Doctors support single-payer plan

American health care is now largely delivered via a government-subsidized private health insurance industry operating parallel to and within Medicare. A recent nationwide poll of physicians published in the Annals of Internal Medicine utilizing the AMA physician database demonstrated that 60 percent of doctors support a single-payer national health plan based on the most efficient and effective Medicare system.  Read more 

California Health Bills Heading to Governor’s Desk Need Your Help

Getting The Word Out About Single Payer

NYT headline evocative of Stepford and Fembots: “Obama to dispatch female surrogates”

Senator Barack Obama will increasingly lean on prominent Democratic women to undercut Gov. Sarah Palin and Senator John McCain, dispatching Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to Florida on Monday and creating a rapid-response team to deploy female surrogates to battleground states, Obama advisers said on Thursday.

Our hero didn’t show much interest in the task at hand. So leave it to the gals to clean up this mess!

 Read more 

On FOX.  Read more 

Police Magazine:

S.C. Sheriff’s Department Armored Vehicle with Belt-Fed Machine Gun
The Richland County (S.C.) Sheriff’s Department has acquired an armored personnel carrier complete with a turret-mounted .50-caliber belt-fed machine gun for its Special Response Team.

Sheriff Leon Lott told the Columbia State newspaper that he hoped the vehicle, named “The Peacemaker,” would let the bad guys know that his officers are serious.  Read more 

Is she on the teebee?  Read more 

I have some samples of wood pre- and post-planing, just to give an idea of what a planer can do. The first two photos are angles of the same stack of wood: Rough sawn yellow cedar from our tree, oak from a pallet, rough sawn maple from our trees, and some salvaged western red cedar.

and

 Read more 

John Sidney McCain.

One of the more frustrating things for me in this primary is the way that years of oppo that we’ve salted away on Republican sexual deviance and Republican torture and killing of animals has gone unused; and both issues speak directly to Republican abuses of power with easy-to-understand stories that cry out for accountability.

So what do we get? Oppo on 17-year-old girls and trash talk about special needs babies.

Gad. Both houses, plague.

And tonight, we can see how the boiz do with hatred for the old! Enjoy!  Read more 

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

In the last two weeks we have seen multiple examples of what civil liberties advocates have been warning about over and over again. The infrastructure of the police state, put together behind the scenes and with secret rooms and fusion centers, was put on display in a number of different places.  Read more 

In New York State Assembly District 72 (upper Manhattan) there is a rather contentious race going on for the Democratic primary election next Tuesday. The incumbent, Adriano Espaillat, is being challenged by his former mentee Miguel Martinez, who has reached the end of his term limit as City Council Member.

Interesting things can be found in the duelling campaign mailers sent out by the two camps. I wonder if this speaks only to the politics of heavily Dominican (and Hillary-supporting) upper Manhattan or whether it’s a sign of how NYC politics as a whole is tacking in 2008.

First mailings:  Read more 

I’ve stayed away from Daily Kos because y’all know why, but there’s one poster there, DogEmperor, who is the go-to guy for all your Christianist/Dominionist research needs:

http://dogemperor.dailykos.com/

I started out with Palin, went to Assemblies of God and the cell-church movement (in which he might fail to account for Saddleback and their adaptation of that approach for more mainstream megachurches), and fell into Amway, Hobby Lobby and US Plastics — the corporations that back the takeover (steeplejacking) of non-cult churches until they spill out with feral Russian murderous homophobes. It’s like a horror show with Air Force access to nukes, and The Family having access to Senator Clinton.  Read more 

Gloria Steinem on Palin:  Read more 

You’ve read this story and dozens like it. Is this the formula?

From The Onion’s “Top Story On John McCain Run Out Of Obligation:”

“Approximately two-thirds of the way through, the legitimate news content grew thin, and several last-ditch efforts were made to increase the length of the story, including a crude listing of pertinent or interesting facts and background information on McCain.

John McCain was born at the Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone….John McCain hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live with musical guest the White Stripes in 2002.

In a clear attempt to fill the remaining space on the jump page, the article then presented a dissenting opinion from an outside source on several points made previously in the story….”  Read more 

Whoa. They even beat us in dumb show.

“After Sarah Palin speech, GOP conducted roll call vote. Second-place finisher: Ron Paul, with 5 delegates; third place, Mitt Romney.”

http://twitter.com/RMN_ME

Now I heard squat about the roll call vote today. Did you? Searched for “roll call” on my papers’ websites, and found nothing. Found this through Google:

http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/a…

“Sarah Palin’s speech may have been the highlight of Wednesday night’s Republican National Convention, but the official business was to formally nominate John McCain as the Republican candidate for President.  Read more 

Denver And Palin Fuel Biggest Campaign Week Yet (Project for Excellence in Journalism)
For much of last week, the Democrats’ effort to make peace and reintroduce Obama to voters were the focal points of campaign coverage. How much success did John McCain have in suddenly stealing the media narrative?

Bag News Notes

Palin touts small-town roots, rips Obama  Read more 

Bob Somerby

PALIN DOES IT AGAIN: As a politician, Sarah Palin is profoundly talented, disturbingly so. But uh-oh–she clearly enjoys telling lies! Last night, in her speech, she did it again! Why is she able to do this:

PALIN (9/3/08): We suspended the state fuel tax and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks,” on that Bridge to Nowhere.

(APPLAUSE)

If our state wanted to build a bridge, we were going to build it ourselves.

(APPLAUSE)  Read more 

Indoors and out?

Out: lettuce, onions, radishes…is it too late for snow peas?

In: herbs? Maybe lettuce?
Do you need grow lights?

C4O Spotlight: Let’s get Debbie Cook (CA-46) on the air!

Today, the C4O All Stars spotlight shines on Debbie Cook, mayor of Huntington Beach, California and candidate for California’s 46th Congressional District.  Read more 

A feasible health care plan

Mr. Margolis implies that the nation can’t afford a Medicare-like system that would cover all Americans, yet the facts would argue otherwise. If one were to add up all the public monies currently spent on health care in the U.S. and applied it across our entire population, on a per capita basis, we already spend more than many industrialized countries do to cover all their citizens.

Medicare’s Poison Pill  Read more 

TalkLeft:

Joe Biden on Sarah Palin’s media coverage:

Asked if some of the criticism aimed at Palin has been sexist, Biden said: “Yes, by you guys in the media. … When I heard that media response, you know, this coming from some of the right-wing guys, saying that, ’Well, how can you be a mother and a vice president at the same time?’ … I mean, millions of women in America are going through exactly what she (is going) through. And guess what? They can handle it.”

Amen.

Amen to Biden’s bullshit, that is. Come on.  Read more 

Otherwise, they could go to town on statements like this:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told ministry students at her former church that the United States sent troops to fight in the Iraq war on a “task that is from God.”

“Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God,” she said. “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God’s plan.”

Well, er. Ick.  Read more 

A few days back, a Corrente Senior Fellow popped in to suggest that many of the posts here in recent months haven’t been, as advertised, “objective media critique or part of a campaign to defeat sexism,” rather they’re “a symptom of tribal warfare within the internet-enabled progressive social network that is being fueled by the Corporate Media and exploited by the Republicans.”

In other words, we’re pissing in the Democratic pool to vent our petty online grudges… because we’ve been tricked by the GOP into doing so.

I don’t know the life expectancy of the hamsters that make the Mighty Corrente Building’s server disks go round and round, but I do wonder how all this will look a couple of years from now.

If it’s President Obama, we’ll get to see whose “I told you sos” are in order. (And they called me petty!)

If it’s President McCain, we’ll get to start even sooner, playing out whether it was an ill-chosen candidate (i.e., they should have listened to us about a different candidate, vote fraud, and disreputable media and blogging) running on an ill-chosen platform (shoulda listened to us about partisanship) or the Judean People’s Front disunity of Hillary holdouts or some other sin of the notorious party-destroyer. Odds are, the genius solution in 2012 will be for a Democrat to run as similarly to a Republican as possible. Fourth time’s a charm.

Well, with the campaign kicking into its ultimate phase, I wanted to front-page (from comments in shystee’s thread) my reasons for doing what I do, when I’m stealing time from real life:  Read more