deadissue.com

(Glenn Greenwald) The FBI’s lead suspect in the September, 2001 anthrax attacks — Bruce E. Ivins — died Tuesday night, apparently by suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to charge him with responsibility for the attacks. For the last 18 years, Ivins was a top anthrax researcher at the U.S. Government’s biological weapons research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, where he was one of the most elite government anthrax scientists on the research team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID).

Kevin Drum talks about the conservative war on birth control, at this point it does seem pretty obvious that certain factions in the US do not want people to have access to birth control and they would like to stigmatize birth control by defining birth control pills as abortion.  This is one that I don’t understand what can be gained from having a population that is either abstinenent or pregnant most of the time.  Pregnant women are not as productive and kids are a huge drain on the medical and education systems in this country already.

This seems like a formula for a permanant underclass of large families that will need government subsidies to feed all of their children and will have almost no hope of educating them.  I wonder if the conservative obsession with large families is not a way to insure that most people are dependant on the government for many generations.

I just finished reading “overtreated” a book by Shannon Brownlee.  One point that she drives home very well is that even if we get universal coverage we may not get better health outcomes as more people with insurance will probably lead to more people being overtreated, and some of the overtreatments are not benign.  For example spinal fusion surgery for lower back pain, even though their is no proof that surgery helps aleviate the pain.

Our health care system is sick and in need of a holistic approach not just a financial fix that enables everyone to receive unneeded surgery.

John McCain is set to pick his running mate and I think like most liberals I fear he will pick Mitt Romney and make himself unbeatable in November.  Mitt being devoutly religous would instantly lock up the evangelical block of the republican party.  Mitt care has been an unqualified success not too mention his desire to double the size of gitmo, he is the one man who can save the McCain campaign, lets hope McCain doesn’t figure it out. 

The dollar has been battered consistently for a while now already, but it’s only the beginning.  Keep in mind that more often than not, an unemployed American worker is someone who has to make interest payments or else face bankruptcy.  Defaults aren’t going to spike lower under these conditions.  There’s nothing magical about this.  Human beings created it and human beings are in charge now, so naturally there is nobody willing to take the blame for anything…short sellers and speculators are blamed for the outcome of other peoples’ mistakes, and like the band on the Titanic, our sacred market fundamentalism hymns will be heard right up to the end.

Kevin Drum explains why the FISA debacle is so bad

From Ezra Klein

There are criticisms that people make of Social Security, most of them relating to a mismatch between the program’s revenue and its future obligations. But McCain’s comment is very different. It’s like if lots of people made fun of one guy’s car because it was broken down, ugly, and lacked headlights. Then one of the dimmer members of the group, sensing an opportunity to jump in, piped up with, “yeah, four wheels and an engine? What’s with that!? When you gonna do something about that!?” Everyone would sort of look at the guy for a moment while they registered that this person didn’t understand how a car worked. Now imagine that this person was applying to run an auto shop. And people were taking his application seriously. That’s sort of the situation we’re in.

I think this is how the whole prvatize social security crowd works, they hate the idea that their tax dollars might actually benefit anyone else, so the program becomes “disgusting”. Personally I like the idea that by paying a small percentage of my income in taxes I can help keep older people, and disabled people, and all the other people that benefit from social security from being homeless. Social security is about caring for your fellow human beings and people like John McCain don’t care about their fellow citizens so the program becomes disgusting. Maybe McCain is not so much dumb as amoral.

Via Andrew Sullivan some people are hoping for a truce in the divisive culture war

In the 35-year fight since Roe v. Wade, it seems there are few common values to be found between our opposing sides. But it turns out that nearly all of us agree on the common value that we should reduce the need for abortions in America.

Supporting that common value is the common ground of dramatically reducing the number of unintended pregnancies in this country that lead to abortions. It means together supporting sex education programs that include accurate information about contraception and the importance of abstinence so that fewer unintended pregnancies occur. It means together supporting programs that teach parents how to communicate better with their children about values and programs that give low-income women greater access to contraception. It means that together we can agree that abortion should never be the only option and that young and poor pregnant women should receive support when they feel they need it to carry their pregnancy to term. The truth is that the most effective way to reduce the prevalence of abortions in America is to actually work together rather than to fight.

Gay and lesbian issues, like abortion, have also been tearing the nation apart. Here again, the differences are real and rooted in theological and philosophical differences. But on these issues too we can find a shared common value and shared path forward. That shared value is human dignity. We can all agree that all human beings are created in God’s image and have and deserve an innate human dignity – even those with whom one differs or disagrees. We can all agree that honoring this human dignity is a high moral and religious calling. And we can agree that any laws we create to expand rights must not abridge the religious liberty of religious communities. Common ground means, for example, that, apart from religious institutions, the workplace should judge you at work for the job you do and nothing more. That would be a careful step along America’s journey to fulfill its national ideals, and also to honor our highest moral and religious beliefs.

The purveyors of abstinence education don’t care about reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, they want to reduce the number of people having sex. The main reason that people are against gay marriage is that by allowing gays to participate in mainstream activities it makes them part of the mainstream. The same can be said of milatary service, if gays openly serve, suddenly openly gay people are doing something that is seen as heroic, it helps make other people accept them and we cannot have that; at least the homobigots cannot have that.
Unwanted pregnancies help to show the rest of the world what happens to people who have sex. If unwanted pregnancies can be avoided, suddenly sex doesn’t have a negative consequence, if condoms are involved you cannot even scare people about STD’s, what then, how do you stop people from having sex?
To me the culture war is about parents trying to control children, I have seen some feminist web sites argue it is about men controlling women but it seems to me that it is about keeping everyone from having sex, especially young people. It is hard to negotiate  a truce in the culture war when many “experts” don’t seem to understand why it is being fought.

I am not being totally sarcastic here.  I don’t know if high fuel prices were the intended consequences of George Bushs’ policies but completely destabilizing the middle east has certainly led to higher prices, and these higher prices may be leading to some things that are in fact good.  At the New york Times reports today

In March, Americans drove 11 billion fewer miles on public roads than in the same month the previous year, a 4.3 percent decrease — the sharpest one-month drop since the Federal Highway Administration began keeping records in 1942.

Less driving is a good thing in that cars are a major source of pollution, high gas prices may also lead to less sprawal.

To Denver’s mayor, John W. Hickenlooper, $4 gasoline offers a useful incentive for such plans.

“It can be an accelerator,” he said during an interview inside the imposing column-fronted City Hall. “It’s not going to be the dagger in the heart of suburban sprawl, but there’s a certain inclination, a certain momentum back toward downtown.”

The article also talks to a few people who live in the exurbs:

Juanita Johnson and her husband, both retired Denver schoolteachers, moved here last August, after three decades in the city and a few years in the mountains. They bought a four-bedroom house for $415,000.

Last winter, they spent $3,000 on propane for heat, she said. Suddenly, this seemed like a place to flee. “We’d sell if we could, but we’d lose our shirt,” Ms. Johnson said. Recently she counted 15 sale signs. One home nearby is listed below $400,000.

“I was so glad to get out of the city, the pollution the traffic, the crime,” she said. Now, the suburbs seem mean. “I wouldn’t do this again.”

My first house was in an a suburban area and the meanness factor as well as the lonliness factor are hard to explain until you have lived in a outlying suburb. I used to take my dog for walks in some of the nearby parks and outside of a few teeneagers drinking beer and smoking, I never saw people in these parks. I live in an urban area now and whenever I take my dog for a walk I run into other dog owners, see people playing frisbee in the park, kids playing soccer, tennis and basketball. For whatever reason people don’t leave their house in the suburbs, like this person:

Megan Werner, 39, a mother of three, moved here five years ago from a dense suburb closer to Denver. She and her husband bought a home set on a 1.5-acre lot in the Deer Creek Farm subdivision. The space justified her husband’s 40-minute commute.

“We wanted more than a postage stamp,” she said, as her 5-year-old daughter walked barefoot across the driveway.

It used to cost her about $30 to fill her Honda minivan with gas. Now, it is more like $50, and she coordinates her trips — shopping in town, combined with dance lessons for her children. But she has no thoughts of leaving.

“I can open up my door and my kids can play,” Ms. Werner said.

Ms Werners children while they have their own space to play, are missing out on a father as I doubt after a full day of work an 40 minute commute each way dad is real interested in the kids, and missing out on most other social interactions as they go through life in the self contained world of Ms Werner. In a few years maybe her 5 year-old will start going to the otherwise unused public spaces where she can drink beer and smoke cigarettes with her friends.   The dance lessons may pay-off for the daughter as later maybe she can get a job as a stripper. 

Maybe High fuel prices will keep other parents from making the mistakes of some misguided exurban parents and their kids will be better off for it.

Paul Krugman points out that home ownership may not be for everyone and that maybe the government should not spend so much time trying to encourage people to buy homes. He goes on to say some people may be better off if they rent.  Mr Krugman seems pretty much right on this one.

The real estate bubble has at least in part, been caused by encourageing people to buy homes that they may not even like that well, because “everyone should own a home”.  I think the same can be said for the conservative obsession with encouraging people to get married, marriage may not be for everyone.  Certainly people should try to find a suitable partner and not get married because “everyone should be married”. It seems like every right wing talking head asserts that marriage will magicaly lift people out of poverty; guess what, if you marry someone who is poor or has financial problems they will probably drag you into a lower income bracket. Not to mention the fact that if you marry someone in hopes of financial gain chances are you are not going to be real happy, even if the gains magicaly appear you are still stuck with someone you may not even like. Of course if you don’t have anything in common or newness has worn off of the relationship you can always have children to increase your happiness. I am not sure how sleep deprivation is going to make you like your spouse any better or how it will increase your life satisfaction but the pro-marriage and family faction seems to think that is how it works.
Home ownership and marriage while they may be symptoms of a life well lived they are probably not the cause of it. In a few years when we are looking at record high divorce rates, wait we already have record high divorce rates, maybe someone will point out that all the things we do to encourage marriage may lead to a lot divorces without producing the magical “marriage prosperity” that certain people promise.

This post is almost a complete rip-off from Matthew Yglasias

Barack Obama, in a private 20-minute meeting with members of the Bikes Belong board of directors, told them if he were elected president he would increase funding for cycling and pedestrian projects. And the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee also said he would support Safe Routes to Schools programs.

If people would bike commute not only would it help conserve anergy, cut down on obesity and it might also put people in a better mood. I know whenever I ride my bike to work I am much happier there. Plus, many brands of bicycle are built in the US so encouraging people to bike might actually help a US industry.

Another reason to support Obama.

If the Patriots had won the superbowl New England would have won every major sports championship in the last year.  Bostonians would have been completely unbearable.   BTW I don’t count hockey as a major sport.

In Florida prescription drugs are far deadlier than most illegal drugs combined.

The Florida report analyzed 168,900 deaths statewide. Cocaine, heroin and all methamphetamines caused 989 deaths, it found, while legal opioids — strong painkillers in brand-name drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin — caused 2,328.

Drugs with benzodiazepine, mainly depressants like Valium and Xanax, led to 743 deaths. Alcohol was the most commonly occurring drug, appearing in the bodies of 4,179 of the dead and judged the cause of death of 466 — fewer than cocaine (843) but more than methamphetamine (25) and marijuana (0).

Zero deaths from marijuana, maybe it is time to legalize the killer weed. Also, maybe it is time to look at how we “manage” pain after my vasectomy I was given a prescription for Oxcotin, which is highly addictive, just ask Rush Limbaugh, even though a bag of frozen peas was more than adequate to deal with the pain. A while back I had knee surgery and I was given Vicodin when again a bag of ice seemed to work fine.
Pain killers seem to have become the new anti-biotic where the doctor prescribes them for the patient just to shut them up. Maybe it is time to make it a little harder to get prescription pain-killers.

People in South Korea are protesting US beef imports:  :

South Korea’s president said Wednesday that his government will make a fresh start, hours after an estimated 80,000 people gathered in the South Korean capital in the largest demonstration yet against the planned resumption of U.S. beef imports.

In the US we are stuck with unsafe food because our government coddles the beef industry. If the market was working people would stop consuming beef in the US, however, beef producers seem to be acting like cigarette companies of a few yeasr ago, denying that their is any problem, maybe it is time to sue the beef industry.

Looks like McCain has a problem with the religious right I thoought this part was especially relevant:

The record is getting pretty long. McCain denounced the religious right (”agents of intolerance”) eight years ago, and bungled the Hagee and Rod Parsley fiascos. McCain can’t even talk about how, when, and whether he switched from being an Episcopalian to a Baptist without sounding completely incoherent.

In some ways I admire this  about John McCain, he is one of the few people who has had the courage to stand-up to the Falwells of this world, and the rest the time he seems to recognize the unimportance of religion.
Obama on the other hand has spent a good deal of time talking about his faith, mostly while trying to explain his relationship with reverend Wright. My guess is that most church goers have ministers who have said offensive things and they understand what Obama is going through. What Catholic has not had to listen to priests make newlyweds promise to “accept all gods children”, knowing full well the bride and groom are going to use birth control. Or the way that catholics treat nuns, the nuns do all the work while the priests drive Caddilacs. A friend of mine was getting married a while back, he was marrying someone of a different race, they had to go to three different ministers before they found someone who would perform the ceromony.
Obamas’ Wright problem is something that most people who go to church can probably identify with, as to one degree or another their spiritual advisors are probably the same way. In the end the right wing, and Hillary Clintons, obsession with reverend Wright may actually be a boost to Obama with evangelicals and people who call themselves Christians, as they have been throught the same thing. My guess is it will probably not hurt him much with Atheists such as myself as we are kind of used to peoples faith causing them problems, and the chance of an admitted atheist getting elected for almost any office is about zero. It is too bad that McCain is such a bad candidate in so many ways, or I might be tempted to support him just because of what he said about Falwell, of course I think he(McCain) went to Liberty university and fellated Falwell or some other religous nut to make up for it anyway.

At the end of the day no one can doubt Obama is a churchgoing man, while McCain seems to go when it is convenient.

I thought this was old news but maybe not for everyone.

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have “been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service … to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government,” a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials’ activities after only a month, and the Defense Department’s top brass never followed up on the investigators’ recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

Given Iran was the only country that benefited from the invasion of Iraq it seems pretty likely they helped get the ball rolling. Hopefully, the November election will be the end of the neo-cons.

Ezra Klein examines the political realities of the farm bill.

Yahoo has an article about Clinton and what led to one of the biggest political upsets in history.

In the end, none of the mistakes by Clinton and her campaign team was fatal in and of itself. She and her husband were experts in extricating themselves from death-defying jams.

But Obama proved to be more than just a traditional opponent. In the end, the Clintons’ usual tactics — big-scale fundraising, high-powered political connections, old-fashioned grit and determination — were no match for Obama and a candidacy uniquely suited to the moment.

Campaigning in the final primaries, Clinton said, “I’ve really enjoyed the process of being able to go out and see this country anew.”

But what she saw was a country that wanted someone new.

I would add that she never seemed to have a message she believed in. Even in her speech last night the only thing Hillary can talk about with any passion is that she should be president, and that she wants her followers to be “respected”(whatever that means). If she had any real urge to end the Iraq war, take care of returning veterans, or fix health care, it got lost in her ambition to be president. At one point she sort of mustered some passion for a “gas tax holiday” which would have been more appropriately titled either national waste gas month, or give oil companies a present day.
Hillary was a bad candidate, without a message, that was kept in the race because of name recognition and a few big money donors, who funnelled the money to Hillary through Bill’s speaking fees.