxpayers. When health care costs grow at the rate they have, it puts greater pressure on programs like Medicare and Medicaid. If we do nothing to slow these skyrocketing costs, we will eventually be spending more on Medicare and Medicaid than every other government program combined. Put simply, our health care problem is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close. Nothing else. (Applause.)

I don't even have a quarrel with this:

Then there's the problem of rising cost. We spend one and a half times more per person on health care than any other country, but we aren't any healthier for it. This is one of the reasons that insurance premiums have gone up three times faster than wages. It's why so many employers -- especially small businesses -- are forcing their employees to pay more for insurance, or are dropping their coverage entirely. It's why so many aspiring entrepreneurs cannot afford to open a business in the first place, and why American businesses that compete internationally -- like our automakers -- are at a huge disadvantage. And it's why those of us with health insurance are also paying a hidden and growing tax for those without it -- about $1,000 per year that pays for somebody else's emergency room and charitable care.

But I want proof of this claim, and I want it documented.

Second, we've estimated that most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system, a system that is currently full of waste and abuse. Right now, too much of the hard-earned savings and tax dollars we spend on health care don't make us any healthier. That's not my judgment -- it's the judgment of medical professionals across this country. And this is also true when it comes to Medicare and Medicaid.

There is much in this speech that indicts Medicare in its present form as unsustainable, and since this President has said elsewhere that Medicare and Social Security reform are tasks he feels he must undertake, and since we know the Republican party remains dedicated, despite its mouthings to the contrary, to the destruction of those programs because they are the working example of the US safety net (aka the hated "entitlements" and "liberal giveaways") I want to be assured, sir, that you are not stealthily helping that indefatigable Republican policy, that you will not fall victim to that cause nor let those in their golden years, to borrow your phrase, or looking forward to them, be bereft of that inestimable gift of security arising out of the work of such laudable presidents as had your bully pulpit in the past.

The only thing this plan would eliminate is the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud, as well as unwarranted subsidies in Medicare that go to insurance companies -- subsidies that do everything to pad their profits but don't improve the care of seniors. And we will also create an independent commission of doctors and medical experts charged with identifying more waste in the years ahead

Show me the money, Mister President.

Hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud in Medicare? What waste? What fraud? Which experts? Experts like these?

Suck on this A&F.

"A judge ordered retail giant Abercrombie & Fitch to pay $115,000 for discriminating against a 14-year-old autistic customer at its Mall of America store.

The civil penalty, the largest of its kind in at least two years, came four years after store employees refused to let the autistic teen join her older sister in a fitting room because of the clothing chain's anti-shoplifting policy. The store refused to relent even after the sister, and later the girls' mother, explained that the 14-year-old couldn't be alone because of her disability.

The confrontation humiliated the girl, who testified that the incident made her feel like a "misfit.""

Deval Patrick's a Democrat, , and the governor of the state from which the late Senator Ted Kennedy hailed. Monday, he claimed his state had struggled to preserve health care reform's promise for its people while closing holes in its budget. As a result (surprise! surprise!! surprise!!! NOT) services for LEGAL IMMIGRANTS will be cut: hospice care, mental health care, and dental care.

In Lakewood Washington last night a town hall for Adam Smith drew a young man carrying a poster of the President altered to resemble Adolf Hitler. Several members of the crowd, among them some older attendees, took exception and the poster was destroyed. Shortly thereafter the young man departed.
From the News Tribune account:

The only incident occurred over a man carrying a sign that depicted President Obama with a Hitler mustache, which prompted outcry from several people standing nearby. Bystanders ultimately brought the man to the ground, crumpled his sign and discarded it.

During the scuffle, Smith’s attempt to answer a question about abortion fell by the wayside. Some people shouted words supporting sign bearer’s right to free speech.

The man with the sign left shortly afterward.

And CNN carried video of what happened when "Reverend" Randall Terry disrupted -- as he had promised media he would do -- a town hall on health care where Dr. Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, appeared.

Hurray for Jim Moran!

Civil disobedience and enforcing agreements despite abrogation by the wingnut warriors -- it's time to hold the country we took back last November...

[Welcome, Lubbock bloggers! -- lambert]

The GOP is in retreat across the land. They don't want to admit it, but they are. So they're responding with ratcheting up their rhetoric and trying to dodge the truth via dissembling, distraction, and pretty pictures.

They remind me of academics fighting over whose name goes first on a paper.To give you an example of that kind of infighting: Niall Ferguson and Paul Krugman are feuding.

The tone of the discussion is ... .

One of them is a “poseur”. The other is “patronising”. One suffers from “verbal diarrhoea”. The other is a “whiner”.

A bust-up on the set of High School Musical 4 perhaps? A scrap behind the catwalk at a Milan fashion show? No. Those accusations were slung round in an increasingly bitter public row between two of the world’s most distinguished commentators on global finance and economics, professors Paul Krugman and Niall Ferguson, of Princeton and Harvard, respectively.

It started as an argument about bond prices. But last week it blew up into a row about racism, printing money, spending our way out of recession, and the fate of the global economy.

Nice to see that economists can be as well-behaved as United States Senators.

Perhaps constituents can evolve toward more professional treatment of one another than their Senators and Congressional Representatives indulged themselves in over the slavery that, the North will tell you, provoked the Civil War.
Today, at least, a few of us seemed able to avoid beating each other with sticks on the floor of a town hall meeting to discuss health care reform.

Not that there weren't comments and statements designed to provoke reaction aplenty.

I could cherry-pick the phrasing for the code, but if I give you just one example perhaps you can fill in the rest for yourselves. One pro-Republican audience member summed up his objections to the socialism emanating from Washington this way:

"When you've got a coon up a tree, bark at him!!"

That's Lubbock. In 2009. You can probably find out a fair amount more at lubbockleft.com. I met the blogger from that platform today, and several other progressives, liberals, Democrats, and folks who had questions for Congressman Randy Neugebauer.

A friend of mine pointed out recently that a post which doesn't stir up comment -- and rebuttal -- is an inefficient use of space

Montana Maven explains what the Democratic central committees in her state did. As a result Max Baucus was forced to admit in public that co-ops and trusting insurance companies to regulate themselves won't get the job done.

Calling themselves the Coalition of the United Montana Democratic Central
Committees, the group's statement announces it has "established a position in support
of a strong public option as an essential element in health care reform." In specifying the
necessary components needed for such a public option, they list:

• National Coverage
• Availability to all Americans

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Because Texas and California are the nation's two biggest schoolbook buyers, publishers edit new textbooks to sell to those states. This creates ripples in the pond of textbooks and public school teaching. As a brand-new card-carrying member of the ACLU (it came in the mail!) I find this repugnant:

AUSTIN — Texas high school students would learn about such significant individuals and milestones of conservative politics as Newt Gingrich and the rise of the Moral Majority — but nothing about liberals — under the first draft of new standards for public school history textbooks.

This draft is the work of ideologues like Morrison Report author Peter Morrison.
Of course, Morrison has said this, defending the odious Texas legislator Debbie Riddle and deriding President Obama, so he may not be all bad from a certain perspective.

And what in the world is the point of putting a right-wing evangelical minister on a social studies panel?

The Peter Marshall Ministries Web site includes Marshall’s commentaries sharply attacking Muslims, characterizing the Obama administration as “wicked,” and calling on Christian parents to reject public education for their children.

Marshall has also attacked Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant churches. In his call for a spiritual revival in America last year, he called traditional mainline Protestantism an “institutionally fossilized, Bible-rejecting shell of Christianity.”

It just doesn't happen to be my perspective.

See, my perspective's different. It's American. I believe that we owe our parents and grandparents a debt of honor for the work they did creating homes for us and getting us through school, and helping us learn what we need to survive. That's a huge generalization, btw; I was blessed to have (adoptive) parents who raised me.
We didn't always get along and I sometimes thought their perspectives were wrong; but they'd LIVED through the Depression and World War II and they knew how stupid it is to borrow against your house to pay for a new car when the one you've got runs fine, just as one example of the imprudence that drove our nation into the maw of the banksters.

It angers me to hear that generations of children across the nation may have this kind of baloney in social studies classes:

David Bradley, R-Beaumont, one of the conservative leaders, figures the current draft will pass a preliminary vote along party lines “once the napalm and smoke clear the room.” But not all conservative board members share that view.

“It is hard to believe that a majority of the writing team would approve of such wording. It's not even a representative selection of the conservative movement, and it is inappropriate,” Terri Leo, R-Spring, said. “I don't think either side should be presented under outside labels.”

Another board conservative, Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio, thinks students should study both sides to “see what the differences are and be able to define those differences.”

He would add James Dobson's Focus on the Family, conservative talk show host Sean Hannity and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to the list of conservatives. Others have proposed adding talk show host Rush Limbaugh and the National Rifle Association.

“I think, at the end of the day, we will want the young students to be able to identify what's conservative, what's their advocacy and who are the conservative groups, individuals and leaders. And what is liberal in contrast,” Mercer said.

Newt Gingrich in, Harriet Tubman out. Focus on the Family in, Cesar Chavez out. Mike Huckabee and Rush Limbaugh in, but Thurgood Marshall out.

Right. That's revisionist. There's nothing really conservative about it. The problem is these so-called conservatives still consider themselves to be ascendant:

The story notes another way far-right board members are trying to politicize the curriculum standards:

Board members appoint the review committees and typically choose people who share their philosophies. Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, was not sure about one prospective appointee — so she asked.

“Would you consider yourself a conservative when it comes to patriotism, the constitution, the heritage of our forefathers, etc?” Cargill wrote last year in an e-mail to Rhonda Williams, an education coordinator at Stephen F. Austin State University.

Cargill appointed Williams to one of the social studies review committees. The Texas Freedom Network obtained the e-mail exchanges under the Texas Public Information Act.

“The majority of the constituents in my 24 counties tend to have conservative views, especially about how history is taught to our students,” Cargill said, explaining her inquiry. Cargill said she expects the review committees will “work toward a fair and balanced approach on this topic when they meet a final time in October.”

See what we mean? Ms. Cargill thinks it’s a good idea to push her version of conservatism in social studies classrooms because she thinks most of the folks in her district are conservatives. So how would she approach Mr. Mercer’s suggestion? Set quotas for conservatives and liberals in the standards based on how Texas votes? This is madness. It’s certainly not education.

What Texas students learn in their classrooms should be based on facts and sound scholarship, not political agendas. But too many of our state board members have no problem forcing their political views on our public school students and their families, whether it’s in science classrooms or social studies classrooms. How much longer must this go on?

It isn't just healthcare town halls.

Take, for example, a recent e-newsletter from the author of the above quote accusing President Obama of racism. In the newsletter, the Peter Morrison Report, Mr. Morrison suggests darkly that health insurance reform will lead to euthanasia for the elderly:

In 1973 there was a Charlton Heston movie called Soylent Green, which depicted a nightmarish future for Americans, especially the elderly. In the film, America is massively overpopulated and resources are scarce. Food riots are common, and old people are seen as nothing but useless eaters, a burden on society which must be removed. In response, the government opens up euthanasia clinics to solve the problem. Such a bleak future is hard to envision, but some of the rhetoric we’re hearing with regard to Obamacare protesters is truly frightening.

Mr. Morrison also returns to his theme about the president’s alleged racism:

Because of the huge demographic changes in America, elderly people, who benefit the most from health care spending, are mostly white, while younger ones are much more racially diverse. Obama evidently sees it as his role to redistribute wealth from older people to younger ones, who are much more likely to be black or Hispanic. When coupled with decades of unchecked immigration, both legal and illegal, it won’t be long before the Democrats will be able to simply buy enough votes in every election to stay in power, and they’ll have no concern for what “old racist white people” want or need.

And he closes with this beauty:

If we fail, all Americans may be headed for a nightmare in our old age, where we’re herded into underfunded, government-run nursing homes, staffed by poorly trained immigrants who regard us as burdens on “their” society. We simply must stop Obamacare. Then we have to elect men and women who will bring an immediate halt to the mass immigration that is destroying our American identity at its very foundation. This is a battle we simply can’t afford to lose.

This person, folks, is helping write curriculum standards for our children’s social studies classroomsv

It's everywhere. The anti-intellectualism has morphed into an anti-education initiative fueled by not merely a disdain for thought, curiosity, and facts -- which all too often have a liberal bias, I remind you -- but by a baseline hate that can be explained in simple terms: we don't want to associate with anybody different.

The New York Times boasts of its prowess from time to time. It claims it's been "following the saga" of Beth Court, a "troubled cul-de-sac" in an LA suburb where four of the eight homes have undergone foreclosure.

Beth Court rose from desert scrub in the city of Moreno Valley during the development boom that spilled over from Los Angeles a dozen years ago, its tidy tile-roofed homes, each roughly 1,800 square feet, arranged in a horseshoe pattern behind leafy trees and palms.

The Times' writers go on to describe the rise of the neighborhood, which is the ultimate suburb in the sense Atrios rails against: car-dependent, fueled by commuter jobs miles distant, built in an unsustainable and unsupported bubble. The gold mine analogy explained by one of their sources seems oddly apt:

But a region that thrived almost solely on development has fallen mightily. Building permits for properties valued at a record $12.5 billion were issued in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties in 2005; in 2008, the figure was $3.8 billion, according to John Husing, an economist whose expertise is Southern California.
“You have to think of it like a gold-mining town in a Clint Eastwood movie,” Mr. Husing said. “Money comes to a place where there has never been any, and next there are tool stores, a saloon, a general store and so on. But the saloon doesn’t exist without the gold mine, and the gold mine here was construction.”

The boom went bust. This is not different in California's Inland Empire -- the counties running back from the borders of LA County and Orange County to the borders of Arizona and Nevada -- than it is in, say, the DC suburbs or than it was in the 1980s in Houston and Dallas.

But this time the attitude of the "survivors" is the one the Times chooses to designate as virtuous, and that of the "newcomers" is the one the Times chooses to designate as sinister.

American citizens who've waited patiently, worked hard, combined the incomes of their family members to afford decent housing -- these are painted as the invading horde, the dangerous and illicit, the somehow unworthy. The Times doesn't quote a cul-de-sac resident for this, but the "mayor of the block" who lives on a corner adjacent:

Ted Hanson, 71, who lives with his wife, Connie, at the entrance to Beth Court, on adjoining Parkland Avenue, views the changes in the neighborhood through three basic prisms: falling home values, growing safety concerns and blighted lawns.

Money uber alles. The people who lost those homes treated them like ATMs during the boom, and when the bubble burst they were unable to keep the payments -- sometimes payments amounting to several times the total value of the house -- current.

Equity soon became irresistible.

Ms. Sanchez and Mr. Winkler, the couple with two daughters, wanted a new car. So they pulled $15,000 out of the house. Mr. Godfrey and Ms. Saldamando, the schoolteachers, dipped into their equity to landscape their back yard. Mr. Blanco, the electrician, used it to invest in a lot in the desert, and Mr. Soto, the landscaper, picked up a rental home in the Central Valley, an agricultural area northwest of here.

The block’s first residents, Ms Hernandez and her husband, bought a shiny commercial truck, with dreams of expanding his trucking business. He pulled money out of the house nearly annually. And the couple from South Los Angeles used their house — bought for $152,500 in 1997 — as a veritable cash machine, refinancing three times before selling it in 2006 for $440,000.

Prudence was not part of the national psyche, but it's the prudence of those who didn't buy in at the peak of the bubble or use multiple equity loans on overpriced construction to finance their American dream, but who scraped and saved and worked to move up to more-sanely-priced homes, the Times excoriates.

And now, as most of the empty houses have filled up, long-term residents face contiguity with strangers, who have seized the moment to buy into a neighborhood that just two years ago was beyond their means.
A carpet cleaner who had moved from a small apartment near Los Angeles was brought to tears the first time he cleaned the rugs in his new four-bedroom home. A maintenance worker at a bakery who had waited two years for the bank to accept his offer on a foreclosed home now spends weekends proudly building an addition. A multigenerational family arrived in Beth Court from a mobile home.

It's the newcomers who are at fault, says the Times:

The blockwide birthday parties, neighborly fence-building and Friday chitchat sessions at dusk have become fragile antiques of the preforeclosure days as the new neighbors keep to themselves and the old-timers struggle to keep their footing. The street is staggering toward recovery, but for every step forward, there are three back.

The snobbery oozes out of every line, doesn't it?

...- actually, all they are seeking to do is readjust it for temporary comfort - and the insurance industry freaks out.

The Democratic-led Michigan House has voted to toughen penalties for insurance companies that deny or delay valid claims.

But the legislation approved today probably will stall in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Supporters of the bills say Michigan is one of just four states without serious financial penalties when a court rules an insurer has not fairly settled a claim.

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The anti-healthcare reform forces are ahead of us, folks. That's Democratic Congressional Freshman Frank Kratovil hanging in effigy thanks to a lobbyist-funded anti-healthcare reform group.

Take a look at what happened to Rep. Doggett in Austin:

What we know is: Tea Parties Creators are sending busloads of anti-reform demonstrators from place to place to disrupt Congressmembers' interaction with their true constitutents, using talking points issued by right-wing organizations. Where are they getting the money? PR Firms and corporations!!! More details below:

More than one source reporting it now (including NPR via Reuters), but nobody's mentioned it here, so I will. George W. Bush stopped a plan to send US troops to a US town to arrest people on US soil.

Remember how the GOP, confronted on FISA or habeas corpus or constitutionality during the w/cheney years would claim they were keeping us safe and say, "your rights don't matter if you're dead?" They were lying: your rights don't matter if you're not dead, either. Vice President Cheney wanted to use US troops in US streets in 2002.

It's possible Bush kept us safer than Cheney wanted -- and apparently even Bush didn't always do as Cheney said although evidently their disagreement over whether or not I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby ought to get a Presidential pardon came nigher ending their relationship than Bush's decision not to send the Army after the Lackawanna Six, who were arrested by the FBI later.

It's the Libby fight that, apparently, let W figure out how to quit Dick, or maybe vice versa.   Read more…

Matt Taibbi asks: Is Goldman screwing taxpayers on TARP negotiations?

Can you guess what the answer is? I knew you could!

Goldman Sachs and its ilk, who received billions in taxpayer money through TARP to keep them in business, have recently posted high quarterly profits. But what do the taxpayers get for our largesse? This is not a non-sequitur, as a post in naked capitalism today makes clear; and at least 6 House Democrats want to do something about the situation. That is the PROFIT act, which Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH) and six others (Reps. Brad Sherman, John Boccieri, Betty Sutton, Jackie Speier, Marcia Fudge and Alan Grayson) introduced to little fanfare last week.

From the New York Times via Bloomberg:

Goldman Executive Named as Obama Adviser

By BLOOMBERG NEWS
Published: July 18, 2009

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