http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/07-4

Could there be a more accurate description of the Obama-Brown message of congratulations to the fraudulently elected Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan? First the Palestinians held fair elections in 2006, voted for Hamas and were brutally punished for it - they still are - and then the Iranians held fraudulent elections in June which put back the weird Mahmoud Ahmadinejad whom everyone outside Iran (and a lot inside) regard as a dictator.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/07-3

Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read’st black where I read white.
—William Blake, The Everlasting Gospel

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/07-2

Ordinary, average, struggling Americans might be scratching their heads over the news today, as the Labor Department reports that unemployment is up by four-tenths of a percent for the month to a record 10.2%, fully three-tenths of a percent higher than economists had been forecasting, and stocks do what? Rise by a quarter of a percent!

What's going on here?

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/07-1

The hopes and prospects for peace aren't well aligned-not even close. The task is to bring them nearer. Presumably that was the intent of the Nobel Peace Prize committee in choosing President Barack Obama.

The prize "seemed a kind of prayer and encouragement by the Nobel committee for future endeavor and more consensual American leadership," Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in The New York Times.

The nature of the Bush-Obama transition bears directly on the likelihood that the prayers and encouragement might lead to progress.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/07-0

The Republican party's failure has me thinking of a Seinfeld episode, the one where Kramer is upset about a Kenny Rogers Roasters restaurant featuring a bright neon sign that lights up his apartment at night.  Jerry has an old college friend who winds up working as an assistant manager at the restaurant, and when Kramer hangs a banner from his restaurant protesting the chicken establishment, Jerry's friend remarks "that's not going to be good for business."  Jerry responds "that's n

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/07

Hey There, Congress and Mr. President. It's your citizens. Lots of us are losing jobs and benefits. We cannot keep the benefits we've got when we lose our jobs. In fact it's really hard to keep paying all the bills without a job and an income. The new jobless numbers are alarming in so many ways.

You keep lying and saying you want to make sure people can keep the health insurance benefits they have if they like them. You call it choice. I call it lying.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/07-3

For all the pain caused by the Great Recession, the job market still was not in as bad shape as it had been during the depths of the early 1980s recession - until now.

With the release of the jobs report on Friday, the broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment tracked by the Labor Department has reached its highest level in decades. If statistics went back so far, the measure would almost certainly be at its highest level since the Great Depression.

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http://ozarque.livejournal.com/622393.html

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/07-2

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/07-1

ARROYO BARRIL, Dominican Republic -- Maximiliano Calcano is 2 and was born with no arms.

"When I was pregnant, I was dizzy, vomiting and could barely walk,'' said Maximiliano's mother, Anajai Calcaño, 20. ``My tooth cracked and fell out. Then my baby was born like that, without arms. Nothing like that had ever happened here before.''

By "before,'' Calcaño means before a U.S. power company's coal ash arrived at a nearby port, sitting there for more than two years.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/07-0

WASHINGTON - As bad as Friday's jobs report was, showing October's unemployment rate jumping sharply to 10.2 percent, the outlook is likely to worsen for American workers well into next year. Economists expect the jobless rate to keep climbing, perhaps above 11 percent, as employers produce more with fewer workers and shy away from hiring.

The nation's unemployment rate leapt by a larger-than-expected four-tenths of a percentage point in October to its highest level since April 1983, even as the pace of job losses slowed sharply, the Labor Department said Friday.

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http://richarddawkins.net/article,4579,n,n

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/07

House Democratic leaders agreed Friday night to settle an impasse over abortion by letting the entire House vote on a proposed solution, a risky decision that could determine the fate of their trillion-dollar overhaul of the nation's health care system.

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http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/11/07/saturday-reading-material/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=9013

I’m out and about again today, so no more from me today here. I know, it’s so unfair. But to keep you occupied all day long, allow me to point you in the direction of “Bone Shop,” a short novel by T.A. Pratt, (who in his other incarnation is the Hugo Award-winning author Tim Pratt) featuring his magic-wielding heroine Marla Mason in an early adventure, which is to say it’s a prequel story, which means you do not need to have read previous works in the series. It’s fun, fast and it’s free to read — but if you like it, T.A. Pratt is accepting donations for the work. So if you read it and like it, which I expect you might, think of sending some love (and a few bucks) in the direction of the author.

Having thus pointed you in the direction of a full day of reading pleasure, I now tip my hat in your direction and bid you adieu for the day.

http://www.cartoonlabs.com/comics/index.php?date=2009-11-07&show=sinfest

Sinfest
Tatsuya Ishida

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Motherjones/mojoblog/~3/8NhsWCV3A9I/gop-health-care-gives-us-all-munchausen-syndrome

Going into the House health care debate today, it pays to keep in mind what the Republican party has identified as the real problem with American health care. Steve Benen in the Washington Monthly sums it up succinctly, quoting former Congressman Dick Armey, the guru of the tea party crowd: “The largest empirical problem we have in health care today is too many people are too overinsured.”

There it is, the right’s philosophy on American health care in 17 words. Most of us think the problem with the existing system is that we pay too much, get too little, and leave too many behind. Dick Armey sees the existing system and thinks we’d all be better off with less coverage....

Just two months ago, Reps. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) and Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal making the same case. “When was the last time you asked your doctor how much it would cost for a necessary test or procedure?” they asked, making the case that consumers need more “control … over their care.”

It’s all premised on the notion that health insurance encourages medical treatments. If we have coverage, we might get tests and procedures that we wouldn’t get if weren’t so darned insured. Less coverage means fewer costs.

</p>

This last point highlights an enduring myth about health care that has yet to be seriously challenged, even by Democrats, in the current debate. It’s the idea that if people had better access to health care, it would lead to “overuse,” and therefore to increased cost. That’s why we can’t have single-payer or any other reform that makes free or low-cost health care more available to more people---because without financial barriers, everyone would be running to the doctor every time they sneezed.

This myth treats medical procedures as if they were enjoyable leisure activities that everyone would like to partake of more often if only they were given the chance: “Gosh, I’ve got some free time today–-I think I’ll go sit in my doctor’s waiting room” or “Wow, I’d love to have another colonoscopy this month” or “Hey, why don’t I have my hip replaced---after all, it’s free.” The overuse myth suggests that a large portion of the U.S. population is suffering from Munchausen syndrome---or at the very least, that we are masochistic hypochodriacs.

In reality, there’s scant evidence that better access leads to overuse---although the opposite is certainly true. And the meteoric rise in health care costs, beginning in the 1990s, has no apparent relationship to greater access. As Physicians for a National Health Program pointed out several years back:

[T]hose with interests in rising health expenditures will try to make sure the American public does not understand the real causes of the recent surge in medical inflation. Their loudest argument is that Americans overuse medical care and that such overuse would only worsen if all Americans were insured.

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Overuse does exist, the evidence indicates. But so does worrisome underuse. And overuse cannot explain the latest burst in health insurance prices or the sharp rises in what drugstores and doctors charge. There is no credible evidence that Americans received a lot more medical care in the past few years. But the price of health care has skyrocketed nonetheless. That inflation is because of the market power of insurers, drug manufacturers, hospitals and other suppliers of medical services.

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PNHP also argues that ”the expectation that patients (especially the sickest 20 percent of the population that account for 80 percent of health spending) should be able to distinguish between what care is ‘necessary’ and what is not is fantastical.” In other words, if people are having too many costly treatments, it’s not because they are choosing to do so; it’s because they are being told to do so by parties with a vested interest in making money off those treatments. 

The real myth is that a system of medicine-for-profit can yield sound health care. In  the preface to his 1909 play The Doctor’s Dilemma, George Bernard Shaw (an early advocate of a publicly run health care system) described the internal contradiction inherent in this idea:

It is not the fault of our doctors that the medical service of the community, as at present provided for, is a murderous absurdity. That any sane nation, having observed that you could provide for the supply of bread by giving bakers a pecuniary interest in baking for you, should go on to give a surgeon a pecuniary interest in cutting off your leg, is enough to make one despair of political humanity. But that is precisely what we have done. And the more appalling the mutilation, the more the mutilator is paid. He who corrects the ingrowing toe-nail receives a few shillings: he who cuts your inside out receives hundreds of guineas, except when he does it to a poor person for practice.

Scandalized voices murmur that these operations are necessary. They may be. It may also be necessary to hang a man or pull down a house. But we take good care not to make the hangman and the housebreaker the judges of that. If we did, no man’s neck would be safe and no man’s house stable.

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Shaw’s words of advice for those approaching the private, profit-driven health care system: “Treat the private operator exactly as you would treat a private executioner.”

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/11/6/192250/267

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/06-8

WASHINGTON - Representative Anthony D. Weiner, Democrat of New York, a fierce champion in Congress of a single-payer health system that would be fully run by the government, said Friday that he had agreed not to insist on a vote on that issue, in an effort to help Democratic leaders pass their plan.

Previously, Mr. Weiner had obtained a commitment from Speaker Nancy Pelosi to allow a vote on a proposal to create a single-payer system like the one used by Canada and many countries in Europe, including England, France and Spain.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/06-7

UN representatives have been working to create a draft political agreement to be presented at next month's climate change talks in Copenhagen.

But the lack of a legally binding deal at the five-day summit in Barcelona has left many at the talks disappointed.

With the clock ticking, this was meant to be the final step towards a global agreement. 

This gathering in Barcelona was to produce the next blueprint for the fight against climate change - the document all leaders would sign next month in Copenhagen.  Only - it hasn't - and they won't.

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