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Date: Hopefully everyone had a chance to read what Jeremy Scahill calls thesaddest and most moving story he's ever written: his interview withMohammed Kinani, father of the youngest victim of the Blackwatermassshooting in Baghdad's Nisour Square in 2007. Here is a powerfulslideshow from the interview, with images of Kinani's beloved sonAli.We'll have video of the interview up this week, and will continue tofollow Kinani's struggle for justice. To date, Blackwater remainsunaccountable for their actions in 2007.
A few things from our orbit this week:
A new video and a major forum on the future of journalism ...
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Date: As I've written previously, 'The Nation' is a community defined byspirited--often fractious--debate. But when it comes to what we'retaking away from the Democratic loss in Massachusetts, it's safe to saythere is a consensus of sorts emerging: moving forward, Democrats needto show they are on the side of working people every step of the way. (Read Greider, Nichols, and me.)
The Obama Administration's proposed bank tax wasa start, though itshould be larger and also extend to a windfall tax on excessive bonuses. But raising $117 billion from the Too Big To Fail financialinstitutions which brought us this economic meltdown is a good and smartstep down the populist path Democrats should have stayed true topost-2008.
And today, a bolder proposal from the Administration--much overdue--tolimit the size of banks and theirability to take people's deposits andengage in casino-like investment banking. The 'New York Times'reports that the regulation targets the BigFive--Citigroup, Bank ofAmerica, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs. There areindications this is a move towards restoring the kind of protectivefirewalls enacted through Glass-Steagall following the Great Depression.
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Date: "We live in a world that increasingly demands more dialogue than monologue."
Those are words from the founding manifesto issued earlier this week by a diverse group of bloggers, journalists, commentators, techies and politicos calling for more question-and-answer sessions, or "Question Time," between the President and the opposition party.
I am one of those, along with Grover Norquist, who has signed on. Here's why: these are times when unfiltered, unfettered public debate--rigorous, substantive, candid and civil--is rare and hard to find. I believe that "Demand Question Time" could help us nurture a more informed, more vibrant democracy.
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Date: Election results rarely have a single explanation.
Yet it's pretty clear that Scott Brown's special election win in a state that last sent a Republican to the Senate in 1978 is an indicator of the turbulent national political mood a year after Obama took office.
There is a generalized anti-establishment anger loose in this country, reinforced by a White House team that has delivered for Wall Street but not enough for hurting communities. It is an anger also fueled by often savage, right-wing anti-government attacks.
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Date: With a nod to Rick Perlstein, 'Welcome to Palinland'. Atop Palinland's Mount Rushmore are Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater. Palinland's Bill of Rights has been edited and redacted, reordered and revised with red ink: in Palinland, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments that ensure due process and the rights of the accused are merely suggestive measures to be administered based on the emotional whim of a carefully-harnessed fear and a fervently-stoked anger. And in Palinland, the Tenth Amendment's reservation of power for the individual states is paramount, a necessary protection for a people whose government is supposedly hell-bent on destroying them.
Though Sarah Palin's National Tea Party Convention keynote garnered more robust bursts of applause when she invoked birthday boy Ronald Reagan (he would have been 99), the real sage behind her speech was Barry Goldwater. Careful to sidestep some of Goldwater's more piquant rhetoric, Palin nonetheless delivered a speech steeped in the late Arizonan's extremist brand of conservatism. In his 1960 manifesto The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater wrote, "I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden." Palin took an equally extremist anti-Washington/anti-government stance, fulminating against the 2009 Recovery and Reinvestment Act by condemning the "fat strings attached" to federal stimulus dollars and by accusing the Obama administration of baldly using the stimulus as a power grab that "disrespect[s] the Tenth Amendment of our Constitution." (Never mind the denunciation of Miranda Rights that she herself had made minutes earlier.)
Palin continued to further explicate the tenets of Goldwater, Version 2.0, as she spelled out her "common-sense conservatism" platform: "The government that governs least governs best...The constitution provides the best road map towards a more perfect union...Only limited government can expand prosperity and opportunity for all." In Palin's universe, Obama hates the American system of government and represents a threat to American security, prosperity, and freedom.
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Date: Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people, freeto flood campaigns with cash contributions so that the voices of, well--real people--are drowned out, the stakes and emotions around this issue are high. Rightly so. Here are 10creative replies to this monstrous decision (in no particular order). Iwelcome your own suggestions below.
1) "If corporations are 'people' then HEY it's time to re-institute thedraft..." --ddeclue, Democratic Underground
2) "Corporations are legally people. And it makes sense, folks. Theydo everything people do except breath, die, and go to jail for dumping1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River." --Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report
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Date: A very sweet victory in Oregon this week, where voters passed two ballotinitiatives to raise taxes on the wealthiest 3 percentof its residents--individuals earning over $125,000 and couplesexceeding $250,000 annually--and also on businesses which have until nowenjoyed "one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the nation."
The $1 billion in increased revenues will go towards public educationand social services, averting significant cuts which would have beenmade worse by the loss of approximately $250 million in matching fundsfrom the federal government.
Charles Sheketoff, executive director of the Oregon Center for Public Policy (OCPP),told the 'New York Times' this was a victory for "true populism" and that conservatives and teapartiers had "tried to hijack the term."
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Date: Hopefully you've read Professor Lawrence Lessig's provocative new essay, "How to Get Our Democracy Back." Lessig's piece is essential reading for people across the political spectrum, and we're doing what we can to reach 'everyone' concerned about the future of our democracy. Lessig appeared on 'Democracy Now' and on 'Bill Moyers Journal', but also on the conservative Hugh Hewitt radio show, and his piece was reprinted at Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com. As Lessig argues, whether you are a progressive who wants healthcare reform or a conservative who wants smaller government, none of it is possible unless we fix Congress first. You can view the 'Bill Moyers Journal' segment here.
Also 'Around the Nation' this week:
Super Super Bowl reading from 'The Nation':
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Date: Deficit hysteria has reached new levels yet where is the attention to anout of control defense budget that is now the largest since World WarII? While the Obama Admistration's three-year freeze on discretionaryspending is a bad idea, it's made even worse because unprecedentedPentagon spending is exempted from it.
Who would know from all of the whining about budget deficits thatmilitary spending is the largest discretionary item in the federalgovernment? Exempting all security-related expenditures from commonsense cuts will have serious consequences for almost everything thegovernment does--from job creation, poverty reduction and alternativeenergy development, to aid for cash-strapped state and localgovernments. In fact, the Economic Policy Institute reports thatnon-security-related discretionary spending is already at near-historiclows as a share of GDP. At a time when foreclosures are still rising,and we face double-digit unemployment, this freeze will make digging outfrom the Great Recession more difficult.
On Monday, the Obama Administration requested $708 billion for theDefense Department next year--including $549 billion for its base budgetand $159 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 'This doesn'teven include the $33 billionsupplement the White House will request forits escalation in Afghanistan this year'.
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Date: This was a rough week for progressives. But will it be our Waterloo--ora turning point? Here's a piece I did for the Wall Street Journal,"Give Up onPost-Partisanship." And here are somesuggestions fromWilliam Greider to the President on how to regain the public trust.
A few other things this week:
'The Breakdown: Can Healthcare Reform Be Saved ...'
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Date: Mon, 08 Feb 2010 06:23:06 -0500Medical fraud kills people. Because it does this slowly and indirectly, we tend not to notice it, and our response is more often the clucking of tongues than the moral outrage that usually accompanies mass murder.
Date: Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:44:38 -0500In the desperate days soon after the earthquake in Haiti last month, foreign medical volunteers relied on improvised, low-tech devices for consultations and coordination. But American doctors are switching to more sophisticated technology to help improve public health in Haiti, one of the worlds poorest nations.
Date: Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:40:22 -0500What should a primary-care physician do when a patient turns up with a friend or family member in tow: someone who's clearly taking some kind of responsibility for that patient's care?
Date: Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:38:33 -0500A Tianjin couple's decision to stop medical treatment for their newborn baby, who suffers life-threatening birth defects, has triggered a huge controversy.
Date: Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:37:28 -0500Current medical practice is enormously expensive, often without clear long-term benefits. A few examples: *End-of-life care at New York University averaged $105,000 per patient in the last two years of life, without evident improvement in mortality rates. Costs at other centers were nearly as high, also without evident benefits.
Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:53:32 -0500In a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, four of 23 patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state showed signs of consciousness on brain-imaging tests.
Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:47:52 -0500Survival is the first order of business when you face a diagnosis of cancer but failure to talk business upfront with your doctor could end up being your biggest setback down the road.Don't wait for your oncologist to bring up the topic of money, a new study suggests. Discussing treatment costs with health providers and budgeting for payment as soon as possible is the best way to soften a secondary blow for survivors who often still suffer the financial consequences years later.
Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:44:46 -0500The top court in President Obama's home state just struck down a law that capped malpractice awards against doctors and hospitals.
Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:43:07 -0500In a case that could have far-reaching implications for medical research and health care based on genetics, groups representing thousands of doctors, scientists and patients went to court Tuesday to argue that no one should be able to patent human genes, a question that has long been controversial in scientific circles.
Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:41:40 -0500Physicians in training and bioethicists at Johns Hopkins have created an easy-to-remember checklist to help medical students and clinicians quickly assess a patients decision-making capacity in an emergency.
Date: Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:21:42 -0500On the big day, Kathleen (Kay) Carter chose to wear the blue floral scarf that was given to her by her sister. On Thursday, Jan. 14, Kay dictated a note to family and friends telling them: "I have chosen to die with dignity, tomorrow."
Date: Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:06:30 -0500lthough several rackets have been busted in Tamil Nadu and many reports, including in some leading medical journals like The Lancet, have indicated that there have been sale of organs, no doctor or hospital has ever been proved guilty. The licences of at least 15 hospitals have been withdrawn and suspension notices issued by the directorate of medical services, particularly after the state health department unearthed a kidney trade where the survivors of the December 2004 tsunami were donors. The Kovai Medical Centre and Research Institute, which has been issued suspension this time, was among them.
Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2010 01:42:38 -0500In the rarefied world of fashion magazines, beauty editors have often relied on a coterie of prominent dermatologists and plastic surgeons to keep them current on advances in cosmetic medicine. This symbiotic relationship has benefited magazines eager for beauty scoops and doctors seeking visibility and patients.
Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2010 01:39:35 -0500Over these last seven months, I have received many letters, e-mails and texts from people who identify themselves as physicians and whose messages suggest that the AMA doesn't do anything for them.
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:28:00 -0500Endorsing vaccines as the worlds most cost-effective public health measure, Bill and Melinda Gates said Friday that their foundation would more than double its spending on them over the next decade, to at least $10 billion.
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