'SiCKO' Saves:

grassroots and youtube activism at work...

US Social Forum

UPDATED

Today was the opening day of the first ever US Social Forum, basicly grassroots social justice groups from all over the country come together for a week of events. The stated goal is

The US Social Forum is more than a conference, more than a networking bonanza, more than a reaction to war and repression. The USSF will provide space to build relationships, learn from each other's experiences, share our analysis of the problems our communities face, and bring renewed insight and inspiration. It will help develop leadership and develop consciousness, vision, and strategy needed to realize another world.

The USSF sends a message to other people’s movements around the world that there is an active movement in the US opposing US Policies at home and abroad.

We must declare what we want our world to look like and begin planning the path to get there. A global movement is rising. The USSF is our opportunity to demonstrate to the world Another World is Possible!

I took the day off of work and me and Deana went down to the opening march. I brought my camera!

Here I am before it got going in front of the State Capital.




















Next time i'm going to start taking notes and asking people more about themselves make it more blogger friendly/citizen journalist thing. But here are the rest of the pics...


































And finally... i'm not sure if it was a government paid for counter-protest. Or maybe just an attempt to get a bunch of leftist to give conservative thought and statism "one more shot"....

Great idea...

Work under way to create open government Web site

Oklahomans interested in finding out how much each state employee earns or where state revenues are being spent soon will be able to find that information on a new state Web site being designed to shed more light on state finances.

Governor Brad Henry yesterday signed a bill dubbed the Taxpayer Transparency Act directing the Office of State Finance to build a Web site detailing virtually all expenditures of state funds, including state contracts and tax credits and incentive payments given to businesses.

The Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce opposed the bill because "will shine an unwanted light on those who invest in Oklahoma, and it will make it much more difficult to attract those investors."

Having that light is a good thing.

A good question....

via TPM

Question: How may Arabic speakers with 3/3 levels of proficiency are currently serving at Embassy Baghdad?

Answer: We currently have ten Foreign Service Officers (including the Ambassador) at Embassy Baghdad at or above the 3 reading / 3 speaking level in Arabic. An additional five personnel at Embassy Baghdad have tested at or above the 3 level in speaking. A 3/3 indicates a general professional fluency level.

The Economist on Obama

The campaign's brightest star

An Obama presidency would signal to many, in and outside America, that the American dream still works. His opposition to the two policies that have hurt America’s image most—invading Iraq and making use of torture—will convince many that he represents a fresh start. But his inexperience is worrisome, and the source of Mrs Clinton’s greatest advantage over him. As George Will, a conservative columnist, put it, he is asking Americans to “treat the presidency as a nearly entry-level political office”.

mandatory minimums

Administration pushes for mandatory sentences

The Bush administration is trying to roll back a Supreme Court decision by pushing legislation that would require prison time for nearly all criminals.

Republicans are seizing the administration's crackdown, packaged in legislation to combat violent crime, as a campaign issue for 2008.

High-Deductible Plans Cost More For Maternity Care

Study Compares Out-of-Pocket Expense

The first study of its kind has found that families typically pay much more out of pocket for maternity care under the new high-deductible health insurance plans paired with health savings accounts that have been heavily touted by President Bush and others.

The cost difference compared to traditional employer-based health insurance is especially stark, in most cases, for women who have complicated pregnancies, according to the study released yesterday by Georgetown University and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The study found that those enrolled in a traditional health plan for federal employees (with a $500 annual deductible and $20 co-payments for office visits) would likely pay $1,455 out of pocket for care during an uncomplicated pregnancy and delivery. That compared to $3,000 for families in a high-deductible plan for federal employees and $7,000 for a high-deductible plan offered through small businesses.

Factcheck.org on the last Republican debate...

Debating once again, Republican candidates miscast some facts and get others flat wrong.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney committed the biggest factual fouls of the night, misleadingly asserting:

That we went to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein refused to allow weapons inspectors to come in
That there's an ocean of difference between his Massachusetts health plan and those "government takeover" plans of "every Democrat" running for president and

That Russia's income from oil exports is vastly larger than it actually is.

The Husseine one really made me mad during the debate. But the health care one is the important one to clarify and reassert to the public because this is going to be a line of attack on Democrats...

Former Massachusetts Gov. Romney tried to distance his state’s universal health insurance plan from the proposals of the Democratic presidential candidates.

Romney: Every Democrat up there’s talking about a form of socialized medicine, government takeover, massive tax increase…. I’m the guy who actually tackled this issue. We get all of our citizens insured. We get people that were uninsured with private health insurance. We have to stand up and say the market works. Personal responsibility works.

There are two problems with Romney’s characterization: One, Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich is the only Democratic candidate to propose a single-payer, wholly government-funded health care plan. And two, Romney’s Massachusetts universal insurance system bears a striking resemblance to the health care proposals of the Democratic front-runners.

We first took a look at the Romney-backed health insurance plan after the May 3 Republican presidential debate, when the candidate said it was not a government takeover and juxtaposed his plan with "HillaryCare." We pointed out that while the plan is not government-administered health insurance, it includes government mandates and subsidies, minimum coverage requirements and fines for noncompliance. The Massachusetts plan is clearly not a complete government takeover; it builds on the private insurance industry – as do the proposals of Sen. Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards, and the health care initiative spearheaded by Hillary Clinton in the early ’90s.

Kenneth E. Thorpe, a professor of health policy at Emory University, has analyzed the costs of the Edwards and Obama plans. In reading those and the Massachusetts plans, the similarities are clear, and Thorpe says the Obama and Romney plans are “virtually identical.” Both call for an insurance exchange (an entity that would offer various private insurance plans to the public), and they offer financial assistance to low-income people. Edwards’ proposal differs in that he uses health care plans in the federal employee program, rather than a national exchange. “That’s an implementation difference,” says Thorpe. “The real important part of it, they’re both building on the private insurance industry.”

Sen. Clinton has not released a formal proposal, but when she does, it's highly unlikely to be a wholly government funded proposal.

Politicians will debate how much government involvement in health insurance regulation is acceptable and how much is stepping on the toes of private insurance companies. But in our view, the term “government takeover” could only be applied to Rep. Kucinich’s proposal. Former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel calls for a federal voucher program, but Kucinich, in fact, brags on his Web site that he’s the only candidate advocating a universal not-for-profit health care system.

The big bad deficit....

Dean Baker jumps on the Washington Post about their deficit reporting.

Measured as a share of GDP, the 2007 deficit is projected at 1.3 percent. The 2008 deficit is projected to be just 0.7 percent of GDP. This is far below the post-war record of 6.0 percent of GDP reached in 1983. Even adding in the money borrowed from Social Security (which is appropriate for this purpose), the deficits for 2007 and 2008 would be just 2.7 percent of GDP and 2.1 percent of GDP for 2007 and 2008, respectively.

These deficits are arguably too high, but they are not close to be records. Readers of the Post opinion pages are aware of the editors strong distaste for budget deficits, but serious newspapers do not make things up in the news section to support their editorial positions.

No... our health care system isn't broken...

Cancer Drug Representatives Spelled Out the Way to Profit

Medicare’s decision to reform the way it paid for cancer drugs came after a decade in which oncologists collectively made billions of dollars on the drugs they prescribed. Many doctors say those profits did not affect their prescribing patterns.

But drug makers evidently believed that they did. Industry documents that have emerged in a federal civil lawsuit in Boston show that big pharmaceutical companies sometimes calculated to the penny the profits that doctors could make from their drugs. Sales representatives shared those profit estimates with doctors and their staffs, the documents show.

In one PowerPoint presentation from 2000, a Bristol-Myers Squibb executive told employees that oncologists’ biggest concern was “Reimbursement Today, Reimbursement Tomorrow, Reimbursement!”

Dr. Robert Geller, an oncologist who worked in private practice from 1996 to 2005 before leaving to join a biotechnology company, said that cancer doctors knew the profits they could make and in some cases would change treatment regimens or offer unnecessary care to make extra money.

“It’s clear that physicians stopped making decisions based on what made scientific or clinical sense in lieu of what made better business sense,” Dr. Geller said.

Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

Philosophy news via Leiter

When I was a teenager postmodernism was an intellectual hit personally because it irritated my elders. I'd say around 9/11 I realized how vitally important reasoned collective discussion was and began to reject pomo in anything outside of the art, literature, and poetry. Rabble rousing as a form of social critique lost its appeal as a way of causing people to see the world in a fresh light as soon as rightwing statist and conservative reactionaries began--what in all honesty all states have done in "times of war" which was--to vulgarize truth, exploit fear of the "other" and impose their authoritarian goals.

I've never read much Rorty. But I'm certain his work and that of his students will keep me quite busy in a productive and healthy manner.

Simon Blackburn on Rorty early 2003

I really wasn't intending to make it John Edwards day...

But it is his birthday. And he is on the cover of the NYT's magazine.

Here is an interview he gave to the nonpartisan group Council of Foreign Relations: Edwards: America Needs a Plan to Forestall Iraq Genocide

John Edwards - On Youtube...

This is why I like Youtube.

Defend Habeas

Social Security...

Romney backs personal retirement accounts

Republican Mitt Romney yesterday praised the notion of personal accounts for Social Security recipients, a key aspect of the Social Security reform plan of President Bush that never made it out of Congress.

Romney said it would be a good idea to use the Social Security trust fund to allow personal accounts, which could earn higher rates of return for beneficiaries.

Health Care Costs...

In yesterdays NYT's there is a great chart in the article Health Care as if Costs Didn’t Matter

One of the big hobgoblins of social spending is the the overwhelming burden of the costs programs like medicare and medicaid weigh on the budget. But what is missed is that the burden--even if you zero'ed out all medicare/medicaid spending would still be felt by people because the real threat is the rising cost of health care. This chart from the CBO does a great job of showing that.

Its a party....

I'm throwing a cd release party for the Instant Karma Cd coming out next Tuesday.

here is the link to the announcement on the Save Darfur website.

More to come...

But my recent post on the fairtax got a comment from a supporter of the fair tax. Who in turn emailed me less than 24 hours after he posted his comments asking that it be taken down because he did not want to attack Joe Miller. I've documented the comment and contacted factcheck.org with the info and asked for a response so maybe i'll have an update soon with a response from that side. I will be posting the comment with everything but the attack soon when I have the time...

now now now...

Dean Baker once again commits the sin of having a good memory...

Due to immigration Canada Has Too Many Doctors

That's the word from an immigration lawyer quoted in an NYT article on immigration reform. According to the lawyer, because of Canada's point system, which favors more highly educated immigrants "we have some professionals, like doctors, who perform low-skill occupations such as driving taxis until they can find more appropriate work. "

Wow, Canada has so many doctors that they have to drive taxis to find work! I seem to remember reading somewhere about how Canada's health care system was collapsing, in part because they have a shortage of doctors. Hmmmm, where was that article? Let's see, here's a quote, "With the population aging, waiting lines for care growing and doctors and nurses becoming sparse, especially in rural areas, opinion polls indicate that satisfaction with medical services has declined in the last decade."

Yep, that was from a NYT article a bit more than three years ago. So the NYT is telling us that both Canada has a doctor shortage, but because of the skills preference in its immigration system, it has too many doctors. That doesn't seem to fit.

on the flaw in Obama's plan...

Len Nichols on why madates are vital to a health care plan...

Mandates make markets work better. Yes, you read that correctly. Markets need help sometimes. Voluntary insurance markets are inherently unstable, because people with more expensive health risks think community rating (charging the same price to everyone) is a bargain for them, while "young immortals" -- low-risk folk, usually young and healthy, who don't expect to use much health care -- think community rates are a bad deal for them. Both groups are right. So either community rates rise continuously (as more good risks drop out as rates rise, over and over) or, more commonly, insurers persuade state legislatures to let them underwrite differential risks and price (or deny) coverage according to preexisting conditions, age, and other criteria. Talk about moral hazard, wherein a behavioral decision is affected by the presence or absence of insurance! The incentive for an individual insurer to err against covering someone with a costly condition is very large.

Mandates go a long way toward correcting this "adverse selection" problem by putting everyone in the same risk pool. If everyone is required to buy, then insurers worry far less about attracting a disproportionate share of sicker patients, because the reluctant "young immortals" are buying, too. So the excess resources they now devote to underwriting and targeted marketing will be largely redundant and disappear. This is why John Sheils of The Lewin Group concluded that Senator Wyden's plan achieves such great administrative savings -- insurers will voluntarily disarm if everyone has to buy, and then the rest of us can stop paying them to figure out how to legally deny coverage to the sick.

In turn, mandates make community rating, the fairest pricing system by far, actually sustainable, because enrollees will not be churning in and out of the market anymore. The lower administrative costs will make insurance more attractive to high-risk and low-risk alike. And mandates will bar them from saving a few bucks by voluntarily joining the ranks of the uninsured, as some "free riders" have been known to do from time to time.

These "free riders" are people who can afford health insurance but choose to spend their money in other ways and thereby gamble that public hospitals will treat them when disaster strikes -- which it does, with actuarial precision. They were the original targets of Romney, and while they are a minority of the uninsured, they do impose costs on the rest of us, even on those who can't afford health insurance but pay taxes to support the public hospitals. So mandates make free riders pay their fair share. In a society that is not willing to deny all care to all who are not insured, mandates are the only way to achieve fair participation from this population

Religion in the media...

more from media matters...

In order to begin to assess how the news media paint the picture of religion in America today, this study measured the extent to which religious leaders, both conservative and progressive, are quoted, mentioned, and interviewed in the news media.

Among the study's key findings:

Combining newspapers and television, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories 2.8 times as often as were progressive religious leaders.


On television news -- the three major television networks, the three major cable new channels, and PBS -- conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed almost 3.8 times as often as progressive leaders.


In major newspapers, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed 2.7 times as often as progressive leaders.

Despite the fact most religious Americans are moderate or progressive, in the news media it is overwhelmingly conservative leaders who are presented as the voice of religion. This represents a particularly meaningful distortion since progressive religious leaders tend to focus on different issues and offer an entirely different perspective than their conservative counterparts.

the need for internationalism...

"The U.S. is relatively strong, but is likely to get weaker over time. It needs to build a world that will be friendly to it when it is relatively weaker. Thus the need for liberal internationalism--as opposed to pissing everybody off by acting like a drunk, paranoid brachiasaurus"

--Brad Delong May 28 2007

Brad Delong on Obama's health care plan...

the UC Berkeley economist chimes in on Obama's new health care plan...

It is an iron law of American politics that Democratic party politicians who propose relatively detailed healthcare reform plans – as Barack Obama did last Tuesday – get trashed. If they propose a plan that might actually pass, securing the 60 needed votes to close off debate and proceed to a final vote in the Senate, they will be trashed for having abandoned their base and their own principles. If they propose a plan that corresponds to the world that they wish they could attain, they will be trashed as having no practical sense. In either case, they lose. It is like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer: a pointless and painful exercise.

This is too bad, as the US needs to have a debate on its healthcare system. It spends twice as much as western Europe for little clear benefit: Americans are no more healthy or long-lived than western Europeans. If the US could get the same value for its healthcare dollars as western Europe, it would have an extra $800bn a year to spend: enough to pay room, board and private college tuition for every American 18-21 year old, and still have enough left over for Marshall Plan-scale economic development programmes for Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt and the Maghreb.

There is an extraordinary opportunity for the US to spend the $1,700bn a year it spends on healthcare better. The most visible and damaging part of the failure of its spending is that 45m Americans lack health insurance. Mr Obama is trying to avoid performing the political equivalent of hitting himself on the head with a hammer by proposing something more like a gardening effort. Instead of doing the equivalent of declaring that there must be an aspidistra five yards from the main gate, he is talking about providing seeds, fertiliser, water and hoes. In this way, Mr Obama’s advisers hope, he will please those party activists who want a vision of utopia and those who want a successful legislative road map.

The gardening plan begins with a tax on employers who do not offer their workers employer-sponsored health insurance – “pay or play”, it is called. If this tax induces them to do so, then the number of uninsured falls to a small and manageable number that can be covered by public hospitals: this particular flowerbed flourishes. If employers do not respond, then the government collects the tax and has money for expanded public health programmes or to subsidise affordable healthcare coverage for the uninsured working poor.In the US, however, there is an additional problem. If you are a single individual without employer sponsorship it is very hard to buy affordable health coverage. “Why do you want to be insured?” the insurance companies ask. “Are you sick? The fact that you want insurance means you are a bad risk.”

Thus the second part of the gardening plan: offer the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program to everybody. It works for federal employees. It should work for everyone – especially with subsidies to cover the cost for the working poor. If the take-up is high, then well and good: uninsurance is reduced to a minor nuisance. If people do not find FEHBP attractive, then move on to the third stage of the gardening plan: health exchanges to serve small companies and individuals the way that benefits departments currently serve the workers of large corporations, collecting bids and assuring quality from insurance companies, and so offering families choices.Mr Obama’s people are betting that at least one of these three flowerbeds will flourish: that people will opt for at least one of these options and that the problem of covering the 45m uninsured will disappear. If not – if, say, young, healthy and rich people become free riders in large numbers – then they move on to mandating coverage and levying taxes. But all four roads lead to the same place: a US that no longer has a massive uninsurance problem.

In a country with rational politics, such a plan ought to be attractive. All should recognise that failure to reform healthcare is a wasted opportunity. The right should embrace it for its market elements – allowing people to vote with their feet for the mechanisms that they want and the promise to support successful institutions. The centre should embrace it because the right has no strong ideological reason to oppose it – hence it is politically viable. And the left should embrace it because it promises the utopia of ending the problems of the uninsured. Unfortunately, however, judging by the brickbats the plan has already received, Mr Obama is set to be another victim of the iron law of American politics.

last nights debate....

From Dodds campaign...



Its a chart showing how much time each candidate (and the moderator) used during the debate.

Unspinning the FairTax

FactCheck.org looks at the FairTax
Everybody pays more in taxes... except people over 200,000 dollars. Okay that and poor people...

Are Media Out to Get John Edwards?

Jeff Cohen on John Edwards..

Today, elite media are doing their best to raise Edwards' unfavorable rating. But the independent media and the Netroots are four years stronger than during Howard Dean's rise and fall.

Shirt...

Defend our Nation DEPORT Xenophobes
by
ptcpedant

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