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Aren’t they the people your mother warned you about?

There used to be some other serious and important issues the whole country was focused on before Barack Obama and the Democrats shoveled $12.8 T-r-i-l-l-i-o-n D-o-l-l-a-r-s of your money (nearly last years U.S. GDP) into the hands of their criminal friends on Wall Street who destroyed the U.S. and global economy before they decided to move forward to torturing and distracting you with promises of a watered down useless legislative proposal called The Public Option that will shovel who knows how much of your money into the hands of the insurance companies who are screwing you out of proper health care while forcing you to pay through your teeth for the highest per capita health care spending, the highest infant mortality, and the shortest life expectancy of all advanced countries in the world.

But there’s always a new flap to take your mind off the older flaps.

If there seems to be something odd about this latest flap, if there’s much that we don’t know yet, we do, at least, know one thing: This particular small splash from the previous administration’s deep dive into crime and folly will have its brief time in the media sun and then be swallowed up by oblivion, just as each of the previous flaps has been.

After all, can you honestly tell me that you think often about the CIA torture flap, the CIA-destruction-of-interrogation-video-tapes flap, the what-did-Congress/Nancy Pelosi-really-know-about-torture-methods flap, the Bush-administration-officials-(like-Condi-Rice)-signed-off-on-torture-methods-in-2002-even-before-the-Justice-Department-justified-them flap, the National-Security-Agency-(it-was-far-more-widespread-than-anyone-imagined)-electronic-surveillance flap, the should-the-NSA’s-telecom-spies-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-engaging-in-illegal-warrantless-wiretapping flap, the should-CIA-torturers-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-using-enhanced-interrogation-techniques flap, the Abu-Ghraib-photos-(round-two)-suppression flap, or various versions of the can-they-close-Guantanamo, will-they-keep-detainees-in-prison-forever flaps, among others that have already disappeared  into my own personal oblivion file? Every flap its day, evidently.  Each flap another problem (again we’re told) for a president with an ambitious program who is eager to “look forward, not backward.”  

Of course, he’s not alone.  Given the last eight years of disaster piled on catastrophe, who in our American world would want to look backward?  The urge to turn the page in this country is palpable, but — just for a moment — let’s not.

As a start, remind me: What didn’t we do? Let’s review for a moment.

Open Thread



Get Smart!

Virtual education… for free

AFP via Yahoo News

WASHINGTON (AFP) – They don’t offer degrees but then they don’t charge tuition either.

Colleges and universities across the United States are offering free courses online on virtually every subject imaginable, including videotaped lectures by some of their most distinguished professors.

Video-sharing site YouTube recently created a hub called YouTube EDU at youtube.com/edu for the more than 100 US colleges and universities offering free online learning.

Among the thousands of videos on YouTube EDU are the celebrated classroom theatrics of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physics professor Walter Lewin, whose clips have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Other leading institutions of higher education posting videos to YouTube include the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale.

Interested in dentistry? Then the YouTube channel of the University of Michigan School of Dentistry may be the place for you, serving up a total of 426 videos.

The courses offered on YouTube EDU are free and not for credit but the number of schools offering online classes which count towards a degree is booming.

According to a November 2008 study done for the Sloan Consortium, more than 3.9 million students in the United States were taking at least one online course in 2007, the latest year for which full statistics were available.

That was a 12 percent increase over the previous year, according to Sloan, a non-profit whose mission is to “integrate online education into the mainstream of higher education.”

Read the whole thing…

House To Vote On Single Payer Health Care

Friday evening in in the House Energy and Commerce Committee health care markup session, Anthony Weiner (D-NY) extracted a promise from Nancy Pelosi that the full House will debate and vote on a single payer plan after the summer recess.

The promise was made after Weiner agreed to withdraw a proposed amendment to H.R. 3200, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s version of a health care reform bill, which the panel passed by a vote of 31 to 28 late Friday, to create a universal Medicare system for the entire nation.

According to the New York Daily News:

“The Brooklyn-Queens Rep. looked a little surprised when Chairman Henry Waxman said Pelosi would allow that vote, and made Waxman repeat the deal to be sure it was clear and on the record. It’s an especially big deal for advocates of a single health care system – who see it as cheaper and simpler than the complicated measure being drawn up – because they have been complaining that they have not even been able to get an airing of their position.”

Melanie Says: It’ll All Be Ok

Melanie – Brand New Key

U.S. Health Care: Mobilize Or Accept The Status Quo

Crossposted from Antemedius

Economist, Author, and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Richard D. Wolff, well-known for his work on Marxian economics, economic methodology and class analysis, Yale University Ph.D. in Economics, and Professor at The New School University in New York City, talks with Real News CEO Paul Jay about the current health care debate and the challenges or barriers standing in the way of a national U.S. single payer plan.

Wolff suggests keeping in mind some basic facts – the U.S. spends far more for far less health care “product” than any other advanced country in the world, and suggests a return to the the old American prideful mindset of “if we’re not producing the best quality at the lowest price we should go and find out who’s doing that and replicate their experience“, and points out that the number one thing standing in the way of doing this is the lack of will to challenge the status quo and to do what everyone already knows needs to be done: spend less to get more.

In other words, Wolff opines, Obama must “mobilize or accept the status quo” and “make his party vote for real health care reform“, instead of making the lame this is the best we can get excuses that may very well destroy his presidency along with screwing millions of Americans out of proper health care.

Another Public Option

Are Liberal Netroots Groups Helping Obama Fail?

by Jeff Cohen

I’ve started deleting them as spam.  

I’m not talking about the enlarge-your-penis emails or “You’ve Won the Lottery” notices.  

I’m talking about the increasingly-urgent emails coming for weeks from liberal Netroots groups calling for a “public option” for health care — a government insurance plan citizens could choose to pay for instead of private insurance.  

Never has so much passion been so misdirected.  If what these liberal groups ultimately wanted out of President Obama and corporate-funded Democrats in Congress was a topnotch public plan to compete with the first-rate private plans, the wrong way to get it was to make that the demand.

Especially of a president whose instinct is toward conciliation and splitting the difference with big business and the right wing.

Sure, Obama was a community organizer once.  That was decades ago when Russia was still our mortal enemy, Nelson Mandela was still an official State Department terrorist threat and the White House was still funding Islamist fanatics in Afghanistan.  

For the last dozen years Obama has been a politician — and a consummate compromiser at that.  Have we failed to notice?

Activists must recognize the surest way to get a strong public option that could compete with the Cadillac of health plans. We needed to mobilize millions of Netroots people, almost every union and 150 members of Congress to endorse a maximum demand: National health insurance . . . enhanced Medicare for All.  In other words, a cost-effective single-payer system of publicly-financed, privately-delivered healthcare that ends private health insurance (and its waste, bureaucracy, ads, sales commissions, lavish executive salaries, profiteering).

Had liberal groups sent out millions of emails building a movement that posed an existential threat to the health insurance industry, Sen. Baucus and Blue Dog Democrats and their corporate healthcare patrons might well be on their knees begging for a comprehensive public option — to avert the threat of full-blown Medicare for All.  

Read the entire article…

Jeff Cohen is an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College, founder of the media watch group FAIR, and former board member of Progressive Democrats of America .  

Bill Kristol: Government Run Healthcare Better Than Private

Bill Kristol was Jon Stewart’s Daily Show Monday night guest. He also thinks that YOU don’t deserve healthcare equal to what the military receives.

Stewart skewers him.

RawStory: Bill Kristol admits govt.-run health care can be better than private

On Monday night’s show, Kristol worked to explain why he didn’t support a public health option, arguing in essence that the existence of Medicare and Medicaid provided health coverage to those most in need.

“So no public option, even though that’s good enough for the military – not good enough for the people of America?” Stewart asked.

“They do not deserve the same quality of health care the soldiers fighting deserve, and they [the soldiers] need all kinds of things we don’t need,” Kristol said.

“Are you saying that the American public shouldn’t have access to the same quality of health care that we give to our better citizens?” Stewart asked.

“To our soldiers? Yes, absolutely,” Kristol responded, to a chorus of boos from the audience.

An incredulous Stewart asked: “Really?”

Moments later, Kristol added that “one of the ways we make it up” to soldiers that they receive relatively low pay is by “giving them first class health care. The rest of us can go out and buy insurance.”

That’s when Stewart struck.

“Bill Kristol just said … that the government can run a first-class health care system and a government-run health care system is better than the private health care system.”

“You trapped me somehow,” a visibly uncomfortable Kristol responded.

Batsh*t!

From Stephen Webster at RawStory:

GOP congressmen run from blogger asking ‘birther’ questions

Mike Stark of Firedoglake and Huffington Post thinks he has stumbled onto the reason George W. Bush was elected to the presidency twice: The GOP’s base, as exemplified by this ubiquitous “birther” nonsense, must be Insane.

In  the video below, he puts the birther fictions before a series of Republican congressmen on the hill, and their reactions are priceless.

Notes Jane Hamsher over at Firedoglake:

Is U.S. Health Care Reform Dead Or Alive?

The Real News Network talks to Executive Editor Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report.

Ford has a little different take on the situation and analyzing the current political dynamics surrounding the issue says that by excluding a single payer plan, Barack Obama allowed the right to dominate the reform debate, and concludes that the longer the Democrats wait to reform the health care system, the more likely it is that the public is going to turn against the so-called reforms.

US Military Releases Devastating Arctic Global Warming Satellite Images

UK Guardian – The Observer, Sunday 26 July 2009

Revealed: the secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide:

Photos from US spy satellites declassified by the Obama White House provide the first graphic images of how the polar ice sheets are retreating in the summer. The effects on the world’s weather, environments and wildlife could be devastating

Satellite images of polar ice sheets

Satellite images of polar ice sheets taken in July 2006 and July 2007 showing the retreating ice during the summer.

View image full size (opens new window)

“Holder Joins Conyers in Demanding Action”

David Swanson this morning…

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers has called on Attorney General Eric Holder to open a criminal investigation into the misdeeds of former president George W. Bush and former vice president Richard B. Cheney.

Holder, in turn, has now called on Conyers to open impeachment proceedings against former head of the Office of Legal Council Jay Bybee, now a judge in the Ninth Circuit.

Conyers, in response, has demanded that Holder open a complete investigation of 14 different areas of criminal enterprise and appoint an independent counsel, offering a list of eight possible candidates.

Holder, in reply, has insisted that Conyers reissue all of the subpoenas his committee has failed to enforce over the past two and a half years and use the Capitol Police to enforce them at once.

In response, Conyers’ office has issued a new report on the need to weed out corruption and undo politically motivated prosecutions by the U.S. Department of Justice.

This morning, the attorney general remarked at a televised press conference, “Chairman Conyers proposed five months ago to extend to 10 years the statutes of limitations on crimes allegedly committed under the previous administration. Introducing a bill might be a way to begin making that happen. Just an idea. I’m no expert.”

Surprisingly, John Conyers removed a large Easter bonnet that had been disguising him, stood up in the back of the room and shouted: “Mr. Attorney General, the former vice president of the United States confesses to authorizing torture every time he leaves his house. You are required by law to indict him. Are you waiting for Marc Rich’s permission?”

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