bmagnus

1, 2, 3, from Sea to Shining Sea

There is a movement afoot to have a multi-state K-12 set of educational standards. The good news, 47 of the 50 states have agreed that it’s a good idea. The bad news, none of them have signed on to adopt such standards yet. I have supported such an idea in the past, and I cautiously support it now.

I say cautiously and I do mean it. There is a huge risk that one of several bad things could happen. The standards could be hijacked by special interest groups (including political groups and education “experts”). The standards could be so stupid — either stupidly complicated, stupidly hard, or stupidly simple — that no state in their right mind would adopt them. The process of writing the standards could get bogged down in educational theory that has little to do with “what does a high school graduate really need to know”. They could be derailed by people who want to water down the standard under the misguided belief that “everybody” should have a high school diploma, regardless of knowing or learning anything. And finally, the standards could be used as a stick to waste the time and money of schools, much like No Child Left Behind.

But, if this nation is seriously ready to commit to the idea that everybody who gets a high school diploma should meet certain standards, that every parent should be able to quickly figure out what their kids in each grade should know, then I am ready to do everything I can do to help.

In Closing: Anti-Abortion Terrorism is fine with some people; this year’s Lunch with Buffett for Charity went for $1,680,000; the best education money can buy; Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security at odds over border patrolling; 4 generations in the workplace; fewer people in restaurants for the 21st consecutive month; Iraqis delighted about departing American troops; when Wal-Mart backs employer mandated health insurance you know it must be a screw-job; we can finally say Senator Franken and mean it; on a possible Health Insurance Exchange and the problems therewith; let’s continue to pressure Congress for a public health plan option; and Hoekstroika.

If A, then B. Therefore, Q.

Sometimes I wonder about Chuck Schumer. Today’s great quote is this:

“I’m sure the civil libertarians will object to some kind of biometric card — although . . . there’ll be all kinds of protections — but we’re going to have to do it. It’s the only way,” Schumer said. “The American people will never accept immigration reform unless they truly believe their government is committed to ending future illegal immigration.”

Now let me get this straight. The only way Americans will accept reform is if it looks like Congress will actually give it to them, and therefore we need a national ID card with fingerprints on it? What? I’m not terribly concerned since it looks like immigration reform is already a dead issue to this session of Congress. However, the depth of this stupidity is breathtaking. Real immigration reform will need to have these components:

1. Severe penalties for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants. And those penalties should go far enough up the corporate ladder that executives will make sure that supervisors and managers follow the law. Some will complain that making employers follow the law will cause a shortage of workers who will work for very low pay. With our current unemployment levels, that’s not a valid argument.

2. A clear and understandable path to legal status for immigrants, coupled with sufficient INS staff to work through any existing backlog within 1 year. It should be simple enough that even a citizen can understand it. If people know they way it has to be and we have the means to make it work that way, there will be no excuse for illegal immigration.

That’s it. We don’t need a high-tech way to verify identity and work eligibility. Actually using the I-9 form as it is supposed to be used does that nicely. We don’t need fallible biometric identification that will leave many eligible workers unable to work. We don’t need a government database that will function as an expensive and error-prone green list of people who are allowed to have jobs. All we need to do is enforce the law, and make it easier to follow the law.

In Closing: Penn Jillette (oh, and Teller too) asks “if two goofball magicians can slip this stuff by with full lights shining on them and the full attention of the audience, then what could a really bad person do?”; volcano punches hole in clouds; Supreme Court rules in favor of common sense; cracks in the Massachusetts Plan (do you remember I said it would fail and be used as “proof” that universal care doesn’t work?); why we need a public option; and Farrah Fawcett, RIP.

The Shorties Sense

The crisis isn’t over yet: 40 bank failures this year, and counting. The year’s not quite half over yet. We will never know how close the very biggest banks came (or will come) to failing because it simply won’t be allowed. Stay tuned for Friday afternoon’s installment of FDIC adventures.

Taking off the rose-colored glasses: official unemployment is bad enough at 9.4%. Real employment is at 16.4%. Remember that unemployed people often don’t have health insurance or the money to pay the bills (or the mortgage, or to put in the bank, etc). And now respectable economists are saying what I have long suspected, that it’s a “lost decade” for job growth. Oh, and Warren Buffett thinks it will get worse.

Poor Babies: the world’s population of millionaires is shrinking. Oh, the horror.

Ain’t nobody but Spies Like Us: (pop culture reference) Hey kid! You with the language skills and no particular job prospects! Want help paying for college and a guaranteed job when you graduate? Please step over here and talk to a representative of the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program. Now recruiting Junior Spies.

It can’t happen here?: As we watch protesters in Iran (which now include clerics and women), it’s easy to sit back and thank the founding fathers for our freedoms. However, we need to remember people are arrested in this country routinely for protesting in the wrong spot or not getting a permit or some other trumped up reason, we need to remember that Blackwater was sent to New Orleans after Katrina, and we need to remember the existence of Infragard.

Little Sister is Everywhere: and she is us. She is every one of us that has a cameraphone. She is every one of us that films that which is not right. She is the one thing that keeps Big Brother in line.

I’ve just got one question: It’s about the e.coli in the cookie dough. Salmonella I could understand, because that’s common from uncooked eggs. But e.coli comes from fecal contamination. Who’s been pooping in the cookie dough??

The get out of the airport screening line free card is dead: It was always a dumb idea, and now the company that made it seem possible is out of business. Gee, maybe now the TSA will have to get serious about security that works.

On Charter Schools and other forms of School “Choice”: Huh, it seems that charter schools aren’t doing quite as well as public schools. Oh, and look how complicated a school choice program can be. I know that locally, we have 5 magnet elementary schools, 6 magnet middle schools, and a dozen magnet high schools! Even with district provided busing, things can get very confusing if you have multiple kids in multiple programs.

If this is the best the SBA can do, let’s close it and save the tax money: Long time readers know I am a big critic of the Small Business Administration, and it’s “loan” programs that often amount to home equity lines. The latest emergency loan program for small businesses is in the process of falling, being primarily available to people who already have SBA loans, and sometimes being tied to moving the entire business’s banking.

Time to hit the old Appalachian Trail, if you know what I mean, eh?: Wow, what a strange story this Gov. Sanford thing has turned out to be! And what a classy lady his wife turns out to be (here’s the “short version“). If Republicans keep blowing up at this rate, will they have anybody that can credibly run in 2012?

If you haven’t seen this yet: Pete Hoekstra is a Meme. And Trollcats.

Weird collaboration: Buzz Aldrin and Snoop Dogg. Say wha?

Ok, I’ll close with a rather random assortment of Health Insurance Reform items: Say, can we stop calling it health care reform when it’s insurance that’s the problem? Please? Anyways. Nuts and bolts of the proposals (as of Monday). Special interest money. They needed a study to find that ER patients are more satisfied the less they wait? Gee how about a study on whether that applies to phone queues or repairmen! Don’t assume that hearing nothing means your medical test was normal. Dr. Dean on science and the difference between telling your doctor what does and doesn’t work vs telling your doctor what to do (yeah I know it’s HuffPo, somebody else pointed me there). We don’t need biparisanship when there’s 60 votes in the Senate. What Ezra thinks will happen. How to lie with statistics. Insurance companies “warn” the government and the President responds “that defies logic”. Quality Adjusted Life Years. How to talk to your Congressmen about health insurance reform. On the Wyden-Bennett plan. Maybe the reason our Congressmen don’t get it is that they have really good health insurance. Robert Reich dismantles most of the conservative argument against a public option. Rahm announces that he thinks the President is a total wuss who is able to walk away from the option that most Americans want. What should a public option look like, anyway? The bitter truth about the insurance industry. For example, they ripped off customers. JP tells it as he sees it. Seriously, call your Senators and Congressman tomorrow if you think this is important. If they get enough calls, they might get the idea that their jobs — and cushy insurance — are at risk.

Here Comes Trouble

We’ve been reading for weeks about politicians and health execs resisting true reform of the way we pay for health care. Remember, relatively few of us want care itself reformed, but most of us want the way we pay for things reformed.

Businesses are experiencing a 9% rise in health insurance costs alone. In these hard times they have no choice but to either pass along the gouge or reduce the level of insurance they purchase. We’ve had people try to scare us with “rationing” of care, which we already do with money. We’ve had people try to scare us by telling us that the government wants to tell your doctor what to do, when insurance companies already do that by telling them what they’ll cover — and the government plan they fear merely wants to figure out what works and stop your doctor from doing stuff that doesn’t work (too scientific, I suppose). We’ve had the Republicans try to dress up the same old nonsense in new clothes with no details and call it “reform”. We’ve been reading about how insurance companies actively try to cut people who need services — and have the gall to say it’s the only way they can be profitable.

But now it looks bad. Ezra warned us of trouble, and then he delivered it. The Senate has been negotiating themselves right out into the cornfield. It’s a stinking political deal that lets Senators prenend they are helping, but it’s nothing more than a mandatory insurance plan with some fancy ribbons to give the illusion that everybody can afford it.

How can you have mandatory coverage when insurance companies can cancel your policy for no reason?

How can you have mandatory coverage in a time of high unemployment, high foreclosures, high bankruptcies, and high credit card defaults? Don’t you suppose that these things indicate that there is no money to buy insurance?

How can you have mandatory coverage of children in a system where most coverage is still through employers? Don’t they know there are child labor laws?

How can we support mandatory coverage from the same people who brought us the most expensive care without bringing us the most effective care?

How can they offer We The People a mandatory plan when there is increasing support for true universal coverage or at the very least a “public option“?

How can anyone support this plan when we can’t even have Senate discourse about the idea of Medicare for All? Are they that completely 0wned by the insurance companies that are bleeding America dry?

And the question the 100 Senators should really ask themselves: how can we send them back to Washington if they sell their voters down the financial river?

Let them know what you think. Do it today. Feel free to use any points you like from above.

It’s ridiculous.

In Closing: unseen Chapter 11 wave; anti-stab knives (how British); Will high speed rail kill the airlines? (answer — not if the TSA does it first); “get used to tighter credit“; highest unemployment rate since 1983 (say, you don’t suppose that true universal healthcare might make it easier to hire people, do you?) including record unemployment in my state, and many are too discouraged to even look for work; I would have gotten fired and probably fined by the feds if I had sent this from my office email account; essentials of financial freedom probably should be applied to the health insurance industry too; recession tracks Great Depression; Boomers rethinking [the existence of] retirement (my favorite part is the guy with 35 years IT experience going back for a degree in IT so he can be even more completely priced out of IT jobs); “new” financial regulation program has support of the ******* who brought us the current crisis so it must be good, right?; on double-standards and really good mascara; The American Tribe; and Zach the Cat.

Iran Revisited

It’s been a long time since I wrote this:

One of the most striking things is that at least once a day, some character [of Clavell’s historical fiction novel, Whirlwind] said that “soon things would get back to normal.” Oh the Shah is gone, things will be back to normal in a few days. Oh Khomeni has arrived, surely things will be back to normal soon. Oh the military has stood down, that means things will be ok soon. A cow farted, things will be back to normal. Talking to people who were adults in this era confirms that this kind of thinking was prevalent in real life in the United States, too. This is but one example of the striking naivety that seemed to afflict all Westerners in the book. Non-natives were consistently caught off-guard by the idea that “progressive” reforms could be rolled back, that a theocracy could be erected, that Sharia could be enforced, that assets owned jointly with foreign entities could be nationalized.

The reason I bring this up today is that we still don’t understand Iran.

As interesting and exciting as current events in Iran are, we would be well served to remember how clueless the West has been about this fundamentally Persian nation in the past. I am very distrustful of anybody’s analysis of what is going on, and even more distrustful of anybody’s prediction of what is likely to happen next. See also.

The interesting thing is how we are learning about what’s really going on. Hint, it’s not the mainstream media. Sure, you’ll get stories on the big news sites, but after many people already know.

Internet veterans remember following important but under-reported events on Usenet — newsgroups online that predate most “web sites”. Then people followed news while in chatrooms or in IRC channels. Then it was blogs. Now it’s Youtube and Twitter.

News media is dying, crushed under the weight of having to overproduce mountains of drivel every day, scooped by everyday people with cell phone cameras and internet connections.

A few short health reform items: a summary of the viable, proposed plans; of all things, a commentator from the Financial Times thinks Medicare For All would be an improvement over what we have; I’ve said that true universal healthcare would help small businesses, and now CNN says that health care costs are “choking” small businesses; ivory tower intellectual says the problem is that we groundlings only pay part of our health expenses, ignores people who have to decide which prescriptions they can afford to fill (his ideas had some validity a decade ago so cut him slack); poll says we need “major change” but not an “overhaul” (hint, mandatory coverage is not a major change); the President shows the AMA a carrot (malpractice caps) and a stick (“If we do not fix our health care system, America may go the way of GM — paying more, getting less and going broke.”).

In Closing: Republican “activist” needs a new sense of humor; Wolf Sanctuary; JP urges us to put blame where it belongs; Regulators Vs Bankers in the fight of the year; Wired on gadgets that were a waste of money; Truth in Comics; and Giant Robot! (Ok, a life-sized Gundam. But still.)

Communication

Graduate students spend a lot of time talking.

One topic that we used to discuss, as music students, was various styles of music. Academic music of course, nothing more popular than Laurie Anderson.

In retrospect, we came off as a bit pretentious.

A quick look at the various periods of music history reveals that style periods got shorter as time marched on. While we don’t know as much as musicologists would like about music much before about 1300, surviving manuscripts show that styles moved fairly slowly and regionally until about 1650. Things sped up a little bit from 1650 to the late 1800s, still with strong regional and nationalistic bias. And the 20th century is a wild mish-mash of quickly developing styles. Regional styles — from New Orleans Jazz to the British Invasion or East Coast vs West Coast Rap — quickly break out and are adopted/adapted elsewhere.

Our theory about this exponential acceleration of style development was communication.

If Mozart wanted to know what was going on musically in London, he needed to take a coach to France and from there, a boat to England (a long and arduous trip) or wait for somebody to come to Vienna with news — and preferably manuscripts. Those of us in the New World could largely forget getting the most modern music of Europe.

On the other hand, a budding 20th century composer in Los Angeles could be in New York or London or Vienna or Moscow to find out what is going on in a matter of hours. In fact, he or she could get recordings of the latest music from around the world locally, maybe the same day. Now, our budding composer doesn’t even need to leave the computer chair — the latest videos and music are a few clicks away. How might his or her art developed differently, perhaps more deeply and perhaps not, without this instant kaleidoscope of influences?

We students were much too self-absorbed to apply this line of thinking to other areas of history. In fact, one great factor in the American Revolution was the delay in getting information to and from England an ocean away — a fact glossed over in history textbooks. A great controversy of math is who actually invented calculus: Leibniz or Newton? They were far enough apart that they apparently came up with the same idea independently of one another!

Faster communications has also changed how we do business. In the old days, if you wanted to buy say, 100 shares of IBM you had to call your stockbroker, have him look it up on the ticker-tape (or call someone for a quote). After you gave the buy order, he would have to call his company’s floor broker in New York, who would literally go out on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to the station where a specialist handles shares of IBM, and shout the order. Only when the sale was actually made would your broker know what you paid. Now all small orders and many larger orders are handled electronically. This allows more people to participate, and that in turn results in more volatility. Whether that is good or bad entirely depends on where you are in the market.

Not that many years ago, there was no computerized collection of real estate listings. Realtors worked from a big binder of listings and waited for a turn with others in the office. It was bad enough that when real estate expert Barbara Corcoran started her own brokerage, she instituted a rule against “pocket listings” — that’s listings that individual agents keep in their pockets instead of putting them in the big book. As recently as 1996, agents would snatch new listings that were perfect for their clients off the fax machine before their colleagues knew about them. Before the age of faxes, your Realtor had to actually take your purchase offer to the listing office personally! If that were true in 2004, the housing bubble might have played out very differently.

Faster communications and travel are undeniably a good thing for modern medicine. Who can forget the real-life sled dog Balto saving Nome, Alaska from an epidemic? Now, sick people can be at a hospital very quickly in most cases, medicine flown in from around the globe in hours, and top experts consulted via phone and video conference in minutes.

Perhaps now communication is too fast for our own good. One politician anywhere in the world can mangle a sentence, and it’s on the evening news for all to misinterpret. One man can spew hate-speech on the radio or TV, and have a million others up in arms — and it only takes one to start shooting. There’s no time to temper it, no time to think about it. Hear, Feel, Do.

Let’s all take the time to consider what communications we want in our lives, and think seriously before we act.

Cross-posted at The Moderate Voice.

Health “Reform” Roundup: on alternative medicine; the reason some Americans would “lose” coverage with a public plan is that they would drop expensive private policies in favor of the public plan; AMA lines up on the wrong side, as usual; how mandatory health care would “work”; Pelosi admits that there won’t be enough votes for a plan that doesn’t include a public option.

In Closing: LIEberman tries to make a compromise that isn’t a compromise between Israel and Palestine; I almost can’t believe they finally made the DTV transition; sometimes urban renewal requires a bulldozer; the truth about “clean coal” is that the by-products are so toxic the DHS doesn’t want anyone knowing where they’re stored; Civil War trivia; 83% of charter schools have “accounting irregularities“; and family arrested for keeping their kids in “squalor.” Now, as a parent, I’d just like to know how much mess I am allowed to have. Is this mess threshold higher or lower if I can’t afford electricity and running water? Does the number of adults in the household change the allowable mess level? How do these rules effect homeless families? At what point is bad housekeeping and no money for utilities a crime? I hope I never need to know first hand.

Don’t Let Reform Turn Into a Scam

As the health insurance reform debate rages on, it seems clear that We The People are at risk of being scammed.

You see, a lot of “experts” — insurance company lobbyists/executives and the politicians they have purchased — think that the way to make sure everybody has access to health care is to simply pass a law saying everybody has to buy it! Make a penalty for anyone who for whatever reason can’t participate. I call this system Mandatory Health Care, because that’s the most accurate description. It’s delightfully simple, except for this:

1) Nobody is forcing the insurance companies to charge reasonable rates, nor preventing them for making it difficult for people with pre-existing conditions to get/afford insurance.

2) Nobody is making insurance companies actually pay for needed treatment in a timely fashion.

3) Nobody is doing anything about bloated insurance company profits, marketing budgets, and executive pay scales that cost consumers money without providing any care.

4) This does nothing to help entrepreneurs who must find a way to afford insurance for his/her family and employees while running a small company in a difficult economy. I would love to see a small business study for Massachusetts: I bet the number of active small businesses has shrunk more than the recession alone would account for in the last few years. The closest any of the available plans get to equalizing the playing field for small businesses is to make insurance benefits taxable for everyone! I’m not sure who that’s supposed to help other than big businesses that are already wildly profitable.

5) Mandatory insurance has resulted in a shortage of providers in Massachusetts, despite the fact that in countries where they actually have universal health care, there is a similar number of providers per thousand patients and no shortage.

6) It doesn’t magically make anybody able to afford premiums — the single biggest reason people don’t have coverage. (And how exactly will a homeless person get the bill, let alone pay it?)

Our system of paying for health care is broken, and the people who brought it to us want to scare us into being a captive audience. This issue is too important to be turned into nothing more than a political football. Let’s not make things worse by forcing every citizen to participate in a broken system. Susie’s right: if the powers that be really wanted reform, they would call the one guy who knows more about how health insurance really works in this country than anybody else, Howard Dean.

Insist on a true, universal public option. Do not let Congress settle for Mandatory Health Insurance.

Don’t take the heat off anti-abortion terror groups either: Tiller’s assassin has warned of more violence unless his viewpoint is immediately adopted and abortion outlawed (textbook definition of terrorism). There is nothing to be said between the points of view until the anti-abortion movement completely renounces and expels the terrorists within.

In Closing: stick a fork in Norm Coleman, he’s done (seat Senator Franken already!); why did the British press have to tell us that American banks are lobbying to not be held to any rules?; it turns out that rural areas have homeless people too; even if the recession ends tomorrow, the unemployment rate may rise for another year or two, and it’s a pretty awful trend now; mindfulness is a good thing; maybe Scholastic Books should stick to selling books.

Look Great, Feel Good About It

If you had to name the top 3 contributors to anti-AIDS initiatives, you would probably guess that Bill and Melinda Gates were up there. Once you saw the list, you’d think the Ford Foundation also made perfect sense.

But would you guess, without looking or knowing a lot more about AIDS issues than I do, that the #3 contributor was a make-up company?

It turns out that the MAC AIDS Fund has given $145 million to anti-AIDS causes, all from the Viva Glam line of lip colors. Animal rights activists will also be happy to know that MAC’s products are not tested on animals*, although some products are not vegan. While I have a hard time spending what a modern lipstick costs, it doesn’t seem so bad if I am helping people when I buy it.

Follow up on the economy: unemployment and part time workers; unemployment and education level; more sad unemployment figures; one in 9 Americans on Food Stamps; 37th bank failure of the year; apparently community banks are small enough to fail; let’s solve “too big to fail” by breaking up the megabanks.

Follow up on health insurance reform (it isn’t care that needs reform, it’s how we pay for it!): Robert Reich explains how the health insurance industry plans to kill real reform; beware of anything labeled a “centrist compromise“, because it isn’t any such thing; an international perspective; be sure to scroll all the way down the charts to see how long people struggle with bills before declaring bankruptcy.

Follow up on Anti-Abortion Terror: Feds now investigating; the myth of the lone gunman; and how to see abortion as a blessing.

In Closing: there’s one, two, three trailers on a big rig; search overload; manopause, the NYT column; and mass transit. Have a great weekend, folks.

* I consider this designation to be bogus on all personal care products. What it usually means is that either some other entity was paid to do the testing, or it is an old formula which was tested and found to be safe many years/decades ago. If a product is going to cause harm, I would rather it was discovered with cute fuzzy bunny rabbits than my family.

Bankrupt

In this great nation, we had over 6,000 bankruptcy filings a day, every business day in May for a total of more than 120,000. We are potentially on track for between 1,393,000 and 1,487,000 filings in 2009. Talk about trends everyone hopes will be broken. And the data seems to indicate that we’re nowhere near the end of this “recession.”

And remember, it’s harder to declare bankruptcy now than it was a few years ago thanks to “reform.” It makes you wonder how bad things might otherwise be.

Further, a follow-up study of 2007 bankruptcies shows that matters are even worse than they were in 2001. In 62.1% of bankruptcies, medical bills were a major factor (a rise of 49% since the original report in 2001). In 1981, only 8% of bankruptcies involved an illness. More:

Surprisingly, most of those bankrupted by medical problems had health insurance. More than three-quarters (77.9 percent) were insured at the start of the bankrupting illness, including 60.3 percent who had private coverage. Most of the medically bankrupt were solidly middle class before financial disaster hit. Two-thirds were homeowners and three-fifths had gone to college. In many cases, high medical bills coincided with a loss of income as illness forced breadwinners to lose time from work. Often illness led to job loss, and with it the loss of health insurance.

Even apparently well-insured families often faced high out-of-pocket medical costs for co-payments, deductibles and uncovered services. Medically bankrupt families with private insurance reported medical bills that averaged $17,749 vs. $26,971 for the uninsured. High costs – averaging $22,568 – were incurred by those who initially had private coverage but lost it in the course of their illness.

For review, almost 2 out of every 3 bankruptcies is due to medical debt, over 3 out of 4 of those people had health insurance, and they still reported medical bills totalling more than the cost a brand new, decent sedan. That means most of us are one serious illness away from our own personal bankruptcy. We’ve got many people who can’t afford to fill prescriptions. It’s getting harder to get in to see a doctor, at all (go ahead, call your local doc and ask when you can come in for a routine checkup). People are falling for scams that they think are health insurance, but are in fact nothing more than an expensive coupon club. And insurers have taken some time out for self-examination. How meditative.

What stands out in this chart of the age of uninsured individuals? Could it be the fact that almost nobody over 65 is uninsured? Do you think that’s a coincidence? Or just maybe is it because there is a government program to ensure that they are insured.

Yet the last thing in the world the insurance industry wants is for the rest of us to have access to a plan like Medicare. They want to saddle it with “triggers“, a term that coincidentally gives us insight into what they really want — to kill the plan or any chance it has at success. Even the President has offered us a mandatory insurance plan instead of the true universal plan We The People want and need.

The private health insurance system has failed. It can reinvent itself as an industry that provides supplemental coverages. This is not the time for half-baked compromises that benefit insurance companies over human beings. A true single payer system is the only way to stop medical bankruptcies, truly control costs, and move forward. It will even create jobs and boost the economy.

In know it’s only sort of related, but I want to make sure nobody forgets about Anti-Abortion Terrorists: *itch PhD on the reporting; the ever cautious and relatively unbiased Christian Science Monitor on the terrorist’s suspected extremist ties; Incertus on the importance of access to abortion; CNN on the charges, which don’t (yet?) include terrorism; many people have pointed out that if local law enforcement had done something radical like enforce the law, this guy would have already been in jail instead of committing acts of terrorism; how quickly some people forget that “abortion doctors” are also “obstetricians”, and how traditional to attempt to stone a perceived “slut”; be on the lookout next year for more violence on May 31; more stories that should make you cry; are the terrorists the mainstream in the so-called-pro-life movement?; is the manufacture of terrorists the goal?; Make no mistake, this is part of a Global War Against Women. No, I’m not being overly dramatic. This is serious stuff.

In Closing: Fun with Science; if a company in India thinks they can sell a 4 seat, 65 MPG car in the United States for less than any car currently in our market, what exactly is the Big 3’s excuse?; funny how this peice on lobbyists getting Congress to change the financial rules arrived the same day as a mailing form Public Citizen, concerned that corporations were writing their own rules in Congress; the ex CEO of Countrywide will be charged by the SEC for insider trading and fraud; Elvis Bin Laden; two bits of Japanfilter, it’s the 67th anniversary of the Battle of Midway and 100 books for understanding contemporary Japan; and judges are also at risk from right-wing domestic terrorists.

Drag Me To Shorties

see more Engrish

I love the new sign for my office. Let’s evaluate some mayhem, shall we?

Says Who? The conventional conservative wisdom on “green cars” is that it would cost American jobs. I never understood that one, since they can be made on the same assembly line they currently use for other cars. Anyway, Congress figures that if they give people money for their old cars, they’ll have money to buy new ones. On one hand, I’ve seen a lot of lower income families waste a lot of money on their clunkers because they don’t see how they are already paying as much as they would on a newer, more reliable car. On the other hand, this feels a lot like the rebates and stupid-low interest rates that helped the auto industry get into trouble in the first place!

Speaking of the Automotive Industry: Who’s to blame for GM’s Bankruptcy.

Cars and Insurance Go Together: Both GM and Citi are out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, replaced by Cisco and Travelers (formerly part of Citi). Oops, as of this writing CNN.Money.com hasn’t updated their list of DJIA components! Surely they’ll get around to that in the morning.

Speaking of Insurance: a few tidbits on health insurance from Ezra (twice) and Dr. Dean (via Suburban Guerrilla). Now, even the White House thinks we can stimulate the economy through “health reform.” Even Baucus is coming off his high horse to pretend to ask the people what they want.

Depressing: The FDA put a warning on antidepressants. Now fewer people are being diagnosed as depressed. Interesting.

Here a bubble, there a bubble: Thanks to Kiko’s House, we wonder if there’s a college education bubble. After all, we’ve been beating the “everybody ought to go to college” drum even longer than the “everybody ought to own a house” drum.

Green Homes Don’t Have to be Expensive: they can be pre-fab models with construction costs as little as $200 per square foot. Of course you can also buy a bank owned home for less than $100 per square in Vegas right now…

Speaking of Bank Owned Houses: The New York Times thinks we are on the cusp of a new wave of foreclosures, propelled by unemployment.

I’ll be glad when this is no longer a problem: facts and myths about child soldiers.

Quick, Junior! To the Gaming Console: The United States Air Force thinks we may have a future shortage of video game programmers. Well, if the **** I see coming out of E3 is any sample, we already have a shortage of decent ones.

Japanfilter: Happy 150th birthday to the port of Yokohama.

My How Banking Has Changed: How did banks get too big to fail? How did we end up with so few banks? A different spin on the same question.

How Much Do You Know: Here’s a little quiz on current events. Only 6% of randomly called American adults could correctly answer all 12 questions. How did you do? (12 out of 12, thanks. I guess that makes me a news junkie.)

On the Forced-Birth Terrorist: While he does turn out to have been a religious zealot with ties to anti-abortion groups, it’s looking like he wasn’t the “loner” that such groups will soon wish he was. He had a history of hanging out with anti-government nuts, having bomb making materials, and hating Dr. Tiller (whom he had never met).

On the Doctor He Murdered and the People He Helped: Here’s a piece on his life. The stories of people who needed his services are very terrible and very personal. While I can’t blame any of these people for not wanting to discuss such things, I think we need to have a better idea of why a mother can come to the conclusion that this is the best option. Here’s the truth about 3rd trimester abortions (it’s not murder to kill the dead)– and why Dr. Tiller was aquitted of all charges mere months ago. As Chuck Butcher so nicely put it, “legal and unfortunately necessary.”

On the Possible Conspiracy to Commit Acts of Terrorism: We need to be on the lookout for other, related domestic terrorism, because these people are dangerous as long as they don’t get exactly what they want (which is for women to be nothing more than baby-boxes). Even the most innocent seeming of these protesters want to prevent people (all women, coincidentally) from getting medical services. This particular terrorist had something in his car that may cause the whole thing to unravel, and a local news crew took a picture as proof: the phone number of Operation Rescue’s Senior Policy Advisor — who happens to have been convicted in a bomb conspiracy back in 1988. If that’s not enough to get a subpoena for phone records and start digging, then I’m unclear on what is. We’ve got a nice, shiny PATRIOT ACT, let’s use it against these terrorists.

On the Media that Made Terrorism Sound Like a Good Idea: They include church elders (I bet they wouldn’t have been happy if the murder had taken place in their church!) and Fox News. That being the case, Olbermann is calling for a boycott not of Fox News, but of the places that air it publicly. Jesse had it right when he pointed out that it’s pretty messed up when you have to specifically send a press release that says you don’t condone murder. The Loony Fringe has nerve claiming that (even as they gloat) they are all being unfairly blamed for fanning the fires of hate. Maybe it’s the match in one hand and the fan in the other that gives us that idea.

Well, we’ve evaluated enough mayhem for the day. I hope you’ll join me again soon.