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Jul 16 2011
Health and Fitness News
Welcome to the Stars Hollow Health and Fitness 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.
The season for freshly picked cherries is short, usually no longer than a month. And in most parts of the country, that month is July.
Like other dark red, blue and purple fruits and vegetables, cherries contain anthocyanins, phytonutrients that some experts believe may help reduce inflammation and may have antioxidant properties.
Because cherries are ripe when they’re picked, this is one fruit that will be sweet and juicy whether you buy it at a supermarket or a farmers’ market.
This classic French dessert looks fancy, but it is a cinch to make.
Steep steel-cut oats the night before in boiling water for a quick breakfast treat.
This dairy-free smoothie serves well at breakfast or as an afternoon snack.
Many versions of cold cherry soup originated in Hungary and Poland; this lighter version is made with drained yogurt instead of cream.
Cornmeal contributes texture, and almond and whole-wheat flours add nuttiness. For a gluten-free version, substitute almond meal or rice flour for the whole-wheat flour.
Jul 16 2011
Punting the Pundits
“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 Reich: The Rise of the Wrecking-Ball Right
Recently I debated a conservative Republican who insisted the best way to revive the American economy was to shrink the size of government. When I asked him to explain his logic he said, simply, “government is the source of all our problems.” When I noted government spending had brought the economy out of the previous eight economic downturns, including the Great Depression, he disagreed. “The Depression ended because of World War Two,” he pronounced, as if government had played no part in it.
A few days later I was confronted by another conservative Republican who blamed the nation’s high unemployment rate on the availability of unemployment benefits. “If you pay someone not to work, they won’t,” he said. When I pointed out unemployment benefits couldn’t possibly be the cause of joblessness because there are now about five job seekers for every job opening, he scoffed. “Government always makes things worse.”
Government-haters seem to be everywhere.
Congressional Republicans, now led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, hate government so much they’re ready to sacrifice the full faith and credit of the United States in order to shrink it.
Fred Branfman: If McCain Had Won
Democrats were united on one issue in the 2008 presidential election: the absolute disaster that a John McCain victory would have produced. And they were right. McCain as president would clearly have produced a long string of catastrophes: He would probably have approved a failed troop surge in Afghanistan, engaged in worldwide extrajudicial assassination and kidnapping, destabilized nuclear-armed Pakistan, failed to bring Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to the negotiating table, expanded prosecution of whistle-blowers, sought to expand executive branch power, failed to close Guantanamo, failed to act on climate change, pushed both nuclear energy and a “nuclear weapons renaissance,” opened new areas to domestic oil drilling, failed to reform the financial sector enough to prevent another financial catastrophe, supported an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, ignored the poor, and failed to lower the jobless rate.
Nothing reveals the true state of American politics today more, however, than the fact that Democratic President Barack Obama has undertaken all of these actions and, even more significantly, left the Democratic Party far weaker than it would have been had McCain been elected. Few issues are more important than seeing behind the screen of a myth-making mass media, and understanding what this demonstrates about how power in America really works-and what needs to be done to change it.
It’s official. The Wall Street Journal has been Fox-ified.
It took Rupert Murdoch only three and a half years to get there, starting with the moment he acquired the paper from the dysfunctional Bancroft family in December 2007, a purchase that was completed after he vowed to protect The Journal’s editorial integrity and agreed to a (toothless) board that was supposed to make sure he kept that promise.
Fat chance of that. Within five months, Murdoch had fired the editor and installed his close friend Robert Thomson, fresh from a stint Fox-ifying The Times of London. The new publisher was Leslie Hinton, former boss of the division that published Murdoch’s British newspapers, including The News of the World. (He resigned on Friday.) Soon came the changes, swift and sure: shorter articles, less depth, an increased emphasis on politics and, weirdly, sometimes surprisingly unsophisticated coverage of business.
New York Times Editorial: Blundering Toward Recession: Beyond the Debt Stalemate
“Catastrophic.” “Calamitous.” “Major crisis.” “Self-inflicted wound.” Those are some of the ways Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, has described the fallout if Congress fails to raise the debt limit by the Aug. 2 deadline.
In Congressional testimony this week, Mr. Bernanke also warned that the Fed would not be able to fully counter the damage from a default, including the possibility that spiking interest rates would roil borrowers worldwide and worsen the federal budget deficit by making it costlier to finance the nation’s debt.
That’s not all of it. Brinkmanship over the debt limit is only one of many epic economic policy blunders now in the making. Even if lawmakers raise the debt limit on time, the economy is weak and getting weaker, as evidenced by slowing growth and rising unemployment.
Dennis Kucinich: Debt Political Theater Diverts Attention While Americans’ Wealth Is Stolen
The rancorous debate over the debt belies a fundamental truth of our economy — that it is run for the few at the expense of the many, that our entire government has been turned into a machine which takes the wealth of a mass of Americans and accelerates it into the hands of the few. Let me give you some examples.
Take war. War takes the money from the American people and puts it into the hands of arms manufacturers, war profiteers, and private armies. The war in Iraq, based on lies: $3 trillion will be the cost of that war. The war in Afghanistan; based on a misreading of history; half a trillion dollars in expenses already. The war against Libya will be $1 billion by September.
Fifty percent of our discretionary spending goes for the Pentagon. A massive transfer of wealth into the hands of a few while the American people lack sufficient jobs, health care, housing, retirement security.
David Sirota: Toward a New Politics of Food
The easiest way to explain Gallup’s discovery that millions of Americans are eating fewer fruits and vegetables than they ate last year is to simply crack a snarky joke about Whole Foods really being “Whole Paycheck.” Rooted in the old limousine liberal iconography, the quip conjures the notion that only Birkenstock-wearing trust-funders can afford to eat right in tough times.
It seems a tidy explanation for a disturbing trend, implying that healthy food is inherently more expensive, and thus can only be for wealthy Endive Elitists when the economy falters. But if the talking point’s carefully crafted mix of faux populism and oversimplification seems a bit facile-if the glib explanation seems almost too perfectly sculpted for your local right-wing radio blowhard-that’s because it dishonestly omits the most important part of the story. The part about how healthy food could easily be more affordable for everyone right now, if not for those ultimate elitists: agribusiness CEOs, their lobbyists and the politicians they own.
Jul 16 2011
On This Day In History July 16
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
July 16 is the 197th day of the year (198th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 168 days remaining until the end of the year.
On this day in 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the Manhattan Project comes to an explosive end as the first atom bomb is successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one…
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Plans for the creation of a uranium bomb by the Allies were established as early as 1939, when Italian emigre physicist Enrico Fermi met with U.S. Navy department officials at Columbia University to discuss the use of fissionable materials for military purposes. That same year, Albert Einstein wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt supporting the theory that an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction had great potential as a basis for a weapon of mass destruction. In February 1940, the federal government granted a total of $6,000 for research. But in early 1942, with the United States now at war with the Axis powers, and fear mounting that Germany was working on its own uranium bomb, the War Department took a more active interest, and limits on resources for the project were removed.
Brigadier-General Leslie R. Groves, himself an engineer, was now in complete charge of a project to assemble the greatest minds in science and discover how to harness the power of the atom as a means of bringing the war to a decisive end. The Manhattan Project (so-called because of where the research began) would wind its way through many locations during the early period of theoretical exploration, most importantly, the University of Chicago, where Enrico Fermi successfully set off the first fission chain reaction. But the Project took final form in the desert of New Mexico, where, in 1943, Robert J. Oppenheimer began directing Project Y at a laboratory at Los Alamos, along with such minds as Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, and Fermi. Here theory and practice came together, as the problems of achieving critical mass-a nuclear explosion-and the construction of a deliverable bomb were worked out.
Jul 16 2011
Obama Wants DADT Reinstated (Up Dated)
The Department of Justice has filed a brief in the 9th Circuit Court to reinstate DADT that was ordered immediately stopped by the court. The brief cited “real and immediate harm.” Now remember, the DOJ has decided not to enforce the “Defense of Marriage Act” (DOMA) or to defend it from being overturned as it winds its way through the courts. Knowing that, I would not want to be the US Attorney trying to explain the rational for this request to the judges of the 9th Circuit.
David Dayen at FDL sheds some light on this seemingly paradoxical pursuit:
The meat of the DoJ order is right here:
In sum, the government argues that lifting the stay unjustifiably takes the authority for repealing DADT away from the executive branch and it does so, at least in part, because of confusion by the Ninth Circuit panel regarding the DOJ’s view of whether DADT is constitutional after the passage of the repeal act and regarding the application of the DOJ’s DOMA decisions to military laws like DADT.
The executive branch wants to defend its policy work and doesn’t want the court bigfooting around finding its laws unconstitutional. Unless we’re talking about DOMA, where that’s precisely what DoJ has requested.
It looks like a question of who gets the power to overturn DADT. The President wants his signing ceremony.
The court is confused? Well, they’re not alone and that twisted argument made my back hurt. The reality is that this is all about the president’s ego and reelection and those pesky gays should be grateful.
Up Date: From John Aravosis at AMERICAblog Gay
9th Circuit again tells Obama administration to stop discharging gays
Oral arguments are set for September 1st in Pasadena, CA.
Jul 16 2011
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
If you do not get Current TV you can watch Keith here:
Jul 16 2011
Too Many Miles and Too Many Smiles
Harry Forster Chapin (December 7, 1942 – July 16, 1981) was an American singer-songwriter best known in particular for his folk rock songs including “Taxi”, “W*O*L*D”, and the number-one hit “Cat’s in the Cradle”. Chapin was also a dedicated humanitarian who fought to end world hunger; he was a key player in the creation of the Presidential Commission on World Hunger in 1977. In 1987, Chapin was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his humanitarian work.
WhyHunger.org is the organization that Harry co-founded with Bill Ayres in 1975.
Rare Harry Chapin concert on WFUV
To mark the 30th anniversary of his friend Harry Chapin’s passing, WFUV-FM (90.7) host Pete Fornatale will air a rare concert by the folk singer on “Mixed Bag” at 4 p.m. Saturday.
The concert, recorded live at Fordham University on Nov. 27, 1977, has not been broadcast in more than three decades; it airs 30 years to the day of Chapin’s death. It was recorded as part of the 1977 Hungerthon to benefit World Hunger Year, the organization co-founded by Chapin and Bill Ayres.
Jul 15 2011
Why Is This Being Ignored?
From Steve Benen at the Political Animal:
Yesterday, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, explored in some detail the effects of a deficit-reduction package. His comments generated almost no media attention, which is a shame because they seem rather important.
Elmendorf argued that, in the medium and long term, small deficits could improve economic output. But what about now, in the short term, when the economy is struggling badly?
In the short term, while the economy is relatively weak and economic growth is restrained primarily by a shortfall in demand for goods and services, the policy would decrease the demand for goods and services even further and thus reduce economic output and income. [emphasis added]
The CBO director’s comments came the same afternoon as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke reminded Congress that the recovery is still fragile, and that “sharp and excessive cuts in the very short term would be potentially damaging to that recovery.”
Jul 15 2011
Punting the Pundits
“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”.
Paul Krugman: Getting to Crazy
There aren’t many positive aspects to the looming possibility of a U.S. debt default. But there has been, I have to admit, an element of comic relief – of the black-humor variety – in the spectacle of so many people who have been in denial suddenly waking up and smelling the crazy.
A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. “Has the G.O.P. gone insane?” they ask.
Why, yes, it has. But this isn’t something that just happened, it’s the culmination of a process that has been going on for decades. Anyone surprised by the extremism and irresponsibility now on display either hasn’t been paying attention, or has been deliberately turning a blind eye.
Jon Walker Calling Obama’s Bluff
Last night the Republicans offered to do a short term increase of the debt ceiling to prevent default and President Obama angrily dismissed it according to the Huffington Post:
At issue was Cantor’s repeated push to do a short-term resolution and Obama’s insistence that he would not accept one.
“Eric, don’t call my bluff. I’m going to the American people on this,” the president said, according to both Cantor and another attendee. “This process is confirming what the American people think is the worst about Washington: that everyone is more interested in posturing, political positioning, and protecting their base, than in resolving real problems.”
At this point though I don’t see why Eric Cantor won’t try to call President Obama bluff over threatening to veto a short term deal.
As I have explain in more detail Obama threat to veto any short term increase has created a serious credibility problem for the President. You can’t both say default would be a huge problem and that you will single-handily cause a default simply because you won’t grant the GOP request for a short term increase so they can have a few more days to negotiate.
Dean Baker: Stealing from Social Security Is NOT a Debt Solution — Why Do the Media Promote This Dangerous Myth?
Pursuing a plan to kill social security, politicians are relying on a credulous public and compliant media to ramp up debt panic.
The conventional wisdom among the current generation of school reformers is that bad teachers are to blame for the failure of many of our children to learn. Applying this logic to the current debates over the budget and the economy, we should be pointing a big finger of blame at the media.
The conventional wisdom among the current generation of school reformers is that bad teachers are to blame for the failure of many of our children to learn. Applying this logic to the current debates over the budget and the economy, we should be pointing a big finger of blame at the media.
As survey after survey shows, the vast majority of the public are incredibly ignorant of the most basic facts about the budget and the economy. If we treated their teachers in the media the way the educational reformers treat public school teachers, few economics and budget reporters would have jobs.
As negotiators in the debt-ceiling talks sputtered and raged, the chill reality of an imminent government default crept up Wednesday and made a mockery of their gamesmanship. Two major rating agencies warned that a once-unthinkable downgrade of the nation’s credit rating would be at hand if this crisis was not immediately defused.
That finally punctured the careless notion, popularized by Tea Party lawmakers like Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert, that default would be a minor inconvenience. Standard & Poor’s said a downgrade could occur if any required payments were missed, even if bondholders were paid first. Moody’s said a new process for dealing with the debt ceiling was needed. Although the bond markets have yet to be roiled, there are fresh indications that China and other investors are beginning to get nervous.
The alarms could not be much louder, but myth-making is still impeding the desperately needed deal.
Matt Taibbi: Greed, Excess and America’s Gaping Class Divide
Courtesy of good friend and Supreme Court of Assholedom justice David Sirota comes this revolting list of Marie Antoinettoid moments from recent years, in an article called “The New ‘Let Them Eat Cake!'”
Some of the moments on the list are easily recalled – Berkshire Hathaway gazillionaire Charlie Munger’s famous “suck it up and cope” quote, coming from a guy whose company was heavily invested in bailed-out banks, was an obvious inclusion – but others are quite shocking.
For instance, I was completely floored by the New York Times‘ pseudo-ironic take on the government’s response to the financial crisis, a piece entitled “You Try to Live on $500K in This Town.”
This came at a time when President Obama was considering curtailing compensation for bailed-out bankers at $500,000. The piece was sort of meant to be taken half as a joke, but it is not hard to detect an element of demented earnestness in the fashion section article, an honest argument that with mortgages and private school tuition and co-op fees and taxes, it really was very hard for a certain kind of New Yorker to get by on half a million a year.
Laura Carlsen: The Audacity of “Free Trade” Agreements
Congress could vote any day now to strike a new blow against already-battered U.S. workers and the unemployed
Committees in the House and Senate recently marked up the Colombia, Panama, and South Korea Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). The Obama administration is urging passage of all three relics of the Bush administration before the summer recess.
The full-court press on the FTAs represents a reversal for a president elected on a trade reform platform. During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama proclaimed his opposition to the NAFTA-style FTAs and boasted of his stance against the devastating North American and Central American agreements. As candidate Obama, he carefully distanced himself from the open-market, pro-corporate policies of his predecessor, calling for significant changes to the NAFTA model, including enforceable labor and environmental standards, and consumer protections.
Bill Boyarsky: ‘Entitlement’ Is a Republican Word
At his news conference this week, President Barack Obama seized on a misleading Washington word-“entitlements”-to describe the badly needed aid programs that are likely to be cut because of his compromises with the Republicans.
“Entitlement” is a misleading word because it masks the ugly reality of reducing medical aid for the poor, the disabled and anyone over 65 as well as cutting Social Security. Calling such programs entitlements is much more comfortable than describing them as what they are-Medicare, Social Security and money for good schools, unemployment insurance, medical research and public works construction that would put many thousands to work.
It’s also a Republican word. It implies that those receiving government aid have a sense of entitlement, that they’re getting something for nothing. And now it’s an Obama word as he moves toward the center and away from the progressives who powered his 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination over centrist Hillary Clinton.
Jul 15 2011
Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Iran
Why is anyone listening to these people? The Wall Street Journal editorial board made it clear that they are all for more war. In an editorial, the board advocated for not only maintaining troops in Iraq for years, as we have in Japan and Korea, but keeping troops in Iraq for decades, as well. Their reasoning is security in the region without any understanding of the consequences of the destabilizing factor of the presence of the US military. The real eye popper was further down in the article:
The U.S. has chosen not to go after the militias directly to shield the government of Nouri al-Maliki from the domestic political fallout of unilateral American military action. Such considerations are cold comfort to soldiers under attack. The U.S. has a legal and moral responsibility to respond. We ought to go after the militias in Iraq as well as their backers in Iran who’ve decided to make Iraq a proxy war.
Seriously? Did they even think about what would happen if the US sent troops into Iran? Iran is not Afghanistan. It is a relatively modern country with a standing army and navy. Former Bush administration National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley described the disastrous effect of an attack on Iran which would most likely result the closing of the Straits of Hormuz which would cut off access to the oil producing states in the Persian Gulf.
While omitting the elephant in the room, Hadley effectively outlined one of the likely disastrous effects of an attack on Iran. In town for a war game organized by an advocacy group that emphasizes energy insecurity, Hadley told Fox’s Eric Bolling:
HADLEY: [I]f you think about it, most of our oil comes from states that are unstable and in the Middle East or states like Venezuela and Libya and Iran that bear is no good will.
BOLLING: Sir, I have pointed this out in the past, a scenario that could happen. They tried it in the past. Iran could close off the Strait of Hormuz, that very, very short world oil choke-point, cutting off not one or two million barrels a day but 17 million barrels a day. A very easy put them to do. What would happen to the price of oil and the American economy?
HADLEY: The price of oil would skyrocket. I am sure you would see more than 200 barrels – dollars a barrel for oil. The economy would be in severe straits. Our military will tell you that in time there will be able to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but it wouldn’t have to be closed very long to have a devastating impact on our economy and the global economy. It’s not just the United States. But the United States is particularly vulnerable because we are struggling and it is of course where we live so we care about it.
If these war hawks want to destabilize not just the US economy but the world’s economy, as well, then by all means let’s “Bomb.bomb, bomb Iran.
Just an aside, Dean Baker @ Center for Economic and Policy Research said that just ending the wars in Afghanistan & Iraq would pay for the shortfall in Medicare over the next 75 years.
h/t Think Progress
Jul 15 2011
On This Day In History July 15
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
July 15 is the 196th day of the year (197th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 169 days remaining until the end of the year.
On this day 1789, Lafayette selected colonel-general of the National Guard of Paris
Only one day after the fall of the Bastille marked the beginning of a new revolutionary regime in France, the French aristocrat and hero of the American War for Independence, Marie-Joseph Paul Roch Yves Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, becomes the colonel-general of the National Guard of Paris by acclamation. Lafayette served as a human link between America and France in what is sometimes known as The Age of Revolutions.
National Guard, Versailles, and Day of Daggers
On 15 July, Lafayette was acclaimed commander-in-chief of the National Guard of France, an armed force established to maintain order under the control of the Assembly. Lafayette proposed the name and the symbol of the group: a blue, white and red cockade. On 5 October 1789, a Parisian crowd, composed mostly of rough women working in the markets selling fish, marched to Versailles in response to the scarcity of bread. Members of the National Guard followed the march, and when Lafayette said that this march is non-sense, the National Guard’s men openly defied his power and according to some sources, they said “We are going with you, or over you”, then Lafayette reluctantly led the National Guard army to Versaille. At Versailles, the king accepted the Assembly’s votes but refused requests to return to Paris. That evening, Lafayette replaced most of the royal bodyguards with National Guardsmen. At dawn, the crowd broke into the palace. Before it succeeded in entering the queen’s bedroom, Marie Antoinette fled to the king’s apartments. Lafayette took the royal family onto the palace balcony and attempted to restore order. The crowd insisted that the king and his family move to Paris where they were installed in the Tuileries Palace. At the balcony, King Louis simply appeared, and everyone started chanting “Vive le Roi!”. Then when Maria Antoinette appeared with her children, she was told to send the children back, afterwards, when she came out alone, people shouted to shoot her, but when she stood her ground facing almost certain death, no one opened fire. After several seconds and the lowering of rifles, people started to chant “Vive la Reine!” (“Long live the Queen”, now the crowd is including the Queen)As leader of the National Guard, Lafayette attempted to maintain order. On 12 May 1790, he instituted, along with Jean Sylvain Bailly (mayor of Paris), a political club called the “Society of 1789” . The club’s intention was to provide balance to the influence of the Jacobins. On 14 July 1790, Lafayette took the civic oath on the Champs de Mars, vowing to “be ever faithful to the nation, to the law, and to the king; to support with our utmost power the constitution decreed by the National Assembly, and accepted by the king.”
He continued to work for order in the coming months. On 20 February 1791, the Day of Daggers, Lafayette traveled to Vincennes in response to an attempt to liberate a local prison. Meanwhile, armed nobles converged around the Tuileries, afraid the unprotected king would be attacked. Lafayette returned to Paris to disarm the nobles.[89] On 18 April, the National Guard disobeyed Lafayette and stopped the King from leaving for Saint-Cloud over Easter.
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