As long as you give health insurance companies your money

They are fine with covering you. It's when you actually try to use it that they get mad at you. And drop you. After years and years of paying into the program.

The money is for health care for the CEOs, not for you.

Isn't greed a pre-existing condition?

Update: Robert Reich on the public option:

Slowly strangling the farmers

Massive seed corporation Monsanto -- through acquisitions and cut-throat business practices -- has cornered 90% of the soy, 65% of the corn, and 70% of the cotton market, and has a rapidly growing presence in the fruit and vegetable market, all without government anti-trust officials raising an eyebrow.

Not only that, but in order to be productive, the entire line of Monsanto's seeds all but require the use of Roundup herbicide, trapping all of their customers into buying it. And who owns Roundup? You guessed it, Monsanto.

Monsanto has, it seems, cornered the market on abusive monopolistic practices as well. In the middle of a recession, while farmers' incomes are dropping, Monsanto recently announced a 42% price hike on its most popular genetically modified seeds. When in many areas of the country distributors carry nothing but these seeds, this sure looks like evidence of a monopolist abusing its market position.

President Obama's antitrust chief Christine Varney has promised rigorous enforcement of antitrust law with a special focus on the agricultural sector. She should start with the worst of the worst, Monsanto. Sign the petition to demand that Varney immediately open an investigation into Monsanto and its abusive business practices.

And:

Last year's food riots in Haiti, India, Indonesia and elsewhere sounded the alarm bell for a painful level of global hunger that is only going to increase with a growing population and a changing climate. In a promising move, the G8 -- a group of the world's eight wealthiest nations -- has just announced a shift away from providing direct food aid to developing countries and towards helping farmers abroad produce and distribute their own food.

That's a laudable goal. But the Obama administration along with members of the U.S. Congress are using this singular moment to move their own agenda: propping up U.S. biotechnology companies like Monsanto. They hope to accomplish this by promoting genetically modified seeds and chemical inputs as tools to fight hunger through an exclusive focus on increasing crop yields. One powerful Senate committee has already passed a bill, sponsored by Senators Casey (D-PA) and Lugar (R-IN), that requires GMO technology to be part of the U.S. agricultural research agenda abroad. We need to tell them not to use our tax dollars to market Monsanto's products abroad!

Despite all the hype, GMOs have simply failed to deliver: there is no evidence that exporting this technology to the developing world will actually boost productivity. A recent analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that GMOs have had almost no impact on crop yields in the United States. Further, GMOs have little to offer drought-prone regions like Africa. Simply put: there are no drought-tolerant GMOs currently on the market. The only two GMO seed traits available -- sold by the biotechnology giants Monsanto and Bayer CropScience -- are herbicide tolerance and pest resistance for a handful of commodity crops like corn, soy and cotton. And not only are the existing seeds expensive but the use of these seeds would also tether poor farmers to the synthetic pesticides and fertilizers GMOs require.

Dedicating millions of dollars in aid money to biotechnology companies also reduces the funding available for proven agro-ecological systems and infrastructure improvements that are more appropriate for small and limited-resource producers.

Sign this petition today to tell your Senators that the path out of poverty isn't through Monsanto's doors. Ask them to oppose Casey-Lugar and any development aid bill that promotes GMO technology.

As simple as it could be

From Bill Moyers "Here's a suggestion, Mr. President: ask Josh Marshall to draft your speech. Josh is the founder of the website talkingpointsmemo.com. He's a journalist and historian, not a politician. He doesn't split things down the middle and call it a victory for the masses. He's offered the simplest and most accurate description yet of a public insurance plan -- one that essentially asks people: would you like the option -- the voluntary option -- of buying into Medicare before you're 65? Check it out, Mr. President."

No death panels, no denial of care, no pre-existing conditions, no rightwing hysteria.

Just a simple question.

Ask it, Mr. President.

Blog sprinkles

To help you figure out why billowing smoke is coming out of the computer tower vents...


click to embiggen..

And speaking of fires, California could use this information from Bryan of Why Now? The real hazards of wood ash after a burn.


Look forward, not back! There's nothing to see or learn from, really! No investigations are needed!

Steve Benen muses that Obama must really hate Bush:

I've been trying, however, to think about this from Obama's perspective. Bush left him with a generational economic crisis, an abysmal job market, a budget mess, a war in Iraq, a deteriorating war in Afghanistan, an nuclear-armed and unstable Pakistan, a nuclear-armed and nutty North Korea, a warming planet, a collapsing U.S. auto industry, an ineffective health care system, a massive debt, an absurd national energy framework, and a nation that has lost much of its global prestige.

Ready to dive in and start getting the nation back on track, the president is told, "Wait, before you tackle this to-do list, we have to deal with the consequences of the previous administration's alleged war crimes, too."

It's no wonder No Drama Obama prefers to turn the proverbial page.

I still wonder what happened to Riverbend of Baghdad Burning.

Matt Taibbi:

Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Cell phones are rotting our brains!

One man's trash.... makes a neat house!

Too many pennies!

Mentioned in comments somewhere:

The Chemists Drinking Song
Words by : John A. Carroll (inspired by Isaac Asimov) Tune of : The Irish Washerwoman

Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde,
Sodium citrate, ammonium cyanide,
Mix 'em together and add some benzene,
And top off the punch with trichloroethylene.

Got gassed up last night with some furfuryl alcohol, Followed it up with a gallon of propanol, Tanked up on hydrazine 'til after noon, Then spit on the floor and blew up the saloon.

Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde,
Powdered aluminum, nitrogen iodide, Chlorates, permanganates, nitrates galore, Just swallow one drink and you'll never need more.

Whiskey, tequila, and rum are too tame. No, the stuff that I drink must explode into flame, When I breathe and dissolve all the paint in the room, And rattle the walls in a ground-shaking boom.

Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde,
Go soak your head in a good strong insecticide, Slosh it around and impregnate your brain, With dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane.

Just let the mothers at the Mom And Me group have at him.

And ... ew? ....

Orlando, FL (AHN) - The unknown animal found inside a can of Diet Pepsi drank by a man from Ormond Beach, Florida last July was a frog or toad, the Food and Drug Administration has confirmed after testing the product.

How to talk to Republicans....

If you must.

Actually, I just wanted to copy Coulter's idiot title on her work of fiction....

Al Franken shows respect and intelligence in this video.



He's wonderful.

Exactly.

Delicious

From nonny mouse at Crooks and Liars.

Why are the Republicans all plugging their ears

And singing 'La la la I can't hear you la la la'?

WASHINGTON -- Government efforts to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into the U.S. economy appear to be helping the U.S. climb out of the worst recession in decades.

Ah. Never mind.

Update: .... but then again...Atrios reminds us

Run away! Run away!

I wonder what kind of recordings the Bush NSA wiretapping has on Ridge.... Ridge was really pitiful on the Rachel Maddow show when she ever so gently eviscerated him.

Listen to all three videos

To hear what an impassioned journalist sounds like. Bill Moyers talking to Bill Maher: One, two and three. Definitely worth your time.

h/t to Steve Bates