Photo credit: NMSU.  (Many more beautiful pics at this site)

It is, as redneck says, that time of year again. It is time to be thankful for what we have, and time that we feel compelled to buy one another gifts. For many, this is also a time of reflection. Their personal circumstances have changed. There's less money to buy things, but they are considering that time is possibly the most important thing that they can give one another.  And it is true, what is more wonderful than families together again going through the crazy conversations and arguments and laughter and remembrances that only families can? Blood and friendship are ties that go beyond mere "things".

Even so, the holiday buying season officially begins this week. And most of us will buy at least a few gifts for one another. So I am proposing that we think about what we buy this year. With so many jobs gone and others wavering, isn't it important? Remember that old "Buy American" ad campaign? Maybe it seems quaint to some: I mean, when you go to your typical retail store, the only nominally American goods are bath products, make up, and food. Looking around at the "made in ____" tags, you would think that we lived in Asia.

But what we buy is important. Here is a site--not a cheesily patriotic site, or one that overly laments the losses of yesteryear--that lists and links to some cool products that we make. There are good athletic shoes made in the USA. Boots. Hats. Linens. Funky things. Boring things. But all things made here by us. Buying these items supports these companies' jobs, their local economy, and ultimately adds to the entire American economy.

Read more »

If you haven't heard what's been going on in California, it's time to catch up. The state, which is pretty close to being bankrupt, has lowered higher education funding dramatically.

The state allocation for the 10-campus system, one of the leading public university systems in the nation, was cut $813 million, or 20 percent, this year, leading to a hiring freeze, furloughs and layoffs.

The impact on the University of California campuses has been dramatic: faculty hiring is not keeping up with enrollment demand, and many course sections have been eliminated. Instructional budgets are being reduced by $139 million, with 1,900 employees laid off, 3,800 positions eliminated and hiring deferred for nearly 1,600 positions, most of them faculty.

This has led to a tuition increase of one-third (32%), which is leading to protests:

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Budgeting isn't fun,but each of us has to at least consider what we are spending. Normally talking about debt is boring, but this is alarming:

The U.S. budget deficit for October surged to $176 billion, a record for the month, the Treasury Department announced today. During the month, the government racked up $311 billion in outlays compared with $135 billion in receipts. The October numbers mark the first month for the new fiscal year after the U.S. wrapped up the 2009 fiscal year that ended on September 30 with a record-high $1.4 trillion budget deficit due to increased government spending...

Yes, the government did a financial bailout. We are in a huge recession. If the government actually balanced the budget using October's numbers (spending 2.3 times what it's making?!? Is something wrong here?!?), we'd have a massive decrease in spending and a massive loss of programs and jobs. And yes, GW Bush lowered taxes and increased spending. And, yes, there's a couple wars going on. And yes, some of the spending, like an increase to the NSF, will reap long term rewards, economy-wise.

We're now spending about 8% of our government revenue on interest alone:

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Arnold Schwarzenegger just vetoed a finance bill for San Francisco. The margins of his veto statement spell out something quite interesting. Check it out for yourself below:

 

Apparently, Tom Ammiano, the sponsor of the bill, has been less than cordial to the Californian governor recently:

The sponsor of the bill was Tom Ammiano, a Democratic member of the State Assembly who recently heckled Schwarzenegger when the governor made a surprise drop-in at a San Francisco Democratic Party fundraiser.

As previously reported by ABC-7 in San Francisco, Ammiano shouted "you lie!" to Schwarzenegger during the event at the Fairmont Hotel, before adding: "kiss my gay ass" as he walked out.

This is just classic.

The Patriot Act turns 8 today. Is it time for a party? Has it kept us safe from terrorists or just eroded our rights? Huffpo reported in September that

Only three of the 763 "sneak-and-peek" requests in fiscal year 2008 involved terrorism cases, according to a July 2009 report from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Sixty-five percent were drug cases.

Wow. It's great to know that the act has been used toward its intended purpose to protect us from terrorists. And not for other purposes like protecting us from drugs or from overuse of the Orange DHS security level. I mean, we've given them the authority to search our homes without a warrant in secret for no reason whatsoever. So it's good to know that we are protected, right?

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Very quick blog. I just want to point out how health insurance money influences positions to the detriment of the states that Representatives and Senators represent.

Last week, Senator McConnell went on a heated tirade about how the HHS was telling an insurance company with very close ties to Senator McConnell to stop sending misleading propaganda to its insurees was a  "gag order" and "stifles free speech".

An editorial in the Lexington Herald Leader responds--and I think the writer does  a far better job than I can:

It's stirring, isn't it? Spine-tingling, really, to hear our senior senator defend the free speech rights of a corporation whose foundation and founder have pledged $1.5 million to his center at the University of Louisville. Humana's PAC and employees also constitute McConnell's seventh-largest contributor.

The editorial also goes into how many more Kentuckians are uninsured now than 10 years ago (McConnell's been a senator since 1985) This is the Senate Minority Leader and it seems that he's just as beholden to health insurers as any Senator. How can we have legitimate reform when our Senators and leaders pitch for companies and not the people who will benefit from universal health care?

----------------------
props to my friend Brian for giving me a heads up about the editorial

Why do we often hate the people that we vote for? Why does a person who seems spineless end up in a position of authority? Why do our choices, come election night, often seem to be false ones? Why is election turnout often low in the United States? Why is primary turnout, where often the real choices are made, even lower?


I'm often annoyed when people cite Wikipedia--hard to explain why, it's just that I often like to go to the original sources coupled with some kind of mental hangup--but I really enjoyed reading this entry entitled Voter Turnout.

The one part of the article breaks it down this way:

The basic formula for determining whether someone will vote is

PB + D > C

Here, P is the probability that an individual's vote will affect the outcome of an election, and B is the perceived benefit of that person's favored political party or candidate being elected. D originally stood for democracy or civic duty, but today represents any social or personal gratification an individual gets from voting. C is the time, effort, and financial cost involved in voting. Since P is virtually zero in most elections, PB is also near zero, and D is thus the most important element in motivating people to vote. For a person to vote, these factors must outweigh C.

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Recently a prominent, prolific contributor left and took his blogs with him. Meaning they are deleted. But that means that my comments and any other person who contributed to a blog also had their work deleted. And by "their work", I mean that normally if you think of something and write it in your own words, then that is your work.

Say I write "Graham's harsh questioning of Sotomayor and then purported support show posturing is a predominant part of his psyche" as a comment on a blog about Sotomayor. The poster decides to leave TPM and delete the original blog. I don't know this and at one point decide that I'd like to use that comment and run with it but doesn't remember exactly what I wrote. But, crap, it's gone.

A lot of blogs have more value in the subsequent conversation after the blog than in the blog itself. Which begs the question: Who ownes blog comments? Type in "who owns blog comments" in Google and you get a few answers, often depending upon the user agreement of the site that one's on. The main three responses that I've found are:

1. If you comment you are automatically relenquishing your content to the original blogger. Which means that whatever you write belongs to the original poster, so if it's deleted in a huff, so be it.

2. Doesn't matter, anything written on a site belongs to the host site. Meaning that TPM owns everything on here.

3. What you write belongs to you. Meaning if I comment, then that's MY comment, dammit. You can't touch it.

Some of how we deal with the issue comes down to how we feel about content and the culture at our site. There is a bit of outrage about this poster leaving and deleting here. And I kind of agree with it. Looking at TPM's comment guidelines , there's no mention of who owns what. The TPM terms of use adds information that pertains to posters, the crux being:

TPM does not claim ownership of the Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the TPM websites. The Content is the property of the author of such Content. You agree to grant TPM a perpetual, royalty-free and irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, create derivative works from, transfer, and sell such Content in any format now know or hereafter created, and to use your name and other identifying information you provide in connection with that Content. You also permit any visitor or member of the TPM websites to use such Content for personal use as described above.

But isn't my comment my comment? Isn't my comment my content? The terms of use basically eliminate my #2. Besides, just the fact that I can delete my own blogs also means that I control my added content. So #1 or #3 are left: Either the commenter owns the comments or the original blogger owns it. But again, since the original poster has the power to delete everything including other's comments, implicitly that means that the answer is the answer is #1: On TPM, the poster owns the comments.

So if you comment on this blog, are your thoughts now my thoughts ?

There's an poem on a lot a walls in the US called "footprints in the sand" about looking back on your life and the help that you've had getting through it.  I can recite that poem--I've seen it so many times.

Well, now that we have an orbiter around the moon with eagle eyes, someone ought to write a poem called "Footprints on the moon". You can look at the pictures  here.

There's the lunar landers from 1969 and later, still there. You can see some scientific equipment, still up there. And you can see the footprints from the astronauts, going back and forth between them.

This is the only other place (we could probably call it a planet if it had been by itself and not circling Earth) where we've walked besides good ol' terra firma. I bet it's quiet up there now. So quiet that some say that the footprints could last millions of years before they are eroded away.

So what's the point of this blog? Just to think back a bit. We just had a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing. Forty years ago. Wow. I also wanted to think forward a bit too.

But what about now? Well, we have 2 probes there.. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and another probe that is going to slam into a crater at one of the poles? Why? Because there's a lot of reason to believe that there's water up there.

"Where there's water, there's life." Probably not right now. But if the moon has water, then it's a lot easier for us to go too. Water breaks down into hydrogen and oxygen. Fuel and breathing. Plus it's nice to be able to drink something too. People on the moon, though, would have to bring their own bourbon, but that's a different story.

I guess I just wanted to put the big picture out there. We're arguing about health care and a slew of other things. In the big picture, humans can grow and evolve. We can become more just and empathetic. We can learn about the world that we live and other worlds. And I also just wanted to say that it's nice having a government that is again realizing that science education, implementation, and that everyone knowing some basics is important.

Photos: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/photosgallery/gallery_20090720164441.htm

For over 200 years, the government has provided free health care to Native American reservations. Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services Secretary, has received a 13% increase in funding  to provide this service as well as stimulus money to improve clinics.

The U.S. has an obligation, based on a 1787 agreement between tribes and the government, to provide American Indians with free health care on reservations. But the troubled Indian Health Service only has about half of the money it needs, leaving poor tribes in remote areas with severely underfunded facilities and substandard care. Wealthier tribes are often able to supplement the federal budget with their own dollars.

However, just because the government has been obligated to provide Native Americans free health care doesn't mean that it's actually done well.  HHS's Office of Minority Health lists grim statistics showing that Native American health fares poorer than the average American in cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, HIV, and infant mortality.  The only bright spot that I see in the list is that they fare slightly better in immunization rate.  Sebelius is trying to address the issue and states:

"One of my challenges to the new head of the Indian Health Service is that we need a multiyear strategy, we need an end goal," she said.

She said health disparities between minority groups and whites are "unconscionable."

"The most severe disparity between quality care and what goes on with health outcomes is in the Native American population," she added.

One reason of many, which include cultural misunderstanding and poverty, for the state of Native American Health include that the health service provider for reservations, the Indian Health Service has "only half the money it needs."  A 13% increase isn't enough to erase years of neglect in their government provided health care system.

Furthermore, doctors and clinic workers often do not understand how most tribes see health care in general. Traditionally, health issues are dealt with by treating the whole body instead of just the problem at hand. Also, because they often are so steeped in tradition, individuals often are averse to change. This ranges from trying new treatments to receiving advice from doctors.

My wife works at an organization that helps sick people get treatment and funds research to cure disease. One problem that always crops up here out West is how hard it is to get Native Americans to get treatment or see a doctor or talk openly about a disease. This problem cuts both ways as doctors often underdiagnose problems with minorities. A really detailed account of the history of government provided health care is here.

Obviously, the problems that plague government-provided Native American health care are different than those we will face in the fight for health care for all Americans. The plight of Native Americans is often ignored by most Americans and our government. President Obama campaigned at reservations and said that he would address these issues. I think a 13% is a start, but a much more comprehensive plan is needed. Of course a nationwide, universal coverage, if extended to reservations, would probably render these problems moot.

Some on the Right are no longer just wanting for Obama to fail.  They are praying for it.  And not only that, but some are praying for him to die.  Wiley Drake, a prominent Southern Baptist, was on Fox radio giving his views:

Later in the interview, Colmes returned to Drake's answer to make sure he heard him right.

"Are you praying for his death?" Colmes asked.

"Yes," Drake replied.

"So you're praying for the death of the president of the United States?"

"Yes."

This isn't the first time that Drake has prayed for someone to die.  He claims to have been asking God to kill the recently slain women's health doctor, George Tiller.  Imprecatory prayer is a rarely performed type of prayer, cited in the Bible's Psalms, which is a curse to bring "death and misfortune" to your enemies.  Drake is proud to use God for his message of hate, and backs it up:

"It is in the Bible, and we are proud to say as Southern Baptists that we believe the Book," he said. "You've got to believe the whole Book, brother, or you don't believe any of it."

Regardless of Drake's words, some Southern Baptists have spoken out against this rhetoric, including pastor Dwight McKissic in Arlington, Texas.  McKissic is African American and has praised Obama in the past.

McKissic, who is asking the SBC this year to adopt a resolution celebrating the election of the nation's first African-American president, said if Drake was identified in the interview as a Southern Baptist, then his remarks should not go unchallenged.

Personally, I think that Drake's prayers are worthless.  But some people do listen to his words--those on the lunatic fringe.  One has already killed a doctor and now Drake is on the radio saying that he is asking God to kill Obama. 

What he really is asking is for one of his listeners to do it.

A report for the Director of National Intelligence's office released just a little while ago names Nancy Pelosi as one of the members of Congress briefed on enhanced interrogation techniques (http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/05/intelligence-re.html).

It also names other names.

The Senate intelligence committee's chairman and ranking member, Bob Graham and Richard Shelby, were given a briefing similar to the one with Pelosi and Goss on Sept. 27, 2002, according to the report.

On Feb. 4, 2003, a briefing on "enhanced interrogation techniques" for Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., revealed that interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri were taped.

In addition, that briefing "described in considerable details" the techniques used, including "how the water board was used."

A similar briefing the following day included Goss and Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., who by that time had become the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, when Pelosi moved on to become minority leader.

I did a quick search for the actual report and haven't found it. 

We've talked about how Democrats had to have also been involved in the torture fiasco.  Well, we have some names in Congress to go with the surmises.  And yes, it has been suggested before here that Pelosi had to have known and had been briefed.

I've had a crazy week that's left me a bit shell-shocked that ended with me giving an extremely mediocre hour-long talk this morning, so aren't really sure what to make of this.  I'm even having trouble dragging out of my brain how much about this list of names we already know.  But to me, this is another chip needed to piece this back together.  How did America come to torture?  Who in Congress let the Bush White House steamroll our Constitution?  Why in the hell were Democrats so happy to be a part of this "rubber stamp Congress"? 

Congress are our elected leaders.  Where was the leading?  Why were they just following orders? It's enough to make one sick, literally. 

Tuesday was a good day. Specter defects to the Democratic Party.  On the same day Senator Coryn (R, TX) proclaims that in Nov. 2010 the "Republicans will regain their status as a national party," which means even they know now that they really aren't all hands on deck. But even though it was a good day for Democrats, something gives me pause.

Last month, Senator Bayh formed the Moderate Dems Working Group, a coalition linked through the Third Way to the House's Blue Dogs. He posited the formation of this group in December after the Democrats had taken everything in November. Members of both coalitions are "Honorary Chairs" in the Third Way, a group that "is the leading think tank of the moderate wing of the progressive movement."   When commenting on posts, such as Tuesday's Specter defection (or "addition", depending upon your taste), I called Specter an instant "Blue Dog"--which I am assuming that he will be.  And though the reasons of his defection are many, including the fact that he has little chance of being re-elected next year as a Republican, one big one is the security that the Moderate Dem Working Group (from now on, I'm just going to call a spade a spade: Blue Dogs) will offer him.

 

The Blue Dogs, now that they are essentially active in the House and Senate, are now often the group that "mainstream" Democrats are having to negotiate with (especially since the Republicans keep voting "no" and refusing to play ball with anyone).  They are a boon to the Democrats, as they caucus and vote with them, mostly.  But it's obvious to me that they now are growing in power--especially with the self destruction of the Republicans.  The House's Blue Dogs boycotted dues to the DCCC in 2007, now negotiate with the Democrats as a semi-independent body, and frankly have more influence over policy than the Republicans. With their official formation in the Senate as well, I'm starting to see them as a de-facto party of their own.

I guess my point is that we should acknowledge that the Democrats are a coalition, one party of many.  But within this coalition is an ever growing, ever independent group. While the Republicans are pounding sand with an ever dwindling moderate/economic/business wing and a steady staunch Christian wing, the Blue Dogs are stealing their thunder.

I finally figured out how to link with Coryn above, but had already done this, so here's some reference links:

Brian Beutler's take on the formation of the Moderate Dem Working Group: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/03/disunity-09.php

 

The Third Way's take on the formation of the Moderate Dem Working Group: <http://www.thirdway.org/press/release/71>

 

Bayh's announcement in March: http://bayh.senate.gov/news/press/release/?id=b30d7f79-9eb1-4819-980f-9489825825ba

Bayh's announcement in December that he wanted to form a new coalition: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/14/evan-bayh-forming-conserv_n_150874.html

 

The Blue Dogs: http://www.house.gov/melancon/BlueDogs/Member%20Page.html

Well, yes, he's not going to be Secretary of Commerce. He's back to the ordinary duties of running a state and defending his people against a "Pay for Play" allegations.  But, all that aside, apparently he's now re-growing his famed beard:

http://abqjournal.magnify.net/video/The-Beard-is-Back

Judas jokes aside, and, yes, the reporter makes one, it still looks pretty thin.

Here's a q and a that was on Election Central awhile ago.  I tried to answer it, but maybe I missed something.