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Destor on Ordering a Pizza Conservatively in Texas Ramona: Hatred in a Lovely Church Gallup: Obama 46, Romney 46 |
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o The New York police department has for years been visiting services in mosques, all over the north east, taking notes, jotting down license plate numbers
o In Afghanistan we burn objectionable books, even the Koran
o And a sergeant walks down a rural street and murders 9 children and 7 adults probably mostly women
They all show that we hate Muslims.
Would Bloomberg and Kelley have staked out St. Patricks? Or a temple in Great Neck? The question answers itself.
Do the commanders understand that the democratic values we’re supposed to be demonstrating to the Afghans don’t include burning books?
Many of us.
It's commonplace to read here that Obamacare is flawed, could have been better, and we might be better off without it.
What Bernard Avishai says, correctly, is:
“If Obamacare is killed it will....cast doubt on whether Americans will ever be able to hold their fears in check and summon the elementary decency toward the sick that characterizes other democracies.”
He says it in six pages of the Feb 12th Nation while refuting what some of the most thoughtful contributors here have said and still say about Obamacare.
What Avishai says is [Read more]
Dean Baker , Beat the Press Tuesday
The piece (in the Washington Post-Flavius) also includes a number of assertions that are unsupported by anything. For example, it tells readers:
Here's an excerpt from Brad Delong, yesterday, writing something that stands common sense on its head: that cutting the deficit doesn't .... well cut the deficit :
Indeed, in less than a year, if current forecasts are correct, Britain’s Cameron-Osborne Depression will not merely be the worst depression in Britain since the Great Depression, but probably the worst depression in Britain…ever. [Read more]
Sunday’s Times editorial page for the zillionth time puzzles over why the US health care system is exceptional: exceptionally expensive without caring for us exceptionally well.
In 1963 the economist Kenneth Arrow said why. He published a paper on the medical care industry in the December issue of The American Economic Review. My google search didn’t turn up much in the way of a refutation. In 2009 an Atlantic interviewer seemed to feel the same way—neither he nor Arrow discussed any particularly trenchant critics. Perhaps because fairly soon after writing it, Arrow became at 51 the youngest winner of the Nobel Prize for economics. [Read more]
Some numbers about US medical costs came out this week.
o Last year the total was $2.6 trillion. That's about $8,000 per person. [Read more]
In 2007 there were 16.million of us below the poverty line. In 2010 that was 19 million. According to the Nation (the source of everything below), quoting the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that would have been even 9.9 million higher except for the Stimulus.
One of those stimulants was continuing the food stamp program which alone saved 4 million from poverty. In 2007 on any given day 26 million of us used them. Now that’s 46 million.
Won’t be for long. By 2013 $11billion-about 20%- of the funding will disappear.
In 1996 there were about 13 million people receiving “welfare as we know it”. By 2008 that was 4 million. 60% of low income children had been on welfare. Last year, 20% [Read more]
Bruce: What do you think about the appointees to the NLRB?
Articleman: What do you think about the Supreme Court's involvement with respect to both the NLRB and the Consumer Protection Agency?
As a layman, it seems to me this Senate's combination of the filibuster with its conversion of the consent requirement into a non-legislative block of presidential action is an attempt to fundamentally alter the division of powers. But what do I know?
From Dean Baker to Brad Delong to Flavius to you:
Social Security Is NOT Selling Government Bonds: In an article discussing the implications of the extension of the payroll tax cut, [Jia Lynn Yang of] the Washington Post told readers:
This year, the Social Security system projects that it will pay out $46 billion more in benefits than it will collect in cash. It made up for the shortfall by redeeming Treasury bonds bought in years when there were cash surpluses. [Read more]
By Elizabeth Weingarten, ForeignPolicy.com, May 23, 2012
It was 2009 in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Mossarat Qadeem was sitting on the floor of a house with about a dozen young Pakistani men -- some of whom had nearly become suicide bombers. Qadeem's goal: to undo the destructive brainwashing of the al-Qaeda and Taliban teachers who trained them in extremism, in part by asking the students to narrate their life stories.
"We were handling one of the boys, and he just came, put his head here in my lap, and he started crying and weeping," Qadeem recalls. "I was taken aback. It is very unnatural in my country that a man that tall can just sit at your feet and put his head here. [The other men] were all crying with him, and I was looking at him, and thinking, ‘my God.'"
All in a day's work for Qadeem. She's the national coordinator of Aman-o-Nisa, a coalition of Pakistani women that convened in October 2011 to combat violent extremism in Pakistan at the grassroots level. [....]
The issue of sexual assaults on American Indian women has become one of the major sources of discord in the current debate between the White House and the House of Representatives over the latest reauthorization of the landmark Violence Against Women Act of 1994.
.......
“We should never have a woman come into the office saying, ‘I need to learn more about Plan B for when my daughter gets raped,’ ” said Charon Asetoyer, a women’s health advocate on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, referring to the morning-after pill. “That’s what’s so frightening — that it’s more expected than unexpected. It has become a norm for young women.”
The difficulties facing American Indian women who have been raped are myriad, and include a shortage of sexual assault kits at Indian Health Service hospitals, where there is also a lack of access to birth control and sexually transmitted disease testing. There are also too few nurses trained to perform rape examinations, which are generally necessary to bring cases to trial.
By Ismail Kahn, New York Times, May 23/24, 2012
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A Pakistani doctor who helped the Central Intelligence Agency pin down Osama bin Laden's location under cover of a vaccination drive was convicted on Wednesday of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison, a senior official in Pakistan said.
A tribal court here in northwestern Pakistan found the doctor, Shakil Afridi, guilty of acting against the state, said Mutahir Zeb Khan, the administrator for the Khyber tribal region [....]
By Sergei L. Loiko, Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2012
MOSCOW — Stiff new penalties aimed at opposition protesters were given preliminary approval Tuesday by Russian lawmakers loyal to President Vladimir Putin, the target of mass rallies and demonstrations before his March election victory.
The bill, which opposition parliament members termed draconian and protested by threatening to file out of a legislative session, calls for fines of up to $50,000 and up to 200 hours of community service for organizers of rallies and demonstrations that grow violent or exceed the approved number of participants.
The sanctions were approved on first reading by parliament's lower house, which is controlled by Putin's United Russia party. They mark a return by the Kremlin to a tough stance against critics after concessions during the recent election campaign [...]
Also see:
Russians back Putin, strong leadership
Washington Post, May 22, 2012
A Pew survey of 1,000 Russians found that President Vladimir Putin is well-liked by more than 70 percent of citizens, especially older adults.
Associated Press, May 21, 2012
HAVANA — It was all sunshine, smiles and celebratory speeches as officials marked the arrival of an undersea fiber-optic cable they promised would end Cuba's Internet isolation and boost web capacity 3,000-fold. Even a retired Fidel Castro had hailed the dawn of a new cyber-age on the island.
More than a year after the February 2011 ceremony on Siboney Beach in eastern Cuba, and 10 months after the system was supposed to have gone online, the government never mentions the cable anymore, and Internet here remains the slowest in the hemisphere. People talk quietly about embezzlement torpedoing the project and the arrest of more than a half-dozen senior telecom officials.
Perhaps most maddening, nobody has explained what happened to the much-ballyhooed $70 million project....
