Whatever Happened To HMO's?

I was lying awake last night, thinking about how the wheels of progress run so slowly, and there is probably already a generation of young adults who don't remember Michael Moore's brilliant dissection of the American Medical Industry, "Sicko", made in 2007.

And then I thought about HMO's.  For those young adults we're thinking about - and I met one recently who didn't see why she should be asked to contribute to the care of those who didn't bother to get Insurance - HMO stands for "Health Maintenance Organization".

In "Sicko", the invalid referred to is America and its Health Care system. In that film , Moore examines how HMO's work, and how they came to exist.

Here's the clip - don't miss Nixon's eyelids as he assures us how he wants every American to have good healthcare!

As we watch the Tea Party's Government Shut Down in action, refusing to countenance the notion of Health Care for All - it's good to be reminded of what the issue is.  And have you noticed how, since "Sicko" came out, we don't hear the phrase "HMO" any more?

For an overview of this brilliant wake-up call Documentary, here's the Trailer -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BJyyyRYbSk&list=TLOqXVWxyGsfxMsDyaBks9sVDr0V39bKMr

Goddammit, What Did I Just Say?

No sooner have I finished a Post about the need for the 99% to have a say in Washington - and the Democrats to pay attention to that need - than I open an e-mail about the case coming up in the Supreme Court next week, McCutcheon v. FEC.

USAction tell us that "The outcome of this case will determine if a "super limit" of $117,000 on large donors will remain the law of the land".

"The impact of this case is huge. Right now, only four out of one million Americans neared or reached the aggregate contribution limit of $117,000 in 2012.¹ But if the FEC loses this case, elite donors will be able to give as much money to influence elections as they want."

Judging by the Supremes' unconscionable decision in Citizens United, we may have a problem, Houston.

The e-mail continues:  "Unfortunately we can't decide for the Supreme Court. But we can work together to pass meaningful campaign finance reform laws. So starting today, USAction and Public Campaign Action Fund are running ads in Kentucky against Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) -- who has been a leading advocate for unlimited campaign contributions.

Click here to view our ad that will be hitting the airwaves of Kentucky today. Then tell Sen. McConnell to stand up for everyday people, not for big campaign donors.

Americans already believe their elected representatives are more responsive to their big donors than voters. But if the Supreme Court strikes down super limits next spring, this will only get worse.

America was founded on the idea of government for the people, by the people. But this idea has been eroded over time by big moneyed interests buying off our politicians -- in the form of political donations -- in order to get the policies they want.

We need real, meaningful campaign finance laws. And we need them yesterday. But right now, we must defend super limits, one of the few remaining protections our Democracy has left.

Watch our video against Mitch McConnell now. Then, tell Sen. McConnell to stop fighting to weaken campaign finance laws.

Together, we can create the Democracy our Founding Fathers envisioned and which the American people deserve."

 Go for it, Citoyens!

Good News for Texas - But Will the Dimmocrats Pay Attention?

Wendy Davis, Texas's glamorous, pink-sneakered, Olympic Filibusterer has announced that she will run for Governor of Texas, following in the admirable footsteps of Ann Richards....

Ann Richards ran well, but did the Harley?

The Daily Kos this morning brought us the

"... huge news from Texas—Wendy Davis just announced her campaign for governor.

Can you chip in $3 to help elect a pro-choice Democrat the next governor of Texas?

Over 76,000 Daily Kos community members signed the petition to draft Wendy Davis for governor. This afternoon, she finally announced that yes, she is taking the plunge.

Let's be clear from the very start: This won't be an easy battle. This is Texas, after all. The state has the lowest voter participation in the country, and you know who those non-voters are: young voters, Latinos, Asians, African Americans, single women—the very people that Democrats depend on to win. As I'm fond of saying, if our voters turn out, we win.

Wendy Davis could be the person to activate our core voters, accelerating the demographic trends that will eventually make Texas purple, and then blue, whether Republicans like it or not.

But that won’t happen without the grassroots.

Turn Texas Blue: Chip in $3 now.

Keep fighting,
Markos MoulitsasFounder and Publisher, Daily Kos"

Now the Daily Kos is a good source, and I often enjoy what they have to say, but I'm not advocating giving your hard-earned cash to the Dimmocrats - that's for you to decide, bearing in mind that John Stone-Face Kerry is at this very moment visiting Asia to sell a Corporate "Trade Deal" that has been described as "NAFTA on steroids", and Obama today achieves the landmark moment of having presided over the deportation of more illegal immigrants than his unspeakable predecessor G.W. Bush.

(Figure given on "Democracy Now".)

The "Washington Post" immediately commented that Wendy Davis will not win.  Why the hell they say that I don't know, bearing in mind that, first, Davis is charismatic, good-looking and a heroine to women for her stand (literally) on Reproductive Freedom in the benighted State. Second, Texas had a very popular and successful woman Governor in Ann Richards, who was defeated in 1994 by W., (probably after a "recount", I don't know.)

Ann Richards QUOTE:  "I get a lot of cracks about my hair, mostly from men who don't have any."

But the main reason I think Davis might have a good chance is that elections in this democracy are decided by who turns out.  With her face-recognition, feminist street-cred, and probable appeal to the young and ethnic minorities, she might do very well indeed.

And that's the lesson for the Dimms.  The reason that they got their asses handed to them in 2010, and possibly the reason we have this Tea Party nightmare in the House right now, is that President Backbone has failed, over and over and over, to live up to the promises he made in his campaigns, to bring us "Hope and Change".

What the students, the women, the progressives, and the ethnic minorities meant by Change, and what they thought Obama meant, was breaking the chains that tie our Government to Big Business, serving the People not the Bankers, the 99% not the 1%, taking care of "Us" not "Them".

If the Dimms would just find the guts to make that their guiding principle, they could be in power for a century.  Maybe standing up for Obamacare, and taking a first timid step towards a basic service that Britain (to name but one) has had since 1949, will prove to be a turning-point.

But I don't suggest you hold your breath....

Bible Class

This brilliant scene is from "The West Wing", of course.  See the rest of the hilarious exchange here.  I highly recommend it!

An astute observer, in the "LA Weekly", I think, said that "The West Wing" is the Government portrayed as we wish it worked - particularly appropriate this week....

(You can watch the video here, but there's no need.)

So Which Nation Is Strongest?

Shutdown Coverage Fails Americans

A short and accurate Commentary from Al Jazeera; read the original piece, complete with links, here.

Shutdown Coverage Fails Americans

Commentary: We need journalists to hold politicians accountable for extremist actions, not to enable them

"U.S. news reports are largely blaming the government shutdown on the inability of both political parties to come to terms. It is supposedly the result of a "bitterly divided" Congress that "failed to reach agreement" (Washington Post) or "a bitter budget standoff" left unresolved by "rapid-fire back and forth legislative maneuvers" (New York Times). This sort of false equivalence is not just a failure of journalism. It is also a failure of democracy.
When the political leadership of this country is incapable of even keeping the government open, a political course correction is in order. But how can democracy self-correct if the public does not understand where the problem lies? And where will the pressure for change come from if journalists do not hold the responsible parties accountable?
The truth of what happened Monday night, as almost all political reporters know full well, is that "Republicans staged a series of last-ditch efforts to use a once-routine budget procedure to force Democrats to abandon their efforts to extend U.S. health insurance." (Thank you, Guardian.)
And holding the entire government hostage while demanding the de facto repeal of a president's signature legislation and not even bothering to negotiate is by any reasonable standard an extreme political act. It is an attempt to make an end run around the normal legislative process. There is no historical precedent for it. The last shutdowns, in 1995 and 1996, were not the product of unilateral demands to scrap existing law; they took place during a period of give-and-take budget negotiations.
But the political media's aversion to doing anything that might be seen as taking sides — combined with its obsession with process — led them to actively obscure the truth in their coverage of the votes. If you did not already know what this was all about, reading the news would not help you understand.
What makes all this more than a journalistic failure is that the press plays a crucial role in our democracy. We count on the press to help create an informed electorate. And perhaps even more important, we rely on the press to hold the powerful accountable.
That requires calling out political leaders when they transgress or fail to meet commonly agreed-upon standards: when they are corrupt, when they deceive, when they break the rules and refuse to govern. Such exposure is the first consequence. When the transgressions are sufficiently grave, what follows should be continued scrutiny, marginalization, contempt and ridicule.
In the current political climate, journalistic false equivalence leads to an insufficiently informed electorate, because the public is not getting an accurate picture of what is going on.

---

Journalists have been suckered into embracing 'balance' and 'neutrality' at all costs.

---

But the lack of accountability is arguably even worse because it has the characteristics of a cascade failure. When the media coverage seeks down-the-middle neutrality despite one party's outlandish conduct, there are no political consequences for their actions. With no consequences for extremism, politicians who have succeeded using such conduct have an incentive to become even more extreme. The more extreme they get, the further the split-the-difference press has to veer from common sense in order to avoid taking sides. And so on.
The political press should be the public's first line of defense when it comes to assessing who is deviating from historic norms and practices, who is risking serious damage to the nation, whose positions are based in irrational phobias and ignorance rather than data and reason.
Instead journalists have been suckered into embracing "balance" and "neutrality" at all costs, and the consequences of their choice in an era of political extremism will only get worse and worse.
One of the great ironies of the current dynamic is that political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, who for decades were conventional voices of plague-on-both-your-houses centrism, have now become among the foremost critics of a press corps that fails to report the obvious. They describe the modern Republican Party, without any hesitation, as "a party beholden to ideological zealots."
But as Mann explained in an interview last year, "The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties' agendas and connections to facts and truth."
Even with a story as straightforward as the government shutdown, splitting the difference remains the method of choice for the political reporters and editors in Washington's most influential news bureaus. Even when they surely know better. Even when many Republican elected officials have criticized their own leaders for being too beholden to the more radical right wing.
Media critics — and members of the public — have long decried this kind of he-said-she-said reporting. The Atlantic's James Fallows, one of the most consistent chroniclers and decriers of false equivalence, describes it as the "strong tendency to give equal time and credence to varying 'sides' of a story, even if one of the sides is objectively true and the other is just made up."
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen argues that truth telling has been surpassed as a newsroom priority by a neither-nor impartiality he calls the "view from nowhere."
Blaming everyone — Congress, both sides, Washington — is simply the path of least resistance for today's political reporters. It's a way of avoiding conflict rather than taking the risk that the public — or their editors — will accuse them of being unprofessionally partisan.
But making a political judgment through triangulation — trying to stake out a safe middle ground between the two political parties — is still making a political judgment. It is often just not a very good one. And in this case, as in many others, it is doing the country a grave disservice.
So, no, the shutdown is not generalized dysfunction or gridlock or stalemate. It is aberrational behavior by a political party that is willing to take extreme and potentially damaging action to get its way. And by not calling it what it is, the political press is enabling it.
We need a more fearless media."

It's "Official" - Orgasms Are Good For You

For those not in the (British) know, the "Daily Mail" is a middle-brow newspaper, very professional, usually conservative politically but also with maverick tendencies. When I worked on a BBC Magazine show, "Nationwide", it was often a source of interesting stories - they're good at relating say, Scientific stories to the bloke or bird in the street.

Take a look at this photo - 

  

The Mail's caption to this picture:  "Strange as it may sound, I am about to lie down and be propelled backwards into the narrow tube of an MRI scanner, where I will hit the heights of passion and have my brain mapped by the scanner as I do so – and all in the name of science"

The enterprising Rowan Pelling is offering up her body - and her brain chemistry - to an American researcher, Professor Barry Komisaruk of Rutgers University - 

"The Professor worded his conclusion cautiously, as befits a scientist still compiling key data: 'The surge of blood and oxygen and nutrients throughout the brain during orgasm is most likely going to be beneficial to brain health.'

In other words: orgasms are good for the brain. This is great news for Hugh Hefner and, indeed, the rest of us, although the exact ways in which orgasm boosts brain function are still unclear. It certainly seems that the moment the French call the petite mort is actually an invigorating zip of new life.

So could an orgasm give the brain a better workout than Sudoku? And if so, then what might the implications be for our ageing population? Might having regular orgasms help improve our memory, keep your brain youthful or even help us live longer? There's only way to find out.

In practice, however, having an orgasm in the name of science is not a simple feat...."

Read more here....

[Grammatical note for lovers of the English language: note that Rowan says "lie down"; a hen lays an egg, but when we're tired we lie on a couch.  Pay attention, class!]