An editorial in the Los Angeles Times on July 4 stated the obvious: “This Independence Day, the holiday’s very name seems to mock us.” The grand old document known as the Declaration of Independence trumpeted citizens’ rights to “alter” or “abolish” governments in face of a hostile world. Now this. Americans couldn’t even get the third world to cough up enough gas to roll their cars out of driveways for traditional summer vacations. Stoned teenagers took over the White House lawn. Freedom seemed a cruel joke or an excuse for chaos. The conservative tabloid, the New York Post, intoned that on “Independence Day, 1979 the American paradox is bleakly apparent. As a nation, we appear to have become steadily more dependent on forces seemingly beyond our control, losing confidence in our ability to master events, uncertain of our direction.” And then the editors slipped in this zinger: “The United States is now a victim of a loss of nerve and will, wracked by indecision and groping for a glimpse of inspirational and innovative leadership.”

this is an excerpt from an excerpt from the wsj:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020411970457423839328630403...

When are we going to straighten up and fly right?

THE_pc_US$_2006.png shows we and it looks like Norway and Denmark have the most expensive health care per capita. See http://www.who.int for far more detail.

We need modern health care. It won't be universal, it will be modern.

Kristof had an interesting article in today's Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/opinion/02kristof.html?_r=1

Perhaps the best explanation yet for why we are all make such foolish decisions. Certainly with a degree in "planning," I should be able to make more rational decisions and be more forward thinking. Perhaps we all should realize that hyperbolic discounting is silly.

This article from the Telegraph is very troubling for "We the people" of the United States. If torture is NOT legal and the USA does it, we are all guilty.

"Barack Obama to allow anti-terror rendition to continue"

Or this link http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20090630/cm_ucru/sorrymrbush that RG (aka 'Jeeves' or 'itsrobbyg') brought to my attention prior to me finding the Telegraph link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicosia is a town on the Island of Cyprus.

http://www.e-innovation.org/ncci.html is a site I found interesting.

I found out about this town from a possible PHP job. Using whois.net I looked up the websites registration. That lead me to a small Island in the Mediterranean Sea.

wikipedia is a wonderful site.

Hint? It is a little smaller than Marathon County Wisconsin. And a lot smaller if you count just land area not water.

Sen. Bernie Sanders We Must Stop the Rampant Fraud in the Health Care Industry

As a member of the Senate health committee, one of two Senate panels dealing with health care reform, it has become apparent to me that real health care reform must address the billions of dollars in fraud and abuse that comes from the major corporations in the health care industry.

What we have seen over the last several decades is the systemic fraud perpetrated by private insurance companies, private drug companies, and private for-profit hospitals ripping off the American people and the taxpayers of this country to the tune of many billions of dollars.

The Real Loss of Michael Jackson's Death
By Tom Degan, AlterNet
Posted on June 26, 2009, Printed on June 27, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/140940/

This may not do me a bit of good. Gather 'round, children, while Mr. Degan commits journalistic suicide. Please forgive me for not participating in the canonization of Michael Jackson.

This is not meant as a condemnation of the man's private life, his eccentricities or the accusations hurled against him in the last decade and a half of his all-too-short life. A jury found him innocent of the worse charge (other than murder) that can possibly be made against a human being. We can speculate forever but in the final analysis, we have no other choice but to respect their verdict. My problem with Michael Jackson is a bit more complicated.

He may well have been a perve and certainly was eccentric to say the least, but Michael Jackson was very talented. Here comes the retrospective; the opining and judgments galore. I prefer to remember him as the gloved one whom I loved as a teenager. Rest in peace.

Was there any other News Story Today?

Column: In praise of DMV-like health care

Not content to save the world's economy, salvage the entire auto industry, rein in greed and corruption on Wall Street and rid the globe of household pests (have you seen his ninja-like reflexes in the fly-killing video?), President Barack Obama now is tackling health care reform.

I don't know what his plan is here. Tackle so many projects that Republicans can't focus fire on any one of them? Do as much as he possibly can while Democrats control Congress?

What I do know is that Obama has critics on their heels. They're left only with two responses to his health care plan.

They either can argue that what we've got is working pretty well and ought to be kept exactly as it is, or they can resort to fear tactics without addressing the issue at hand.

Not surprisingly, they've done both.

Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, called Obama's plan "the first step in destroying the best health care system the world has ever known."

Really? The best the world has ever known?

For the past week or so I have received no fewer than 50 what I will call Green Notifications. Emails, messages on both FaceBook and Twitter to go green. Make my Twitter and Facebook background green, or wear green of something to support the Iranians. Honest showing you are thinking of them might be a good thought, but will do nothing other than make you feel good. I care, I read the news, I am part of the world.

Tom Friedman in yesterday's NYT had the answer. But then again so did John Anderson almost thirty years ago. We need a tax on gas. Period. Full Stop. Anything less is self destructive.

Read the article yourself, let me what you think, what you are going to do to show your support not just for Iranians but yourself, friends, neighbors and the good old USA.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/opinion/24friedman.html

There is a 5,200 BTU ac in my living room. I am sleeping there tonight.

1959
I swear, it really is the year everything changed.
Fred Kaplan | books | Thursday, 11:58 AM ET

http://www.slate.com/id/2220751/

I haven't even looked at the article but you can't beat the headline

I am in big trouble. I understand very few of the words.

"If The New York Times ever strikes you as an abstruse glut of antediluvian perorations, if the newspaper’s profligacy of neologisms and shibboleths ever set off apoplectic paroxysms in you, if it all seems a bit recondite, here’s a reason to be sanguine: The Times has great data on the words that send readers in search of a dictionary."

http://ow.ly/eBVr

I got the link from CSMonitor.com

These are the words people click on most.

1 sui generis
2 solipsistic
3 louche
4 laconic
5 saturnine
6 antediluvian
7 epistemological
8 shibboleths
9 penury
10 sumptuary
11 schadenfreude
12 peripatetic
13 abstruse
14 parlous
15 enervating
16 adenoidal
17 feckless
18 solipsism
19 ersatz
20 fealty
21 sanguine
22 sartorial
23 hagiography
24 pandemic
25 hagiographic
26 dauphin
27 antebellum
28 paroxysm
29 risible
30 interlocutor
31 swine
32 apotheosis
33 comity
34 Atreus
35 banal
36 profligacy
37 Sisyphean
38 inchoate
39 apoplectic
40 neologisms
41 bildungsroman
42 peroration
43 fungible
44 recondite
45 bonobo
46 phlogiston
47 contretemps
48 appurtenances
49 glut

I found a couple of sites that seem to come up with a better way to draw a district. We should have a consitutional amendment to make every state follow a computer program.

http://www.rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html

http://bolson.org/dist/

What got me thinking about this is the fact that their are far more Republican Congressional Disctricts than Democratic ones according to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook_Partisan_Voting_Index

According to Cook, the average district leans .2615 to the Democrats. So, it would seem that we should have more Democratic districts than Republicans. But there are 240 districts that are Republican, 192 that are Democratic and 3 that are neutral.

I think that means the Republicans did a good job of gerrymandering the districts after 2000.

I am not smart enough to know if California with a 8.06 average Democratic advantage is fair with a 33-19 advantage with a heavily Democratic seat being vacant.

Alabama has a 13.4 Republican advantage and is 6-1 Republican.

Of course, the Voting Rights Act forces a lot of the south to have a Black liberal in a seat and make the surrounding areas far whiter and conservative.

http://www08.wolframalpha.com/

learned about it from the WSJ Numbers Guy:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124516890985419379.html?mod=djemnumbers

simple stuff that i can easily understand gives simple results

Input interpretation:
Wednesday, January 16, 1957 to Sunday, July 19, 1959
Time span:

* More forms

2 years 6 months 3 days
Time difference from today (June 16, 2009):
52 years 5 months since January 16, 1957
49 years 10 months 28 days since July 19, 1959

Not sure if this is true but this is a Twit from a SC Publican

"Just heard Obama is going to impose a 40% tax on aspirin because it's white and it works."

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/06/south-carolina-gop-operative-...

Another reminder of why I am not a republican

Got to smile when I read MoDo this morning, the first column of hers I have enjoyed in a while:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14dowd.html?em

Isn't it ironic that as humans, we don't necessarily want to see and know everything?

Keith Olbermann said this last night on Countdown.

Tim Russert has been gone for a year now. We miss him deeply.

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren't any other people living in the world.
Anne Frank

Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn't matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.
Anne Frank

Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.
Anne Frank

Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!
Anne Frank

How true Daddy's words were when he said: all children must look after their own upbringing. Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.
Anne Frank

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
Anne Frank

I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.
Anne Frank

Salih is a Kurd, on the Wednesday Colbert Report Colbert asked Salih if the Kurd's still wanted independence. He then went on to say that Kurdistan is something like Texas, it wants to be independent, but realize it is in it's best interest not to be.

Unfortunetly Hechtmail will not allow for the embedded hyperlinks, am I using the term correctly, in this article in the NYT. But here are the two links, from the article in today's NYT and the Alan Auerbach paper on the mess we are in

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/business/economy/10leonhardt.html?em

http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~auerbach/fiscal_future.pdf

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/140570/stop_being_distracted_by_loudm...

thoughts?

Ok, I guess Black Elvis, what Bill Maher called the President this past Friday, is better than calling him Chocolate Jesus, which he did before. But you have to admire his self-effacing humor.

By now I am sure even if you missed last night's Colbert you have seen out-takes on the news. Just before the Commander in Chief commanded Ray Odierno, top commander of US forces to cut Colbert's hair as short as his own I started crying. This is the dialog I liked best:

BHO: I over heard your conversation about Stephen's hair
SC:Wait a second, are your spy satellites really that good?
BHO:No but my ears are really that big?

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0608/p90s01-wome.html