AMA supports the achievement of meaningful health system reform, which follows six key concepts:
To learn more about the AMA’s position Click Here
(from Thom Hartmann)
Republicans are using the T-word – taxes – to attack the Obama healthcare program. It’s a strategy based in a lie.
A very small niche of America’s uber-wealthy have pulled off what may well be the biggest con job in the history of our republic, and they did it in a startlingly brief 30 or so years. True, they spent over three billion dollars to make it happen, but the reward to them was in the hundreds of billions – and will continue to be.
As my friend and colleague Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks pointed out in a Daily Kosblog recently, billionaire Rupert Murdoch loses $50 million a year on the NY Post, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife loses $2 to $3 million a year on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, billionaire Philip Anschutz loses around $5 million a year on The Weekly Standard, and billionaire Sun Myung Moon has lost $2 to $3 billion on The Washington Times.
Why are these guys willing to lose so much money funding “conservative” media? Why do they bulk-buy every right-wing book that comes out to throw it to the top of the NY Times Bestseller list and then give away the copies to “subscribers” to their websites and publications? Why do they fund to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year money-hole “think tanks” like Heritage and Cato? Read More
More and more we are seeing a looser grip on Marijuana laws, mostly because the war on drugs is failing. Without regulation, it is being sold to kids on school playgrounds and on the streets, and billions are spent every year to house prisoners who are only guilty of smoking a joint. We could turn this around by legalizing marijuana and taxing it. Instead of there being billions going out to prisons, we could have billions coming in from sales. Instead of drug dealers selling to kids, we could take their business from them and sell to adults, legally from a pharmacy or other means. You don’t see people selling booze to kids as a means of making income, it’s always about being the ‘buddy’, and you can’t do anything about that, there will always be losers who need to feel important. Marijuana has never killed anybody, but we have all heard of alcohol poisoning. Here’s a video of Bill Maher at a NORML convention…
Public Option Health Care Plan Saves Money | Oliver Willis
No reason not to do it.According to a pair of Capitol Hill sources, preliminary estimates from the Congressional Budget Office suggest that a strong public option–the kind that the House of Representatives is putting in its reform bill–should net somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 billion in savings over ten years.
The sources cautioned that these were only the preliminary estimates, based on previous discussions–that CBO had not yet issued final scoring on language in the actual bill. But the sources felt the final estimate would likely be close.
For those who think it’s a bad idea, I just say – look at what you are trying to defend. Our health insurance industry CEO’s are the Robber Barons of modern times. They make more money when they raise premiums and reject claims, while not covering pre-existing conditions. Any individual can make as much money as they want, but we are responsible for telling them how much of ours they can have. It’s time to pull the plug on their windfall.
U.S. House Repeals Provision Prohibiting Washington, D.C. from Enacting Medical Marijuana; Nation’s Capital Could Soon Join 13 States That Have Legalized Marijuana for Read More
July 07 2009 show notes | Thom Hartmann
Quote: “We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular.” – Edward R. Murrow, 1954.
On the Checking Out of Nice Asses
Early this morning, I received an email with this picture….
My initial thought was, “How funny! Cool, he’s human.” And I posted it to facebook. A while later, a friend posted a comment that said the picture wasn’t entirely accurate, and referenced this video, which shows the few seconds before and after.
Well, it looks like President Obama was being the gentleman, helping another woman down the steps, while Sarkozy was, indeed, checking out the girl’s ass!
Either way, big deal. As long as they didn’t touch….
For a few years, I’ve been following a picture site that is managed by NASA. It’s been a source of contemplation for me, as well as a great archive of information. There’s a new picture every day, and the list goes back to June 16 1995. You could spend hours on this if you like to study astronomy. There are many pictures of distant galaxies and stars, along with lots of other stuff related to our planet’s position in the universe. Go to the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive for some of the best pictures of outer space that you will ever see! If you like science, you don’t want to miss out on this one.
If we should pick up signals from alien civilizations, Stephen Hawking, our century’s Einstein, warns: “we should have be wary of answering back, until we have evolved” a bit further. Meeting a more advanced civilization, at our present stage,’ Hawking says “might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus. I don’t think they were better off for it.”
Mankind has always been driven by contradictory drives. The relentless curiosity that pushes us forward and is directly responsible for our progress from caves to cities. The fear of change that tells us “hang on, these caves/cities are really nice, we don’t want to risk losing them.” There isn’t any greater potential threat to the status quo than the discovery of extraterrestrial life, which is why some people would prefer we didn’t try.
There has been some outrage recently over attempts to contact intelligent aliens, where instead of hiding in the corner and listening real hard some astronomers beamed intense directional messages up up and away. Critics decried these actions as dangerous, though their fears reveal more about us than any eventual ETs. They assume that they would be similar to humanity, so their first response to finding a more primitive culture would be to exploit the hell out of it. Read More
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