June 2013 archive

Welcome to the Stars Hollow Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.

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Beans never cease to astound me with their versatility. As the weather heats up and our hunger for comforting stews gives way to a desire for lighter fare, beans can still be the backbone of a meal, but I’m more inclined to make them the focus of a main dish salad than a simmering ragout. I love the way they soak up tart salad dressings and the way their velvety textures play against the crunch of other salad ingredients, like fresh green beans, celery or fennel. [..]

Beans are an important source of plant-based protein. In her interesting new book, “Eating on the Wild Side,” Jo Robinson, a health and nutrition writer, cites a 2004 federal Agriculture Department survey of the phytonutrient content of 100 of our most common fruits and vegetables. Three of the four top-ranked foods were legumes (only blueberries were higher). Lentils were second, followed by black beans and red beans. The study found that a cup of cooked pinto beans had six times the amount of antioxidant activity as a cup of cauliflower and 12 times as much as a cup of carrots.

“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”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Jonathan Turley: The Fantastic Feinstein: How To Make Privacy Disappear While Appearing To Defend It

Civil libertarians have long viewed Senator Dianne Feinstein (D.,CA) as a menace to privacy and civil liberties in her role on the  Senate Intelligence Committee. She has worked to blocked investigation of torture while supporting warrantless surveillance of our own citizens. Recently, many Californians became aware of her role in seeking ever-expanding powers for the security state. Feinstein desperately tried to get citizens to embrace a new model of privacy that allows for their continual surveillance in the latest scandals under her tenure. That has not worked particularly well so now Feinstein is taking a new approach: she is proclaiming her concern over the dangers of privacy posed by . . . drones. That’s right. Like the street magicians distracting an audience, Feinstein is trying to get citizens to focus on the use of drones for surveillance and promising some form of “regulation” in the future. The obvious intent behind yesterday’s carefully constructed scene was to present Feinstein in the light of a fighter for, rather than an attacker of, privacy rights. [..]

Feinstein appears to be taken advice from street magicians: [..]

I hear that her next trick will be to saw the Separation of Powers in half by further supporting the unchecked powers of the President.

Gary Younge: Is Obama Worse Than Bush? That’s Beside the Point

Obama’s transformation from national security dove to hawk is the norm: any president is captive to America’s imperial power

Not long after the story into the National Security Administration’s spying program broke, US president Barack Obama insisted the issues raised were worthy of discussion:

   “I welcome this debate and I think it’s healthy for our democracy. I think it’s a sign of maturity because probably five years ago, six years ago we might not have been having this debate.”

In fairly short order, a YouTube compilation appeared, showing Obama debating with himself as he matured. Flitting back and forth between Obama the candidate and the Obama the president, we see the constitutional law professor of yore engage with the commander-in-chief of today. [..]

What makes these clips so compelling is that they show not evolution, but transformation. On this issue, at least, Obama has become the very thing he was against. They’re not gaffes. These are brazenly ostentatious flip-flops. And regardless of how much they cost him, Obama has clearly no intention of taking them back.

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.

Click on images to enlarge.

June 22 is the 173rd day of the year (174th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 192 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs into law the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill.

The G.I. Bill was an omnibus bill that provided college or vocational education for returning World War II veterans (commonly referred to as G.I.s) as well as one year of unemployment compensation. It also provided many different types of loans for returning veterans to buy homes and start businesses. Since the original act, the term has come to include other veteran benefit programs created to assist veterans of subsequent wars as well as peacetime service.

By the time the original G.I. Bill ended in July 1956, 7.8 million World War II veterans had participated in an education or training program and 2.4 million veterans had home loans backed by the Veterans’ Administration (VA). Today, the legacy of the original G.I. Bill lives on in the Montgomery G.I. Bill.

Harry W. Colmery, a World War I veteran and the former Republican National Committee chairman, wrote the first draft of the G.I. Bill. He reportedly jotted down his ideas on stationery and a napkin at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC.[2] U.S. Senator Ernest McFarland was actively involved in the bill’s passage and is known, with Warren Atherton, as one of the “fathers of the G.I. Bill.” One might then term Edith Nourse Rogers, R-Mass., who helped write and who co-sponsored the legislation, as the “mother of the G.I. Bill”.[citation needed] Like Colmery, her contribution to writing and passing this legislation has been obscured by time.

The bill was introduced in the House on January 10, 1944, and in the Senate the following day. Both chambers approved their own versions of the bill.

The bill that President Roosevelt initially proposed was not as far reaching. The G.I. Bill was created to prevent a repetition of the Bonus March of 1932 and a relapse into the Great Depression after World War II ended.

An important provision of the G.I. Bill was low interest, zero down payment home loans for servicemen. This enabled millions of American families to move out of urban apartments and into suburban homes. Prior to the war the suburbs tended to be the homes of the wealthy and upper class.

Another provision was known as the 52-20 clause. This enabled all former servicemen to receive $20 once a week for 52 weeks a year while they were looking for work. Less than 20 percent of the money set aside for the 52-20 Club was distributed. Rather, most returning servicemen quickly found jobs or pursued higher education.

As attentive readers may have observed I rarely provide explanations for unexpected absences or temporary unavailability, or even much notice for that matter.

Nor am I doing so now.

So I’m off feeding kittens and puppies (really cute ones too) to alligators out of pure spite merely to maliciously deprive you of my photonic presence.

Deal.

The main purpose our blogging is to communicate our ideas, opinions, and stories both fact and fiction. The best part about the the blogs is information that we might not find in our local news, even if we read it online. Sharing that information is important, especially if it educates, sparks conversation and new ideas. We have all found places that are our favorites that we read everyday, not everyone’s are the same. The Internet is a vast place. Unlike “Punting the Pundits which focuses on opinion pieces mostly from the mainstream media and the larger news web sites, “Around the Blogosphere” will focus more on the medium to smaller blogs and articles written by some of the anonymous and not so anonymous writers and links to some of the smaller pieces that don’t make it to “Pundits” by Krugman, Baker, etc.

We encourage you to share your finds with us. It is important that we all stay as well informed as we can.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

This is an Open Thread.

The AMA has decided obesity is a disease but fail to acknowledge that the biggest cause of obesity is poor diet. Calories are the biggest cause of obesity but doctors very rarely ever talk to their patients about nutrition.

I wonder if the AMA would consider making violence against women a disease now that the WHO has reported that it’s “global health problem of epidemic proportions”

h/t lambert at Corrente who continues to update on ObamaCare Clusterf**k.

Kevin Gosztola at FDL The Dissenter has the up dates for Day 7 and Day 8 of Bradley Manning’s trial and reports that Edward Snowden has become the 8th person to be indicted for espionage by the Obama Justice Department.

At FDL Action, Jon Walker tells us how Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell tried to scare Democrats by threatening to actually making the Senate functional. Harry Reid will never stand for that.

Just for laughs, Sen. McConnell thinks that a constitutional amendment that would establish that corporations are inhuman not people with constitutional rights is absurd. I guess he’s worried that the next amendment would be to deny human hybrid turtles the right to hold elected office.

At the FDL News Desk, DSWright has an open letter to the Secret Service regarding the Aaron Swartz file and tells us that sources are not talking to the Associated Press.

At Hullabaloo, digby said something:

One of the most laughable comments the NSA program supporters have been making is the one insisting that the FISA court is “transparent.” It’s rulings are secret as are the government’s interpretations of the law and those rulings. If that’s what we call due process these days, we might as well just officially institute a Star Chamber and call it a day.

Atrios wants to know if there is any reason that the defeat of the farm bill is bad news?

Oh Cool! The Rude Pundit think that “David Brooks is the Paula Deen of the Times” op-ed page and tears him a new one as only he can.

At Esquire’s Politics Blog, Charlie Pierce rips into President Obama for his ludicrous argument defending the transparency of the FISA court.

And the last words go to watertiger at Dependable Renegade for her tribute to James Gandolfini on his death at 51 from a sudden heart attack while on vacation in Italy:

And yet, Dick Cheney is still alive.

Only the good die young. R.I.P. James and Michael.

“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”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: Profits Without Production

One lesson from recent economic troubles has been the usefulness of history. Just as the crisis was unfolding, the Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff – who unfortunately became famous for their worst work – published a brilliant book with the sarcastic title “This Time Is Different.” Their point, of course, was that there is a strong family resemblance among crises. Indeed, historical parallels – not just to the 1930s, but to Japan in the 1990s, Britain in the 1920s, and more – have been vital guides to the present.

Yet economies do change over time, and sometimes in fundamental ways. So what’s really different about America in the 21st century?

The most significant answer, I’d suggest, is the growing importance of monopoly rents: profits that don’t represent returns on investment, but instead reflect the value of market dominance. Sometimes that dominance seems deserved, sometimes not; but, either way, the growing importance of rents is producing a new disconnect between profits and production and may be a factor prolonging the slump.

New York Times Editorial Board: The Fed’s Next Move

The recent announcements by the Federal Reserve have generated huge interest – and, on Wall Street, a sell-off costing the Dow Jones industrial average more than 500 points in two days. Only six weeks ago, the Fed was talking about continued “downside risks to the economic outlook.” On Wednesday, however, it said these risks had diminished since last fall, and that it expected further improvement to drive the jobless rate down to 7 percent by mid-2014, at which point it would end its stimulative bond-buying programs. [.]]

The Fed is in a spot. If it continues its bond-buying programs, bubbles could form; but worse, if it ends the programs prematurely, economic weakness could persist and deepen.

The Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, said that the plan could change as conditions warrant. That is reassuring. Still, the Fed can’t keep buying bonds forever. The real responsibility for boosting the economy lies with Congress, where Republicans have thwarted most attempts to spur growth, create jobs and strengthen the safety net, while successfully focusing the attention of the Obama administration on deficit reduction – exactly the wrong remedy for today’s economy.

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.

Click on images to enlarge.

June 21 is the 172nd day of the year (173rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 193 days remaining until the end of the year.

On non-leap years (until 2039), this day marks the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere and the winter solstice in the southern hemisphere, and this is the day of the year with the longest hours of daylight in the northern hemisphere and the shortest in the southern hemisphere.

On this day in 1964, Civil rights workers disappear.

In Neshoba County in central Mississippi, three civil rights field workers disappear after investigating the burning of an African American church by the Ku Klux Klan. Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers, had traveled to heavily segregated Mississippi in 1964 to help organize civil rights efforts on behalf of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The third man, James Chaney, was a local African American man who had joined CORE in 1963. The disappearance of the three young men garnered national attention and led to a massive FBI investigation that was code-named MIBURN, for “Mississippi Burning.”

The Mississippi civil rights workers murders involved the 1964 lynching of three political activists during the American Civil Rights Movement.

The murders of James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from Meridian, Mississippi; Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old white Jewish anthropology student from New York; and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old white Jewish CORE organizer and former social worker also from New York, symbolized the risks of participating in the civil rights movement in the South during what became known as “Freedom Summer”, dedicated to voter registration.

The case also made salient the efforts of Jews in the civil rights movement.

The Lynching

The lynching of the three men occurred shortly after midnight on June 21, 1964, when they went to investigate the burning of a church that supported civil rights activity. James Chaney was a local Freedom Movement activist in Meridian, Michael Schwerner was a CORE organizer from New York, and Andrew Goodman, also from New York, was a Freedom Summer volunteer. The three men had just finished week-long training on the campus of Western College for Women (now part of Miami University), in Oxford, Ohio, regarding strategies on how to register blacks to vote.

After getting a haircut from a black barber in Meridian, the three men headed to Longdale, Mississippi, 50 miles away in Neshoba County, in order to inspect the ruins of Mount Zion United Methodist Church. The church, a meeting place for civil rights groups, had been burned just five days earlier.

Aware that their station wagon’s license number had been given to members of the notorious White Citizens’ Council and Ku Klux Klan, before leaving Meridian they informed other Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) workers of their plans and set check-in times in accordance with standard security procedures. Late that afternoon, Neshoba County deputy Cecil Price – himself a member of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan – stopped the blue Ford carrying the trio. He arrested Chaney for allegedly driving 35 miles per hour over the speed limit. He also booked Goodman and Schwerner, “for investigation.”

Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were all denied telephone calls during their time at the jail. COFO workers made attempts to find the three men, but when they called the Neshoba County jail, the secretary followed her instructions to lie and told the workers the three young men were not there. During the hours they were held incommunicado in jail, Price notified his Klan associates who assembled and planned how to kill the three civil rights workers.

While awaiting their release, the men were given a dinner of spoonbread, green peas, potatoes and salad. When the Klan ambush was set up on the road back to Meridian, Chaney was fined $20, and the three men were ordered to leave the county. Price followed them to the edge of town, and then pulled them over with his police siren. He held them until the Klan murder squad arrived. They were taken to an isolated spot where James Chaney was beaten and all three were shot to death. Their car was driven into Bogue Chitto swamp and set on fire, and their bodies were buried in an earthen dam. In June 2000, the autopsy report that had been previously withheld from the 1967 trial was released. The report stated Chaney had a left arm broken in one place, a right arm broken in two places, “a marked disruption” of the left elbow joint and may also have suffered trauma to the groin area. A pathologist who examined the bodies at the families’ request following their autopsies noted Chaney also had a broken jaw and a crushed right shoulder which were not mentioned in the autopsy report. As the autopsy photographs and x-rays have been destroyed, the injuries could not be confirmed.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department brought a $5 billion fraud law suit against the ratings agency Standard and Poors for knowingly giving triple “A” ratings to financial products the agency’s analysts understood to be unworthy. The financial crisis that began in 2007 was mostly caused by those fraudulent ratings. Senators Al Franken (D-MN) and Roger Wicker (R-MI) worked together on an amendment that was included in  Dodd-Frank (pdf) to bring accountability and transparency to the ratings process. The amendment also required that the Securities and Exchange Commission conduct a study, that study has been completed (pdf). It found that there were “inherent” conflicts of interest in the system contributed to the 2008 crisis.

Contributing editor and investigative journalist for Rolling Stone Matt Taibbi published an in depth look at the ratings agencies and how ratings agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s helped trigger the meltdown with new documents. The documents surfaced from two lawsuits that files against S&P by  a diverse group of institutional plaintiffs with King County, Washington, and the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank. The plaintiffs claimed that S&P, along with Morgan Stanley, fraudulently induced them to heavily invest in a pair of doomed-to-implode subprime-laden deals. Matt calls these new revelations the “Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis:

What about the ratings agencies?

That’s what “they” always say about the financial crisis and the teeming rat’s nest of corruption it left behind. Everybody else got plenty of blame: the greed-fattened banks, the sleeping regulators, the unscrupulous mortgage hucksters like spray-tanned Countrywide ex-CEO Angelo Mozilo.

But what about the ratings agencies? Isn’t it true that almost none of the fraud that’s swallowed Wall Street in the past decade could have taken place without companies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s rubber-stamping it? Aren’t they guilty, too?

Man, are they ever. And a lot more than even the least generous of us suspected.

Thanks to a mountain of evidence gathered for a pair of major lawsuits, documents that for the most part have never been seen by the general public, we now know that the nation’s two top ratings companies, Moody’s and S&P, have for many years been shameless tools for the banks, willing to give just about anything a high rating in exchange for cash.

In incriminating e-mail after incriminating e-mail, executives and analysts from these companies are caught admitting their entire business model is crooked.

Matt joined MSNBC’s All In host Chris Hayes to discuss how these newly-revealed documents are “the smoking gun of the financial crisis” revealing the corruption and dishonesty at the core the industry.

We are halfway through the year and are ready to celebrate the first harvest amidst climate disruption, natural disasters compounded by man’s foolish idea that he could harness the devil. I spent some time this morning weeding my herb garden, snipping the flower buds from the huge pot of sweet basil so the energy goes to the flavorful leaves and a short walk on the beach. Tomorrow morning I will watch the sun rise for the last few hours of Spring and later watch it set on the first few hours of Summer which ushers in at 1:04 AM EDT as the Earth tilts towards the sun at its Northern maximum, the Tropic of Cancer.

Sunrise on the first day of Summer at Stonehenge in Salsbuty, England

It is a but a moment in time significant for so many cultures, religions and countries. Here in the US there are many cities that will light huge fires in public places to celebrate the longest day of the year, Midsummer. The fires will be lit in the stone fire pit in my yard. We’ll eat some of the newly harvested vegetable that are available at the local markets and eat food cooked with the herbs from my garden.

This year there is another treat for the first weekend of Summer, a Super Moon, on June 22 and 23. This is when the moon is closest to the earth (perigee), about 221,824 miles away, as compared to the 252,581 miles away that it is at its furthest distance from the Earth (apogee). The moon will appear 14% larger and 30% brighter than a typical full moon.

“The supermoon of March 19, 2011 (right) compared to a more average moon of December 20, 2010 (left), as viewed from the Earth”

Image Credit: Supermoon Comparison via Wikimedia Commons

The weather here in the northeast is going to be near perfect for watching the sunrise on the longest day of the year and moonrise the brightest and biggest full moon of the year. Check out the awesome photos from last year’s celebrations from around the world, courtesy of Huffington Post Canada.

I will be on the beach as the sun peaks over the horizon tomorrow and at a cook out with friends on Saturday celebrating the glory of Summer and the moon. Tell us what you will be doing.

Happy Summer