The (task force) recommends against routine screening mammography in women aged 40 to 49 years. - U.S. Preventative Services Task Force, Nov. 17, 2009

When I read stories such as this from guys like Michael Collins I have to wonder aloud how far we've really gotten from the fake panels and ignorant civilians that always seemed to be employed by the Bush administration.

True, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius did the right thing and swiftly denounced a report from an HHS-sponsored U.S. Preventive Services Task Force panel claiming that breast examinations weren't all that important for women aged 40-49. Secretary Sibelius said in her official response,

The U.S. Preventive Task Force is an outside independent panel of doctors and scientists who make recommendations. They do not set federal policy and they don't determine what services are covered by the federal government... My message to women is simple. Mammograms have always been an important life-saving tool in the fight against breast cancer and they still are today. Keep doing what you have been doing for years - talk to your doctor about your individual history, ask questions, and make the decision that is right for you.

Yes, you read that right. In fact, they even recommended against regular mammography screenings for women in that risky demographic.

The panel of 16 members, including two nurses and a researcher (but she had a PhD!) had not one single oncologist or anyone with a recorded history of treating cancer. Huh? How could this be, since the thrust of the panel was preventive medicine.

So who was one of the voices of this panel? None other than the ironically-named Dr. Diane Pettiti, M.D. Who is Dr. Diane Pettiti, MD? She is, to quote Michael Collins' simple description, "a health policy and medical advisor for Kaiser Permanente of Southern California." Kaiser Permanente? The people mentioned often in Michael Moore's SiCKO, the largest health insurer in the country, the one that routinely shoves uninsured patients into cabs and leaves them wandering the streets of LA in the general vicinity of free clinics with the IV's still in their arms?

The Kaiser Permanente who, under Richard Nixon in 1971, began to change the way HMO's would cover their policy-holders, the one that became the soulless juggernaut prizing profits over the health of their policy-holders, the model for other HMOs to emulate over the next four decades?

That Kaiser Permanente?

WUSA did an in-depth report and found out that three of the panel members had ties to the health care industry, not including Pettiti. The furor stated when NPR's Diane Rehm had Dr. Pettiti on her show and asked her point blank how many oncologists were on the panel and she couldn't answer. Among others, Dr. Rebecca Zurrbier, MD was listening to Rehm's show and became enraged by what she'd heard. Dr. Zurrbier is the Chief of Breast imaging at Sibley Memorial Hospital in DC and when she went public with her own outrage, Secretary Sibelius had no choice but to denounce the report the day after it came out.

Question: How could this happen under Sibelius' nose and why were oncologists and breast cancer specialists seemingly deliberately omitted from a 16 member panel supposedly dedicated to preventive medicine such as mammograms? Why were so many of them affiliated with a health care racket and a notorious HMO like Kaiser Permanente that would love nothing more than for people to stop getting sick and to squander their bottom line on frivolous things such as cancer screenings?

And how come it was up to NPR, WUSA and a breast imaging chief of staff to turn up this obviously tilted panel?

We had enough of this shit under the Bush years. Under Bush, we had a 24 year-old college dropout determining what NASA scientists could or couldn't say about the Big Bang. We had religious fundmentalists in the FDA spreading the wrong ideas about womens' health and birth control and others who owned stocks in the food and medical device industry they were supposed to regulate. We saw the same suppression of information in the EPA, the Surgeon General's office and other places. Under Bush, there was an all out Cold War against science that poo-pooed global warming, the plight of the polar bear, evolution, stem cell research, even the origins of the universe.

But at least it can be said that the shills and ideological rodeo clowns of the pathetic dumb show that was the Bush administration earnestly believed through some tragic misguidance the positions they took.

This panel of preventive medicine was acting largely, if not solely, in the interests of health care profits. And that's what makes this HHS-sponsored panel even more despicable.

And this report came out a little over two weeks after Breast Cancer Awareness month.

Believe it or not, there are still many women who die from breast cancer through lack of education. In fact, breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death among US women (after lung) . According to Networkofstrength.org, 40,170 women (and 440 men) are expected to die of the disease this year. Cancer.org stated late last September that 192,370 women will be diagnosed with the disease in 2009. So how important is screening, in reality?

Early last year, the British National Health Service released a finding that was hardly startling but one that stands in stark contrast to the "findings" of the voodoo panel that briefly had the HHS seal of approval written all over it: The NHS determined that merely getting screened halves cancer deaths. If that goes for the UK, why shouldn't it go for the US?

Molly Ivins, liberal icon and one of the greatest political journalists of our time, said just before her own death of breast cancer, "Get. The. Damned. Test. Done."

And while we're renewing the battle to have women (and men) screened for breast cancer (and to examine themselves once a month), let's also renew calls to screen out industry ideologues and shills who will try to get away with saying anything even though it could result in the deaths of close to 200,000 women just so they could keep their employers and their shareholders fat and happy.

I wonder why anyone would think the Federal government and the medical profession were gunning for only WOMEN'S health care. After all, they're just planning to pass health care "reform" that doesn't allow coverage of abortion, they don't think breast cancer screening is necessary unless you are "at high risk" (note to the geniuses who thought up that one: for years they've been telling us that just being a woman puts you at high risk), and now they don't think cervical cancer screening is all that and a bag of chips either:

New guidelines for cervical cancer screening say women should delay their first Pap test until age 21, and be screened less often than recommended in the past.

The advice, from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is meant to decrease unnecessary testing and potentially harmful treatment, particularly in teenagers and young women. The group’s previous guidelines had recommended yearly testing for young women, starting within three years of their first sexual intercourse, but no later than age 21.

Arriving on the heels of hotly disputed guidelines calling for less use of mammography, the new recommendations might seem like part of a larger plan to slash cancer screening for women. But the timing was coincidental, said Dr. Cheryl B. Iglesia, the chairwoman of a panel in the obstetricians’ group that developed the Pap smear guidelines. The group updates its advice regularly based on new medical information, and Dr. Iglesia said the latest recommendations had been in the works for several years, “long before the Obama health plan came into existence.”

She called the timing crazy, uncanny and “an unfortunate perfect storm,” adding, “There’s no political agenda with regard to these recommendations.”

In 1989 I had Pap test come back as class 3, which considering that the previous year's was normal, caused my doctor a fair amount of concern. Ordinarily, she would have just done another test, but because of the rapid change in results in just a year, she did a punch biopsy in addition to another Pap. It was a week before I could get these biopsies done, and yes, the anxiety was severe. After all, I was only 34 and there was the possibility of cancer. The biopsies came back normal, the second Pap came back normal, and everything was fine. She had me come back in six months for another Pap, and again in another six months to put me back on normal schedule.

Perhaps this doctor was being overly alarmed. Perhaps she could have just done the second test. Would that have caused me any less anxiety? I hardly think so. In fact, as afraid as I was before these biopsies were taken, and as anxious as I was, I think I would have been MORE so if I were just waiting for the results of another test, or worse, if I'd been told "Let's just keep an eye on it."

It's easy to talk about guidelines and statistics, but it's quite another thing when YOU are the woman staring breast cancer or cervical cancer in the face. With this sudden rash of "Ha ha, just kidding" out of the medical profession, but ONLY as it pertains to WOMEN'S health care screenings that WOMEN have been told for a generation are necessary, coming at a time when cost-cutting is the health care watchword of the hour, is more than a little bit suspicious. And if the Obama Administration really thinks that insurance companies won't look at these reports and change what they cover for women, and if they really think women won't care that it's THEIR health care, not men's, that's being sacrificed, then Sarah Palin is going to have one hell of a platform to run on against him in 2012 if she can get past her fetophilia and megalomania long enough to realize it.

Now let's see if the feminist bloggers get on this one. After all, this isn't just about old bags who don't matter anymore, it's about THEM too.

Labels: health care, just another outrage, Women's bodies

With even the most optimistic estimates having the employment picture not even BEGIN to improve until 2011, and Tim Geithner's buddies giving themselves huge bonuses instead of doing things like lending money in the aftermath of their huge taxpayer bailout, and Barack Obama's continued tossing under the bus of everyone who could otherwise be relied on to go to the mat for him, it's hard to imagine that the 2012 race won't be a real dogfight. The question is, just how angry (or racist) are people going to be, and are they willing to destroy the country in a stupid attempt to save it?

The signs are already there that the men who sit in the executive suites behind the so-called liberal media long for a Republican restoration, and if they can get a president about whom they can fantasize in a French maid costume, or dressed in dom/sub gear, or if they are like David Vitter, diapering them, well, so much the better. That every time she opens her mouth, incoherent babble comes out is immaterial. After all, we had a babbling idiot in the White House for eight years and survived, though whether we have survived or are just enduring the death rattle of a once-great nation remains to be seen.

Does anyone actually believe that if Sarah Palin looked like Barbara Mikulski, there would be this kind of fascination with her? Sure, her palpable self-delusion and ability to baldface lie without even flinching has a perverse kind of fascination. But I don't think it's her narcissistic, delusional megalomania or her willful ignorance that people find so attractive. Sure, projecting confidence can make people think you know something even when you're a blithering moron. But it's clear that Sarah Palin is all about the looks. The question is just how far those looks will carry her, and whether anger at what threatens to appear to be the utter failure of Barack Obama to clean up an economic mess that has taken nearly thirty years to make in a few short years is enough to generate a protest vote of that magnitude.

What OUGHT to make people sit up in their chairs, look at their children, and see if this is the future they want for them, is the idea that Palin hasn't ruled out choosing Glenn Beck as a running mate:

It's no secret that former GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Fox News host Glenn Beck share great respect and admiration — so their fans can be forgiven for wondering: Is a "dream ticket" of Palin-Beck ticket completely out of the question?

Perhaps not.

Palin initially chuckled when Newsmax broached the idea. But then she had some serious words of praise for the popular Fox personality.

"I can envision a couple of different combinations, if ever I were to be in a position to really even seriously consider running for anything in the future, and I'm not there yet," Palin tells Newsmax. "But Glenn Beck I have great respect for. He's a hoot. He gets his message across in such a clever way. And he's so bold — I have to respect that. He calls it like he sees it, and he's very, very, very effective."

Now right now this isn't worth sitting bolt upright in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. And hopefully the mediapalooza that surrounds Palin's book tour (that just happens to be focused on swing states) subsides by the time the 2012 race starts to kick into gear. But when you look at how we've seen mass mob mentality take hold when a population gets angry enough, and you look at the Bob Forehead quality of the other 2012 Republican hopefuls -- the parade of dull gray men (Tim Pawlenty) and poufy hair (John Thune) whose names are mentioned, the idea becomes not so ridiculous.

But Glenn Beck? Seriously? Are we THAT crazy? I know that intellectual acumen is a devalued commodity in these days of the fall of the American Empire, but have we embraced stupidity and ignorance to that extent?

Stay tuned.

Labels: 2012 election, batshit crazies, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin

And while the right is having vapors about how President Barack Hussein Obama, the secret Muslim terrorist who is both a Nazi and a part of the Great Jewish Conspiracy at the same time "allowed" a "possible terrorist" to remain in the military, the fact of the matter is that the Bush Administration's policy to let anyone with a pulse serve because they needed enough people for their Middle East meatgrinder allowed Nidal Hassan to serve:

Two years ago, a top psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was so concerned about what he saw as Nidal Hasan's incompetence and reckless behavior that he put those concerns in writing. NPR has obtained a copy of the memo, the first evaluation that has surfaced from Hasan's file.

Officials at Walter Reed sent that memo to Fort Hood this year when Hasan was transferred there.

Nevertheless, commanders still assigned Hasan — accused of killing 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood on Nov. 5 — to work with some of the Army's most troubled and vulnerable soldiers.

On May 17, 2007, Hasan's supervisor at Walter Reed sent the memo to the Walter Reed credentials committee. It reads, "Memorandum for: Credentials Committee. Subject: CPT Nidal Hasan." More than a page long, the document warns that: "The Faculty has serious concerns about CPT Hasan's professionalism and work ethic. ... He demonstrates a pattern of poor judgment and a lack of professionalism." It is signed by the chief of psychiatric residents at Walter Reed, Maj. Scott Moran.

When shown the memo, two leading psychiatrists said it was so damning, it might have sunk Hasan's career if he had applied for a job outside the Army.

Perhaps they hoped Hasan would snap in time for the 2008 election, reminding Americans just how much we are in danger from terr'ists all the time and how only Republicans, who presided over the worst attack ever on American soil, can keep them safe by allowing such attacks to happen.

(h/t)

Labels: Bush Administration, closing the barn door after the horse escapes, incompetence

Being disheartened is such a usual state of mind for me these days it's surprising that this one gets to me so much. But I decided to do a quick spin around some of the alpha dogs of the so-called feminist blogosphere to see what is being said about the USPSTF's new mammography guidelines. You know what I saw?

Almost nothing.

I guess that when you're young (instead of old like me and leaving the house between 6-7 AM and getting home at 6:30 PM, then doing 2-3 hours of work every night and all weekend), you just don't have TIME to handle TWO issues about women's health care. After all, there's advertising to talk about, and the Sarah Palin Newsweek cover, and when combined with the Stupak amendment, well, the poor dears just have to pick and choose.

Kudos to Nordette at Whose shoes are these anyway? and jluther over at Feministing for actually realizing that they too will be over 40 someday and that this will become their problem.

Other than that? Crickets.

I'm not going to shame the so-called feminist bloggers who have chosen instead to write about divas with no pants or webcomics or the Sarah Palin Newsweek cover or why there are no women in Pirate Radio by naming them publicly. They know who they are. And to those bloggers, I have just one question: Why do you think this is not your issue?

Pregnancy hasn't been a concern for me since 2005, but I still write about the importance of access to abortion and contraception. Reproduction is an issue in my PAST, that I will never have to worry about again, at least not in this particular incarnation. But for the feminist bloggers in their twenties and thirties, this latest assault on women's health care is in YOUR FUTURE -- and that future is coming faster than you can even imagine.

So why the silence? Is it because this plan to ration health care services to older women is coming directly from Barack Obama's Department of Health and Human Services and you're afraid to criticize it? Is this what we've come to, selling our own sisters down the river rather than criticize a Democratic president?

I want to know: Am I wrong? I realize that with 20 minutes to blog this morning after I head in for a 7 AM meeting I don't have time to look at ALL the feminist blogs. But where is the feminist blogosphere on this? If you're a feminist blogger and you're writing about this, or if you're just a blog reader and you find a post about the new mammography guidelines, post the links in the comments. I'll bump them up into their own post tomorrow along with my crow eating (but the consumption of the bird only happens if the posts are timestamped BEFORE this one). And if I don't hear from anyone, I'm done writing about abortion. After all, it isn't MY concern, right?

Labels: abortion, faux feminism, health care, rant, Women's bodies

When you have a health care "reform" bill in the Senate that not only may effectively make abortion a non-reimbursable procedure, but also does not explicitly cover procedures that are unique to women, you have to wonder if women's health care is going to be sacrificed on the altar of cost containment. That's why I'm skeptical about the mammography guidelines put forth yesterday by the United States Preventive Services Task Force:

The new recommendations, which do not apply to a small group of women with unusual risk factors for breast cancer, reverse longstanding guidelines and are aimed at reducing harm from overtreatment, the group says. It also says women age 50 to 74 should have mammograms less frequently — every two years, rather than every year. And it said doctors should stop teaching women to examine their breasts on a regular basis.

Just seven years ago, the same group, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, with different members, recommended that women have mammograms every one to two years starting at age 40. It found too little evidence to take a stand on breast self-examinations.

The task force is an independent panel of experts in prevention and primary care appointed by the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

Its new guidelines, which are different from those of some professional and advocacy organizations, are published online in The Annals of Internal Medicine They are likely to touch off yet another round of controversy over the benefits of screening for breast cancer.

Dr. Diana Petitti, vice chairwoman of the task force and a professor of biomedical informatics at Arizona State University, said the guidelines were based on new data and analyses and were aimed at reducing the potential harm from overscreening.

While many women do not think a screening test can be harmful, medical experts say the risks are real. A test can trigger unnecessary further tests, like biopsies, that can create extreme anxiety. And mammograms can find cancers that grow so slowly that they never would be noticed in a woman’s lifetime, resulting in unnecessary treatment.

Now that said, I have a certain amount of skepticism about mammograms, for all that I have one every year. I'm not sure I believe that they CAUSE breast cancer, as some believe (though I wouldn't rule it out, this IS women's health care that is aimed at women who are no longer "fuckable" and are therefore expendable in our society), but whether they prevent deaths remains to be seen. And then when I start thinking that way I think of the family friend who never had a mammogram and by the time her cancer was discovered, she had significant lymph node spread.

The timing of this report has my spidey-sense a-tingle, coming as it does from a group that advises doctors and insurance companies. If you think this report isn't going to affect coverage for mammograms, you're deluding yourself. And it just seems peculiar that it's WOMEN'S health care that is getting this kind of scrutiny.

Labels: health care, tinfoil, Women's bodies

I wonder, when the Republicans and their corporate buddies decided that the middle class was a pesky thing that needed to go away, returning us to the Golden Age of lords and serfs, if they thought about how a few preposterously wealthy people were going to be able to buy enough STUFF to keep an overall economy going. Operation Feudal System has now been almost completely successful, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out now that it looks like unemployment is going to hit near-Great Depression levels, while the Dow marches merrily along.

Nouriel Roubini has been dismissed by just about everyone (including the Obama administration, which places him right up there with Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz in the Pantheon of Guys Who Are Right And Must Be Ignores), but he's been spot-on right all along. So it's worth paying attention to him now:

So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down. All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs just are not coming back.

There's really just one hope for our leaders to turn things around: a bold prescription that increases the fiscal stimulus with another round of labor-intensive, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, helps fiscally strapped state and local governments and provides a temporary tax credit to the private sector to hire more workers. Helping the unemployed just by extending unemployment benefits is necessary not sufficient; it leads to persistent unemployment rather than job creation.

The long-term picture for workers and families is even worse than current job loss numbers alone would suggest. Now as a way of sharing the pain, many firms are telling their workers to cut hours, take furloughs and accept lower wages. Specifically, that fall in hours worked is equivalent to another 3 million full time jobs lost on top of the 7.5 million jobs formally lost.

This is very bad news but we must face facts. Many of the lost jobs are gone forever, including construction jobs, finance jobs and manufacturing jobs. Recent studies suggest that a quarter of U.S. jobs are fully out-sourceable over time to other countries.

Other measures tell the same ugly story: The average length of unemployment is at an all time high; the ratio of job applicants to vacancies is 6 to 1; initial claims are down but continued claims are very high and now millions of unemployed are resorting to the exceptional extended unemployment benefits programs and are staying in them longer.

Based on my best judgment, it is most likely that the unemployment rate will peak close to 11% and will remain at a very high level for two years or more.

The weakness in labor markets and the sharp fall in labor income ensure a weak recovery of private consumption and an anemic recovery of the economy, and increases the risk of a double dip recession.

In past, less severe recessions, we started to see a rise in resentment against the poor, who were always referred to as lazy people who don't want to work. Now we see wide swaths of the country in which middle-class and working-class white people aren't working. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the "Work hard and you'll get ahead" doctrine that has kept Americans silent during the last 30 years as ever-more wealth has been shoveled upwards into the pockets of those who already have far more than they can ever spend. It isn't Barack Obama who caused this (though his preference for guys like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers over guys like Roubini, Krugman and Stiglitz hasn't helped). But he's going to preside over one hell of a wake-up call by those who used to have jobs where they could work for a living. And as long as he continues to coddle Wall Street at the expense of the people who elected him, he's going to open the door for some right-wing demagogue to wrest Congress -- and his office == from him. And if you think things are bad now, just wait till the extreme right takes over.

Labels: economic death watch

What does it say when a sizable number of people who would vote for a particular Presidential candidate don't think that candidate is qualified for the job? In a world where we face an intractable war in Afghanistan, widespread unemployment that looks every day to be more structural than cyclical, a declining dollar, global climate change, a nuclear Pakistan, and that's just what I can think of before my morning coffee, are fantasies about a miniskairted president that you can fantasize about fucking really all that important? Is an egomaniacal prom queen who probably would have snubbed you at every turn in high school really a representative of Every American Woman?

Last night I saw parts of Sarah Palin's Oprah appearance and thought "This woman is just babbling. She has no idea what she's talking about." We all babble sometimes; I had a Best Practices teleconference yesterday morning for which I hadn't had time to prepare because I was meeting a deadline and when asked my opinion I bullshitted my way through it, thinking every step of the way, "I'm just babbling here." But I at least know when I'm babbling to fill up time. I don't have ideas that I could be president, I'm not on a book tour, and I don't have millions of people thinking they'll vote for me because I look good in a miniskirt (which I don't).

I understand that Americans are angry. But they should have started getting angry long before Barack Obama became president. The seeds of today's economy, and indeed of Al-Qaeda, were sown during the Reagan years, when the idea that if you shovel enough money into the gaping holes in the souls of rich people, eventually they would shower some largesse upon you, and that arming the Afghan mujahadeen was a great policy took hold. Oh they let some of it out during the Clinton years, but they saved most of it for the black guy, while the dry-drunk with daddy issues strutted across his prop ranch in Texas for eight years.

But Sarah Palin? Why? The world is full of pretty women, and many of them don't have that maniacal look in the eyes that makes them seem that they're just this side of going completely bonkers on national television.

From the day Adlai Stevenson lost the presidency to Dwight D. Eisenhower (who seems like a rocket scientist by the standards that have brought us Sarah Palin, Michele Bachman, Louie Gomert, John Boehner, and any number of other Republican House members) we had this unfortunate mindset in this country that the president should be someone just like us, or like our neighbor. I don't know about you, but I want a president who has the capability to put two coherent thoughts together. I mean, Barney Gumble is a funny character on The Simpsons, but I wouldn't want him as president. Meryl Streep is funny and smart AND a great actress, but I don't think she's qualified to be president either. The idea of voting for a candidate that you don't feel is qualified? You might as well put a bumper sticker on your car for one of the look-alike blondes of Gossip Girl.

And yet, Jon Meacham points out in Newsweek this week (which features what in a more innocent time was called a cheesecake photo of a miniskirted Palin on the cover), According to Gallup, Republicans are more likely to say they would seriously consider voting for Palin for president (65 percent) than to say she is qualified for the job (58 percent).

Even if you think Palin is hot (and her MILF shelf life is growing short; as a woman of 54 who's been there I can tell you that the age of 45 starts a dramatic acceleration in the sagging and aging process), even if you think she's exciting, even if you agree with her viewpoints (though how you can find them amidst the babbling, I have no idea), does that really trump knowledge? Does that trump diplomacy? Does ideology, or some delusion that this woman knows what your life is about, or some fantasy that you'll get to have sex with her really trump EVERYTHING?

Labels: rant, Sarah Palin

I don't know what it is about the extreme right and terrorism. I don't know what the feargasm is that they get when they can be really shit-your-pants terrified of Scary Brown Men with Boxcutters.

We're seeing it in New York City, where millions of people are going to work every day, and have been for the last eight years, even walking past Ground Zero every day, while Senators and Congresscritters from red states have made hay over the last eight years whipping their constuents into a frenzy about Scary Brown Men bombing the local Wal-Mart. Here in the New York area, we don't have the luxury of fear. We have to just go about our business.

A funny thing happened after the September 11 attacks. Americans talked tough, especially the bantam rooster-in-chief, about "dead or alive", or "turning their sand into glass." But it wasn't about toughness, it was about fear. We were a nation that had experienced (or viewed on television) something unthinkable, and rather than rally around the documents and laws that have kept us strong for over 200 years, we en masse reverted to the very same lawlessness that the right wing uses to characterize the Middle East.

In right-wing America, fear = strength and respect = weakness. This is why you have people like Karl Rove referring to Barack Obama bowing to the Japanese Emperor as "a gesture of weakness." Of course to people like Karl Rove, respect = weakness. Because after all, look how far the bellicosity of the Bush years got us -- by the time Bush left office, the entire world hated America because we were fool enough to let George Bush and Dick Cheney lead our country for eight years. If Obama bowed perhaps more than was necessary just to show respect (and I would say that a very tall man bowing that deeply to a very short man isn't beyond the pale at all), after the last eight years, perhaps it's warranted.

But there is nothing that the right-wing wants more than another major terrorist attack on our soil. Glenn Beck talks about returning this country to how it was on 9/12, and it's not about good will and helping out. It's about fear -- that blind, shit-your-pants fear that gives the right so much comfort. How fear makes them feel more secure, I have no idea. Perhaps someone can enlighten me how fear = strength while respect = weakness, and how hoping for a terrorist attack is somehow patriotic.

Labels: rant

There are many reasons why, despite having an all too typical spineless centrist Democrat in the White House, we should be more grateful than ever that George W. Bush is still not occupying it. Presidential term limits denied us the excitement of seeing yet another Diebold/ES&S/Sequioa/Karl Rove-rigged election that would’ve resulted in a third term for one who had to be the most surreally inept and unqualified boob whose portrait was ever hung in a federal building.

Yet consider what would’ve happened as a result of Major Hasan’s shooting at Fort Hood last week if Dubya was still squatting in the Oval Office and especially if the Republicans were still running Congress while they weren’t engaging in furtive, extramarital affairs, lining their pockets with soft PAC and bribe money and turning graft into a largely-passive spectator sport:

Major Hasan is obviously a very deeply disturbed man whose fundamentalist Muslim beliefs eventually won out over his psychiatric training, humanity, patriotism, oath to defend his adopted country and pragmatism. Yet if George W. Bush was still running from the center ring his pathetic yet highly lucrative and deadly flea circus, Major Hasan would’ve been linked to virtually every Muslim terrorist group on the planet. Plus we probably would’ve renewed our dedication to the destruction of Afghanistan, the source of Dr. Hasan’s discontent, even moreso than President Obama already had.

We’d be seeing even more Muslims detained at airports and put on terrorist No Fly watch lists and Gitmo and torture palaces in places such as Syria and Egypt would be steadily filling up again under a ramped-up extraordinary rendition program. Who knows? In Dubya’s Christian fervor, we may have even invaded another weak Muslim nation in response.

Look what we’ve done to Iraq so far and Saddam Hussein, a former ally in the Reagan years, hadn’t been responsible for the taking of an American life or even threatening an American life since a few dozen of our men and women were killed during Operation Desert Storm in early 1991.

Even if Republicans remained in the minority, you could count on an invertebrate Democrat majority under Bush to remain just as supine as they were during the first 6 years of his Reign of Error. This is a Democratic Party that gave their Republican overlords the power to invade Iraq, designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, officially condemned Moveon.org for telling the truth about Gen. Petraeus, renewed the USA PATRIOT Act with the draconian sections 215 & 218 intact, helped give retroactive immunity to the telecom giants for illegally spying on us, ratified with hardly a Nay Jane Harmon’s HR 1955 that would label bloggers and other dissenters as potential terrorist threats, year after year shoveled tens of billions into Iraq without asking for nor getting any worthwhile results, voted in the Military Tribunal Act, refused to seriously entertain articles of impeachment and a whole host of other complicit evils.

Major Hasan’s murder spree, while certainly horrific, would’ve been conflated into another 9/11. Starting with Fox “News”, terrorist threat assessments in all their pastel glory would be back on TV every day in advance of the 2010 midterms and we’d be rounding up the usual suspects of those suspected of comprising part of Major Hasan’s nonexistent support network. Think of the poster board of the 19 9/11 hijackers that was leaked to the press within hours after the attacks in New York, Washington, DC and Pennsylvania and the underreported and inconvenient fact that about half those men were still alive. Think of Mohammed Atta’s pristine passport found several hundred yards from Ground Zero.

Yes, the Obama administration has deeply disappointed me and regardless of what this man will do in the next 3+ years, he has permanently lost my vote. But we should all be thankful for small favors, grateful this coming Thanksgiving that we don’t still have a neoChristian warrior in the White House who is dedicated to the extermination one way or the other of every Muslim on the planet. In a way, if we had a Muslim President as Fox would have us believe, perhaps we as a nation would immediately have some actual credibility in the Middle East and could even more quickly begin a diplomatic process that would usher in a period of healing after this last Stupid White Man crusade.

As Thom Hartmann said last November 11th, the White House (and the disillusioned American people) needed a super hero, a St. George who could slay a dragon and it didn’t matter to us at first if the dragon that St. George slew was still a threat or even real, whether or not it was Dick Cheney hunting canned pheasants on a larger scale. They’d demonized an aging dictator whose days were numbered while forgetting all about the very real supervillain that was Osama bin Laden.

George of the Bungle, St. George Dubya, The Lord of War, was a superhero whose only power was in choosing old, incompetent enemies. He could’ve accepted the offer of Mullah Omar of Afghanistan's Taliban, who before the largely-unexamined rubble at Ground Zero was carted away offered to hand over bin Laden gift-wrapped or have him tried for 9/11. He could’ve told French special forces snipers to take out bin Laden when they had him in their crosshairs not once but twice. He could’ve dispatched our forces to Tora Bora more quickly instead of letting Musharaff’s men take point then loaf their way to the mountain pass while bin Laden was airlifted out like Jimi Hendrix leaving Woodstock (But to show that we still respected their opinion, we have the consolation of knowing that four years later, the Bush administration earmarked a half a million of our tax dollars to get the Taliban to the negotiating table, an amazingly generous offer that was rebuffed.).

He had real, effective options, Super George did, yet did absolutely nothing while his Justice League (aka the Coalition of the Willing) loitered. 6 months after 9/11, bin Laden was no longer Hitler but a fading unpleasant memory, hardly worth the time and cavernous space in George’s beautiful mind. Meanwhile, Iraq had become Nazi Germany, Saddam had become the Hitler du jour and many wealthy men got even wealthier while Iraqi children continued dying of cancer due to Daddy’s depleted uranium shells and hospitals and cancer clinics crumbled before they were even finished.

We the people had begun to see SuperGeorge as did Molly Ivins for the bumbling, ineffectual buffoon that he was after putting on blinders during the 2000 election. Then, the second we were attacked on 9/11, a blitzkrieg killing almost 3000 innocents that could’ve been avoided in so many ways yet wasn’t, we kicked back to the curb Ivins and precious few others in the reality-based community as we scrambled to put those blinders back on. And still, to this day, we have yet to completely take them off.

Oh, this is priceless. Just stick with it and listen to what this kid says:

If these nimrod teabaggers had half a brain, the impish grin would have given "Robert Erickson" away immediately.

Labels: American Idiots, immigration, pwned

Maybe it's all those job cuts at the New York Times. But tucked away below the fold today is a rather peculiar article expressing wonder that MSNBC, which despite three hours of the Idiocy of Joe Scarborough (or if you prefer, Joe Scarborough's Presidential Exploratory Committee's Fifteen Free TV Hours Every Week), and Chris Matthews' Excoriation of Bad Girls Who Get Themselves Pregnant (sic), is regarded as "the liberal network" actually criticizes the Obama Administration -- from the left:

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues.

“I don’t think our audience is looking for unequivocal ‘rah-rah,’ ” said Ms. Maddow, who calls herself a liberal but not a Democrat.

The spectacle of Democrats sniping at one another is not new, but having a TV home for it is. MSNBC — sometimes critically called the “home team” for supporters of Mr. Obama — has even hit upon the theme with a promotional tagline, “pushing back on the president,” in commercials for “Hardball,” Chris Matthews’s political hour.

“Our job is not to echo the president’s talking points,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC. “Our job is to hold whoever’s in power’s feet to the fire.”

I suppose that when you're in a profession which has decided that "some say..." is an authoritative source, and that known lies have to be given the exact same weight as the truth simply because some lunatic in Pocatello said it at a teabag rally (or Fox News said it at any time of the day or night), the idea that it is possible to knock your own teem must seem rather alien. Or perhaps it's just that "journalists" like Brian Stelter, who write this piece, are no longer capable of stringing two thoughts together. But the fact that it is news that the most liberal of MSNBC's hosts are ctiticizing Barack Obama ought to underscore just HOW much Fox News is nothing but a water-carrier for the GOP.

For all that lazy so-called journalists elsewhere insist on the meme that MSNBC and Fox News are exactly the same, the Liberal Trinity of MSNBC in the personae of Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and the I Still Don't Trust Him Ed Schultz, are quite open about the fact that their shows are offering analysis of news through the perspective of their shows' hosts, rather than God's Own Truth As Reported By Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Fox News will trot out Greta Van Susteren, who I guess constitute "balance" simply because she's not totally off her rocker, or the pathetic Alan Colmes or the embarrassing Juan Williams, as evidence that they're "balanced." But that's sort of like saying that a school's pupils embraces diversity because the school's star linebacker beats up the kid with cerebral palsy every day. Every day at MSNBC, after I Got My Job Because My Dad Is a Raconteur Willie Geist fills up a half-hour of airtime, you get three hours of Joe Scarborough clutching his pearls about Barack Obama bowing to the much-shorter Japanese Prime Minister or whatever offends him that day.

The day that Fox News replaces its Three Morning Idiots with Break Room Live with Maron & Seder, then we can talk.

Labels: hack journalism, MSNBC, opinion journalism

If you're a liberal and the President is a Republican, your protest is penned in a mile away from where the president is. If you're a teabagger and the President is a Democrat, you can take a loaded gun to the place where the president is appearing.

If you were a lefty activist in the 1960's and you advocated armed revolution, you might find yourself on an FBI watch list for the rest of your life and ended up going to jail for conspiracy. For that matter, if you are an adviser to the president and you ever used the "r" word, you're hounded out of your post by teabaggers. But if you're a conservative teabagger in 2009, you can advocate revolution and get paid millions of dollars by a corporation to use the public airwaves to do so. You can even be a United States Congresswoman.

Imagine if, say, a group of antiwar protesters in 2004 had burned Denny Hastert in effigy. Imagine the outcry from the media. David Brooks would have shit his pants. David Broder would need an army of little girls with palm fronts to revive him from his place on the fainting couch. Chris Matthews would be sweating so profusely he'd have to wipe his own forehead right on the air. Never mind what Rush Limbaugh would have said. But if you're a teabagger, you get to burn Nancy Pelosi in effigy, and that's perfectly OK.

Because in the United States of America, anything the right does is free speech. Anything the left does is dangerous subversion. It has always been thus.

(h/t)

Labels: double standards, wingnuttia

Two-term republican Senator Jim DeMint thinks we need a Constitutional amendment mandating term limits:

A handful of Republican senators have proposed a constitutional amendment to limit how long a person may serve in Congress.

Currently, there are no term limits for federal lawmakers, but Sen. Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina, and several of his colleagues are advocating that service in the Senate be limited to 12 years, while lawmakers would only be allowed to serve six years in the House.

"Americans know real change in Washington will never happen until we end the era of permanent politicians," DeMint said in a statement released by his office. "As long as members have the chance to spend their lives in Washington, their interests will always skew toward spending taxpayer dollars to buyoff special interests, covering over corruption in the bureaucracy, fundraising, relationship building among lobbyists, and trading favors for pork -- in short, amassing their own power."

No word on whether Jim DeMint plans to run for re-election, since he has served the two terms to which he wants to limit OTHER Senators.

There's an easy way to enforce term limits, and that's to have voters pay attention. I live in a town that just out of force of habit elected a mayor who has been on the exclusively-Republican town council for nearly three decades, and ran as the candidate of "change." Voters don't pay attention, and so they vote for the familiar name on the ballot. If voters want term limits, they need to start paying attention and doing the civic part of their duty as citizens.

Labels: American Idiots, House Republicans, politics

For years we've heard from working people who support the Republican policies that have robbed the U.S. of its job base that "we have to cut taxes for the rich because rich people create jobs." During the Bush years, the wealthy and the corporations saw their taxes cut to the bone, so where are the jobs? Yesterday I heard from a co-worker about yet another situation in which workers for a major corporation are training their offshore replacements before being laid off. Here in the U.S., we no longer actually make anything. Our manufacturing base has been gutted. The promise was that the "information economy" would replace the manufacturing one, but the IT jobs have now been offshored. More recently we've heard about the pressing need for scientists to develop the technologies of the future. There's only one problem: research jobs are being gutted as well:

ere's a sobering sign that firms are robbing the future to pay for short-term profits: Over the past year, US employment of scientists and engineers – the people who create the next generation of products and make the US more competitive in the long term – has fallen by 6.3 per cent. Yet overall employment has fallen just 4.1 per cent.

That's a big problem, because the output of such well-educated workers has become a more important part of the American economy in recent years. New research by the University of Maryland suggests intangible business investment came to roughly $1.6trn in 2007, compared with about $1.2trn spent on tangible assets such as machinery and buildings. In 1995, the two were roughly equal. Going back further, tangible investments in 1985 were about 40 per cent larger than intangibles.

America's Bureau of Economic Analysis is taking steps to deal with the new realities. Software has been treated as investment since 1999, and the BEA plans to include R&D in the official GDP statistics in 2013. But the agency acknowledges that other areas of intangible investment still need to be worked into the numbers. "We think it's important not to ignore the fact that R&D is only part of broader innovative activity," says BEA director Steven Landefeld. For now, though, the US is navigating through the downturn with fragmentary information.

While the statistics don't account for it, there's good reason to suspect intangible investments are falling. Companies are under pressure to cut costs by reducing R&D expenditures and deferring other crucial intangibles.

At the same time, companies, especially those in the pharmaceutical industry, are moving more research to China, India, and elsewhere. They don't want to commit to costly investments if the economy remains weak.

One clear sign that GDP growth is being over-estimated is the sharp drop in venture-capital investment, which goes directly to new businesses. VCs invested about $12bn in the first three quarters of 2009, barely half the $22bn invested during the first three quarters of 2008. Some of this shortfall would have been spent on computers and other physical equipment, which would have been picked up in GDP. But most of the drop in VC money would have gone to pay for scientists, engineers, and new product development.

Similarly, many companies have taken a deep axe to reported R&D spending, which doesn't show up in GDP. Adding to the uncertainty, firms report their R&D only on a global basis. So, even though some are adding to such spending, there's no way to know how much of the increases take place in the US.

The stimulus package passed in February did include extra government funds for R&D. But even with this bump, a just-released analysis by the Democratic Leadership Council suggests total real spending on US R&D is falling for the second straight year. The labour market in particular shows the effects the fall in intangible investment is having, and it's not a pretty sight. In the manufacturing sector, non-production jobs – which include engineers, scientists, and other knowledge workers – declined at a 7.6 per cent annual rate in the third quarter, almost twice as fast as the loss of production workers.

Another big problem not reflected in the GDP statistics is that firms are retreating from development of new products, especially in stressed industries. Richard Shellabarger, 59, was a product development engineer. Before being let go in February he was working on the "next-generation air bag". He says: "I was trying to anticipate what the customer needed." In retrospect, Shellabarger worries that product development wasn't a good place to be in a downturn. "I suppose if you are looking to cut personnel, you don't want to short an area where you are delivering to customers right now."

I think of friends of mine whose children are within a few years of going to college. What should these kids choose as majors? What kinds of jobs will there be for them? For years I've been saying that if you liked 1905, you'll love [insert the present year here]. And it certainly seems to be coming to fruition, where there will be a few corporate executives with homes in the double-digits and vehicles they never drive -- and the rest of the country will find that the only jobs available are those helping them live their luxurious lives. But it won't be as shop floor workers or cube rats; it'll be as maids, chauffeurs, and gardeners.

Labels: economic death watch