Kevin Drum talks about the conservative war on birth control, at this point it does seem pretty obvious that certain factions in the US do not want people to have access to birth control and they would like to stigmatize birth control by defining birth control pills as abortion. This is one that I don’t understand what can be gained from having a population that is either abstinenent or pregnant most of the time. Pregnant women are not as productive and kids are a huge drain on the medical and education systems in this country already.
This seems like a formula for a permanant underclass of large families that will need government subsidies to feed all of their children and will have almost no hope of educating them. I wonder if the conservative obsession with large families is not a way to insure that most people are dependant on the government for many generations.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:52 AM GMT+4
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I just finished reading “overtreated” a book by Shannon Brownlee. One point that she drives home very well is that even if we get universal coverage we may not get better health outcomes as more people with insurance will probably lead to more people being overtreated, and some of the overtreatments are not benign. For example spinal fusion surgery for lower back pain, even though their is no proof that surgery helps aleviate the pain.
Our health care system is sick and in need of a holistic approach not just a financial fix that enables everyone to receive unneeded surgery.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 1:29 AM GMT+4
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John McCain is set to pick his running mate and I think like most liberals I fear he will pick Mitt Romney and make himself unbeatable in November. Mitt being devoutly religous would instantly lock up the evangelical block of the republican party. Mitt care has been an unqualified success not too mention his desire to double the size of gitmo, he is the one man who can save the McCain campaign, lets hope McCain doesn’t figure it out.Â
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:28 AM GMT+4
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(AP) Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, fresh from an Iraq trip with Democrat Barack Obama, said the presidential candidates should focus on the war’s future and stop arguing over the success of last year’s troop surge.
Hagel didn’t name names but aimed his remarks at Republican John McCain. McCain, while Obama traveled the Middle East, has attacked Obama for opposing the military escalation last year that increased security in Iraq.
“Quit talking about, ‘Did the surge work or not work,’ or, ‘Did you vote for this or support this,’” Hagel said Thursday on a conference call with reporters.
“Get out of that. We’re done with that. How are we going to project forward?” the Nebraska senator said. “What are we going to do for the next four years to protect the interest of America and our allies and restructure a new order in the world. … That’s what America needs to hear from these two candidates. And that’s where I am.”
Hagel, too, opposed the troop increase strategy, though he acknowledged Thursday it brought about positive changes. “When you flood the zone with superior American military firepower, and you put 30,000 of the world’s best troops in a country, there’s going to be a result there,” Hagel said.
Whether the surge worked, though, can’t be measured, Hagel said, arguing the small gains came at a high price. He said President Bush’s decision last year to dispatch an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq has cost more than 1,000 American lives and billions of dollars.
Though Hagel is a Republican, his name has been floated as a potential vice presidential running mate for Obama. Like McCain, he is a Vietnam war veteran, but Hagel is a fierce critic of the war in Iraq. He said Thursday he would consider running with Obama on the Democratic ticket but that he doesn’t expect to be asked.
Hagel joined Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island in traveling with Obama to the Middle East. Reed said the trip was productive. “It wasn’t just a photo op and social chit chat,” Reed said in a telephone interview.
Reed said the group pressed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to have the Iraqi government do more.
“Unless the government of Iraq can start delivering — delivering jobs, delivering funds, performing — then the gains that have been made will be quickly erased,” Reed said. “I think that is a point that we all stressed, particularly Senator Obama, with the prime minister.”
Posted by Al Swearengen as History at 9:53 PM GMT+4
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The dollar has been battered consistently for a while now already, but it’s only the beginning. Keep in mind that more often than not, an unemployed American worker is someone who has to make interest payments or else face bankruptcy. Defaults aren’t going to spike lower under these conditions. There’s nothing magical about this. Human beings created it and human beings are in charge now, so naturally there is nobody willing to take the blame for anything…short sellers and speculators are blamed for the outcome of other peoples’ mistakes, and like the band on the Titanic, our sacred market fundamentalism hymns will be heard right up to the end.
Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 8:38 PM GMT+4
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Two more transactions for this morning. Diversifying further out of gold, increasing stake in BAM and keeping cash on hand.
Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Economics at 8:40 PM GMT+4
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From Ezra Klein
There are criticisms that people make of Social Security, most of them relating to a mismatch between the program’s revenue and its future obligations. But McCain’s comment is very different. It’s like if lots of people made fun of one guy’s car because it was broken down, ugly, and lacked headlights. Then one of the dimmer members of the group, sensing an opportunity to jump in, piped up with, “yeah, four wheels and an engine? What’s with that!? When you gonna do something about that!?” Everyone would sort of look at the guy for a moment while they registered that this person didn’t understand how a car worked. Now imagine that this person was applying to run an auto shop. And people were taking his application seriously. That’s sort of the situation we’re in.
I think this is how the whole prvatize social security crowd works, they hate the idea that their tax dollars might actually benefit anyone else, so the program becomes “disgusting”. Personally I like the idea that by paying a small percentage of my income in taxes I can help keep older people, and disabled people, and all the other people that benefit from social security from being homeless. Social security is about caring for your fellow human beings and people like John McCain don’t care about their fellow citizens so the program becomes disgusting. Maybe McCain is not so much dumb as amoral.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:19 AM GMT+4
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Via Andrew Sullivan some people are hoping for a truce in the divisive culture war
In the 35-year fight since Roe v. Wade, it seems there are few common values to be found between our opposing sides. But it turns out that nearly all of us agree on the common value that we should reduce the need for abortions in America.
Supporting that common value is the common ground of dramatically reducing the number of unintended pregnancies in this country that lead to abortions. It means together supporting sex education programs that include accurate information about contraception and the importance of abstinence so that fewer unintended pregnancies occur. It means together supporting programs that teach parents how to communicate better with their children about values and programs that give low-income women greater access to contraception. It means that together we can agree that abortion should never be the only option and that young and poor pregnant women should receive support when they feel they need it to carry their pregnancy to term. The truth is that the most effective way to reduce the prevalence of abortions in America is to actually work together rather than to fight.
Gay and lesbian issues, like abortion, have also been tearing the nation apart. Here again, the differences are real and rooted in theological and philosophical differences. But on these issues too we can find a shared common value and shared path forward. That shared value is human dignity. We can all agree that all human beings are created in God’s image and have and deserve an innate human dignity – even those with whom one differs or disagrees. We can all agree that honoring this human dignity is a high moral and religious calling. And we can agree that any laws we create to expand rights must not abridge the religious liberty of religious communities. Common ground means, for example, that, apart from religious institutions, the workplace should judge you at work for the job you do and nothing more. That would be a careful step along America’s journey to fulfill its national ideals, and also to honor our highest moral and religious beliefs.
The purveyors of abstinence education don’t care about reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, they want to reduce the number of people having sex. The main reason that people are against gay marriage is that by allowing gays to participate in mainstream activities it makes them part of the mainstream. The same can be said of milatary service, if gays openly serve, suddenly openly gay people are doing something that is seen as heroic, it helps make other people accept them and we cannot have that; at least the homobigots cannot have that.
Unwanted pregnancies help to show the rest of the world what happens to people who have sex. If unwanted pregnancies can be avoided, suddenly sex doesn’t have a negative consequence, if condoms are involved you cannot even scare people about STD’s, what then, how do you stop people from having sex?
To me the culture war is about parents trying to control children, I have seen some feminist web sites argue it is about men controlling women but it seems to me that it is about keeping everyone from having sex, especially young people. It is hard to negotiate a truce in the culture war when many “experts” don’t seem to understand why it is being fought.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 6:54 PM GMT+4
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(TP) President Bush denied knowledge of the contract, saying that he “knew nothing about the deal†and was “concernedâ€:
I knew nothing about the deal. I need to know exactly how it happened. To the extent that it does undermine the ability for the government to come up with an oil revenue sharing plan that unifies the country, obviously if it undermines it I’m concerned.
However, the documents released by the Oversight Committee today include ample evidence that officials in the State Department and Commerce Department “knew about Hunt Oil’s interest in the Kurdish region months before the contract was executedâ€:
- Hunt sent two letters to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board “making clear his intentions to pursue oil exploration in Kurdistan.â€
- Hunt Oil’s general manager informed the Regional Reconstruction Team (RRT) that “Hunt is expecting to sign an exploration contract,†a warning that was sent to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and to the State Department.
- Hunt Oil officials met with the RRT to inquire about U.S. policy towards oil contracts with the KRG, and were told that the “U.S. has no policy, for nor against.â€
- In an internal company e-mail, Hunt’s general manager said that there was “no communication†from the State Department that Hunt should not make the deal, despite “ample opportunity to do so.â€
This isn’t the first time the Bush administration has helped out the billionaire Hunt. In 2006, a proposed border fence in Texas “abruptly ended†right before Hunt’s property.
Posted by Al Swearengen as History, Military at 11:49 AM GMT+4
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(TP) “In a 1998 interview, Osama bin Laden — the terrorist organizer of 9/11 who still roams free — listed as one of his many grievances against the U.S. that Americans “have stolen $36 trillion from Muslims†by purchasing oil from Persian Gulf countries at low prices. The real price of a barrel of oil should be $144, bin Laden demanded. Ten years ago today, the price of a barrel of oil was just $11. Heading into this holiday weekend, the price of a barrel of oil rested at $144 — a thirteen-fold increase. One month after 9/11, the New York Times wrote of possible “nightmare†scenarios that would deliver bin Laden’s goal. Neela Banerjee warned that among the “misguided decisions†that would put oil supplies at risk would be “that the United States attacks Iraq.†The Times included this quote in its story:
“If bin Laden takes over and becomes king of Saudi Arabia, he’d turn off the tap,†said Roger Diwan, a managing director of the Petroleum Finance Company, a consulting firm in Washington. “He said at one point that he wants oil to be $144 a barrel†— about six times what it sells for now.
Posted by Al Swearengen as Bush idocy, Economics at 11:43 AM GMT+4
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