Friday, February 11, 2005


America's greatest living playwright, until today. Posted by Hello

Arthur Miller 1915-2005 Posted by Hello

"Death of a Salesman" Posted by Hello
A few days before my visit, the Tribune’s Sunday magazine had published a memoir by a woman who had been unable to get health insurance because she suffers from depression. Lipinski walked across her office to her desk and played back a voice-mail message she had received in response to the story. A woman’s voice said, “I’m really quite disgusted with the article on the uninsured. I think it’s very socialistic. Health care is not a right in this country. We are not Sweden and we are not Canada. I do not like these heart-tugging stories about people who don’t have health care. . . . Are you a socialist? . . . I do not appreciate these insipid little stories that say, ‘Oh, this poor person who doesn’t have health care.’ . . . I know friends and family who are really upset with the leftist tendencies of your coverage.” At this point, the voice-mail system timed out; it sounded as if the woman would gladly have kept going. “I get surprised,” Lipinski said. “Even something like this is seen through a political lens, rather than as, Here’s somebody with a different experience from me.”







The New Yorker: Fact
Liar, Liar, Towers on Fire

Two separate stories are breaking that indicate the Bushies had ample and multiple warnings that if heeded could have prevented the 9-11 attacks. In one case, they have covered up the information for months (especially until after the election), and in the other, they lied.

This is from a Newsday report, widely reported elsewhere as well:

"On 52 occasions, from April 1, 2001, to Sept. 10, 2001, the FAA's own daily intelligence briefings contained references to the al-Qaida terror network and its leader, Osama bin Laden, mostly in regard to overseas threats...
FAA officials discussed the growing threat from bin Laden and a renewed interest in hijackings. In the briefings, security officials noted that a hijacking on U.S. soil would result in a greater number of American hostages but would be more difficult for terrorists to carry out. "We don't rule it out," the agency said of a domestic hijacking."""

Newsday.com - State/Region News

That;s the Federal Aviation Agency. This information was part of the 9-11 Commission Report but was withheld from the public for "security" reasons.

A separate story, reported so far only outside the U.S. in the Australian Herald Sun: The adviser it refers to is Richard Clarke.

"EIGHT months before the September 11 attacks the White House's then counterterrorism adviser urged then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold a high-level meeting on the al-Qaeda network, according to a memo made public today."We urgently need such a principals-level review on the al-Qaeda network," then White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke wrote in the January 25, 2001 memo.

However, Ms Rice wrote in a March 22, 2004 column in The Washington Post that "No al-Qaeda threat was turned over to the new administration". """"


Clarke has talked and written about this memo before, but the memo itself was only released now, by the National Security Archive, which also released the FAA information covered by the NY Times and others.

In other news...

A review of Scott Sandage's eye-opening new book, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America is up at Books In Heat.



Thursday, February 10, 2005

Update
to the story below:
The New York Times reports:
"Two Democrats in Congress are pressing for investigations into how a Washington reporter who used a pseudonym managed to gain access to the White House and had access to classified documents that named Valerie Plame as a C.I.A. operative.

The Democrats, Representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and Louise M. Slaughter from Rochester, wrote yesterday to Patrick Fitzgerald, the independent prosecutor appointed in the Plame case, seeking an investigation into how the reporter, James D. Guckert, who used the name Jeff Gannon, had access to classified documents that revealed the identity of Ms. Plame. "

The New York Times > Washington > Democrats Want Investigation of Reporter Using Fake Name

Earlier in the day, Senator Frank Lautenberg wrote a letter to the Bushhouse demanding to know how Gannon/Guckert got White House press credentials so easily, and with a pseudonym.

Guckert talked to the gullible media, telling them that Talon has 700,000 readers (demonstrably false) and that he quit Talon over death threats, and being followed to church. Daily Kos points out that the story broke Monday night, not Sunday.
Bloggers Expose Dirty Trick

Here at American Dash we select stories other people report and do commentary, analysis and synthesis. But some bloggers do reporting, and investigative reporting at that.

Probably the most important story bloggers have broken so far this year concerns a bizarre tale that may yet be revealed as a nefarious political conspiracy inside the Bush White House. Jeff Gannon---though as it turns out, that is probably not his real name---got press credentials at the White House with amazing ease. Among his known activities, he trashed Tom Daschle during his campaign and got himself in the middle of the Joseph Wilson (who blew the whistle on Bush's assertion that Saddam's Iraq got nuclear bomb material from Niger) and Valerie Plame (Wilson's wife who was outed as a CIA undercover by Robert Novak who was told by persons yet unknown in the Bush government) controversy, trying to show that it was Wilson's wife who suggested he be sent to investigate the Niger story, that her CIA identity was well known, and that they both were anti-Bush partisans, all of which parrots various company lies from within the Bushhouse.

Gannon wrote for a previously unknown outfit called Talon News, which Daily Kos bloggers traced back to GOPUSA and Eberle Communications, a partisan PR firm whose clients include Operation Rescue, Ollie North and Paula Jones, and had allegedly illegal dealings with John Ashcroft as a Missouri Senate candidate.

Gannon was given access to White House and presidential press conferences, and even though Helen Thomas, the senior working correspondent who had covered numerous presidents, no longer got to ask questions, he was regularly called on, and typically asked very friendly softball questions. But he rose to new heights with this one:

Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. Harry Reid was talking about soup lines. And Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work -- you've said you are going to reach out to these people -- how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?"

This got people curious, and they uncovered the story outlined so far. Then Daily Kos "kossacks" as they call themselves discovered the most sensational element---the one that caught media attention: this guy owned a couple of porn sites that seemed to be dealing in gay prostitution.

Here's the summary so far from the place that broke the story:
Daily Kos :: The bottom line

And here's a fast summary of the salient and sordid facts so far in the New York Daily News.

But the story may be just beginning. Daily Kos bloggers are pursuing timelines and other evidence that suggest Gannon was a plant, used to detour the Wilson story when it threatened the White House and Ashcroft.

So at best, the Bushhouse gave press credentials and preferential treatment to someone using an alias who ran gay prostitution porn sites. In addition to paying several Rabid Right "journalists" they installed one in the White House with the most dubious excuse for a news organization on record. But if the indictments ever come out, and the investigation ever gets going, the Plame story may return with a vengeance.

In the meantime, Tricky Dick must be grinning in his grave. The Sons of Nixon are back, with only a wussy overfed media and an exhausted, advertising-doped dumbed down panic-stricken public to not stop them. Unless of course you count the blogs.

Hats off to the Daily Kos bloggers and bloggers like them everywhere. You may be not only the salvation of the Democrats, but of this poor excuse for democracy.

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Failing Health continued

Hard on the heels of the Harvard study linking health care costs to bankruptcies, even for the insured, comes a Boston University study that finds fully half of the nearly $1.9 trillion spent on health care is unnecessary waste, paying for nothing more than excessively high profits, over-the-top drug and hospital prices, unnecessary administrative costs mandated by insurance companies, plus a healthy dollop of fraud and theft.

By the way, in the spirit of our colleague's essay on numbers at Blue Voice, we will spell that out for you: the amount wasted per year is $950 billion, which is 950x1000x1,000,000. Nine hundred fifty one thousand millions.

This study follows another Harvard study which determined that bureaucratic inefficiencies in medical insurance, hospitals, nursing homes and doctors' practices in 2003 cost the U.S. nearly $400 billion.

So put them together and what have you got? Half the annual bankruptcies in America are caused by medical costs that are twice as high as they should be.

Excessive medical expenses / Study finds that half of health care dollars are wasted

None of this is all that surprising, given the sheer size of these industries and their nature as profit-making corporations whose purpose is accumulating wealth, not health. How can anyone be surprised at the excessive profits, when these corporations buy off scientists and government agencies, while growing to enormous sizes by killing off or buying out smaller businesses and swallowing up their markets? Anybody who believed that costs rising so fast for so long was unfortunately due to the cost of new technology, just hasn't been getting wined and dined enough by health insurance companies.

Healthcare in the U.S. is about as good for your health as taking a bath with ravenous piranas. The condition of the healthcare system is terminal and everyone knows it. Yet nobody responds to the flatlining whine, because everybody is busy filling out forms, or munching on the tax-flesh of soon-to-be-poor people at the White House.
How do you spell Decadence?

Headline: Study links illness to half of U.S. bankruptcies

A Harvard University study found that illness and medical bills cause about half of all bankruptcies in the United States, an increase of more than 23 times the rate in 1981.

Most of the 2.2 million Americans who file for bankruptcy for these reasons start out with health insurance. Most were middle class workers who simply got sick.

"I think it's a societal failure to have people facing bankruptcy over health care," said Dr. Alan Glaseroff, chief medical officer for the Humboldt-Del Norte Independent Practice Association. "No other developed nation has that."

Headline: S.F. company to start marketing high-tech toilet seats

A San Francisco company is tooling up to produce the Swash 400, a heated toilet seat with push-button controls to adjust water pressure and temperature. A self-cleaning spray arm adjusts to the differing anatomies of male or female users. The Swash 400 lists at $699, with the more advanced Swash 600 for $899.

The Swash will compete with products from Japan's Toto Ltd., which has sold more than 20 million Toto Washlets, with warm-water cleansing system and an automatic catalytic air deodorizer. They start at $727.

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

In other news...

New commentary on the future of Star Trek at Soul of Star Trek.

At This North Coast Place, interviews and reporting on a symposium concerning subduction earthquakes and tsunamis, in South Asia and elsewhere.
Isn't This Fun?

Some days being President must just be so much fun. First you propose a budget based on optimistic if not utterly dishonest revenue projections, you leave out several of the biggest costs your programs will incur, then you propose slashing and zeroing out hundreds of programs that mostly benefit the poor, the poor and sick ,and the poor, sick and disabled, while making tax cuts to the rich permanent, and you still wind up with a huge deficit. And you grin at reporters and watch the rest of the world go crazy. Watch Democrats tear out their hair! Hell, even half the Republicans are having heart attacks. Such fun!

Why it makes you want to do something really fun, like proposing a whole new arsenal of even deadlier nuclear weapons! Then maybe threaten to bomb Iran!

Owning a baseball team was kind of fun, and fraternity hijinks lots of fun, gaming the electoral system very satisfying, but there's nothing like being irresponsible to the max and way outrageous, and there's nothing they can do about it!

Bush's budget likely to trigger months of contentious debate in Congress

Monday, February 07, 2005

Elevator Speech

By Theron Dash

It's the latest "reframing" craze. In an effort to actually communicate with voters, Democrats are trying to "reframe" their issues. George Lakoff has become the patron saint of this toil.

The search is now on for "the elevator speech:" that combination of winning words that can explain the party's values to somebody on an elevator.

According to an article in American Prospect, here is the GOPer Neo-Con Elevator Speech:"We believe in freedom and liberty, low taxes, less government, traditional values, and a strong defense."

Here's someone's try at a Democratic Progressive example:

"We believe in prosperity and opportunity, strong communities, healthy families and great schools, investing in our future and leading the world by example."

There are two intents here. First, to talk on the level of values, and second, say something short and persuasive.

I agree that progressives have to communicate better, more clearly and more succinctly. But I have loads of questions about this particular approach.

First of all, who is on the elevator? And is it going up or down?

My first guess of who: college professors, or maybe motivational consultants.

My first guess of direction: in circles.

These words are mostly abstract. The GOP speech consists of abstractions that are actually code words. They imply a whole litany that's been repeated at rubber chicken dinners and on talk radio forever. They summarize.

But first you have to have something to summarize. Well, you could start with the words and then develop them in detail. But you have to do both.

But in the past, Democrats won elections by making definite promises that were appealing. For instance:

A living wage.

That's a good one. And it could still work. If you built an argument around it. And you have a plan.

So my modest proposal is: start with how people live their lives. Know who these people are. Then match what they need to what you want to stand for, and run on.

Stay off the elevator for awhile. Try walking down the street first.



In other news...

A meditation on Numbers at A Blue Voice.

Sunday, February 06, 2005


Ok, let's get this 05 thing over with, so we can get ready for Super Bowl '06 Posted by Hello
Sermon from the gridiron

"Ancient, traditional themes appear in the most ordinary of circumstances, and all it takes is an eye for the sacred to see them. The clearest place where this is true is sports. There you witness a dramatic battle between self and other, and home and visitors. Sports bring out the basic themes in any human life: facing difficult odds; struggling, advancing and retreating; winning and losing. A ball game takes place within certain bounds and according to strict rules, which keep the game separate from real life. These rules are like the rubrics or instructions for ritual. They allow a certain kind of athletic theater to take place, where both players and spectators experience in imagination the tensions they feel more meaningfully in everyday life. The spiritual element in sports appears in language such as 'miracle plays,' 'super bowls' and superstars---'super' is a word for transcendence--and in the pagentry and rituals of various games. In professional football, the Super Bowl is for some a powerful rite of civil religion, a compelling ritual process for a large segment of the culture."

Thomas Moore

Consecration of the beer and pretzels is at 3:30 p. PST. Go Steelers. (Well, in '06. Don't much care who wins '05. After all, there is only one team that beat both teams in the Super Bowl this year, back-to-back. )