In case you haven't heard, the Million Can March is a counter protest to the teabagging protest redux scheduled for the Fourth of July. Good luck wi dat, teabaggers.
But seriously, I'm already in the process of cleaning out my pantry and getting some food over to the local food bank.
The idea is to do something positive in response to the Teabagger business. The instigator of this project, Rev. Phat of Les Enrages, points out:
This all started with a vague notion that we should do something more than just have a good laugh at the next round of tea parties scheduled for July 4th. I thought that if teabaggers are so afraid of socialism, maybe we could show 'em socialism on a national scale. And what is more socialistic than sharing our food with others.
And in the spirit of forgiveness, Rev. Phat invites conservatives to provide the drinks: dry packaged drink mixes and other non-perishable beverages are welcome at food banks, too.
If the First Amendment means anything,
it means that a state has no business telling a man,
sitting alone in his house,
what books he may read or what films he may watch.
On Sibel Edmonds blog today, this heroic naturalized citizen reminds us "home-groaners" of our responsibilities:
Here comes our Fourth of July. Surely what is left of our Bill of Rights is worth celebrating, and just as surely what has been taken away is worth fighting for. So let us enjoy that cold beer, savor that hot dog, and while doing that let us reflect and renew our pledge to fight for those irreplaceable American liberties that have been taken from us; the fight against our 'real' foes. Are we prepared to make the same pledge those founding fathers made 233 years ago?
Edmonds was fired from her position as a language specialist at the FBI's Washington Field Office in March, 2002, after she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleging serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence which, she contended, presented a danger to the United States' security. Since that time, court proceedings on her whistleblower claims have been blocked by the assertion of State Secrets Privilege. On March 29, 2006, she was awarded the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award in recognition of her defense of free speech as it applies to the written word.[5]
Both Franklin and Jefferson, two of the smartest guys to whom we attribute the inspiration for the Founding, repeated sentiments like these (the rhyme is Franklin's, I believe): "Those who would be both safe and free desire that which never was, nor ever will be."
Not long ago I found a disconcerting message on my answering machine. It said simply, "Don't send me any more emails. We went bankrupt." It is a message that has been reverberating through towns in America mostly below the radar screen of the mainstream media.
The businesses filing for bankruptcy range from manufacturers to auto dealers. Some of them are national, many of them are regional, and quite a few are local, the anchors of many small towns. A lot of them are niche businesses. By that I mean they operate in specialized markets often as suppliers to larger firms.
SEPARATED at BIRTH #1 - after seeing a photo of the newly-deposed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya .....
.... for all the world, all I could think of was El Exigente - the old Savarin Coffee pitchman (who, as it turns out, was portrayed by Ricardo Montalban's brother Carlos).
Such is life. Before I go off-the-deep-end - and it may be too late for that - why not stop in for a look at news items outside the headlines, in the arts and sciences; foreign news that generates little notice in the US media and ....well, just plain whimsy.....
It seems only yesterday that we could read entire five-hundred word essays and take the time to form an insightful comment to them, sometimes generating actual discussion. But that is so 2006. Today, online communication seems to have devolved to one-hundred-forty character Tweets, and endlessly wandering through Facebook, posting pithy comments on our friends' walls.
Even teh Google seems to be passe--taken over by the new Microsoft search engine, although from what I've seen about Google Wave, I'm not counting them out yet. (Warning, the linked video runs 80 minutes. Good luck sustaining your attention span for that long).
Michael Jackson made perfectly disposable music everybody was in love with for 15 minutes back in the 80s. It got real tired real fast, and, uh, let's see how long this rebirth in sales for his old trite shit lasts. Not. v. long. Here's the real meaning of Michael Jackson:
Joe Jackson beat his children to turn them into pop stars. For that he was rewarded with the American Dream, fame and fortune. Why don't we celebrate that?
Somewhere in Iran, there are terabytes of data - unseen photos, unwatched videos and unread words that have captured events that have yet to be seen by those of us in the "West."
The Ahmadinejad regime has struggled to tamp out communication among the Iranian people, now keeping it to a very slow drip. Hardly anything comes out from Iran these days, unlike the deluge that we have seen in the past. Keep in mind, Iran is the biggest blogging nation in the world outside of the United States. The culture there, with a majority of the population being young, is a wired culture. Hell, we are a wired planet, so why should Iran be any different?
When it comes to politics, new language and new thinking are different things. Whatever new language progressives used in 2004 failed to change the electoral outcome, and at most it'll help them eke out a few victories in the coming years. New language is like changing the window treatment, not the window, not the view, not the perspective.
What's required for social change, and it could come from either party, is the kind of political realignment we get once every 50 years. Such realignment pulls a sizeable majority from the vast non-ideological, sensible middle of the political spectrum, and creates a real mandate for fundamental social change. Like those that FDR and LBJ presided over. Like the universal health care and campaign finance reform that we need now.
Okay, I admit the title is a bit of a red herring, but this story is absolutely hysterical.
For a couple of decades now, social psychologists and behavioral economists have been amusing themselves manipulating consumers into doing odd things. They've delighted in debunking the notion of homo economicus, that theoretical creature who rationally seeks maximum economic utility.
...
But suppose, instead of scanning people's brains as they're sipping wine in a laboratory, you tested them in a more realistic situation: a restaurant where they're spending their own money. That challenge was undertaken at an upscale restaurant in Tel Aviv by two behavioral economists, Ori Heffetz of Cornell and Moses Shayo of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who expected to be able to manipulate diners' choices by changing the prices on the menu.
Just wait. I haven't gotten to the punch line yet.
In a recent thread concerned with the social construction of gender and the essential (or non-essential) differences between men and women, Joools made the following observation:
And anyone who has spent any time at all in organizations that are mainly female knows that women can be very aggressive. Just not in a guy way. More subtly, probably, but still very aggressive.
the consequences of how "we wake up in the morning to hear and watch the newest tragedy that has swept the world's media attention"--whether it's "the tragic crash of an airplane" or "the death of a star." Meanwhile:
Serious events and acts are taking place everyday which merit serious social debate, yet because of the fact that our societies are deeply fragmented, broken and clashing between each other, we are unable to grant ourselves the necessary pause, required for conciliation and unity.
Because of this, we are easy to control as a mass of isolated individuals, which is held together by norms and regulations, bureaucracies, military and police, and concepts such as the nation state, the church and the corporation.
If we are to stay in this model of society, I fear we will live in perpetual war until we destroy ourselves by not paying attention to the fact that something is drastically wrong.
Ouziel's digest of exactly what is wrong reads like a list of topics steadfastly avoided by corporate media in the U.S.: "We are living in societies plagued with corruption at all levels, we are constantly expanding our militarized societies surveilled by police forces and colonizing armies, which are rapidly eroding our freedoms." (See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Media Ignore Their Core Duty: Arianna Huffington & Glenn Greenwald on Media Accountability" (9-10/08).)
Isolation, ironically, has ALWAYS been part of the telos of "massification," through alienation. The increased development of 'niche markets' exaggerates alienation. Alone in the crowd, we are puppets of the media who pull our strings and push our buttons while driving us, aas individuals, even further apart. This is not surprising given that 1) the media are owned by the CorpoRats, and 2) the 'solidarity' of members of related groups is utterly inimical to the CorpoRat interests in imposing more corporate authoritarianism, globalism, and increased, (repressive) social surveillance.
5:00 PM ET -- Mousavi rejects partial vote recount.
Defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi on Saturday rejected authorities' proposals for a partial recount of votes from this month's election and repeated his demand the entire ballot be annulled.
Iran's top legislative body, the Guardian Council, had offered to recount 10 percent of ballot boxes from the June 12 vote in the presence of senior officials representing the government and opposition.
"This kind of recount will not remove ambiguities...There is no other way but annulment of the vote...Some members of this committee are not impartial," Mousavi said in a statement posted on his website.
5:06 PM ET -- "Hactivists" take up cause as streets quiet. A report from the AP:
A sharp clampdown by Iranian authorities may have quelled street protests, but the fight goes on in cyberspace.
Groups of "hacktivists" -- Web hackers demanding Internet freedom -- say they are targeting Web pages of Iran's leadership in response to the regime's muzzling of blogs, news outlets and other sites.
It's unclear how much the wired warriors have disrupted official Iranian sites. Attempts by The Associated Press to access sites for state news organizations, including the Islamic Republic News Agency and Fars, were unsuccessful -- with a message saying the links were "broken."
Other Iranian Web sites, including the official site for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were able to be viewed.
Below, Gary Larson 'bird's-eye' view of the House/Senate
reconciliation process on climate protection and health-care Bills:
The "LEAST" being the (Ree-vo-fucking-LUTIONARY!) "Cap-and-Trade" band-aid on the suppurating, metastacizing bed-sore which is the USer reply to global climate change, passed by the House (but still pending in the Senate), and the "Obama-care" health care reform 'plan' which has not even been introduced in EITHER House. Both of these, whatsoever their weaknesses, holes, absences, and flaws, will assuredly be hailed as the GREATEST THING SINCE EDIBLE UNDIES, and will be touted, by everyone involved in passing them, as the 'answer' to the (apparently, otherwise, abjectly betrayed) "promise" for a new approach to USer health care and climate change, and neither of which will make sufficient strides to ameliorate the problems they're allegedly designed top meet; but each of which will be sufficient reason/excuse to postpone any FURTHER "pain" to the legislators who are required to enact them.
"They," of course, being the corpoRat pig-fuckers in the WhiteHouse and Congress (inclusive).
To the extent that either the energy-plan or the health-plan is in any way 'satisfactory' to the industries which must fall under the regulatory supervision of the legislation, that bill will be a failure to the interests of common folks and the environment, the planet and life in general. These folks always seem willing to prove the null hypothesis in my theory, that humanity is a cosmic experiment testing whether "life" can survive "intelligence."
To the folks who claim that ANY attempt is better than no effort, I offer a hearty "Cods'-wallop!" Both measures, in whatsoever form they eventually comprise, will become excuses to forego FURTHER reforms, to IGNORE the metastacizing crises, and to go before the voters as "reformers," their patent, looming, reeking, odious failures to act in any meaningful way notwithstanding...
(*Anosognosia: "The condition in which a person who suffers illness or disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her illness/disability; may include unawareness of quite dramatic impairments, such as blindness or paralysis." And my newest blog.)
The fact is that despite the bluster of the American Right that Something Must be Done, the United States is not a neutral or benevolent player in Iran. (And never has been. W) Washington overthrew the elected government of Iran in 1953 over oil nationalization, and installed the megalomaniac and oppressive Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, who gradually so alienated all social classes in Iran that he was overthrown in a popular revolution in 1978-1979. The shah had a national system of domestic surveillance and tossed people in jail for the slightest dissidence, (where they were tortured and sometimes killed. W) and was supported to the hilt by the United States government. So past American intervention has not been on the side of let us say human rights.
More recently, the US backed the creepy and cult-like Mojahedin-e Khalq (People's Holy Warriors or MEK), which originated in a mixture of communist Stalinism and fundamentalist Islam. The MEK is a terrorist organization and has blown things up inside Iran, so the Pentagon's ties with them are wrong in so many ways. The MEK, by the way, has a very substantial lobby in Washington DC and has some congressmen in its back pocket, and is supported by the less savory elements of the Israel lobbies such as Daniel Pipes and Patrick Clawson. I am not saying they should be investigated for material support of terrorism, since I am appalled by the unconstitutional breadth of that current DOJ tactic, but I am signalling that the US imperialist Right has been up to very sinister things in Iran for decades. A person who worked in the Pentagon once alleged to me that then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was privately pushing for using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. And Dick Cheney is so attached to launching war on Iran that he characterized attempts to deflect such plans as a "conspiracy." Given what the US did to Fallujah, it strikes me as unlikely that a military invasion of Iran would be good for that country's civic life. And there are rather disadvantages to being nuked, even by the kindliest of WASP gentlemen of Mr. Rumsfeld's ilk.
As I write this, I'm sitting in a Dunkin Donuts -- one of two in this small college town -- and avoiding real work. The coffee here is quite drinkable, and it's at a pretty good price. I can get enough coffee to make my little heart go pitty-pat for less than two bucks. I can get a reasonably healthy little flatbread sandwich that I burn through in about two hours and want more. No, this is not an endorsement of Dunkin Donuts, because here's the thing: Starbucks makes a better cup of coffee. Heresy, I know, but the fact of the matter is that if you want to put cream and sugar in it, the coffee there is substantially better than the coffee at Dunkin Donuts. The kicker: the price is not that much better here, if at all.
YUK for today - when I saw the jersey of this hockey player from Slovakia (whose first name is Miroslav) for the Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins: I'll admit ..
Well .... maybe not. Regardless: why not stop in for a look at news items outside the headlines, in the arts and sciences; foreign news that generates little notice in the US media and ....well, just plain whimsy.....
Much has been made of the death of traditional media, particularly newspapers. Apparently, traditional journalism is going the way of the dinosaur, thanks to people like you and I who would rather get our news as it happens, rather than fished from our bushes or dragged out of a puddle twelve hours later.
The twenty-four-hour news networks, pioneered by CNN, and the internet have given people a myriad of information sources from which to choose. Now, rather than being patient enough to wait for the six-o'clock news, and sitting through the commercials, we can read about a story on numerous websites, filtering them for our preferred spin.
The recent "election" in Iran has been a lesson in the effectiveness of electronic media. While reporters have been stifled, phone service has been sporadic, and internet connections limited, Twitter has continued to provide us with a window into the protests on the streets, and YouTubes have been sent out using proxy servers.
The information provided by these new technologies has been consumed by an eager public, but the media conglomerates are struggling to find a way to make them pay off.
(I wrote this for the local fishwrap and there is a 500 word limit there so I hope you don't mind the brevity and consider the original venue. - X-posted at DK (with a pointer here ;)-D.)
For those of us who got hooked early on news from Iran the mainstream media was criminally complacent. The whole of the weekend of June 13th and 14th, with the streets of Tehran filling with protesters of the phony presidential vote, they completely missed the story; so we gathered like tribes at the virtual campfires of Daily Kos or Andrew Sullivan's blog "The Daily Dish" to anxiously follow the furtive "tweets" from cell phones, to watch over the brave young people for whom we feared.
Thousands of photographs flowed from our monitors, beautiful young people, green ribbons streaming from their wrists, hands upraised in clenched fist or flashing the iconic "V", simultaneously making our hearts soar with their courage and quake from fear and anxiety for their safety.
For we knew they defied monsters.
Their words, delivered in real time staccato bursts from unknown streets and plazas like dispatches fleeing a war zone stirred parental or familial concern - like troubling phone messages from loved ones we could not return...
According to theWorld Bank, almost forty percent of humanity lives on a daily income of less than two dollars per day. Another 1.1 billion scrape by on less than one dollar per day.
How can anyone possibly survive or raise a family with such a meager income? In New York City, two dollars per day won't even cover my daily Brooklyn/Manhattan round-trip subway commute. Yet billions of low skilled people put food on the table, educate their children, grapple with unexpected emergencies and even save money.
I don't know if Howlin' Wolf has ever been translated into Farsi, but if Islamic Republic government snipers are now killing beautiful women on live TV, something's sure gone up the Supreme Leader's ass sideways. Call me a sucker, call me a romantic, call me a suburban armchair activist-but I have been extremely moved by the fact that the women of Iran seem to be in the vanguard of the election-related protests. Indeed, if the basiji are shooting innocent bystanders-as they seem to be doing in a heartbreaking and grisly snuff film out of (I believe) Tehran, then the current regime's days truly are numbered. You don't win friends and influence people by murdering the hot chicks, Khameini.
AKA, I TOTALLY Steal a Topic from My Friends at Pajiba...
I'll Start:
thirtysomething
I so vividly remember sitting there and waiting for the news of whether Nancy's cancer was gone or was going to kill her -- would she receive her death sentence or not?
And the sucker punch of the episode was not, after all, that we would receive word of Nancy's impending death at all -- no. No -- I watched, unsuspecting, at first, and then with a quickly growing sense of horror as I realised that Gary Shepherd would be the sacrificial lamb taking Nancy's place... and almost as soon as that realisation had taken shape in my mind, Gary rounded the corner on his infernal, environmentally friendly, ubiquitous goddamned bicycle -- and met his inexorable fate, his doom, his death.
It sucked the breath out of me for several seconds and then I burst into heaving sobs in front of my television. I was in my very early 20s, and maybe I'll get laughed out of the virtual room for admitting this, but that damned episode just threw me for a fucking loop -- for several hours, maybe even a day or two. I was married to my first husband at the time, and he could NOT conceal his scorn; how someone could be SO affected by a television show... well, PSHAW. How VERY bourgeois.
Needless to say -- since I described him as my FIRST husband... Yeah. Well. (My SECOND husband is about to be my second EX-husband, so... the common denominator is not looking like she's got much to recommend her as a WIFE, either, but that's a story for another day...)
I have a feeling no one would have thought of this show; on Pajiba everyone was talking about either the very recent or the very classic.
ALSO: "If you're on Twitter, set your location to Tehran & your time zone to GMT +3.30. Iranian security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches. The more people at this location, the more of a logjam it creates for forces trying to shut down Iranians' access to the internet. -- MSOC
UPDATE
They're shouting DEATH TO KHAMEINI! now. This is turning into something very, very different, now. And there have been many, many brutal betaings and deaths. There's been a horrible shooting of an innocent bystander, a young woman, recorded on video and shown on CNN; I don't have the video to post here, but it's available elsewhere -- I haven't watched it, but am informed it it graphic beyond belief, so be warned.
President Obama made a statement to Khameini, essentially saying, "The world is watching and you will be judged, the people of Iran have spoken and you HAVE ben judged."
And -- well, I'll say. When your own people, who've seemingly been content to live with a theocracy for 30 years, are shouting "Death to the Supreme Leader" -- well, dude, you've jumped the shark.
Sorry for the lame vernacular -- I'm exhausted.
From HuffPo:
4:28 PM ET -- Roger Cohen's latest. Via reader Maher, it begins with an amazing moment:
The Iranian police commander, in green uniform, walked up Komak Hospital Alley with arms raised and his small unit at his side. "I swear to God," he shouted at the protesters facing him, "I have children, I have a wife, I don't want to beat people. Please go home."
A man at my side threw a rock at him. The commander, unflinching, continued to plead. There were chants of "Join us! Join us!" The unit retreated toward Revolution Street, where vast crowds eddied back and forth confronted by baton-wielding Basij militia and black-clad riot police officers on motorbikes.
4:04 PM ET -- Freeway overtaken by battle with the basij. Reported to be from today, near Azadi Square. It's a bit difficult to tell what's happening here but it seems that the basij are the smaller crowd on the right hand side, being confronted by the much larger crowd of demonstrators.
Re: another longer video with some graphic content near the end... Reader Chas sums it up: "Its a roaming shot of protesters walking toward a street corner where people are already clashing with the militia, Women hand them rocks on the way, and when they get there shots are fired and the crowd carries back a man who has been hit, and then the crowd retreats away from the scene, showing the blood of the man who has apparently been killed."
3:31 PM ET -- "I was in the middle of a war." Another email from a contact in Iran:
You couldn't imagin what I saw tonight, I walked down many streets(Vali asr, keshavars, amir abad, Fatemi, Shademan, Satarkhan, Khosro), and I was injured by tears gas, but the main thing : The big killer group, called "Basij", weared our special military service group -"Sepah"- dresses and they were all armed , I saw by myself one of them had only around 15 years old!!!! and he had the shot order! I saw a girl injured by gon shot (in Amir abad St.)! and there weren't enough ambulances . I walked through Shademan St. they start shooting , a young boy in front of my eyes murdered , and 3 other people were injured , there were also a big fight between people and Basij at Tohid Sq. 7 people was murdered there, I walked from my company to my home , It was taken 4 hours and I couldn't be able to make a video , cause I was in the middle of war!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3:25 PM ET -- Riot police target people with cell phone. A brave Iranian photographer has been sending us photos (through an amazing Iranian-American reader who has been helping us cover the situation since we started). The photos are in the slideshow currently on the homepage.
The photographer also included this note:
I could not get through. the guards were hitting people really hard to block their way. I got hit a few times, fortunately a few bruises but nothing major. they were hitting the women as hard if it didn't seem harder. they smashed all mobiles and then smack the mobile owners with batons. they also blocked all above ground routes out. the only way out was via the metro
This isn't the first we've heard of the riot police and basiji targeting people with cell phones and mobile devices. A contact from the National Iranian American Council wrote this today:
Security and police have been confiscating cameras and arresting those who are taking footage. I saw this young guy taking a video and 5 people attacked him and throughout it all he help his hand up with a peace sign.- then they arrested him. They have also handcuffed students to the Tehran University fence.
We talk to some normal police and patrolling cops- they are nice and are trying to help people. But it is the Basij and anti-riot that are ruthless.
3:20 PM ET -- Accounts from the ground. From a reader in Iran who I've been corresponding with for the last several days:
Just got home...haven't read you're blog yet but if there's a lot of stories about violence I'm sure they're all true. I don't know where to start, I'd taken my camera but had the sence to take out the memory card this came in hany as I was serched twice (by Basij) before getting stuck in the middle of hell. If I'd been caught with pictures it would mean jail time and a possible a charge of spying (as I'm a Canadian citizen). Eventually I dropped of the camera at the house of a friend without being able to take any pictures as it would make me a definate target...The chants of death to Khamenei are true...I witnessed peoples fear of the Basij dissapear, an 80 year old chadori woman with rocks in her hands calling for the exacution of khamenei and all Basij...A group of Basij were surrounded and forced in to a building, the front was blocked with garbage and set on fire, They (basij) opened fire on the crowd with what I assume were blanks, the crowed disspersed for a moment the came back with a fury...thats when the molotov cocktails came out. When I moved on the building was on fire...an hour later when I passed by again there wasn't much of a building left. There was full blown war...there was a young man who had taken all of a basij's things including their teargas rifle. We were finnaly able to get out on the back of motorcycle...the ride home took 25 minutes,for 15 minutes of it we were passing intermitently though Basij and protesters fires placed to displace the teargas... might I add the 3 hours that we walked through fire we didn't see one shop or car that had been damaged by protesters...however I just recieved word for the one who was kind enough to keep my camera and other belongings that the Basij had gone into her street and destoryed cars...thats all I can get out for now hope some of it may be useful...I'm pissed I was unable to get pictures.
In a follow-up email, he adds, "oh and one last thing the water canons didn't seem to do anything but cool people down. the one that I saw was chased off my a mass of people not seconds after it opened fire (or is it water)."
On Friday June 26 at 5PM (next week) we will demonstrate for single payer healthcare for all at the Warner Center Park.
This will be an optimistic demonstration, not an angry one therefore Single Payer Happy Hour. (We may go to some local bar, T.G.I. Friday's ? afterward).
So we will gather at the corner of Topanga Canyon and Califa in Woodland Hills with signs and banners. Single Payer! Healthcare for all! Stop funding the HMOs! and things like this.
The HQs for Blue Shield, Blue Cross, Wellpoint, Health Net and others are nearby.
Pris from LA and I have been cranking up the volume in Los Angeles but we need all the help we can get (more below the fold.)
As btchakir points out -- the chart lists more votes cast than there were eligible voters... Curiouser and curiouser. And while this is a rather dated post, there is some up-to-the-moment stuff in the comments from the invaluable resource that is Huffington Post's Nico Pitney. Also, Kane brings up an intriguing question: To just WHICH "dictator" are those signs wishing "death," anyway -- Ahmadinejad... or the Ayatollah Khameini? Food for thought...
--MSOC
While Iran has declared Ahmadinejad the Winner, these numbers have been leaked out of Iran showing how the votes really accumulated:
In case you've come late to the party, MLW has gone green in solidarity with the Iranian protesters. We will return to our regularly scheduled colour scheme when Iran reaches a resolution -- or revolution.
-- MSOC
And I think both the left and the right should
celebrate people who have different opinions,
and disagree with them, and argue with them,
and differ with them, but don't
just try to shut them up.
It wasn't until we saw a recently-convicted man photographed differently than before that this comparison was possible:
SEPARATED at BIRTH #1 - producer Phil Spector and Riff Raff from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show".
Ahhh, my mis-spent youth (then again, if you can't mis-spend as a youth, when can you?) Either way:
stop in for a look at news items outside the headlines, in the arts and sciences; foreign news that generates little notice in the US media and ....well, just plain whimsy.....
The time has come to demonstrate. It will make a difference.
So Pris from La and I have picked a place and time that we think will have the greatest impact.
And we need all the help we can get.
Friday June 26 at 5PM at the Warner Center Park in Woodland Hills (Topanga Cny. and Califa ) will be the 1st Single Payer Happy Hour. The idea is to do it every last Friday of the month at this strategic location.
Strategic because it is very close to the HQ of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of California, the national HQ of Health Net and others. Believe it or not the Happy Hour bit was Pris' idea, not Shockwave's. It makes sense. Let's make it a positive event rather than an angry demonstration.
I'm trying to change (temporarily) a lot of MLW's fonts to GREEN in solidarity with the Iranians in the streets. Not sure if it's going to take, but don't be shocked if all of a sudden the site turns green. It ain't leprechauns.
But this IS the USofA, 21 Century version: placid, incurious, lazy, fat, stupid, ill-educated (but highly schooled), compliant, obedient. They need to be reminded, as Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo, expostulates today:
health insurance is not
the same has health care. health care is about treating you...making you better. health insurance is about making money for the company...and letting you die if you are too sick because it would affect their bottom line. you get sick...your insurance company will drop you like a hot potato...as some in congress are finding out:
...an investigation by the house subcommittee on oversight and investigations showed that health insurers Wellpoint Inc., Unitedhealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period.
it also found that policyholders with breast cancer, lymphoma and more than 1,000 other conditions were targeted for rescission and that employees were praised in performance reviews for terminating the policies of customers with expensive illnesses.
...a texas nurse said she lost her coverage, after she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, for failing to disclose a visit to a dermatologist for acne... latte times
I'm going to abandon my usual practice of carefully constructed arguments and detailed hyperlinked posts with blockquotes today. I'm going to do that because all I want to do today is communicate some basic common sense, with a simple message:
Pass healthcare with a public option with 51 votes during the reconciliation process. Do it yesterday. It's a win-win situation, and little else matters.
Harry Reid's latest statements on the issue are heartening, but Reid and congressional Dems have a long history of doing stupid and/or immoral things in the name of "bipartisanship." That must not happen on healthcare.
The reasons for that are simple: while other issues are critically important to the American people and to the world, they are also deeply confusing or fraught with political peril. We desperately need legislative solutions on climate change, true, but cap and trade legislation polls at 50-50 at best. We need reversal of course on the occupation of Iraq, but moving too quickly could destabilize the situation. Bank regulation is so complex that Republicans can easily pretend any economic problems are the fault of a new regulatory scheme, and a large number of people will believe them.
But much as pundits pretend otherwise, there is really no real political peril in creating a public option for healthcare. Many people--especially those with decent insurance afraid of losing what they have--may be wary of so-called "government intrusion" into healthcare. That creates peril in advancing the legislation in the first place. But there is no political peril once the legislation is actually passed, and people see the rapid benefits to their bottom lines, their standard of living, and the standard of care they receive.
Once it is done and done right, the American Public will be immediately grateful for the Public Option. And they won't care about the procedural methods it took to get it done.
And what of the GOP minority who will go ballistic by the use of the reconciliation to pass healthcare? Who cares? The nice thing about having an opposition party that opposes you no matter what, is that they have no leverage with which to negotiate.
There will be no Republican support for cap and trade. There will be no Republican support for any new Wall St. regulatory structures with any teeth. There will be no Republican support for any other major piece of important legislation desperately needed by the American People.
If the GOP chooses to shut down the Senate with procedural garbage, so be it. Let the record show that the GOP chooses to stop the public's business in its tracks because they choose to throw a temper tantrum over the passage of healthcare reform. Seriously, let them do that.
And in 15 months, we'll clean up and win 3-4 more Senate seats. And provided that our Senate Democrats aren't too corrupt or bought out by special interests, we'll be able to do pretty much whatever we want.
The GOP has no bargaining chip to play in this game. Without some realistic promise of compromise on another important bill, there's no reason to pay them any mind whatsoever.
Pass the public option. Pass it yesterday. Pass it with 51 votes if need be. Then reap the benefits at the polls for years to come. It's really that simple.
Among the most important of the rules Rosie laid down, in my opinion, is #12: Get the US consumer right and everything else will take care of itself. The reason is fairly simple: The U.S. consumer has the biggest balance sheet on the planet. The U.S. consumer represents 70 percent of our GDP and about 18 percent of global GDP.
This is, however, following the entrenched habits of thought that got us into this mess in the first place. My reply, below the fold.
I'll Start:
On Agent Orange, 
