January 2011 archive

Last March, the Republican controlled Arizona State Legislature cut $1.4 million from state’s Medicaid program – Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) – cutting off urgent transplant funding that was previously promised to 98 Arizonans. Gov. Jan Brewer (R), who advocated for the cuts, has blamed those cuts on “Obamacare” even though the bill had not even been signed into law at the time the cuts were made. The cuts have attracted the attention of the foreign media. When Brewer was asked by Britain’s Channel 4 News Washington correspondent Sarah Smith “how many people would die” before she restored the funding Brewer quipped, “if people are so worried about the transplant patients, then they should ask the federal government in Washington to send us more money”. Brewer has yet to explain what she did with the $200 million that Arizona received in stimulus funds. Maybe Darrell Issa would like to investigate that.

Since the cuts went into effect two of those patients now have died. The “Brewer Death List” is now down to 96.

In late November, Mark Price, an Arizona father who had been battling leukemia for a year, died due to complications related to chemotherapy treatment he was receiving. Price was awaiting an organ transplant that could’ve saved his life, but he was unable to receive one in time due to Brewer’s budget cuts.

Now, the University of Arizona Medical Center has told the press that another patient passed away in late December because they were unable to get their organ transplant funded. Although the attending physicians declined to release the name of the patient out of respect for the family’s privacy, they confirmed that the patient that passed away was one of the 98 Arizonans cut off from organ transplants by Brewer and the GOP-controlled state legislature. He “was our patient. He was on our list,” said surgery department spokeswoman Jo Marie Gellerman.

Not all Republicans are as heartless as Gov. Brewer and the legislature. An Illinois State GOP Central Committeeman, Steven Daglas, working with others found solutions to restoring the funding, one from a $2 million AIG settlement or transferring $1.2 million from a now defunct plan to build bridges for endangered squirrels (No, I did not make that up) or using a portion of unclaimed lottery player prize winnings, roughly $6 million annually.. However, Daglas has heard nothing but silence from Brewer’s office

Since early last month, Daglas and those with whom he is working have been reaching out to the governor and her staff with the ideas. Among other things, they sent a letter that required a signature confirmation so they knew the information was getting through.

But they haven’t heard back.

“We’re worried that maybe her office is thinking that we’re offering these ideas as a way to attack her or make her look bad, and that isn’t it at all,” Daglas said. “I’m a Republican guy from Illinois. We have plenty of problems up here. We’re just concerned about these transplant patients and want to help. We have provided detailed information about the suggestions, the statutes, the original sources and so on.”

Daglas and five of the families of the patients from the transplant list have launched a web site, Arizona98.com, The website lists 26 possible ways that Arizona can shift funding in order to pay for the transplant procedures without having to raise any additional revenue.

On “Countdown”, Keith Olbermann discussed these cuts and revealed that one those whose life is threatened by these cuts is the great granddaughter of Franklin Roosevelt. As Arizona mourns one senseless tragedy, who will stop another one?

In all the Throwball excitement I feel I may have passed too quickly over the reputed demise of Sarah Palin’s Alaska.  Unlike some I didn’t think it totally unwatchable from a reality TV standpoint.  Better than Dog The Bounty Hunter, not quite so good as Billy The Exterminator.  I’ll be sad to see it leave

V premier.  NCIS x 2 premiers.  Nova Earthquakes; Frontline, Independent Lens Haiti.

We’re gonna bring this party up to a nice respectable level. Don’t worry, we’re not gonna hurt anyone. We’re not even gonna touch ’em. We’re just gonna make ’em cry a little, just by lookin’ at ’em.

• ABC Family– Remember the Titans
• AMC– Once Upon a Time in Mexico x 2
• Disney– Phineas and Ferb
• Discovery– Dirty Jobs (last week’s and new), Auction Kings (premier)
• ESPN– College Hoopies, Wisconsin @ Michigan State, Florida @ Tennessee
• ESPN2– College Hoopies, Texas @ Texas Tech
• Food– Cupcake Wars, Chopped (premiers)
• FX– Iron Man, Lights Out (Seriers Premier)
• Oxygen– The Queens of Comedy, Something New
• Sci Fi– More Green Hornet!
• Speed– Monster Jam
• TBS– Family Guy marathon, Glory Daze (premier)
• Turner Classic– Laurel & Hardy marathon
• TLC– What Not to Wear (premier)
• Toon– Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
• TV Guide– Some Kind of Wonderful (if it wasn’t good, I wouldn’t mention it)
• Vs.– Flyers @ Sabres

Later-

• AMC– The Quick and the Dead
• Comedy– The Onion Sports Desk (premier)
• USA– Next Friday, Burn Notice

Dave hosts Vince Vaughn, Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz, and Cage the Elephant.  Jon has Colin Firth, Stephen Chris Hughes.  Conan hosts Javier Bardem, Rashida Jones, and Steel Train.

Zap2it TV Listings, Yahoo TV Listings

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

Now with 50 Top Stories.

1 Biden says US may stay in Afghanistan after 2014

by Katherine Haddon, AFP

2 hrs 9 mins ago

Following his initial extradition hearing today in Belmarsh Magistrates Court, London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said he was “happy about today’s outcome” and “said the skeleton argument he and his legal team hastily produced over Christmas will be made publicly available later” reports the UK Guardian in an article published this morning.

This outlines “some important issues which will be gone into in detail on 6 and 7 February”, he said, according to the Guardian.

“I would also like to say that our work with WikiLeaks continues unabated and we are stepping up our publishing for matters relating to ‘cablegate’ and other materials. This will shortly be occurring through our newspaper partners around the world, big and small newspapers and some human rights organisations.”

In today’s 10-minute session, Assange’s QC, Geoffrey Robertson, said all legal preparations are in place for a full two-day extradition hearing next month.

District judge Nicholas Evans released Assange, who spoke only to confirm his name, age and address, on conditional bail. Assange, who wore a dark suit and light-coloured shirt, listented intently as he sat behind a glass screen at the top security court.

Judge Evans also modified the terms of his bail to allow him to stay at the Frontline Club in Paddington on February 6th and 7th so he will not have far to travel for the full two-day extradition hearing in February.

His bail terms had previously required him to stay at at the home of Vaughan Smith, founder of The FrontLine Club – the journalists’ club in London where Assange had stayed before his arrest in December – since he was originally granted bail on December 16, 2010.

Assange appeared outside the court today with a public statement and was videoed by Euronews:

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Robert Kuttner: Zero Hour for Social Security

As I have previously warned–and I hope I’m wrong–President Obama seems on the verge of needlessly cutting America’s most valued social program and the one that best differentiates Republicans from Democrats. This is part of a vain effort to appease deficit hawks in his own party and on Wall Street, as well as Republicans who are utter hypocrites when it comes to deficits–increasing them as long as the purpose is tax cuts but then turning around and demanding program cuts in order to reduce the deficits they created.

All the choreography is in place for the president to embrace Social Security cuts in his upcoming State of the Union address.

Cutting Social Security is financially needless–the program is in sound shape for the next 27 years. It has nothing to do with the current deficit. It will be solvent indefinitely if we can get some wage growth going again. Failing that, we should raise the lid on income taxed, so that millionaires pay the same rate as regular people. For more detail, see ourfiscalsecurity.org.

Chris Hedges: Even Lost Wars Make Corporations Rich

Power does not rest with the electorate. It does not reside with either of the two major political parties. It is not represented by the press. It is not arbitrated by a judiciary that protects us from predators. Power rests with corporations. And corporations gain very lucrative profits from war, even wars we have no chance of winning. All polite appeals to the formal systems of power will not end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must physically obstruct the war machine or accept a role as its accomplice.

The moratorium on anti-war protests in 2004 was designed to help elect the Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry. It was a foolish and humiliating concession. Kerry snapped to salute like a windup doll when he was nominated. He talked endlessly about victory in Iraq. He assured the country that he would not have withdrawn from Fallujah. And by the time George W. Bush was elected for another term the anti-war movement had lost its momentum. The effort to return Congress to Democratic control in 2006 and end the war in Iraq became another sad lesson in incredulity. The Democratic Party, once in the majority, funded and expanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Barack Obama in 2008 proved to be yet another advertising gimmick for the corporate and military elite. All our efforts to work within the political process to stop these wars have been abject and miserable failures. And while we wasted our time, tens of thousands of Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani civilians, as well as U.S. soldiers and Marines, were traumatized, maimed and killed.

Bob Herbert: A Flood Tide of Murder

By all means, condemn the hateful rhetoric that has poured so much poison into our political discourse. The crazies don’t kill in a vacuum, and the vilest of our political leaders and commentators deserve to be called to account for their demagoguery and the danger that comes with it. But that’s the easy part.

If we want to reverse the flood tide of killing in this country, we’ll have to do a hell of a lot more than bad-mouth a few sorry politicians and lame-brained talking heads. We need to face up to the fact that this is an insanely violent society. The vitriol that has become an integral part of our political rhetoric, most egregiously from the right, is just one of the myriad contributing factors in a society saturated in blood.

According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, more than a million people have been killed with guns in the United States since 1968, when Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were killed. That figure includes suicides and accidental deaths. But homicides, deliberate killings, are a perennial scourge, and not just with guns.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

January 11 is the 11th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 354 days remaining until the end of the year (355 in leap years).

On January 11, 1908, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt declares the massive Grand Canyon in northwestern Arizona a national monument.

Though Native Americans lived in the area as early as the 13th century, the first European sighting of the canyon wasn’t until 1540, by members of an expedition headed by the Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. Because of its remote and inaccessible location, several centuries passed before North American settlers really explored the canyon. In 1869, geologist John Wesley Powell led a group of 10 men in the first difficult journey down the rapids of the Colorado River and along the length of the 277-mile gorge in four rowboats.

By the end of the 19th century, the Grand Canyon was attracting thousands of tourists each year. One famous visitor was President Theodore Roosevelt, a New Yorker with a particular affection for the American West. After becoming president in 1901 after the assassination of President William McKinley, Roosevelt made environmental conservation a major part of his presidency. After establishing the National Wildlife Refuge to protect the country’s animals, fish and birds, Roosevelt turned his attention to federal regulation of public lands. Though a region could be given national park status–indicating that all private development on that land was illegal–only by an act of Congress, Roosevelt cut down on red tape by beginning a new presidential practice of granting a similar “national monument” designation to some of the West’s greatest treasures.

Grand Canyon National Park became a national park in 1919. So famous is this landmark to modern Americans that it seems surprising that it took more than thirty years for it to become a national park. President Theodore Roosevelt visited the rim in 1903 and exclaimed: “The Grand Canyon fills me with awe. It is beyond comparison–beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world …. Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity and loveliness. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see.”

Despite Roosevelt’s enthusiasm and his strong interest in preserving land for public use, the Grand Canyon was not immediately designated as a national park. The first bill to create Grand Canyon National Park had been introduced in 1882 and again in 1883 and 1886 by Senator Benjamin Harrison. As President, Harrison established the Grand Canyon Forest Reserve in 1893. Theodore Roosevelt created the Grand Canyon Game Preserve by proclamation in 1906 and Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908. Senate bills to establish a national park were introduced and defeated in 1910 and 1911; the Grand Canyon National Park Act was finally signed by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919. The National Park Service, which had been established in 1916, assumed administration of the park.

The creation of the park was an early success of the environmental conservation movement; its National Park status may have helped thwart proposals to dam the Colorado River within its boundaries. (Lack of this fame may have enabled Glen Canyon Dam to be built upriver, flooding Glen Canyon and creating Lake Powell.) In 1975, the former Marble Canyon National Monument, which followed the Colorado River northeast from the Grand Canyon to Lee’s Ferry, was made part of Grand Canyon National Park. In 1979, UNESCO declared it as a World Heritage Site.

The Grand Canyon itself, including its extensive system of tributary canyons, is valued for the combination of large size, depth, and the exposed layering of colorful rocks dating back to Precambrian times. It was created through the incision of the Colorado River and its tributaries after the Colorado Plateau was uplifted and the Colorado River system developed along its present path.

Don’t worry the media in the U.S. and its political leaders won’t allow this to happen as they enjoy conflict too much  



Spirit of unity after Arizona slayings may be fleeting

Reporting from Washington and Phoenix – Silence fell in Washington on Monday as President Obama, members of Congress and hundreds of officials bowed their heads in the wake of Arizona’s mass shooting and promised a new spirit of comity that harkened back to the days after the terrorist attacks of 2001.

“Harsh words are offered from both sides,” said Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas). “I hope this tragedy will play a role in diminishing some of the strident statements that we have heard.”

PBS has a biography of U.S. Grant.  Other premiers.  College Throwball Championship.

Oh, fascinating. Twenty particles of space dust per cubic meter, 52 ultraviolet radiation spikes, and a class-2 comet. Well, this is certainly worthy of our attention.

• ABC Family– Pretty Little Liars, Greek (premiers)
• AMC– Exit Wounds x 2
• Bravo– Inside The Actors Studio: Jim Carrey (premier)
• Comedy– Balls of Fury, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (new to Comedy)
• Disney– Ratatouille, Phineas and Ferb
• Discovery– Sr. v. Jr.
• ESPN– Tostitos BCS National Championship: Auburn vs. Oregon
• ESPN2– Notre Dame @ Marquette
• Food– Triple D (premier)
• FX– X-Men: The Last Stand
• History– Pawn Stars and Pickers
• Lifetime– Dan in Real Life
• Sci Fi– Star Trek: Nemesis, Star Trek: First Contact
• TBS– Family Guy marathon
• Turner Classic– The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
• TLC– Cake Boss (last week’s and new)
• TNT– Men of a Certain Age
• Toon– Regular Show, MAD, Robotomy (premiers)
• Vs.– Bruins @ Penguins

Later-

• AMC– Bowfinger
• FX– Coach Carter
• Turner Classic– Patterns, The Rabbit Trap
• Travel– Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations

Dave hosts Bill Cosby and the Black Keys.  Jon has Denis Leary (those interviews always suck), Stephen Fen Montaigne.  Alton does Meringue and Banana Pudding.  Conan hosts Donald Glover and Guster.

I suppose I’ll be watching the BCS game so there might be periodic updates below.

Zap2it TV Listings, Yahoo TV Listings

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Huge turnout again on 2nd day of south Sudan vote

by Steve Kirby, AFP

1 hr 48 mins ago

South Sudan is probably not very high on your news radar but the voting that started there on Sunday that would split the Republic of Sudan into two countries is momentous, not just because of the democratic process but also the shedding of the vestiges of colonialism that created the largest country in Africa and the Arab world. Voting on the referendum started Sunday and is being conducted around the world including the United States and will continue until January 15. The referendum is part of an agreement worked out in 2005 with the central government in Khartoum. The agreement, The Nairobi Comprehensive Peace Agreement, granted Southern Sudan autonomy for six years, is now being followed by the referendum about independence. It created a co-vice president position and allowed the north and south to split oil deposits equally, but also left both the north’s and south’s armies in place.

There are great concerns that the split will cause even more war in a country torn by the violence of militant groups and factions, much of it fueled by religious and tribal differences and, of course, oil. US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton  and actor/human rights activist, George Clooney have expressed those concerns amidst the hope of a peaceful process. Mr. Clooney has been at the forefront of keeping Sudan in the news. He along with activist John Prendergast have created a novel solution to monitor the situation using Google satellites, Satellite Sentinel, the “anti-genocide paparazzi”.

A new state is being born in Southern Sudan against a backdrop of decades of war between the South and North of Sudan. A peace deal in 2005 ended the latest round of open conflict, but the possibility of a return to war remains high as Southern Sudan prepares for independence.

One of the biggest risks in this dangerous moment is that an incident on the highly armed border could lead to wider conflict. The government in Khartoum has armed militias in contested bordering regions, the government air force has bombed border areas, and both sides have massed military units and equipment along the hottest border spots.

These areas have witnessed some of the most deadly conflict in the world since World War II. The former director of national intelligence says that Southern Sudan is the place in the world most likely to experience genocide.  

We can’t allow another deadly war, and we surely cannot stand by in the face of a genocide threat.

We were late to Rwanda. We were late to the Congo. We were late to Darfur. There is no time to wait. With your support, we will swiftly call the world to witness and respond. We aim to provide an ever more effective early-warning system: better, faster visual evidence and on-the-ground reporting of human rights concerns to facilitate better, faster responses.

This is why we have launched the Satellite Sentinel Project. There has never been a sustained effort to systematically monitor potential hot spots and threats to human security, in near real-time, with the aim of heading off humanitarian disaster and war crimes before they occur.

Previously, when mass atrocities occurred in Darfur, the Government of Sudan denied its involvement. Since photographers could not get access, it took years to amass evidence of genocide. But now we can witness in near real-time and put all parties on notice that if they commit war crimes, we will all be watching, and pressuring policymakers to take action.

We want to cast a spotlight – literally – on the hot spots along the border to record any actions that might escalate the chances of conflict. We hope that if many eyes are on the potential spoilers, we can all help detect, deter and interdict actions that could lead to a return to deadly violence. At the very least, if war crimes do occur, we’ll have plenty of evidence of the actions of the perpetrators to share with the International Criminal Court and the UN Security Council.

The world is watching because you are watching. This is our opportunity to prevent a war, to deter genocide. Make your voice heard. Click here to take action in support of peace in Sudan.