September 30, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
An 8.0-magnitude earthquake, off the coast of Samoa, has resulted in a tsunami that came ashore just minutes after warnings were issued. Many areas received no warning, and officials now say at least 99 people have died. They also estimate the death toll could rise steadily as remote areas are accessed and the full scale of the tsunami is better understood and a comprehensive count of missing persons can be made.
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September 30, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
Apple’s long-awaited tablet computer, likely to run a version of Mac OS X and to merge the touchscreen stylings of the iPhone and iPod Touch with the full functionality of the MacBook line, is expected to be aimed at revolutionizing the way print media deliver text to readers. If true, the device would again put Apple at the cutting edge of a field where Amazon, Microsoft, Sony and others, are trying to set the standards for e-book distribution and licensing.
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September 29, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
During the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, riot police were recorded firing tear gas into crowds of students and faculty who were doing nothing more than sitting, standing or walking on their own campus. A group of students reported being forcibly removed from “our own unit”. By PA, the police order all people in the public spaces on campus to “immediately disperse” or risk attack from “less lethal munitions”.
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September 29, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
In Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus’ advanced counter-insurgency strategy worked because a large key population, in Anbar province, wanted it to work. Petraeus, the leading counter-insurgency intellectual among the American military brass, was elevated to Iraq operations commander, because there was a need to use his know-how in community-building-linked counter-insurgency. The Anbar Awakening, however, was a grassroots, local movement among clergy, police and communities that wanted to push insurgents out.
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September 29, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The field of ecological research and reporting is a part of the basic human urge to engage the world through reason and a quest for understanding. It is not about seizing control of society’s urges and services and limiting the freedom of anyone, but rather about making sure we have the information we need to make the best choices, then advocating for those choices, when inertia and custom stand in the way of better health — for individuals and in the manner in which human individuals respond to their social and natural environments.
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September 28, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: Comments Off
The vehement opposition being engineered by the Republican party against the market-oriented “public option” is proof the party does not favor market diversification or consumer choice, but rather rigged games that give huge payouts to specific interests. The Republicans’ argument is that private insurers should not diversify the plans they offer or have to compete in a more dynamic and diverse marketplace.
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September 27, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Iran’s precarious ruling power bloc, centered around Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i and Pres. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, continues to use detention as a means of silencing the opposition. The Green Path of Hope movement started by Ahmedinejad presidential rival, the opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, has continued to stage protests and demands the release of leading politicians being held for protesting the legitimacy of the 12 June election.
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September 26, 2009 :: Mirya Dunaeva :: Comments Off
The government of Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has been hard to characterize, seeming one day to be a mouthpiece for the bellicose policies of his predecessor, now PM, Vladimir Putin, and another day to be the first Russian leader ever to express interest in a uniform standard of global governance and cooperation, rooted in democratic principles. Now, Mr. Medvedev’s political stock has gained, as ongoing nuclear negotiations with the US, at Pres. Obama’s urging, have resulted in a unanimous Security Council counter-proliferation vote.
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September 26, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
We also took unprecedented steps to secure loose nuclear materials; to stop the spread of nuclear weapons; and to seek a world without them. As the first U.S. president to ever chair a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, I was proud that the Council passed an historic and unanimous resolution embracing the comprehensive strategy I outlined this year in Prague.
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September 26, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
After police fired tear gas at demonstrators on Thursday, hitting a CNN reporter, who made clear to the world the harsh effects of the chemical agent used against the crowd, there was concern that marches planned for Friday could turn violent. The situation was tense, police presence was overwhelming, and there were fears police might [...]
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September 25, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
DVR is an increasingly popular consumer-oriented technology which simultaneously liberates viewers from strict TV viewing schedules and also imposes new constraints on recording freedoms (including sharing). DVR is a concession by content providers, advertisers and infrastructure (connectivity) providers, to the advantages of digital technology, and to the common individual demand for more freedom to control when information (content) is accessed. And the technology is framing a new logistics of consumer access and corporate control.
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September 24, 2009 :: staff :: One Comment
The legislature of the state of Massachusetts has voted to grant Gov. Deval Patrick (D) the power to appoint an interim replacement for the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D). The move means the Democratic party will see its fragile 60-vote majority in the United States Senate restored, in time for crucial votes on healthcare reform this fall. Today, Gov. Patrick has named Paul Grattan Kirk, Jr. to the interim post.
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September 24, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
Queen Noor, of Jordan, spoke last night to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell about the growing movement among world leaders to rid the world of nuclear weapons. She said a major sign of hope is the support expressed by Presidents Obama (US), Medvedev (Russia) and Hu (China), for a global effort to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether. Today, Pres. Obama achieved an historic Security Council resolution to reduce the global nuclear threat.
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September 23, 2009 :: staff :: 2 Comments
The President’s plan prohibits insurance companies from rescinding coverage that has already been purchased except in cases of fraud. In most states, insurance companies can cancel a policy if any medical condition was not listed on the application – even one not related to a current illness or one the patient didn’t even know about. A recent Congressional investigation found that over five years, three large insurance companies cancelled coverage for 20,000 people, saving them from paying $300 million in medical claims – $300 million that became either an obligation for the patient’s family or bad debt for doctors and hospitals.
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September 23, 2009 :: Evelyn Winston Perez :: One Comment
The issue of women’s equality is a question as old as human history. And even now, in the most modern of democracies, which guarantee more or less political and economic equality for women, there remain fundamental imbalances in rights, privileges and enforcement. Women are often guaranteed freedom from discrimination, but nevertheless suffer essential inequalities that do in fact alter the landscape of their choices and freedoms.
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September 22, 2009 :: staff :: One Comment
Pres. Barack Obama today delivered his first address to the UN General Assembly, promoting cooperation to green the global economy and combat climate change. He pledged the US would lead by example, and called on other nations to find common ground and work to secure the global environment against irreversible degradation.
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September 22, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell The healthcare reform debate has been steered so far largely by efforts from conservative political action groups and insurance company lobbying efforts to sow fear and confusion about the nature and the intended effects of reforms being proposed by Pres. Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress. Now, [...]
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September 22, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
This article began as a response to a very heated comment left by one user of the Open Salon network who seems to be a physician, based on some of his phrasing. The usefulness of the exchange is meaningful, because the commenter is a physician who is very afraid of some of the key elements of the proposed healthcare reform framework. (As a margin note: the AMA —the doctors’ biggest national association— favors the proposed reforms and says they will help both doctors and patients.)
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September 22, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The UN General Assembly, which brings together every head of government in the world, to offer their country’s position on issues, their country’s demands regarding trade and conflict negotiations, their country’s hopes for a more harmonious world, this year truly grapples with issues of global consensus. Economic recovery, for many parts of the world, will require an unprecedented expansion of women’s rights and sustained attention to responsible environmental stewardship.
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September 21, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Healthcare costs have doubled over the last ten years. The primary drivers of this unrestrained cost inflation are massive uninsurance and dysfunctional profit-making schemes for private health insurers. The ‘market’, so-called, is not really a market, because instead of lowering costs and increasing quality, it has driven costs up while reducing quality. This is what the currently proposed reforms seek to correct.
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September 20, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
There is federal legislation that helps banks “rewrite” or renegotiate home mortgage loans that have homeowners ‘underwater’, meaning that they now owe more money than the value of their home plus interest. Bank of America has reportedly been found to be rewriting only 7% of eligible mortgages, needlessly putting potentially tens or even hundreds of thousands of families at risk of losing their home.
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September 19, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
When the CEO of a major bank takes home $150 million in compensation in just one year, that means the bank must find an equivalent amount in profits in order to pay the CEO’s salary. That’s 150 million transactions worth $1 each to the bank, or 150,000 transactions worth $1,000 to the bank. How many of those are there in a year, and how many executives are earning in the millions, or in the tens of millions?
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September 19, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
At rallies around the country, an increasingly hateful tone, complete with visual and rhetorical references to racist slurs against Pres. Obama, has emerged. From hanging the president in effigy (a rhetorical ‘lynching’) to portraying him as an African tribal witch-doctor, a monkey or an old-time minstrel show performer, extremist elements have penetrated conservative rallies against proposed healthcare reforms.
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September 18, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The most aggressive argument Republicans are now making about healthcare reform is that it would allegedly “gut Medicare and Medicaid”, two government-administered health insurance programs that provide treatment coverage for the elderly and the poor, respectively. The irony that emerges from the incoherent oppose everything Obama wants strategy being used by Republicans, shadowy front groups paid for by individuals linked to the insurance lobby, and conservative PACs, is that they are actually now arguing in favor of ‘socialized medicine’.
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September 17, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The Senate finance committee’s version of healthcare reform, the America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009, has finally been released, and while opposed by both the conservative base and Democratic progressives, is being praised for cost-effectiveness and for achieving important reform goals. The Congressional Budget Office says it would save $49 billion over 10 years and would not add to the federal deficit.
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September 16, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Caster Semenya, the 18-year-old track-and-field phenomenon from South Africa, is a woman whose hormonal chemistry is unusual for the average adult female. Test results are reported to show that her body naturally secretes three times the normal female levels of testosterone, the dominant “male” hormone, which some competitors say gives her an “unfair advantage”. The issue has raised perhaps the most serious challenge to the notion of fairness in sport, and to conventional attitudes about gender.
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September 16, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
One solution for California would be the expansion of its efforts across the region and the nation, to spur the creation of a full-scale renewable resource-based power grid, to optimize both generative capacity and distribution. The question is, now that the decision has been made to shift toward renewables, how can California go beyond the 1/3 threshold and build a strong renewable-energy export economy?
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September 16, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: One Comment
FOX News has relentlessly smeared and defamed the umbrella organization for volunteer community groups, ACORN, openly participating in a concerted nationwide effort to promote false charges of illegal activity and force the group to stop all involvement in efforts to bring urban and minority voters to the polls.
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September 15, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) is reported to be planning to enact the most stringent renewable energy regulations in the nation, requiring public utilities to generate fully one-third of their electric output from renewable resources by the year 2020. California has been pushing for aggressive new standards requiring a transition to renewable energy, but was blocked by the Bush-era EPA from implementing more stringent state-wide emissions protocols and has recently seen a tough battle in Sacramento over the question of imposing on utilities a shift to clean, renewable resources.
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September 15, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Capitalism is “survival of the fittest”… capitalism is rooted in the idea of merit; everyone should be compensated according to his or her contribution (to the common good?)… capitalism is about the movement of capital; the more it moves, the richer everyone gets… capitalism is an upgraded feudalism, where the capitalist is an overseer of an abstract terrain made up of investments, not of arable lands… capitalism is democracy; the free spirit of an open society requires capitalism to support the liberties of individual citizens, and protect against government overreach… capitalism is virtue… or, capitalism is the absence of virtue…
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September 15, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
And based on a brand-new report from the Treasury Department, we can expect that about half of all Americans under 65 will lose their health coverage at some point over the next ten years. If you’re under the age of 21 today, chances are more than half that you’ll find yourself uninsured at some point in that time. And more than one-third of Americans will go without coverage for longer than one year. I refuse to allow that future to happen. In the United States of America, no one should have to worry that they’ll go without health insurance – not for one year, not for one month, not for one day.
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September 14, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: One Comment
Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) presided over 200 executions between taking office in 2001 and June of this year. During that time, Texas executed three times more people than the next three states combined had executed since 1976. New investigations are now raising the question of just how many innocent people were sent to their deaths by a governor and a system that ignore legal obligations to examine new evidence or counter prosecutorial or judicial misconduct?
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September 13, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
As the “perfect storm” gathers from inchoate, deceptively non-threatening winds, we can look ahead, backward and into the mirror and ask how crisis comes, or why, if it is inevitable, if we might just fall right out of it, as we fell into it. But the answer is simple: human crisis comes from excess, from inordinate ambition, from misplaced aggression, from over-exploitation of resources, each of which generates real and problematic tension across the landscape of human experience.
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September 13, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
The scope and variety of lies being told about the nature of proposed healthcare reforms in the United States are threatening to undermine the possibility for meaningful reforms that would save literally tens of thousands of lives each year. Those lies need to be dispelled, or reform will be delayed and more lives lost.
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September 11, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Apple’s product-announcement conference on Wednesday had long fueled speculation they would be announcing a new 10-inch touchscreen tablet computer and possibly announcing a deal to bring the Beatles catalog to iTunes. Neither of those two big splashes happened, but they did announce new iPods with photo and video camera functions.
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September 11, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Rep. Charles Boustany, an experienced cardiologist who says he wants health insurance reform and to cut costs across the system, and who delivered the Republican response to Pres. Obama’s address on Wednesday, again misrepresented the president’s position on healthcare reform, saying Obama has not focused any attention on the doctor-patient relationship.
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September 11, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
In matters of electoral rights and campaign financing freedoms, no corporation or registered multi-party organization will be afforded the specific electoral rights afforded individual citizens under this Constitution.
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September 10, 2009 :: staff :: One Comment
The United States Supreme Court has returned to open session to hear a case in which a corporate-funded film was barred from being aired in the weeks prior to an election, because it was intended to serve as a campaign advertisement against then Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), who now serves as Secretary of State. The Court will decide whether to overturn laws that restrict the way corporations can spend money to influence election outcomes.
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September 10, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Pres. Obama went to Capitol Hill last night to talk tough to Congress and speak truth to the American people. He framed his speech in terms of a call for responsible, cooperative action to solve the nation’s healthcare crisis, saying: “The time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action… Now is the time to deliver on healthcare.” And he repeated: “Now is the time to deliver on healthcare.”
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September 10, 2009 :: staff :: 2 Comments
But the problem that plagues the health care system is not just a problem for the uninsured. Those who do have insurance have never had less security and stability than they do today. More and more Americans worry that if you move, lose your job, or change your job, you’ll lose your health insurance too. More and more Americans pay their premiums, only to discover that their insurance company has dropped their coverage when they get sick, or won’t pay the full cost of care. It happens every day.
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September 9, 2009 :: staff :: One Comment
Perhaps the single most important tool Republicans have used to spur opposition to plans for healthcare reform —moreso even than their misuse of the word “socialism”— is their claim to seniors that Obama is planning to take your Medicare away. Currently proposed reforms have inefficiency cuts, designed to make Medicare more cost-effective, but not one part of the proposed reforms would reduce anyone’s benefits or access to care.
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September 9, 2009 :: Webb Tisch :: Comments Off
Rep. Charles Boustany lied repeatedly in his official Republican response to Pres. Obama. The first major lie was his reiteration of the false claim that Obama is proposing a “government takeover” of healthcare that would “replace” healthcare American families already have. Not only has that never been proposed; Obama had just explained that the public option, if passed, would only apply to the uninsured.
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September 9, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) has announced he will push ahead with major healthcare reform legislation next week, whether he has Republican support or not. The bill he will present to the Senate finance committee would assess fees from private insurers to help pay for extending care to the uninsured, but would not create a “public option” for buy-in health insurance. Baucus says a public option cannot win passage in the Senate.
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September 9, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) is presently preparing his “rebuttal” to Pres. Obama’s major policy address to a special joint session of Congress, on the issue of healthcare reform. Boustany is in some respects a moderate Republican, a physician who has worked in healthcare, healed actual people, and who believes in major health insurance reform. He is not emblematic of the mainstream of Republican elected officials, many of whom have vowed to “kill reform” no matter how many Republican ideas get worked in by Pres. Obama.
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September 9, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: Comments Off
The Republican party is suffering a period of decline and isolation. Certain elements in its leadership seek an ideological “purification” of the party, ousting anyone who does not agree with a hardline right-wing philosophy of evangelical conservatism — often with a near messianic devotion to militarism or to Machiavellian manipulations as a means to an end.
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September 9, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
When Barack Obama, not a month into his first term as president of the United States, announced a far-reaching, phased-in recovery plan, this February, he was trying to do something more clever and more appropriate than an all-or-nothing one-shot stimulus. That would have been a ham-fisted gamble at best, in the midst of a complex banking crisis, especially because such an attempt had failed in Bush’s last year to stave off recession.
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September 9, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
The Communist party boss for Xinjiang province was is known as one of China’s toughest remaining strongmen, according to numerous reports. But when somewhere between 1,000 and 20,000 residents of Urumqi, the regional capital, took to the streets, Beijing reacted by removing the party chief in hopes of curbing inter-ethnic unrest and growing anti-government sentiment.
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September 9, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Cornel West: “The child crisis converges with the failure of the American public school system to accomplish a central part of the mission of schools in a democracy: to rescue children from the limitations of class and family situation, giving them access to a world of longer memory, broader imagination and stronger ambition.”
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September 9, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical-thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.
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September 8, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Is the very thing we demand of our computers the thing that will make them intolerant of our humanity, if and when they awaken to an artificial intelligence? One of the fundamental problems in achieving a state of computational agility and independence that would allow us to say a synthetic entity has acquired ‘artificial intelligence’ is the problem of autonomy. If we give real autonomy to artificially intelligent machines, can we trust them to cooperate with us, in the ways we, as human beings prefer?
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