Oh no. I seem to have prematurely posted this tube diary and I cannot seem to take it back without deleting it. Bummer.
Ah well, perhaps I will just let the delightful Headzup speak for themselves. I was gone for a while and missed three months of Headzup. I was catching up on them and thought I would share them with you.
Volume I ~ May 2009
Ooooh!!! Versusplus released a new song Friday. I absolutely adore these folks and my only regret is they don’t produce more often.
Perhaps Dick could use that at his trial.
Uh oh. The President went to Montana on Friday. I bet he got his butt kicked there…
Friday August 14, 2009: The day in 100 seconds from TPMtv.
Or not. Could it be there are reasonable people everywhere?
Once again, American politics continues to dominate UK politics, especially over the misrepresentations of our National Health Service. Today’s news is dominated by far right wing Tory, Daniel Hannan, who keeps appearing on Fox decrying the NHS, much to the chagrin of most the population of the UK, and his Party leader.
Meanwhile, I thought Obama’s defence of his plan was urgent, angry and completely on the money. I hope that lots of Americans saw this:
Cross-posted at River Twice Research.
With Wall Street – and the Federal Reserve – in a headlong rush to declare the recession over, the economic data has indicated that the simple binary recession-no recession framework obscures more than it reveals. Yes, defined purely in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the recession looks to be winding down, with strong indications that GDP is about to turn positive after a long and painful swoon.
But GDP alone is a pretty poor proxy for the lived experience of many millions of people. Wall Street may be booming, the market rising, and many companies reporting strong profits relative to weak global economies. Yet that says little about any one national economy, even one as large and prominent as the United States (see my recent Wall Street Journal piece here http://online.wsj.com/article/…
I am getting a bit worn out listening and responding to the cacophony of lies and anger and greed that has taken over the national dialogue in regards to health care reform. I keep thinking that Americans will wake up and understand what is in all of our best interests. It is so plain to me, what is needed in our country, and yet all of the recent noise takes us ever further from reality.
Wednesday August 12, 2009: The day in 100 seconds by TPMtv.
Are you fearful for our country or are you hopeful? I am trying to stay hopeful.
SHOCKING! BREAKING! NEWS!!! Uh, or not.
Could someone post a nice photo with my buddy Karl behind bars. A girl can dream. Or rather here in Minnesota, often uttered by both genders: a guy can dream.
Thursday August 13, 2009: The Day in 100 seconds.
What? Wait! The Earth is not flat?!?!? Oh and for the record, I think that the idea of Death Panels rock/snark/. I have just always called them insurance companies/not snark/.
While in Asheville, North Carolina this past Monday I saw a free publication I couldn’t avoid. The Asheville Tribune is published by The Tribune Papers, an ultra-right-wing political publication dedicated to the fall of the United States. On its cover it showed a bus that has been travelling around, hosting John Locke Society speakers and explaining how President Obama and the Liberals will be coming to kill your grandparents – and not simply because their proposals will fail but because “They want to ration healthcare.”
The implication of an Orwellian plan to execute the old is left hanging in the air only long enough to be picked up again and smashed repeatedly onto the heads of the “hundreds of people” who have been coming to see this Magic Mystery Tour.
But this newspaper is even more special. It’s for Conservatives promoting the death of America. Now them’s some real patriots!
(cross posted at kickin it with cg)
On a recent trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo this week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged 17 million dollars in new funding to combat sexual violence. Sadly though that’s not the story most of the media is covering.
Instead there has been intense focus on Clinton’s snippy response to an apparently rude question from a Congolese student during a forum in Kinshasa:
“We’ve all heard about the Chinese contracts in this country – the interferences from the World Bank against this contract. What does Mr. Clinton think, through the mouth of Mrs. Clinton, and what does Mr. Mutumbo think on this situation?”
It is now the day after Senator Benjamin Cardin’s Town Hall meeting in Hagerstown, MD, and I have had plenty of time to see what the local papers and television news have covered on it… plus I spent some time looking into the web sites of organizations that pushed attendees to the meeting (like Resistnet.com) and the prearranged instructions they put out to make sure nothing was reasonably discussed.
And this is what amazes me the most: a couple of hundred people who are my age or older who came to protest the benefits which, for the most part, would serve them well and which they actually need. Thinking back to where this kind of behavior, in which ordinary citizens are convinced to work against themselves, started… the incoming of Ronald Reagan 40 years ago… I am as confused now as I was then. How do middle-class and lower-middle-class individuals justify campaigning for the things that make their own lives worse?
This evening, I was talking about health care reform with a family member and she said something that threw me off-balance for a bit. She said that it was about people with their hands out wanting something for free. 
As far as she was concerned, no one gave her health care and she doesn’t see why anyone else shouldn’t have to go out and get their own. I was totally unprepared to hear this coming from someone in my family, so I didn’t respond right away. It was also late and I knew there wasn’t really time to go into everything involved right then. Since I really didn’t want to let it die there I wrote the information below and emailed it to her. I decided that if someone close to me could misunderstand the need for reform that it would probably be a good idea to put this on the Moose for everyone to read.
The email was titled, “A little primer I wrote for you on the health care debate – it isn’t all about the uninsured”
The cost for health care in the United States currently consumes 17% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in this country. The U.S. spends, on average, 50% more per person than any other developed country. Unfortunately, the extra money we spend doesn’t buy us better health care.
An excerpt from a speech by Kathleen Sebelius the Secretary of Health and Human Services: (my emphasis)
My local 9/12 group is fraying under the need to keep up the level of generic outrage displayed at town halls in recent weeks. I know from observation that all the people below generally agree politically, but the desire by some to sustain the level of hysteria Glen Beck is promoting at all times and in all public places is more than the calmer members can take.
As I have mentioned earlier, I have been reassured to hear some calm voices of reason among the heated discussions. I share some of the fundamental concerns that this and other groups are in theory advocating for and it has been good to see that there are people involved who are not simply shouting but actually trying to make some cognizant points. However, recent evolutions of the discussion indicate that tolerance of dissenting opinions is wearing thin.
If this is the path the group chooses to follow then that itself may be for the best. This has always been my belief: allow – nay, encourage – those with outrageous views to air them publicly. More often it is the vocal far Left embarrassing themselves in public – which worked to support the previous administration – now the same thing is happening with the extreme on the Right.