But while the organizers are as crass as they come, I haven’t seen any evidence that the people disrupting those town halls are Florida-style rent-a-mobs. For the most part, the protesters appear to be genuinely angry. The question is, what are they angry about?

There was a telling incident at a town hall held by Representative Gene Green, D-Tex. An activist turned to his fellow attendees and asked if they “oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.” Nearly all did. Then Representative Green asked how many of those present were on Medicare. Almost half raised their hands.

Now, people who don’t know that Medicare is a government program probably aren’t reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing. They may believe some of the disinformation opponents of health care reform are spreading, like the claim that the Obama plan will lead to euthanasia for the elderly. (That particular claim is coming straight from House Republican leaders.) But they’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is.

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.

Many people hoped that last year’s election would mark the end of the “angry white voter” era in America. Indeed, voters who can be swayed by appeals to cultural and racial fear are a declining share of the electorate.

But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.

And if Mr. Obama can’t recapture some of the passion of 2008, can’t inspire his supporters to stand up and be heard, health care reform may well fail.

Labels: health care, thuggery

Labels: fascism

The Mighty Huntress

Labels: cat blogging

"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn't as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.

The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

[snip]

Last year the International Journal of Obesity published a paper by Gortmaker and Kendrin Sonneville of Children's Hospital Boston noting that "there is a widespread assumption that increasing activity will result in a net reduction in any energy gap" — energy gap being the term scientists use for the difference between the number of calories you use and the number you consume. But Gortmaker and Sonneville found in their 18-month study of 538 students that when kids start to exercise, they end up eating more — not just a little more, but an average of 100 calories more than they had just burned.

If evolution didn't program us to lose weight through exercise, what did it program us to do? Doesn't exercise do anything?

Sure. It does plenty. In addition to enhancing heart health and helping prevent disease, exercise improves your mental health and cognitive ability. A study published in June in the journal Neurology found that older people who exercise at least once a week are 30% more likely to maintain cognitive function than those who exercise less. Another study, released by the University of Alberta a few weeks ago, found that people with chronic back pain who exercise four days a week have 36% less disability than those who exercise only two or three days a week.

But there's some confusion about whether it is exercise — sweaty, exhausting, hunger-producing bursts of activity done exclusively to benefit our health — that leads to all these benefits or something far simpler: regularly moving during our waking hours. We all need to move more — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says our leisure-time physical activity (including things like golfing, gardening and walking) has decreased since the late 1980s, right around the time the gym boom really exploded. But do we need to stress our bodies at the gym?

Labels: weight

Labels: movies, obituaries

Labels: Glenn Beck, right-wing hatemongers

Republicans think this is funny

Labels: lynching, racism, Republicans, sick motherfuckers, wussy-ass Democrats

Planned to do this in the summer but figure to stick around to see the election outcome. This particular one got so much attention and I was just curious. Not like I give a flying fcuk who won, since this exit plan was already planned. Good luck to Obama! He will be successful. The liberal media LOVES him. Amerika has chosen The Black Man. Good! In light of this I got ideas outside of Obama's plans for the economy and such. Here it is: Every black man should get a young white girl hoe to hone up on. Kinda a reverse indentured servitude thing. Long ago, many a older white male landowner had a young Negro wench girl for his desires. Bout' time tables are turned on that shit. Besides, dem young white hoez dig da bruthrs! LOL. More so than they dig the white dudes! Every daddy know when he sends his little girl to college, she be bangin a bruthr real good. I saw it. "Not my little girl", daddy says! (Yeah right!!) Black dudes have thier choice of best white hoez. You do the math, there are enough young white so all the brothers can each have one for 3 or 6 months or so.

Labels: crime, misogyny, racism, wingnuttia

With the support and encouragement of the Republican leadership, one of America's most despicable political thugs, Dick Armey, a corporate lobbyist funded by the "health" industry, is organizing mobs to disrupt, harass and intimidate every public event organized to discuss the health care reform effort.

It's not just Dick Armey. The entire Republican leadership has been fanning the flames with persistent lies claiming the Democrats want to force euthanasia on old people, abortions on the unwilling and have Obamacrats tell your doctor how or whether to treat you. We've seen months of pernicious lies, and they're having the predictable effect in scaring the elderly and inciting the gullible to vent their anger at anyone they can associate with Obama or health reform.

But instead of condemning such reprehensible behavior, the media writes absurd stories about the resurgence of the party, it's prospects for 2010-12 and who the next leader will be. But we already know: the leaders of the Republican Party are liars who think it's fine to organize thugs to disrupt town halls and stifle discussion.

Armey's Republican endorsed effort is profoundly anti-democratic. It is nothing less than an assault on the country's ability to talk about public issues. It seeks to prevent public officials from speaking to or hearing from affected citizens.

The organizers and their corporate sponsors are not interested in public dialogue or debate. Their purpose is to intimidate and threaten reform proponents, to silence them and prevent their views being heard.

The First Amendment protects even the most objectionable speech. Even speech whose content you hate. But this will quickly move beyond speech. It is sheer thuggery, driven by anger and induced by lies. And because the Republicans are inciting the most gullible and desperately fearful, it will get worse unless the Party's leaders, organizers and their corporate sponsors are shamed into stepping back from the abyss.

The restraints that separate where we are from organized violence are always fragile, based as much on a commonly shared sense of fairness as on civil enforcement. That shared notion has been severely damaged in recent years. Once it's gone, it's a small step for angry people to cross the line from vigorous, constitutionally protected demonstrations to illegal and violent behavior.

Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) will not be hosting any town hall events this August -- instead, he's making himself available to constituents for one-on-one meetings about health care reform -- and at least part of the reason is this: His offices have received threatening phone calls, including at least one direct threat against his life.

"We had no town hall events scheduled for the August recess anyway, but in light of everything that's happened -- we have received a threatening phone call in the D.C. office, there have been calls to the Raleigh office," said Miller communications director LuAnn Canipe, in an interview with TPM. The threatening call in question happened earlier this week.

"The call to the D.C. office was, 'Miller could lose his life over this,'" said Canipe. "Our staffer took it so seriously, he confirmed what the guy was saying. He said, 'Sir is that a threat?' and at that time our staffer was getting the phone number off caller ID and turning it over to the Capitol Police."

They haven't heard anything back from the police yet, but they did get the caller's number. So this could develop into something soon enough.

Hectoring protesters at a handful of Democratic town hall forums became a flash point Wednesday in the health-care debate, as party leaders cast the critics as "angry mobs" trying to "destroy President Obama" while Republicans accused Democrats of dismissing public opposition to their proposals.

As House members head home for the August recess, some Democrats have been met by taunts, jeers and, in one case, an effigy. Video footage of the sometimes-belligerent protests has taken hold online and on television in a relatively quiet news week, threatening to drown out any health-care debate.

That has fed a political tug of war over whether the protests, at gatherings from Pennsylvania to Texas to Wisconsin, have been organized by conservative groups or sparked by average citizens voicing their own displeasure.

Labels: brownshirts, right-wing hatemongers, thuggery, wingnuttia

Labels: Bollywood

But it is here in Chicago that Obama learned to put together coalitions, understand the value of compromise and the need to bridge gaps — all things he says will work in the White House.

It was here that Barack Obama, activist, became Barack Obama, politician.

He did it by relying on his experience as an outsider, always finding ways to meld with worlds that were not his own.

"He was a stranger but he made his way," says Mike Kruglik, who worked with Obama as an organizer. "He could see himself in other people."

[snip]

Though he had a diverse group of friends, he and two others among Punahou's few black students met weekly for what became known as "ethnic corner."

"It was more about learning from one another, other than it's the only place we feel safe," says Tony Peterson, one of the three. They discussed interracial dating, education — and, he says, probably "whether we would see a black president in our lifetime."

Peterson and other buddies say Obama never spoke of the turmoil he revealed in his memoir, "Dreams from My Father," in which he wrote about wrestling with his racial identity and using drugs — including marijuana and cocaine — to "push questions of who I was out of my mind."

Labels: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush

Former President Bill Clinton left North Korea on Wednesday morning after a dramatic 20-hour visit, in which he won the freedom of two American journalists, opened a diplomatic channel to North Korea’s reclusive government and dined with the North’s ailing leader, Kim Jong-il.

Mr. Clinton departed from Pyongyang, the capital, around 8:30 a.m. local time, along with the journalists, Laura Ling, 32, and Euna Lee, 36, on a private jet bound for Los Angeles, according to a statement from the former president’s office.

Labels: Bill Clinton

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting "illegal" or "unlawful" weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.

These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct.

Ever since former president George W. Bushreferred to the war on terror as a “crusade” in the days after the September 11 attacks, many have charged that the United States was conducting a holy war, pitting a Christian America against the Muslim world. That perception grew as prominent military leaders such as Lt. Gen. William Boykin described the wars in evangelical terms, casting the U.S. military as the "army of God." Although President Obama addressed the Muslim world this month in an attempt to undo the Bush administration's legacy of militant Christian rhetoric that often antagonized Muslim countries, several recent stories have framed the issue as a wider problem of an evangelical military culture that sees spreading Christianity as part of its mission.

A May article in Harper’s by Jeff Sharlet illustrated a military engaged in an internal battle over religious practice. Then came news about former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s Scripture-themed briefings to President Bush that paired war scenes with Bible verses. (In an e-mail published on Politico, Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn denied that the former Defense secretary had created or even seen many of the briefings.) Later in May, Al-Jazeera broadcast clips filmed in 2008 showing stacks of Bibles translated into Pashto and Dari at the U.S. air base in Bagram and featuring the chief of U.S. military chaplains in Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, telling soldiers to “hunt people for Jesus.”

In the aftermath of that report, the Pentagon responded that it had confiscated and destroyed the Bibles and said there was no effort to convert Afghans. But while the military dismissed the Bagram Bibles as an isolated incident, a civil-rights watchdog group, Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), says this is not the case. According to the group's president, Mikey Weinstein, a cadre of 40 U.S. chaplains took part in a 2003 project to distribute 2.4 million Arabic-language Bibles in Iraq. This would be a serious violation of U.S. military Central Command's General Order Number One forbidding active-duty troops from trying to convert people to any religion. A Defense Department spokeswoman, in an e-mail to NEWSWEEK, denies any knowledge of this project.

The Bible initiative was handled by former Army chaplain Jim Ammerman, the 83-year-old founder of the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches (CFGC), an organization in charge of endorsing 270 chaplains and chaplain candidates for the armed services. Ammerman worked with an evangelical group based in Arkansas, the International Missions Network Center, to distribute the Bibles through the efforts of his 40 active-duty chaplains in Iraq. A 2003 newsletter for the group said of the effort, "The goal is to establish a wedge for the kingdom of God in the Middle East, directly affecting the Islamic world."

Labels: Blackwater, Christofascist Zombie Brigade, Iraq, right-wing hatemongers

At the end of our long and increasingly longer lives, when we are terminally ill and in the last months of life, we must accept our bodies' decline, face our own mortality, gather our families and say goodbye. Say no to feeding tubes, ventilators, resuscitators, the isolation of ICU.

End-of-life care eats up 12 percent of U.S. healthcare dollars; next year, we'll spend $135 billion on it. That's not money spent getting well and extending life, that's money spent preventing and easing death in terminally ill patients. Indeed, 40 percent of Medicare dollars are spent in the last 30 days of life.

Where does the money go? Hospitals. Half of us die in hospitals, 20 percent of us in their ICU beds, which cost 10 times as much, on a daily basis, as hospice care. ICU costs $1,500 daily; on average, $10,900 the first day.

Don't blame hospitals or physicians. We check in, we ask to be saved. Doctors provide care; they're not supposed to cut off or limit care. Besides, they might get sued.

We are the problem. We are Harry and Louise, the fictional suburban couple who keep cropping up in TV ads, paid for by health industry groups. In 1994, they criticized government involvement in Clinton's healthcare plan, and now in 2009 they support government reform in Obama's plan. In each case, Harry and Louise embody and fan our fears about limiting care. They want it all, every choice, every procedure. They want doctors to "do everything possible." Harry and Louise must die.

How did we get into this mess? The 30 percent end-of-life spending rate hasn’t changed since the 1970s, when Medicare began tracking it. We’ve been dying poorly -- at great expense -- for decades.

We did this to ourselves. We moved death out of homes and into hospitals, and once there, left poor or no instructions.

Besides, accept death? We're Americans! We're hard-wired to live fully and richly. We certainly will not go gently into that good night. Every day we cheat death. We buy automobiles with airbags on all sides, wear helmets when we bike and face infants backward in car seats. Many of us feel most alive flirting with death: We jump out of airplanes, surf with sharks and ski off-piste. We expect to be rescued from an avalanche and miracles to happen in the E.R. How do we know? We've seen it on TV.

That we fear death is understandable. Among human experience it's the sole unknown. No matter where or how we live -- in cities or countrysides, extreme skiing or sunning by the pool -- death is the only part of life we can't know.

But when it comes to dying, we act the same: We call 911 and leave decisions to medical professionals. We do everything medically possible to prevent death. We get hooked up. Do we fend off death? Nope.

Labels: health care

Labels: corporatism, health care, Keith Olbermann

Labels: bloggers

A Long Island mother of three -- armed to the teeth with an assault rifle and shotgun -- was arrested for scouting out and taking pictures of an Air National Guard base in the Hamptons, authorities said.

Suffolk County Undersheriff Joseph Caracappa said Nancy Genovese, 53, of Quogue, was arrested for trespassing outside the Gabreskie Airport ANG facility Thursday night, and Homeland Security and the FBI are also investigating.

Caracappa said Genovese was taking photographs of the perimeter of the base. A search of her car uncovered an arsenal -- an XM-15 assault rifle, a shotgun and 500 rounds of ammunition.

When asked what she was doing, she replied, "Nothing."

"They are registered weapons, but they're scary weapons," said Caracappa. "It's very odd."

He said she had been at the base a few weeks earlier, taking photos and asking questions of the guards.

FEMA just returned my phone call and...
Current mood: accomplished
k, when I saw the caller ID just now, saying FEMA...I gasped for air and answered the phone.

I did clarify, he was from the DHS, Department of Homeland Security, which he says is under FEMA, or a department of FEMA. When did this happen? FEMA has too much power if this is true.

Funny, the FEMA international desk I spoke to in the beginning of this week, told me the opposite, "America is a global community." So he says the troops are allowed here. Double talk from both of them.

My main concern was the drills on July 27 to July 31.

He told me 3 times, foreign troops will NOT be on American soil for this drill. He told me they were doing the same drills in their own countries to coincide with us and be sure all works well.

I asked him several times why the FEMA home page says the foreign troops will be at the drill, and it names the countries, Mexico, UK, Canada, etc.
He insists there are not NOW (which is a lie) nor will be foreign troops on our soil, for drills or anything else.

He told me he has had calls from people about FEMA rounding up people for camps, he denied this too. I didn't ask him about this but he did volunteer the info.

While I still had him on the phone, I went to the site and it was right on the home page, I don't see the announcement regarding the drills, including foreign troops, anymore. It was always right there on the home page. Um, maybe too many people are complaining? Maybe you guys can find it.

This man denied every single thing I asked him about, so I told him I would email the info going around online. Like he has no idea, right? He kept insisting FEMA is under direct instructions of our President, no one else can direct them.

He also continued to explain that FEMA is available ONLY for disasters, natural emergencies. It seemed like he was defending himself against questions I had not even asked.

This is such bull. I have his name and email address as he asked me to send him the info on the FEMA leased lots with the caskets. Honestly, do any of you think this guy has never seen these videos or posts regarding all the bad things FEMA can do.

Ok, so people what do you want me to email to this guy? He is obviously a puppet, and a liar, as the FEMA site clearly says the troops will be here, in America.

Labels: batshit crazies, right-wing hatemongers

Labels: Sarah Palin

For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O’Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann’s bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.

It was perhaps the fiercest media feud of the decade and by this year, their bosses had had enough. But it took a fellow television personality with a neutral perspective to help bring it to at least a temporary end.

At an off-the-record summit meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in mid-May, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose asked Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of G.E., and his counterpart at the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, about the feud.

Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs. Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal.

In early June, the combat stopped, and MSNBC and Fox, for the most part, found other targets for their verbal missiles (Hello, CNN).

“It was time to grow up,” a senior employee of one of the companies said.

The reconciliation — not acknowledged by the parties until now — showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations. A G.E. shareholders’ meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers) last April.

“We all recognize that a certain level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion,” Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for G.E., said this week. “We’re happy that has happened.”

So now GE is using its control of NBC and MSNBC to ensure that there is no more reporting by Fox of its business activities in Iran or other embarrassing corporate activities, while News Corp. is ensuring that the lies spewed regularly by its top-rated commodity on Fox News are no longer reported by MSNBC.  You don't have to agree with the reader's view of the value of this reporting to be highly disturbed that it is being censored.

This is hardly the first time evidence of corporate control over the content of NBC and MSNBC has surfaced.  Last May, CNN's Jessica Yellin said that when she was at MSNBC, "the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this [the Iraq War] was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation"; "the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives ... to put on positive stories about the president"; and "they would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive."  Katie Couric said that when she was at NBC, "there was a lot of undercurrent of pressure not to rock the boat for a variety of reasons, where it was corporate reasons or other considerations" not to be too critical of the Bush administration.  MSNBC's rising star, Ashleigh Banfield, was demoted and then fired after she criticized news media organizations generally, and Fox News specifically, for distorting their war coverage to appear more pro-government.  And, of course, when MSNBC canceled Phil Donahue's show in the run-up to the Iraq war despite its being that network's highest-rated program, a corporate memo surfaced indicating that the company had fears of being associated with an anti-war and anti-government message.

And now we have an example of GE's forcibly silencing the top-rated commentator on MSNBC -- ordering him not to hold Fox News accountable any longer -- because, in return, News Corp. has agreed to silence its own commentators from criticizing GE.  The corporations that own our largest news organizations have extensive relationships with the federal government.  Anyone (like Charlie Rose) who denies that those relationships influence how these news organizations "report" on the government -- driven by the desire which corporate executives have to avoid alienating the government officials on whom their corporate interests depend, or avoid alienating potential customer bases for their products -- is completely delusional.  GE's forcing Keith Olbermann to cease his criticism of Fox News and Bill O'Reilly is a clear and vivid example of how that works.

* * * * * 

On a very related note:  this week, former Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe was a guest-host on MSNBC's Countdown while Keith Olbermann is on vacation.  When Olbermann is there, Wolffe is a very frequent guest on Countdown, where he is called an "MSNBC political analyst" and comments on political news.  All of this, despite the fact that Wolffe left Newsweek last March in order to join "Public Strategies, Inc.," the corporate communications firm run by former Bush White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, its President and CEO.  According to the Press Release they issued to announce Wolffe's joining the company:

Labels: Bill O'Reilly, corporatism, Fox News, Keith Olbermann, mainstream media, MSNBC

	YES	NO	NOT SURE
ALL	77	11	12
MEN	75	12	13
WOMEN	79	10	11
DEM	93	4	3
REP	42	28	30
IND	83	8	9
OTH/REF	80	9	11
NON VOTERS	84	7	9
WHITE	71	14	15
BLACK	97	1	2
LATINO	87	6	7
OTHER/REF	88	6	6
18-29	88	4	8
30-44	72	14	14
45-59	82	8	10
60+	69	17	14
NORTHEAST	93	4	3
SOUTH	47	23	30
MIDWEST	90	6	4
WEST	87	7	6

Labels: American Idiots, Republicans