highway2healthcare

i don't click on banner ads very often. but how do you not click on a healthcare take on appetite for destruction? i certainly don't know.

turns out this is a clever effort by the AFL-CIO to gain support for reform, even a public option. you got me to sign up, fellas. nice work.

new rule

bill maher did a great segment ending his show last night. if you missed it on HBO, it's written up in the huffington post.

miami airport

a proposal was made to introduce slots to the miami international airport, in an effort to increase revenue.

but a florida law (which was written in an effort to keep slots at racetracks), states that slot machines can only reside in places where the ponies race.

the answer? bring ponies to the airport as well.

hey, why the hell not.

dave barry had an amusing chat about this very topic with NPR's robert siegel.

orly taitz

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i first heard about this woman via the daily show [ because jon stewart is, after all, the most trusted man in america ]. but then i read this article in oc weekly. [ obviously the crazies are concentrated in orange county ]. then the washington post's secular corner ran this.

when is the truth not good enough for us anymore?? i'm reminded of a bit lewis black did, and i'm scouring the internet trying to find it. basically, he talks about how you can't look at a piece of footage [ in this case, it was whether george bush was told about bin laden ] and say that it didn't happen. he then relates it to cat suicide. [ natch ].

but seriously, when did facts and evidence become not good enough? has photoshop made us overly cynical, even when we shouldn't be? do we just want to be upset, to be upset? someone please enlighten me.

best excerpts of the oc weekly piece:

The problem is most of the above facts aren’t true.

For starters, the Pakistan “travel ban” is a complete fabrication based on zero evidence and completely contradicted by State Department records and a 1981 New York Times article. The full transcript from Obama’s grandmother shows that she never said he was born in Kenya—in fact, she repeatedly said he was born in Hawaii. The law allowing foreign-born children to obtain Hawaiian COLBs didn’t exist until 20 years after Obama was born, while Obama’s published COLB says his birth information was recorded four days after his birth in 1961. And those “forensic experts” who say Obama’s document is phony? There have only been three of them: Two haven’t published their real names or any verifiable credentials (one went by the moniker “TechDude”), and the other merely said that she can’t make a determination of a document’s authenticity based solely on a JPEG.

***

“It’s just fascinating,” says Bob Haggard, a frequent poster on Politijab’s Orly Taitz forum. “She runs around the country doing things that amount to absolutely nothing. She tells her followers that she ‘files’ all sorts of documents, but she never files anything. She drops stuff off.”

Patrick McKinnion of Yes to Democracy puts it a different way: “There’s a certain amount of fascination with unbridled insanity, and that’s what you’re seeing with the birthers: a level of hatred that borders, if not absolutely pole-vaults, into insanity.”

two recent post articles about sarah palin

i'm kind of in love with this op-ed written by barbara boxer and john kerry, refuting a palin op-ed about energy. i hate that anyone has to take her seriously, but i like how the senators subtly mention her ties to oil companies, and state how scare tactics used in the past to stymie environmental legislation have no basis.

the other article i'm digging is the results of a post-abc news poll. while palin still has her GOP following, she's clearly losing ground, and for that i am thankful. more people don't think she's a strong leader, or clearly understands complex national policies. my favorite excerpt is as follows:

Rick Buila, 38, of Sharonville, Ohio, who works in finance and voted for the McCain-Palin ticket in November, said his opinion of the governor has changed. "I don't think that she is cut out to be on the national stage," he said. "I look at her education and her background and the way she carries herself and her [resignation] speech, and when you have someone who's out there saying 'You betcha' about 50 times, I don't think that's the person we want to have negotiating with other countries."

amen.

the complexities of sustainable food

i came across this article today, even though it was published in february. it talks about the complexities of our food system, and why labels like "organic" and "local" aren't enough to address the problems we face.

Real sustainability... is defined not by a food system's capacity to ensure happy workers or organic lima beans, but by whether the food system can sustain itself—that is, keep going, indefinitely, in a world of finite resources. A truly sustainable food system is inherently resilient—more capable of self-correction and self-revitalization than its industrial rival. Unfortunately, in the real world of farming, ideas like "resilience" must compete with realities like "costs" and "profits," and producers and consumers alike gravitate toward simpler standards—even if those standards don't represent truly sustainable practices. Worries Kirschenmann, "We've come to see sustainability as some kind of fixed prescription—if you just do these 10 things, you will be sustainable, and you won't need to worry about it anymore."

while the article never offered up a grand solution, it is interesting to think about what how inadequate some of our sustainable parameters are. it also does a good job tying in the economic side of the equation, including demand for unsustainable meat and dairy products, and the habits we've formed because of relatively cheap food. the idea that a consumer push strategy will never be enough certainly rings true - which means we need to do more to encourage our government to address this problem.
in any case, it's a good read, especially before i head out to the grocery store.

palin's resignation speech: the good version.

vanity fair takes a stab at making sarah palin sound cohesive. nice try, guys. notice not a single thing was stetted.

utah kiss-ins

we're all god's children. until we're not.

A police report said they sat down for a kiss and were approached by a pair of church security guards, who asked them to leave because their behavior was "unwanted."

maddow v. buchanan

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via huffington post, rachel maddow argues with pat buchanan about racism and affirmative action. though rachel tells him that he's dating himself, she pretty much sits back and lets him look the silly old uncle we're ashamed to invite to our bbq's. enjoy.

jesus dress-up

paper dolls and jesus: two things that are sort of intrinsically funny. put them together, and... well... this happens.

malcolm gladwell and the moral hazard myth

as debate over national health care rolls on in congress, i am reminded of one of the most poignant and memorable articles i have ever read. it was published in a 2005 issue of the new yorker but is still [ if not more ] relevant today.

i thought about bullet-pointing the striking parts of the article for those who don't wish to read it, but i truly feel it would be doing gladwell [ and the uninsured ] a huge disservice. if you don't believe in "socialized medicine" and don't think we need reform, you need to take a look. and even if you do, some of the facets you learn in this article are too critical to pass up.

** if you're curious as to what prompted this entry, it was the drudge report's cover story labeled "TAX THEM!" with this picture:

samantha bee/jon stewart covering the palin resignation

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the geniuses at the daily show did it again. the craziest thing is a coworker of mine actually said he was so sorry that jon stewart was in repeats the week palin did this. do you think she knew? i'm glad she didn't get away with it. enjoy.

obama's commencement speeches

i love president obama with the intensity of my disdain for george w. bush. i make no secret of this. but i have especially loved how he has taken the past two university controversies and confronted them head-on. this write-up in the washington post sums it up pretty well.

The failure of both sides to use "fair-minded words," he said, overly inflames an important debate. As an example, he described his own 2004 campaign Web site, which at one point referred to "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman's right to choose."

It was not until a doctor e-mailed him about the phrase that Obama ordered it taken down, he said.

"I didn't change my underlying position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my Web site," he told the crowd. "And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that . . . that's when we discover at least the possibility of common ground."

i think obama has played the controversy so smartly. by acknowledging that "at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable," he simply calls for a civilized debate. is it naive? perhaps. but he's right. there are crazies on both sides (i am one of them). and the crazies aren't doing anything to forge understanding.

at ASU, obama also addressed the university's decision to deny him an honorary degree, saying 

"Your own body of work is also yet to come," he told 60,000 people at the stadium. "Building a body of work is all about . . . the daily labor, the many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up over time, over a lifetime, to a lasting legacy. That's what you want on your tombstone. It's about not being satisfied with the latest achievement, the latest gold star -- because the one thing I know about a body of work is that it's never finished."

mmmmmm, smart words. of course, nothing illustrates this point quite so finely as this daily show video.

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