House Passes Health Care Reform Bill
Michael Mcauliff writes in the New York Daily News:
The biggest overhaul of America’s medical system since Medicare passed with a tight vote in the House of Representatives Saturday night. The bill passed with a vote of 220 to 215, with only one single Republican — Joseph Cao from Louisana — choose “Yea.”
The health reform bill included a controversial amendment to restrict coverage of abortion.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to bring up the abortion amendment after a deal with conservative Democrats collapsed and they threatened to sink the whole bill.
The move enraged liberals, but most agreed to stay onboard and President Obama traveled to the House to make a personal appeal and seal the deal.
Pelosi hailed the progress as delivering on the promise of Obama’s election. “President Obama’s leadership gives…
Jim Carrey’s Web Site: A Bizarre Visual Treat
Michelle Kung in the Wall Street Journal:
This weekend, the blogoverse has been all abuzz about Jim Carrey’s new Web site. Speakeasy was a bit suspicious, given how the site’s launch was timed to coincide with the opening of the actor’s tepidly-reviewed “A Christmas Carol.” So we checked out the site with a little bit of cynicism. We were pleasantly surprised.
The Flash-heavy site, created by 65 Media, the Web designers behind the landing pages for Hollywood movies like “Ratatouille” and “Land of the Lost,” is a bizarre, mind-bendy experience into the world of Jim Carrey. When you click on any of the site’s tabs — broken into News, Biography, Filmography and Origins — the screen launches visitors on an in-your-face, Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole journey, zooming and twisting through various landscapes until you arrive at your final…
Texas Governor Says There Were Three Shooters At Fort Hood
Texas Gov. Rick Perry comments on the Ft. Hood shooting and surprisingly says there were three shooters…
‘Collision’ Attempts to Answer ‘Is Christianity Good for the World?’
Collision carves a new path in documentary filmmaking as it pits leading atheist, political journalist and bestselling author Christopher Hitchens against fellow author, satirist and evangelical theologian Douglas Wilson, as they go on the road to exchange blows over the question: “Is Christianity Good for the World?” The two contrarians laugh, confide and argue, in public and in private, as they journey through three cities:
Feds’ Search of Twittering Anarchist Upheld
Ryan Singel writes on WIRED’s Threat Level:
Federal authorities can resume combing through the notebooks, memory cards and computers of a twittering anarchist being investigated for violating an anti-rioting law, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled Monday.
U.S. district court judge Dora L. Irizzary found no reason to throw out the government’s search of the home of a 41-year old social worker who used the micro-publishing service Twitter to help anti-globalization protestors at the recent G-20 convention, clearing the way for the feds to look through the evidence they collected. Madison and his attorney sought to have his possessions returned unexamined, on the grounds the search violated his constitutional rights to free speech.
The Joint Terrorism Task Force raided Elliott Madison’s house in a dawn raid on October 1, seizing myriad computers, unpublished…
Dylan Ratigan: The Cost of Corporate Communism
Dylan Ratigan writes on the Huffington Post:
Lately I have been using the phrase “Corporate Communism” on my television show. I think it is an especially fitting term when discussing the current landscape in both our banking and health care systems.
As Americans, I believe we reject communism because it historically has allowed a tiny group of people to consolidate complete control over national resources (including people), in the process stifling competition, freedom and choice. It leaves its citizens stagnating under the perpetual broken systems with no natural motivation to innovate, improve services or reduce costs.
Lack of choice, lazy, unresponsive customer service, a culture of exploitation and a small powerbase formed by cronyism and nepotism are the hallmarks of a communist system that steals from its citizenry and a major reason why…
Teacher Claims Fingerprinting Is ‘Mark of the Beast’
From Wired:
A 22-year veteran kindergarten teacher in the Texas Bible Belt could lose her job for refusing, on religious grounds, to give fingerprints under a state law requiring them.The evangelical Christian, Pam McLaurin, is fighting a looming suspension, claiming that fingerprinting amounts to the “Mark of the Beast,” and hence is a violation of her First Amendment right to practice her religion. Her case is similar to a lawsuit by a group of Michigan farmers, some of them Amish, challenging rules requiring the tagging of livestock with RFID chips, saying the devices are also the devil’s mark.
The latest case is the first in which a teacher is refusing fingerprinting on religious grounds, the woman’s lawyer said. The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to decide whether the First Amendment is implicated in fingerprinting, especially…
Criminal Convictions of 22 CIA Agents in Italy
From Salon:
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA’s kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
The criminal conviction of 22 CIA agents (and 2 Italian intelligence officers) by an Italian court yesterday — for the 2003 kidnapping of an Islamic cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, off the street in Italy and his “rendition” to Egypt to be tortured — highlights several vital points:
First, illustrating how these matters are typically distorted by the U.S. establishment media, note that CNN — in the very first paragraph of its story — claims that the CIA agents were convicted “for their role in the seizing of a suspected terrorist in Italy in 2003.” What did Nasr allegedly do that warrants that “terrorist” label? Did he participate in the 9/11 attacks, or plan attacks on “the American homeland” or U.S. civilians? No. According to CNN, this is…
FBI File Links Kennedy to Monroe’s Death
From The Sydney Morning Herald:
BOBBY KENNEDY’S affair with the screen idol Marilyn Monroe has been documented, but a secret FBI file suggests the late US attorney-general was aware of – and perhaps even a participant in – a plan “to induce” her suicide.
The detailed three-page report implicates the Hollywood actor Peter Lawford, Monroe’s psychiatrist, staff and her publicist in the plot.
The allegations suggest the 36-year-old actress, who had a history of staging attention-seeking suicide attempts, was deliberately given the means to fake another suicide on August 4, 1962. But this time, it is suggested, she was allowed to die as she sought help.
The document, hidden among thousands of pages released under freedom-of-information laws last October, was received by the FBI on October 19, 1964 – two years after her death…
New Ebola-like Virus Threatens U.S. Troops In Afghanistan
Sara Carter reports exclusively for the Washington Times:
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan | U.S. military officials sent a medical team to a remote outpost in southern Afghanistan this week to take blood samples from members of an Army unit after a soldier in the unit died from an Ebola-like virus.
Dr. Jim Radike, an expert in internal medicine and infectious diseases at the Role 3 Trauma Hospital at Kandahar Air Field, told The Washington Times that Sgt. Robert David Gordon, 22, from River Falls, Ala., died Sept. 16 from what turned out to be Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever after he was bitten by a tick. The virus is transmitted by infected blood and can be carried by ticks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Dr. Radike, who is with the Navy, said…
Noam Chomsky: War, Peace, and Obama’s Nobel
Noam Chomsky for In These Times:
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.
The Nobel committee’s concerns were valid. They singled out Obama’s rhetoric on reducing nuclear weapons.
Right now Iran’s nuclear ambitions dominate the headlines. The warnings are that Iran may be concealing something from the International Atomic Energy Agency and violating U.N.…
Google Unveils Protocol For An Interplanetary Internet
From Wired UK:
Vint Cerf, Google’s internet evangelist, has unveiled a new protocol intended to power an interplanetary internet.
The Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol emerged from work first started in 1998 in partnership with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The initial goal was to modify the ubiquitous Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to facilitate robust communications between celestial bodies and satellites. [...]
The core issue is that TCP assumes a continuous (and fairly reliable) connection. DTN makes no such assumptions, requiring each node to buffer all of its packets until a stable connection can be established. Whereas TCP will repeatedly attempt to send packets until they are successfully acknowledged, DTN will automatically find a destination node with a reliable connection, and then send its payload just once. Given the latency of space communications and the…
Goldman Sachs Official Says Jesus Embraced Greed
Matt Taibbi writes:
I didn’t believe this story was true at first — thought it had to be a spoof. But it turns out to be true. The great banks of the world have gone on a p.r. counteroffensive in Europe, and are sending spokescrooks in shiny suits into churches to persuade the masses that Christ would have approved of the latest round of obscene bonuses.
Goldman Sachs international adviser Brian Griffiths explains it this way: that Christ’s famous injunction to love others as one would love oneself actually means that one should love oneself as one would love oneself. This seemingly baffling outburst by a Goldman executive in what appears to have been a prepared speech — someone actually wrote this, and thought about it, before saying it out loud — gets…
