In its 10th year, the war in Afghanistan has given us not just Taliban and war lords as guards, but these troubling facts: the U.S. military now spends three times more on private contractors than its own personnel; those contractors account for half the total rise in war spending from $7.2 to $62 billion; and the U.S. has spent $1.121 trillion for war-related expenses like military operations, foreign aid and veterans' health care, with 94% of that total going to the Department of Defense. Reports on what we spend where from Open CRS: Congressional Research Reports for the People here. More stuff we shouldn't be doing and what it costs here. Rethink Afghanistan is here.
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Stop. Criminalizing. Science! "Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has threatened that, if he becomes chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, he will launch what would be a hostile investigation of climate science. The focus would be on e-mails stolen from scientists at the University of East Anglia in Britain last fall that climate-change deniers have falsely claimed demonstrate wrongdoing by scientists, including me. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) may do the same if he takes over a committee on climate change and energy security. ... What could Issa, Sensenbrenner and Cuccinelli possibly think they might uncover now, a year after the e-mails were published? ... The truth is that they don't expect to uncover anything. Instead, they want to continue a 20-year assault on climate research, questioning basic science and promoting doubt where there is none. ... We have lived through the pseudo-science that questioned the link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer, and the false claims questioning the science of acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer. The same dynamics and many of the same players are still hard at work, questioning the reality of climate change."
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Q Salt Lake reports that over 100 Wal-Mart stores are carrying the anti-gay children's book written by the wife of the president the Mormon anti-gay group Standard Of Liberty.
Chased by an Elephant, the Gospel Truth about Today's Stampeding Sexuality by Janice Barrett Graham was written to "help shed the clear light of truth on today's dark and tangled ideas about male and female, proper gender roles, the law of chastity, and the God-given sexual appetite," according to Janice Graham in the book's introduction. The Grahams claim that their son, Andrew, successfully changed his sexual orientation and is now a happily married man.
Andrew Graham has published his own book about being "lured" into homosexuality while a student at Brigham Young.
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UTAH: Thousands Protest Anti-Gay Remarks By LDS Leader Boyd Packer
Thousands of protesters gathered in Salt Lake City's Temple Square last night to denounce remarks by LDS Apostle Boyd Packer, who called gay people "impure and unnatural." Packer's speech, delivered during the LDS Church's 180th Semiannual General Conference, hit a nerve, protesters say, because it came after a string of gay teen suicides in the national news. Boys as young as 13 took their own lives after reportedly being bullied by their peers for being gay. On Thursday, protest organizers estimated that 4,500 people ringed the two downtown blocks that make up the LDS Church's headquarters. Participants wore black, and some carried signs. Lying head to toe or sitting shoulder to shoulder, they encircled Temple Square two times. "Tonight, we are symbolic of all the children who have been killed by messages like Boyd K. Packer's," said organizer and Salt Lake City blogger Eric Ethington. "When you hear nothing from [church leaders] but that you are nothing but evil and you need to change the unchangeable nature of yourself, that is only a message kids can take for so long."
Jerry Coyne looks a little deeper at that part of the exhibit, and there is a lesser subtone of pandering to religion, and while it doesn't overwhelm the story at all, there's still an element of turning an exhibit on the science of evolution into an opportunity to promote theology. Which may partly explain why a wealthy kook like Koch was willing to throw money at it.
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Everyone Loses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DRkUU-qhjk&feature=player_embedded
Suck it up and get out there and vote.
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Marc Perkel:
Letter to the Editor
Republicans are raising lots of money for this election because they need it to mask the bad ideas from the radical far right candidates the Republicans are running this year. They hope to cover up crazy with millions of corporate dollars.
Republicans want to privatize Social Security. The want to run up the debt by extending tax cuts for millionaires. Rand Paul has said that private businesses should be allowed to exclude blacks. Christie O'Donnell thinks scientists are using stem cells to create mice with fully developed human brains. They say that Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment are unconstitutional. Several Republican candidates want to lower or eliminate the minimum wage. They want to reverse health care reform, eliminate consumer protection, reverse wall street reforms that would prevent another bailout. They oppose abortion even for women who are raped. They want us to believe that the solution to America's problems is to go back to the Bush era policies that created the mess in the first place.
The Republicans positions are so bizarre that they have to take and spend tons of money because without a campaign to bombard us with lies they don't have a chance of winning election this year. It's like putting lipstick on a pig, and when you have a lot of pig you have to use a lot of lipstick.
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JINZHOU, China — The world's newest Nobel Peace Prize winner remained unreachable in a Chinese prison Saturday, while his wife's mobile phone was cut off and the authoritarian government continued to censor reports about democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo's honor.
Police kept reporters away from the prison where Liu is serving an 11-year sentence for subversion, and his lawyer said that Liu's wife — who had been hoping to visit him Saturday and tell him the news of the award — has "disappeared" and he is worried she may be in police custody.
Too bad we owe them so much money, or maybe we could say something about this and the fact that they skin cats and dogs alive too.
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When it's budget-cutting time, maybe Eric Cantor can start with this: $7,451 on chocolate.
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Doubting Thomas
I'm just guessing that Clarence Thomas would still vote with the conservative court majority whether or not his wife was the head of a right-wing group that got $550K in donations from unnamed sources. Ezra Klein said it pretty well the other day:
I'll only add that the arguments being tossed around by the two sides are essentially meaningless. There's no "right" argument here. No one doubts that health-care reform would be constitutional if Antonin Scalia decided to pursue his passion for beekeeping and allowed President Obama to appoint his replacement. The only reason there's any question about the law's constitutionality is that conservatives appointed five of the nine sitting justices, and conservatives have organized against the constitutionality of a proposal they once considered not just constitutional, but desirable as a matter of public policy.
And so it goes. Politics is politics, and the Supreme Court is, at this point, deeply and unquestionably political. I continue to think it unlikely that they will want the sort of direct confrontation with the political system, and with the Democratic Party, that overturning health-care reform would entail. But only time will tell.
If there's any better reason to vote for a Democrat than the need to nominate and confirm decent Supreme Court justices, I don't know what it is.
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Here's an interesting tidbit Ben Smith got from a Democratic source about outside spending in Senate races:
Republican Third Party Groups — $43,664,661
Democratic Third Party Groups — $6,658,236
Forty-three million out a 150 million total spending in the races (that would be a rough guess for the total) would be a ton. But if the total spending is much higher, then it's not such a big deal. I'm curious what proportion of the spending here is from these outside groups. I may try to do some calculations if I have times, but remember, my calculator doesn't go into the billions.
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Illegal Aliens Close Lou Dobbs' Barn Door After Horse Escapes
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Move over, Betty White fan, move over Gleeks -- there's a new star in town.
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Bank of America is halting foreclosure sales. They will not carry out foreclosures for the time being.
What that means is if people have walked away from their houses, then they will still be on the hook for property taxes, maintenance, insurance and so on. What Bank of America is also doing is keeping the loans on their books as loans, rather than having to wipe them out. They don't have to manage even more property and they are not stuck with having to dispose of the properties at a sharp loss after nobody bids above the upset price at a foreclosure auction.
So Bank of America isn't acting entirely out of a sense of altruism or shame when they stopped all foreclosures.
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The GOP is a mental illness
Meet Art Robinson. He's running for Congress in Oregon.
Art is insane. Can you say insane? I thought you could.
(The first link is to Dogcicle's excellent video-intensive blog, BlogDog, where you can see Art's interview with Rachell Maddow, and where you can see he is nuts. The second link is to Drifty, who always has great things to say about the nutjobs in the GOP.)
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Just as we suspected; the private health care system in this country is killing us all. "The US healthcare system is to blame for declines in the country's life expectancy ranking, a study suggests. The Columbia University report rejects claims that factors such as obesity have shortened life-spans for Americans relative to other wealthy nations. The study blames reliance on costly and fragmented specialised care, and calls for systemic reform. Its release comes as President Barack Obama's healthcare reform remains a key issue in upcoming mid-term elections. The study notes that in 1950, the US ranked fifth among leading industrialised nations for female life expectancy at birth, but only 46th in 2008. It finds that US healthcare spending increased at nearly twice the rate of that in other wealthy nations between 1970 and 2002, with the increased spending corresponding with worsening survival rates relative to the other countries studied."
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As mentioned before, Tom Daschle admits that the White House threw the public option - and any hope for genuine health care reform - under the bus to please the insurance giants. Everyone who hasn't known this since the summer of 2009, stand on your head.
And now, those "good Americans" at the health insurance companies are thanking Democrats for that bailout by - you guessed it - pouring millions into repug election campaigns.
Noam Levey has a wonderfully revealing piece in the LA Times today about the health insurance industry's hopes and dreams for a Republican Congress next year. The insurers, it turns out, like the new healthcare reform rules that force everyone to get health insurance, but they aren't so keen on all those other pesky regulations:
The insurance industry, attracted by the prospect of millions of new customers as a result of the coverage mandate, initially backed President Obama's campaign to overhaul the healthcare system. And insurers scored a key victory when Democrats abandoned plans to create a government insurance plan, or "public option." But insurers are increasingly balking at the myriad new directives in the healthcare law.Among other things, the law prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage to sick children and canceling policies when customers get sick. The law bars insurers from placing lifetime caps on how much they will pay when their customers get ill. Many consumers will also get new rights to appeal denied claims and win new access to preventive care without being asked for copays.
"The health reform law did not deliver the uninsured in the way that insurers wanted," said veteran healthcare analyst Sheryl Skolnick, senior vice president at CRT Capital Group.
That final quote is priceless. "The health reform law did not deliver the uninsured in the way that insurers wanted." Apparently they wanted the uninsured trussed up and delivered to their doorsteps wallet first, but without any actual obligation on their part to provide decent service in return. And they know just how to get their wish: "The industry would love to have a Republican Congress," says Wendell Potter, a former Cigna insurance executive. "They were very, very successful during the years of Republican domination in Washington."
But this is creating a wee problem for everyone. You see, Republicans are loudly proclaiming right now that they want to eliminate the part of the law that forces everyone to buy insurance. But that's exactly the part of the law that insurance companies like. In fact, they want to see it strengthened. At the same time, they want to get rid of the popular parts of the law that keep insurance companies from figuring out ways to screw patients. But those are the provisions that Republicans say they'll keep if we turn over Congress to them.
And yet, the insurance companies are massively funding Republicans this cycle anyway. Why would that be? It's almost as if they're sure that Republicans are just blowing campaign smoke and will support their agenda once they're safely in office. They're so sure, in fact, that they're willing to put their money where their mouths are to the tune of millions of dollars.
So which do you believe? Republican mouths or insurance industry money? Decisions, decisions.....
It will be interesting to see how this all unfolds. If I had to guess, I'd think that the Republicans will relentlessly chip away at the funding mechanisms for the big medicaid expansion wherever they can, even if it requires changing the law the first chance they get a Republican majority w/president again. I would think the mandate will stand but that the mechanisms requiring that they keep prices manageable will be tweaked in such a way that the insurance companies will have much more latitude for charging customers. And they will be relieved from having to create comprehensive policies and will be able to go back to the old expensive premiums for crappy coverage model they love so much. In other words, it will take a while, but they'll probably be able to go back to some version of the status quo, only with a mandate that all citizens buy shitty insurance.The proof will be in the pudding about a decade from now when the court cases all finish and whatever is left of the program is in place. At this point we are dealing with theoretical outcomes even if the plan is unchanged for the worse (and I am very skeptical that it will be.) Politically, this is not a winner for the Democrats or Obama because average people don't see any positive change and until full implementation it's likely they will continue to see their rates going up. But then, that was baked in the cake as well. It is what it is.
And we can guarantee one thing: all the talk of "improving" the legislation will be a joke if the Republicans get the chance to gut it before it ever gets going. That long window to implementation is a land mine that was set when everyone was still singing Kumbaaya about the Permanent Democratic Majority. It doesn't look so smart right now.
Have you made calls for your Democratic congressional candidate today?
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How many people drink water that originates in the Danube? 100 million? 500 million? "The death toll following the spill of a large amount of toxic red sludge from an industrial plant in western Hungary has risen to seven, officials say. Disaster unit chief Tibor Dobson said two bodies had been found near the town of Devecser, but were likely residents missing from Kolontar, a town nearby. Earlier, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said the River Danube was no longer under threat of widespread pollution. Mr Orban said the situation had now been brought "under control". Experts have been pouring large quantities of clay and acid into affected waterways in an effort to neutralise the alkaline pollutants."
We need more deregulation.
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Update! AFA blogger still knows Jesus wanted that house to burn down
