More docs for healthcare change than against it

Don't know where all the heat is coming from when most in healthcare want meaningful reform. Is it just that those who oppose the President want to win by trying to make him lose? Weird country this - at times like these.

I know tons of folks who don't get the preventive and corrective care they need because they can't afford it.

and then theres' my 70 year-old buddy who is doing great because he is fully covered because of his coverage from the VA and Medicare - two government run healthcare programs that some say we should be afraid of - go figure.

clipped from undertheinfluence.nationaljournal.com Physicians Chant For Health Care Reform Everyone else is weighing in (or screaming), so it's no great surprise that a coalition of 14 groups representing half a million doctors announced a new ad campaign Monday calling on Congress to get cracking on health care reform. The organizations sponsoring the ad include the AMA, The American Academy of Pediatrics, The American College of Physicians, The American Osteopathic Association, Doctors for America, the National Medical Association and the National Physicians Alliance.

ICE: Wait, wait! Let me shot myself in the other foot too!

Sigh... We had a process that enabled children and parents to be reunited fairly quckly. Now to "protect" kids, we are going to lock them up for months before they can be returned to their parents. I guess Homeland Security cloned Dumb and Dumber many more times than we thought they did.

clipped from news.newamericamedia.org More Children Held in Detention Centers A new law designed to combat labor and sex trafficking, the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, H.R. 7311, requires that the case of every unaccompanied minor detained along the border be investigated before the child is repatriated. The law calls on investigators to research the reason for their entry into the country and the immigrant status of their parents. A process that used to take hours, he said, could now take months. According to the Department of Homeland Security, about 10 percent of the immigrants arrested crossing the border are minors.

Interactive Map: Faith Groups Rally Around Immigration Reform

Interactive Map: Faith Groups Rally Around Immigration Reform

The Other Ongoing World Shame: Darfur

As the author indicates, when you have lots of "show," there is often very little "go." Take away all the glitter and false starts and Darfur is still one of the leading killing grounds in the world. Is Sudan's oil worth that much?

clipped from www.sudantribune.com Diversionary tactics on Darfur By Anne Bartlett September 20, 2009 — Diversionary tactics seem to be the order of the day where Darfur is concerned. The real tragedy of Darfur – the suffering of its people – has been forgotten under a sea of pointless initiatives, all of which seem to have only one goal in mind: to create enough confusion and chaos that the status quo will prevail. On the ground - and contrary to prevailing diplomatic speak - people continue to be killed and targeted in the Jebel Marra area by government forces that now have carte blanche to do what they like. Meanwhile, day after day we are treated to a circus-like environment in which more and more competing initiatives are announced. Of course none of them have a hope of working, but that isn’t the point. For most of those involved, self-interest and geo-political gamesmanship have been put before human suffering – a point that is not lost on those living through this nightmare every day on the ground.

The Ghosts of Afghan Past Scream: Get Out Now - There Is No Winning Here!

Robinson hits it right on - it does seem live a horror story or a Greek tragedy and the chorus of ghosts and dead from past failed empires broken on the stony fields and hills of Afghanistan scream: "Get out while you can!"

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com More Than a Numbers Game in Afghanistan It's hard to read Gen. Stanley McChrystal's assessment of the Afghanistan war without hearing one of those horror-movie voices that seem to come from everywhere and nowhere, a voice that grows louder and more insistent with every page: "Get out. Get out. Get out."

Right-Wing #1 Scapegoat - ACORN

No hypocrites here - ha, ha. How many would support a bar on funding:
1. Pfizer Slapped With $2.3 Billion Fine For Illegally Promoting Drugs & Defrauding Gov't?
2. On July 23, 1992, GE pled guilty in federal court to civil and criminal charges of defrauding the Pentagon and agreed to pay $69 million to the U.S. government in fines " one of the largest defense contracting fines ever.

3. US: DynCorp Billed U.S. $50 Million Beyond Costs in Defense Contract
by V. Dion Haynes, Washington Post
August 12th, 2009

4. Halliburton didn't hesitate to pay $382 million in fines to the U.S. Department of Justice as part of the settlement of a controversial KBR gas project in Nigeria in which the company admitted to paying a $180 million bribe to government officials.

5. Wackenhut is currently involved with scandal over their guarding the US Embassy in Kabul, and in April of this year - the appellate court's ruling late last week, it upheld all but $5 million of the original $47.5 mi

clipped from blogs.findlaw.com Congress Votes to Cut ACORN Funding The amendment to defund ACORN was recently written into the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009, which is making its way through Congress.  Though ACORN has been on the community organizing scene since its founding in 1970 and has been as the largest organization to champion the rights and needs of the low-income sector, in recent weeks it has been doing damage control for incriminating videos of its staff members giving illegal advice to citizens. Non-profit or not, it's not easy being ACORN these days.  And the House of Representatives' resounding vote to deny federal funding to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) this week is case in point.  And, with votes totaling 345 to 75 in favor of the funding cut, the numbers also signal a deliberate effort by the government to distance itself from the longtime community organizing institution.

Afghanistan is not Iraq, Viet Nam, or Cleveland

Seems as though we have to learn and relearn the most common of military lessons. Seems someone has not even watch the iconic Eastwood flick "Heartbreak Ridge" on how to survive and win "You're Marines now. You adapt. You overcome. You improvise," says Eastwood's character.

As several marines, one US and one Aussie, advised about the same topic: Trust the terrain, not the map. The plan calls for training Afghans to fight the fight we want them to fight and the way we would fight it.

People who care about each other, innovate, adapt, and overcome win - or at least don't lose because they took the advise of someone 10,000 miles away with no eyes on the ground and butt on the line.

clipped from www.registan.net The Importance of Local Relevance Their American trainers spoke of “upper body strength deficiency” and prescribed pushups because their trainees buckle under the backpacks filled with 50 pounds of equipment and ammo they are expected to carry. All this material must seem absurd to men whose fathers and brothers, wearing only the old cotton shirts and baggy pants of everyday life and carrying battered Russian Kalashnikov rifles, defeated the Red Army two decades ago. American trainers marvel that, freed from heavy equipment and uniforms, Afghan soldiers can run through the mountains all day — as the Taliban guerrillas in fact do with great effect — but the U.S. military is determined to train them for another style of war.

Lucy Liu - Trafficking is real and has to end!

What can chasing money lead to - buying and selling your fellow beings. Some days, even God must wonder whether humans have run out their string of depravity and separation from what could be theirs if they chose love and not money and, fear, hate...

clipped from www.youtube.com Trailer for Traffic - Hosted by Lucy Liu

What did slave labor make for you?

Human trafficking is as much about child labor slavery, as it is about sex.

Something that you already own was probably made by a child slave. Find out what is is so you don't support slavery any more!

clipped from www.givmusic.com Made By Slaves: Do you know who makes the goods you buy? Want to learn more about Human Trafficking? Not For Sale Campaign is hosting a global forum on Human Trafficking in Carlsbad, California October 8-9. They are giving a way a free audio book copy of Not For Sale, the book that began the movement if you register TODAY! Register at www.globalforumonhumantrafficking.org

Buried at Wounded Knee - Fasting for Leonard

Leonard who? Leonard Peltier was a mover and shaker in the American Indian Movement. He was THE SCAPEGOAT for a government operation designed to discredit AIM as a quasi-terrorist, criminal group, in the same way they suppressed black consciousness by criminalizing the Black Panthers and killing Huey Newton. Leltier was not killed but has been in prison for years for supposedly shooting and killing an FBI agent with a broken rifle and the lies (now admitted) of someone who was there.

What would it feel like to be invisible? Read this and find out.

clipped from narcosphere.narconews.com News blackout: Fasting for Peltier at the White House Ben Carnes, Choctaw, and Rob Fife completed a weeklong fast at the White House, to bring attention to President Obama of the longstanding injustice of the imprisonment of Leonard Peltier. But if you check Google News this morning, you will see that there's only one news article, the one posted by Narco News. News reporters weren't the only ones ignoring this fast. So far, there's been no word from President Obama, who could see the men fasting from his window. Today, Wanbli, at the Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee, released a statement, "Ignoring us out of existence." It is appropriate for these times, when censorship has increased to such an extent that the US media is a mockery of the ethics of journalism.

It is Friday - Spend it in a Salt Marsh

It has not been an easy week. Some good things, lots bad, some disappointments, a few victories... we've earned some nature time to recreate, relax, dream and maybe learn but that's not the intention it's just to say - whew!

clipped from www.boston.com The wonders of the salt marsh By Renee Loth September 18, 2009 E-mail this article To: Invalid E-mail address Add a personal message: Your E-mail: Invalid E-mail address Sending your article Your article has been sent. E-mail| Print| Reprints| Yahoo! Buzz| ShareThis Text size – + “In harsher environments you tend to see more cooperation, as opposed to competition, among the species,’’ says Farnsworth. “All of the organisms are at the extreme, and they seem to have evolved so that they interact in more positive ways.’’ Wow. It’s risky to anthropomorphize nature, ascribing human attributes to plants or animals. But can’t we wish that our own harsh conditions - of economic instability, declining resources, and environmental threats - could actually make us more cooperative?

Ohio's Execution Round One

Ever wonder what it would be like to be executed and have it botched?

Ohio has 88 counties, 88 elected District Attorneys, several hundred elected common pleas judges who can preside over death penalty cases, 88 elected coroners, hundreds of police departments. None of the elected criminal justice officials in Ohio's 88 counties have to have any specific training to run or be elected to office.

Do you think there could possibly be equal justice for either the accused, the victims, or friend and relatives of either party?

clipped from www.deathpenaltyinfo.org Chronology of A Failed Execution Tuesday 5:08 a.m.: Broom awakens for the day. 2:01 p.m.: Medical team enters holding cell and begins trying to insert IVs. 2:30 p.m.: Unable to find a usable vein, team leaves the cell to take a break. 3:11 p.m.: Execution team members say they are having problems keeping a vein open because of Broom's past drug use. 4:07 p.m.: Collins consults with Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland and the Ohio attorney general's office. 4:24 p.m.: Strickland issues one-week reprieve.

Up is Down, Peace is War, Love is Hate - Huh?

When you look at how we have made being at war seem nothing more than a video game, is it any wonder that people think the war in Iraq is over, that we are not really at war in Somalia, that Afghanistan is a "good war" like WWII was?

I am not sure anymore what it will take for people to wake up to the facts that our economy depends on war, climate suicide and agriculture-based cancers (our steady diet of pesticides and fertilizers in food and water - what do you think is driving pancreatic cancer epidemic?).

I do hope that sharing via Amplify helps to dirve real change in not just hand wringing.

clipped from www.tomdispatch.com Tomgram: War Is Peace Is America Hooked on War? "War is peace" was one of the memorable slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth, Minitrue in "Newspeak," the language invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984. Some 60 years later, a quarter-century after Orwell's imagined future bit the dust, the phrase is, in a number of ways, eerily applicable to the United States. What does it mean when American pilots can be at war "in" Afghanistan, 9 to 5, by remote control, while their bodies remain at a base outside Las Vegas and then can head home past a sign that warns them to drive carefully because this is "the most dangerous part of your day"? What kind of a world do we inhabit when, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7% and an underemployment rate of 16.8%, the American taxpayer is financing the building of a three-story, exceedingly permanent-looking $17 million troop barracks at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan?

Julias Ceasar to Algonquins: "divide and rule!"

The Algonquins in Quebec want their rights respected; the company and government want the trees and try to "create" pliable minority with the tribe to "deal" with. Divide and rule has been the way to power and profit for several thousand years. Let's hope that the Algonquins can use Canadian law and savvy protest to keep and exercise their rights.

clipped from intercontinentalcry.org Algonquins set for peaceful, indefinite blockade The Algonquins of Barriere lake have announced plans to set up an indefinite roadblock on their land—beginning today, September 1, 2009. “Our plan is to peacefully put our bodies in front of their machines until we get some results. We expect they may use the police, because we are used to such tactics. This is our territory and they can’t push us off our lands,” says Matchewan. “Instead of acting honourably and cooperating with our Customary Council to implement these signed agreements, the federal and provincial governments have been working in unison to try and install a minority faction whom they can use to sign off on the cutting of our forest,” says Matchewan.

Turn, Turn, Turn: A time for Learn, Learn, Learn Afghan War

Vietghanistan could sink Obama and hurt US. Learn from the mistakes we made in past few years and in Viet Nam. Remember that peace is what Afghans and Americans will support.

clipped from www.cleveland.com Vietnam's lessons for our commanders in Afghanistan Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. (McClatchy-Tribune) In Vietnam and Afghanistan, the United States (along with NATO in the current war) spent vast sums of money to train an indigenous military that proved to be just as corrupt as its government and wholly ineffective. Enemy soldiers in both places were largely indistinguishable from the local population because they, too, were Vietnamese and now, in most cases, Afghans. And in both wars the United States was fighting highly skilled, ideological zealots for communism and now for Islamic extremism. I am not saying here that Afghanistan will become a 21st-century Vietnam. But I am saying we should hope that Obama will learn from President Lyndon Johnson's mistakes as he considers that troop-increase request soon to land on his desk.

Sweatshop Slavery in Jersey

Sex slavery usually gets the headlines and is serious - to be sure - but most modern slavery involves labor slaves to supply many of us with what we thought were legitimate low cost goods and services at places like Wal-Mart who spends way too much in trying to appear family friendly of late since we and they have practically underwritten much of the outsourcing of what used to be jobs in the US. Rant done, its - grin - safe again.

clipped from www.nj.com From hair salons to court, to face forced-labor charges The West African nation of Togo is a small and mountainous sliver of land where villagers scratch livings from cassava fields and phosphate mines. It was there, amid mud-thatched houses and dusty marketplaces, that a successful textile merchant named Akouavi Kpade Afolabi allegedly recruited about 20 girls between the ages of 10 and 19 and promised them better lives in New Jersey. Once the girls arrived, she forced them to work 14-hour days without pay in hair-braiding salons in Newark and East Orange, binding them into submission through beatings and threats of voodoo curses, authorities say.

Peaceful vs Militant Islamic Schools - Which is Winning?

For young Muslim boys, often, the only way they may get to learn how to read and write is to attend a local religious school - a madrassa - where they learn how to read and write using the Koran as their basic book.

Over the past 10-15 years many of these schools in Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt and other countries also became sources of militant fundametalist teachings that seemed to overpower the peaceful or submit to God messages of Islam.

If the militancy is now changing, some may be due to efforts such as those noted in the article and much may be due to pressure from those who pay for the schools and its teachers - Saudi Arabia. To make sure that their view of Islam was supported worldwide and to maintain their role as "protectors of the faith," they ramped up spending on these school some 10-15 years ago. The unintended consequences of terrorism that now threatens the Kingdom as well, has, I am sure led them to use their purses trings to reign in the militantcy te

clipped from changinguppakistan.wordpress.com Reforming Madrassas from the Inside Out September 9, 2009 by Kalsoom Nevertheless, efforts to curb militancy and extremism are gaining traction in Pakistan. Below is Amanpour’s interview with Azhar Hussain, who has been working tirelessly with Pakistani madrassa [religious school] leaders to reform the system from the inside out. Often in our effort to address education reform in Pakistan we ignore the thousands of madrassas, acknowledging them only as the problem. Azhar’s work is unique because he engages these schools as a potential part of the solution. The results are insightful, to say the least:

Polar Bear as Canary in Coal Mine

Birds in the coal mine gave miners a warning that air was running out or gas was building up for an explosion.

Polar Bears are one of the species that serves as a warning sign that our whole world may be in danger - not just the bears - because if they disappear, other impacts endanger us as well.

Too many of us try to pretend we have no responsibility or that the worst will not happen - wrong x 2. Take a stand today!

clipped from www.savebiogems.org As their habitat melts away, Alaska's polar bears could be extinct by 2050. Polar Bear SOS But instead, Interior Secretary Salazar has cut the polar bear's lifeline by adopting a Bush era policy that prevents the government from using vital Endangered Species Act protections to save the polar bear from the two deadliest threats it faces: global warming and Arctic oil development.

Meet a Former Taliban Commander

This is a must read, if you want to understand why what we are currently doing in Afghanistan makes little sense for the short or long run.

"The government has no roots in the community because 95% of the population has a jihadi background. They were fighting for 15-20 years, yet there is no share for the ex-jihadis in this government, even though most of the people in this society are ex-jihadis."

clipped from captaincat.typepad.com Interview with a former Taliban commander I thought you might be interested to read the notes from a meeting I had a couple of weeks ago when I was in Khost province (bordering Pakistan), with a reconciled former Taliban commander (and cousin of one of the most important Taliban commanders operating just across the border in Pakistan today, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, FATA). He is a Mullah (a religious leader) in Khost province, and belongs to one of the most fiesty tribes in Southeastern Afghanistan. In parts, his comments are deeply sad, and reveal how vulnerable he is, despite his connections; yet this is the story of so many Afghans.

Small Doses of "Reality" Really Are Helpful

Too much coffee or too much reality? The second is my guess:
“The thing with the army is, you have to keep up. It don’t matter if you’re not as fit as the rest, if you can take the pain or can outdo your peers, you’re ok. The army’s all about being there for each other, we push each other. I’d do anything for my buddies. Back before we deployed, we’d get up at 4.30 and run for 8 miles. I hate the cold, but they stationed me in Alaska. WTF?”

“I love jumping, but jumping out of a plane in Alaska in winter? WTF? I love to surf. I’m from California and me and my buddies surf all the time. You gotta get on the board right. I can’t snowboard though. I get back from surfing all day and I watch TV.”

“In Alaska when you go running when it’s negative 30, you can’t touch your eyelashes ‘else they’ll just fall off.”

clipped from captaincat.typepad.com Conversation with a young American soldier He furrowed his brow and spat, taking a swig of water then pulled out another cigarette. He told me his parents couldn't afford to send both of their kids to university, so he signed up. He hopes to go to school (university) in a few years' time. I believe the military help pay for their recruits' studies once they've served for a few years, but it’s so sad that he was in that situation in the first place, that he didn’t feel he had a choice. “The thing with training, when they train you to become a soldier, they f***k with your mind. That’s what it’s all about. It’s all brain games.” Mike pretty much talked at me for 45 minutes without stopping. He talked quickly and earnestly without ever making eye contact, as if he were on ecstasy. He hopped from one topic to the next, I couldn’t follow his train of thought, but I sat and listened.