What's the Matter?

MSNBC is part of the problem in America. It is one long deceitful ad after another for the Obama administration. The New York Times is almost as bad as MSNBC. But the entire corporate media system works to keep public understanding low. Anyone who gets news from it cannot possibly fathom the issues. If they understood the issues, why would they watch and read corporate/state propaganda?
MSNBC has been marketed so cleverly. Its defenders constantly praise Rachel Maddow (She's so smaaaat!) And because they think she's brilliant, they're willing to fall in line with her ridiculous interpretation of policy and events.
There is also the lesser of 2 evils dynamic. The republicans are presented in such a way as to terrify and repulse the public. Not that they aren't terrifying and repulsive. They are. But so are democrats. Yet that democrats push the same terrifying, repulsive agenda is carefully  obfuscated by media. We are more than a decade past Clinton's banking deregulation. That deregulation destroyed what was left of an already compromised economy. Yet the media position Clinton as a great economic manager. So much so the democrats coud trot him out during their 2012 convention. If the public understood the roll he played int eh economy, he'd be tarred, feathered and ridden out on a rail. People gobble up the propaganda because they don't have knowledge about what he did or  understanding of how economies function.
A similar thing is at work with Obama. He was shoe horned into office because the republicans are so scary, and maddow is so smaaaaat, and there is essentially no coverage of his policies, certainly no meaningful critique. The only critique comes from right wing media and that is garbage. People who partake of that are dumb enough to think Obama is a socialist.

How I Love This Poem!

A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING.
by John Donne

AS virtuous men pass mildly away, 
    And whisper to their souls to go, 
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
    "Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."                     
So let us melt, and make no noise,                                       5
    No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys 
    To tell the laity our love. 
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
    Men reckon what it did, and meant ;                              10
But trepidation of the spheres, 
    Though greater far, is innocent. 
Dull sublunary lovers' love 
    —Whose soul is sense—cannot admit 
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove                                     15
    The thing which elemented it. 
But we by a love so much refined,
    That ourselves know not what it is, 
Inter-assurèd of the mind, 
    Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.                           20
Our two souls therefore, which are one, 
    Though I must go, endure not yet 
A breach, but an expansion, 
    Like gold to aery thinness beat. 
If they be two, they are two so                                          25
    As stiff twin compasses are two ; 
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show 
    To move, but doth, if th' other do. 
And though it in the centre sit, 
    Yet, when the other far doth roam,                                30
It leans, and hearkens after it, 
    And grows erect, as that comes home. 
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
    Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,                                    35
    And makes me end where I begun. 
 

Time To Fire Tim Geithner

Toads and lizards fall from this liars mouth every time he opens it. CHANGE? This is more of the same and a kick in the face to the American people from Barack Obama.

Pfizer Broke the Law by Promoting Drugs for Unapproved Uses

“Marketing departments of many drug companies don’t respect any boundaries of professionalism or the law,” says Jerry Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston and author of “Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs” (Random House, 2004). “The Pfizer and Lilly cases involved the illegal promotion of drugs that have been shown to cause substantial harm and death to patients.”
The widespread off-label promotion of drugs is yet another manifestation of a health-care system that has become dysfunctional.
“It’s an unbearable cost to a system that’s going broke,” says Avorn, who heads the pharmacology economics unit of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “We can’t even afford to pay for effective, safe therapies.”
10 Million Prescriptions
About 15 percent of all drug sales in the U.S. are for unapproved uses without adequate evidence the medicines work, according to a study by Randall Stafford, a medical professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
He estimates that doctors write more than 10 million such prescriptions each year.

Is the House Health Care Bill Better than Nothing?

(...)

What does the insurance industry get out of it? Tens of millions of new customers, courtesy of the mandate and taxpayer subsidies. And not just any kind of customer, but the youngest, healthiest customers -- those least likely to use their insurance. The bill permits insurers to charge twice as much for older people as for younger ones. So older under-65's will be more likely to go without insurance, even if they have to pay fines. That's OK with the industry, since these would be among their sickest customers. (Shouldn't age be considered a pre-existing condition?)
Insurers also won't have to cover those younger people most likely to get sick, because they will tend to use the public option (which is not an "option" at all, but a program projected to cover only 6 million uninsured Americans). So instead of the public option providing competition for the insurance industry, as originally envisioned, it's been turned into a dumping ground for a small number of people whom private insurers would rather not have to cover anyway.
If a similar bill emerges from the Senate and the reconciliation process, and is ultimately passed, what will happen?
(...)
First, health costs will continue to skyrocket, even faster than they are now, as taxpayer dollars are pumped into the private sector. The response of payers -- government and employers -- will be to shrink benefits and increase deductibles and co-payments. Yes, more people will have insurance, but it will cover less and less, and be more expensive to use.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcia-angell-md/is-the-house-health-care_b_350190.html&cp

On the anniversary of the crashing of the berlin wall, why we must endure bogus claims about Reagan

Reagan's record speaks for itself.  He was a disaster for the country. His administration trashed carter's energy conservation polices in favor of building up the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, ripped the solar panels from the white house, pulled the funding for alternative energy research and development, shoveled money into the pentagon instead. Without Reagen we may have solved our energy problem decades ago.
As part of his moronic deregulatory agenda he gutted the FTC allowing, among other travesties, defense contractors to buy media conglomerates. Clear conflict of interest. And bent the rules to allow that pig Murdoch to become a media mogul in the US.
His administration not only created the environment for vast media consolidation, but consolidation of all kinds, the utter suppression of healthy competition, the destruction of main street, the wiping out of small towns, family farms, common sense.
He appointed narcissistic shit stain Antonin Scalia to the court, empowered Bush family ambitions, staged dirty wars in central America resulting in untold deaths, cut deals with the Iranian militants to hold American hostages - a treasonous act - ignored AIDS until MILLIONS were infected, deregulated industry after industry, began the revolving door between government and industry with the ultimate consequence that our food, water and air are not safe anymore.
Because of Reagan our unions are broken, allowing far too much power to corporate interests. Who have taken a wrecking ball to the American middle class and to anything that remotely resembles democracy. On and on. I don't have all day though it could easily take all day to list Reagan's list of crimes against freedom, democracy, life, America.
There was not widespread homelessness in the US prior to Reagan. The dollar had value prior to Reagan. There was a healthy middle class prior to Reagan, and plenty of upward mobility. America was not teetering on the brink prior to the right wing onslaught of idiocy.

Reagan most certainly DID NOT win the cold war - which was a joke anyway - the soviet union broke itself in Afghanistan. Its called bankruptcy. And we are there now thanks to Reagan's right wing heirs in both parties.
  He was a very bad turning point. Just look at the record. Though he was apparently personally likable, though I did not imbibe,  and probably never made a single decision on his own he began the earnest destruction of the US in favor of making a small group of people fabulously wealthy. He was even surrounded by some of the same scum who ran DUBYA. Neither man should ever have been president.
People praising Reagan are simply uninformed and probably watch that propaganda outlet FOXS news.
And yes, Clinton was also a right wing piece of shit who did huge damage to the country and to the democratic party by causing those running it to agree to shift right in the hopes of getting elected.

18,000 Americans die every year for lack of HEALTH INSURANCE

But President Barack Status Quo Obama isn't launching a war on that. In fact he had to be bullied into even allowing single payer advocates to attend his big health care reform planning meeting with the insurance companies.

I'm sick to death of right wing democrats and will not be voting for this one in 4 years. Let the republicans completely wreck the country. Then maybe the citizens will get up off their asses and fight back.
.....
if you've got drug gangs crossing our borders and killing U.S. citizens."

Already this year there have been 1,000 people killed in Mexico along the border, following 2008's death toll of 5,800, according to federal officials who credit Mexican President Felipe Calderon for a crackdown on drug cartels.

But the spillover on the border -- for example, to El Paso from neighboring Ciudad Juarez -- has created a political reaction.

In a recent visit to El Paso, Texas Gov. Rick Perry called for 1,000 troops to protect the border.

Obama was cautious, however. "We've got a very big border with Mexico," he said. "I'm not interested in militarizing the border."

True Dirty Facts About The Dip Shit Right Wing

[...]

The conservative movement has invested enormous effort in crafting a political mythology that gratifies its ideological impulses. The lesson they learned from Ronald Reagan is that ideological purity is not only compatible with political success, but is also the best path to political success. They dutifully applied this interpretation to everything that happened since--George H.W. Bush, then Newt Gingrich, and then George W. Bush all failed because they deviated from the true path--and to all that happened before. Nixon failed because he embraced big government. Kennedy succeeded because he was actually a proto-supply-sider.

From such a perspective, Roosevelt casts a long and threatening shadow over the conservative movement. Here was a case of a wildly unpopular conservative Republican, Herbert Hoover, who gave way to an unabashed liberal Democrat who won four presidential elections. Shlaes goes to great pains to explain away this apparent anomaly. In this instance, she does produce an internally coherent argument. It is, alas, wildly ahistorical.

If the New Deal failed so miserably, one might wonder why voters continued to endorse it. In Shlaes's telling, Roosevelt's first challenger, Alf Landon, lost in 1936 because he "failed to distinguish himself" from Roosevelt. It is certainly true that Landon hailed from the party's moderate wing and shied away from the root-and-branch condemnation of the New Deal favored by, say, Hoover. But as the campaign wore on, Landon's rhetoric grew increasingly harsh. If Roosevelt returned to office, he warned, "business as we know it is to disappear." Voters who opposed the New Deal may not have had a perfect choice, but they did have a clear one. It also takes quite a bit of ideological credulity to believe, as Shlaes apparently does, that Roosevelt's twenty-point victory represented anything other than massive support for his program. Landon himself later remarked that "I don't think that it would have made any difference what kind of a campaign I made as far as stopping this avalanche is concerned."

And Shlaes offers an even odder explanation for Roosevelt's triumph in 1940. Wendell Willkie seized the advantage by attacking the New Deal, she writes, but squandered it with his dovish position on the war. The war, she argues, had become "the single best argument to reelect Roosevelt and give him special powers." After the election, she asserts, the Republicans "concluded, accurately enough, that the outcome would sideline not only their party but their record of accuracy when it came to the economy. They had been right so often in the 1930s and they would not get credit for it. The great error of their isolationism was what stood out."

Shlaes, characteristically, bolsters this highly idiosyncratic reading of history with only bare wisps of data. It is true that the outbreak of war in Europe made Roosevelt, the incumbent, appear safer. But this pro-incumbent upsurge merely cancelled out a powerful current of anti-third term sentiment. Moreover, public opinion opposed entry into the war, and Roosevelt had to fight the suspicion that he was nudging the country into the war by explicitly promising to stay out. Shlaes's portrayal of an electorate seeking activist government abroad and laissez-faire at home gets the history almost perfectly backward. (The Forgotten Man ends with the 1940 race, sparing her readers any further contortions of electoral interpretation.)

[...]

Games With Oil

Ali al-Naimi, the oil minister of Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s largest exporter and its de facto leader, said in Cairo that $75 a barrel oil represents a “fair price” needed to support investment in new fields. The group’s next meeting is in Oran, Algeria, on Dec. 17.

Oil fell as much as $99.02 a barrel from its July record, making the four-month slump steeper than crude’s drop from its 1996 peak to the low set in December 1998.

At that time the hesitation of countries including Iraq, Venezuela and Russia to rein in output amid the Asian financial crisis and a warm U.S. winter contributed to the decline. Now, sinking demand is the main issue as the world’s largest economies slip into recession.

Crude oil for January delivery fell $5.15, or 9.5 percent, to $49.28 a barrel at 2:47 p.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the lowest settlement since May 23, 2005. It was the biggest one-day drop since Oct. 10.

Supplies Rise

OPEC, the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Energy Department reduced consumption projections in November because of the economic outlook. OPEC trimmed its forecast for average oil use next year by 530,000 barrels, or 0.6 percent, and the IEA cut its estimate by 670,000 barrels, or 0.8 percent.

Never Mind Barack Obama. Fascism Still on the March in the USA

The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.

he long-planned shift in the Defense Department's role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said.

There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement.

Clouds of pollution threaten glaciers, health

A dirty brown haze sometimes more than a mile thick is darkening skies not only over vast areas of Asia, but also in the Middle East, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin, changing weather patterns around the world and threatening health and food supplies, the U.N. reported Thursday.

The huge smog-like plumes, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and firewood, are known as "atmospheric brown clouds."

When mixed with emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for warming the earth's atmosphere like a greenhouse, they are the newest threat to the global environment, according to a report commissioned by the U.N. Environment Program.

[...]

One of the most serious problems, Ramanathan said, is retreat of the glaciers in the Himalaya and Hindu Kush and in Tibet. The glaciers feed most Asian rivers and "have serious implications for the water and food security of Asia," he said.

Monsoon rains over India and southeast Asia decreased between 5 and 7 percent overall since the 1950s, the report says, naming brown clouds and global warming as a possible cause. Likewise, they may have contributed to the melting of China's glaciers, which have shrunk 5 percent since the 1950s. The volume of China's nearly 47,000 glaciers has fallen by 3,000 square kilometers (1,158.31 square miles) in the past 25 years, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Soot winds up on the surface of the glaciers that feed the Ganges, Indus, Yangtze and Yellow rivers, which makes the glaciers absorb more sunlight and melt more quickly and also pollutes the rivers, the researchers say.

[...]

Wow!

Better Watch Out Obama or Rahm wil get you oily

Just 3 ‘superbanks’ now dominate industry. so much for competition.

[...]
Several of the nation's biggest banks have failed or been absorbed by healthier institutions, leaving three giant "superbanks" with an unprecedented concentration of market power: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

While that may be good news for emerging giants and the failing companies they helped rescue, the new oligopoly raises troubling questions about regulation and competition, analysts and consumer advocates say.

"Bank fees are going up, up, up, and that’s the danger to consumers as more of these banks consolidate,” says Sally Greenberg, executive director of the National Consumer League. “It’s difficult for the average person to get a bank account that doesn’t involve fees, and if you get into financial distress you’re cooked, and you’ll be ‘fee-ed’ to death.”

According to a recently released banking fee study from Bankrate.com, ATM surcharges rose 11 percent this year to an average of $1.97, and the fee a bounced checks rose 2.5 percent to an average $28.95.

“Large institutions are impossible to manage prudently, let alone regulate,” says Amar Bhide, a professor at the Columbia Business School.

In fact, existing federal banking laws say that no bank can have more than 10 percent of the domestic deposit market — a threshold recently surpassed by all three superbanks.

When asked whether the government would take any action, a Justice Department official was noncommittal.

“It’s always something we’ve looked at and will continue to look at," said spokeswoman Gina Talamona. "It’s something we’ve looked at as part of our general antitrust review.”

The reason limits on market share were put in place were so banks didn’t get so big they’d become monopolies that could risk the whole economy, explains Atul Gupta, finance department chair for Bentley University in Boston.

But now the government appears to be pushing banks in the direction of more consolidation. The Treasury is pouring some $250 billion of taxpayer money into healthy financial institutions, and some of that is being used by stronger banks to snap up weaker rivals.

[...]

Barack Obama elected 44th president

The Telescope Turns 400

Dutch eyeglass-maker Hans Lippershey first tried to patent the telescope in October 1608, and his invention was soon a big hit in Europe—as a tool for insider trading. Futures contracts were in vogue, and spying a cargo ship first had financial benefits. Oh, and the telescope also redefined our universe: In 1608, Earth was the center of God's perfect Creation. By 1610, Galileo showed that Jupiter had moons, Earth's moon had mountains, and the Catholic church was fallible. Four centuries on, we know we're a mere speck in a universe of wonders.

Oil May Fall to $50

[...]

Crude-oil future prices have fallen almost a third in New York since reaching a record $147.27 a barrel on July 11, driven by concerns a worsening financial crisis in the U.S. is crimping energy demand. U.S. oil use is declining faster than expected, while European consumption is falling ``rapidly,'' and OPEC production capacity is ``just about to soar,'' Merrill said.

``Combined, these factors represent significant short-term headwinds for both upstream and downstream companies alike,'' Merrill analysts Mark Hume and Alexis Clark said in the report. ``Notionally it is conceivable that in a worst-case scenario global oil demand actually contracts in the near-term as it did back in the 1980s post the Iranian Revolution.''

[...]

Pictured: Typical Republican Voter

Mortgages Now, Credit Cards Later

A hurricane of bad credit card debt will start crashing ashore in the United States in the first quarter of next year, even as the mortgage crisis continues, analysts at New York research firm Innovest Strategic Value Advisors warned Monday.

“A combination of a 10-year steady drip of deteriorating personal finances and a tidal wave . . . brought on by the mortgage and credit crisis leads us to believe that credit cards are going to implode in the near term,” Gregory Larkin, Innovest's senior banking analysts said during an online seminar on the topic.

So far, credit-card “charge-offs” – debts declared irrecoverable by card issuers – have been “defying gravity,” with losses lower than in both 2001 and 2005, Mr. Larkin said.

But, historically, after a time lag, irrecoverable credit-card debt has followed mortgage charge-offs up or down, and U.S. mortgage charge-offs have rocketed up eight-fold since the last quarter of 2007.

US Econmoy Cracks From Years Of Right WIng Deregulation. Autosale Crash

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Major automakers reported plunging U.S. sales for September on Wednesday -- led by a 34 percent slide at Ford Motor Co -- as an escalating credit emergency slammed a slumping industry and raised new doubts about when the world's largest auto market would hit bottom.

The downturn in auto sales for September coincided with a crisis on Wall Street and claimed even the auto industry's better-performing brands.

Sales were down 24 percent at Honda Motor Co Ltd, 32 percent at Toyota Motor Corp and 37 percent at Nissan Motor Co Ltd.

U.S. industry sales leader General Motors Corp, which was more aggressive in discounting its vehicles, managed to keep its September sales decline to a relatively small 16 percent to take a larger share of a rapidly declining market.