I love meat. I eat pork chops, thick bacon-burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou.

Note, especially, the medium-well-done. Sarah’s confident that those few liberals who still eat meat eat it rare, medium rare, or (for the snootiest among them) bleu. Moving on, from page 133:

I also trimmed the state food budget by keeping our home’s freezer stocked with wild seafood we caught ourselves, as well as organic protein sources hunted by friends and family. We kept an interesting variety of food that way. If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a saalad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?

Italics are Sarah’s. You have to love the gratuitous swipe at that most liberal of all liberals, the vegan. I imagine Sarah’s spotted them driving their Prius’s on her not infrequent forays into urban areas outside of Alaska.

She goes on to explain the challenges of hunting while serving as governor: Hollywood pressure to ban guns, halt hunting, and save wildlife. Evidently doing the job itself while raising kids, “cooking dinner and washing dishes” (page 108) was no obstacle.

What Sarah is espousing is a proud Conservative version of the liberal foodie. From page 134:

People outside of Alaska are often clueless about our reliance on natural food sources. (You know you’re in Alaska when at least twice a year your kitchen doubles as a meat-processing plant.) They don’t use common sense in considering why our biologists need responsible tools for abundant game management. But as the ninety-year-old Alaska Native leader Sydney Hunnington told Todd, “Nowadays, common sense is an endangered species.”

So wonderfully clear and can’t we just all agree with her on that? Of course, we can! But I’m left wondering, has she ever seen a CAFO? And what, exactly, does she believe “responsible tools for abundant game management” are? No further word on that.

For the record, I’m an omnivore with retrovore tendencies. I ponder the difference between animal rights and animal welfare. And I, too, eat meat.

Via this week’s delectable doubleX Gabfest.

BONUS VIDEO: Fans gone mad…

I have frequently written on patriotism, “supporting the troops,” the cost of war as measured in “bullets and dollars” and, most important, on the cost of war as measured by the sweat, blood, tears and lives of our valiant troops. This, while Americans back home are not asked to sacrifice in any meaningful manner, and are even encouraged to “go shopping.”

My words, however, are woefully inadequate when compared to a powerful, heart-rending article that appears today in my hometown newspaper.

The column, titled “Military draft would end America’s two-faced patriotism,” in my opinion, eloquently expresses sentiments and emotions that so many of us have felt so strongly over the past eight years, but have not been willing or able to express.

I will share a couple of them here.

The author, Joe James Sawyer, who was in the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) 1st Special Forces from 1963 to 1966, writes:

The cost of asymmetric warfare is evident in the growing numbers of young Americans coming home with horrific injuries inflicted by improvised explosive devices. The lives of those wounded soldiers are shattered — they come home missing limbs, blinded, brain damaged.

There is no end in sight. For all these years, we have carried on a national debate about the necessity of these wars and the terrible cost they carry. That dialogue has been, in the main, dishonest and hypocritical.

[In all the wars we have fought in our history] [A]ll Americans shared the pain when young lives were lost or forever shattered in America’s battlefields. The rich and the poor, black, white, red, yellow and brown — all of us — knew the grief, the loss and the suffering of Vietnam.
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That is no longer true and has not been for far too many years.

He continues:

There are generations of American men and women who have no sense of service, fidelity or sacrifice. There are far too many among us who believe patriotism is to be found in waving flags and wearing yellow ribbons.

We are sending the same men and women to theaters of combat over and over, without relent. This simply cannot continue. It harms our country to do so. It cheapens any claim to patriotism by Americans who wave flags and profess to honor “our” troops while their children will never know what it means to serve the flag of the United States. Just as their parents have never known.

After claiming that others will do “the sacrifice of dying” while “the children of privileged Americans…are sheltered from any threat of having to defend their country” and while enjoying the right “to rant about the need to fight, to display their flag-waving courage and continue their feast unabated,” Sawyer points to the need to again have a universal draft: “If war is to be waged, we all must contribute; we all must sacrifice. Without that, we truly become hollow men.”

Sawyer concludes:

The time must come again when all Americans fight our wars, shoulder to shoulder on the field of combat. Only three things are required to make this come true: a sense of fairness, a sense of duty and a sense of honor.

Regardless of what your position is on the military draft, I urge you to read all of Sawyer’s moving words here.

Like the would-be VP but for much longer and in a far different way, Oprah has been a phenomenon, rising from the depths of poverty to become an American icon with empathy, intelligence and enthusiasm, an Everywoman in constant battles to control her emotional life as well as her weight, educate herself and her audiences with a book club, overcome all obstacles in a world still dominated by men.

Her embrace of Barack Obama last year was the climax of a career that went well beyond race, giving a rhetorically gifted but emotionally standoffish candidate just the touch of humanity needed to connect with her constituency, to say nothing of the $3 million and more she raised for him.

Trading her celebrity at 55 to become a mostly behind-the-scenes Rupert Murdoch, Oprah leaves more than two decades of what has been called “a talk show as group therapy session” for millions

MORE.

– “Actually, the GOP has been the leader in starting good environmental programs in this country.”

Maybe, if you go all the way back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt. More recently, the GOP is the party of global warming denialism and opposition to environmental legislation generally.

– “Just as we were the people who passed the civil rights bills back in the ’60s without very much help from our colleagues across the aisle. They love to engage in revisionist history.”

If it’s revisionist history you want, you’ll get it whenever Foxx opens her mouth. She’s certainly old enough to remember that it was a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, who was largely (but not solely) responsible for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Furthermore, Republicans were broadly against civil rights, and in fact it was to a great extent their opposition to civil rights that flipped the South from the Democrats, who had long held it, ushering in a new regional and demographic alignment in American politics and paving the way for Republican electoral success over the next few decades, pretty much up to the present. It was only in 2008, with a hugely popular presidential candidate, that the Democrats were able to break through in parts of the South — notably Virginia and North Carolina — that were for the most part solidly Republican. Even with Obama, though, the South remains a Republican bastion, and democrats continue to have a problem winning over white men.

Did some Republicans support civil rights in the ’60s? Of course. A lot of them did — and a lot from parts of the country that are now solidly Democratic, now that the GOP has moved to far to the right. But it’s crazy to think that they did it on their own, or that they were largely responsible for it, or that Democrats not only had nothing to do with it but were actively against it. That last one is insulting, not just to President Johnson but to the many Democrats who were on the front lines of the struggle, and to those who stood with their president to change America for the better.

But, then, this is Virginia Foxx we’re talking about. We shouldn’t be at all surprised by her misrepresentation of historical fact.

(Cross-posted from The Reaction.)

Mike Oreskes, a senior managing editor, offers staffers a description of the AP’s own work tracking down and fact checking the book and it reads like a spy thriller:

“The AP was determined to get the first copy,” Oreskes wrote, detailing how the writers learned a store had “inadvertently placed the book on sale five days before its official Nov. 17 release date.”

“They bought a copy, ripped it from its spine and scanned it into the system so it could be read and electronically searched,” he wrote. “A NewsNow moved within 40 minutes, followed quickly by multiple leads as details were gleaned from the 413-page manuscript.”

From the newsletter:

The publisher, HarperCollins, had it locked down. There were no galleys for reviewers or agents. Warehouses were closely guarded. Stores were threatened with large fines. People close to Palin – those given early copies – were strongly advised not to show them to reporters.

The AP had owned the story from the start, with a series of exclusives from Italie beginning with Palin’s contract with HarperCollins, and the AP was determined to get the first copy. [...]

The story commanded massive play, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal.com and USA Today, the three major television networks, and major Web sites and portals Yahoo, Google, Huffington Post and Politico. The Washington Post did a separate story about how the publisher’s carefully orchestrated rollout was foiled, and Palin herself, not happily, noted the scoop on Facebook.

Impressive. And nice to know that AP rewards good work. The two journos who found the book share a $500 cash prize that AP gives each week for best gets.

Yours truly also predicted this entire economic collapse at least 5 years ago, but no one took me seriously. Prophets are never appreciated or heeded in their own times. However, I am not pleased that I was correct in my original assessment of Mr. Geithner 7 months ago because the entire country has suffered due to his incompetence, Wall Street Bias, and overall cluelessness towards the needs of Main Street and the vast majority of Americans.

Most politicians are quick to blame others (sometimes correctly) for political and economic problems but they never want to admit they were incorrect in any of their decisions or that they helped make those problems. Unfortunately hindsight is 20-20 and no one is clairvoyant except Madame Olga on the West Side of Cleveland. We all make mistakes – yours truly included – and it is better to quickly fess up publicly to those errors in judgment, change course and move on.

Too many politicians think an admission of error is a sign of weakness so they continue to proudly deny, blame others, obfuscate the real facts, and follow various stupid and discredited policies so as to not have to admit they made any mistakes. This applies to most of our elected leaders regardless of their political or economic positions. I wrote back on 3/19/09:

Many in the general public want some genuine honesty from their politicians. Some voters will always punish our leaders for admitting mistakes because they themselves are unwilling to admit their private errors either. However, most people understand all too well our human imperfections. But we expect people to learn from their errors and move in another direction after taking full ownership of their mistakes.

President Obama would not fare poorly in 2010 or 2012 if he promptly admitted numerous errors he has made while in office – while avoiding admitting any more debatable or obvious mistakes made in U.S. history to which he was not a party. He could then promptly change his focus and move on with renewed public support. That would really distinguish him from other politicians and gain him public respect. There has been sufficient time now to fully judge Secretary Geithner. The President can now point to the worsening general economy and public anger over unregulated massive bailouts of Wall Street to justify his decision to part ways with his chief financial adviser.

I can list a number of policy and tactical mistakes the President has made since taking office, and so can most TMV readers. One major issue today is with those who aare key advisors to the President in making public policy with respect to our country’s financial and economic future. There are many independent and highly capable individuals in the U.S. without any direct ties to Wall Street or prior Administrations who could competently lead the U.S. Treasury Department. Secretary Timothy Geithner is not one of them.

The 2010 Midterm elections are less than a year a way because of Constitutionally-fixed federal elections every 2 years. Mr. Geithner is eminently disposable for the good of the country and for President Obama’s political survival. So Mr. President, please admit some of your mistakes (most people will likely forgive you), and throw Secretary Geithner under the bus – or at least ease him out the rear doors to some cushy Wall Street position where he can do no more harm to the nation.

Marc Pascal – the ever ranting sage in Phoenix, AZ who wishes everyone a pleasant weekend.

After nearly two months of deliberation, some have criticized the Obama Administration of foot-dragging a decision on Afghanistan. As a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, I could not disagree more. If the previous administration had put such care into its approach toward Iraq and Afghanistan, we might not be facing the difficulties we face today.

An informed decision is not the same as indecision. Given the complexities of securing Afghanistan and turning the tide against the insurgency, it is critical that our commander-in-chief understand the nature of the challenge, and I applaud the president for taking the time to acquire that understanding.

But to succeed in Afghanistan, we need more than a president who understands what we’re up against. We need the American people to understand. To achieve this understanding, I would suggest that there are two major trends in our favor that the American people ought to know.

First, Pakistan has finally recognized the need to confront al Qaeda and the Taliban within its own country, conducting significant operations over the last year to retake Taliban controlled territory.

This is a tremendous shift by Pakistan, which has historically funded terrorist organizations aimed at attacking India. They are in the fight against terrorism now. This gives us the opportunity to crush al Qaeda and the Taliban in the region, with Pakistan attacking them from its own territory in the east, while U.S. and allied forces attack from the West in Afghanistan. This is a vice we should tighten.

Second, America now “does” counter-insurgency. The attitude, tactical skills, and operational ability needed to defeat an insurgency are very different from the conventional warfare abilities that have guided our military thinking since World War II.

Leaders such as Generals Petraeus and McChrystal have recognized this fact and begun to conduct military operations accordingly. The Army and Marine Corps also gained counter-insurgency skills the hard way, during the Iraqi crucible, learning that the key to defeating insurgents lies in protecting the population.

Success in Afghanistan will only come if the Afghan people see the U.S.-led mission in a positive light, which requires the military to put a premium on protecting people. With a counter-insurgency strategy firmly in place, securing this long-term support has now become a possibility.

Of course, these developments alone do not guarantee easy success in Afghanistan. There are, however, no real alternatives. The two most popular suggestions – walking away from Afghanistan or returning to a failed “counter-terror” strategy – carry far too much risk.

Walking away from Afghanistan would be a disaster. We did that once before, after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in the 1980s. The result? Without an American hand in the region, Afghanistan disintegrated into chaos. Pakistan supported the least bad path toward stability, the Taliban. The Taliban eventually gave legal sanctuary to al Qaeda, which used Afghan territory to prepare the 9/11 attacks.

Were we to leave Afghanistan now, the region would spiral out of control once again. Except this time, Pakistan is a nuclear nation. Getting out of the game now would allow extremists to get closer to nuclear weapons, a decidedly unacceptable situation.

Similarly, a counter-terrorism approach to Afghanistan is no real solution. We have been trying that for eight years, with large unit operations to hunt bandits, and drones to kill Taliban and al Qaeda leaders. Though we have eliminated a significant number of bad guys, we have also alienated a lot of fence-sitters, and the insurgency has grown stronger. Clearly, we need a new approach.

So what should that approach look like? First, the U.S. must commit to defeating the elements of the Taliban who would either challenge the legitimate governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan, or harbor members of trans-national terrorist organizations.

Then we need to follow up these commitments with troops and time. Give General McChrystal what he needs to get the situation under control, and the time he needs to train more Afghan forces. The sooner the Afghans can protect themselves, the sooner we can bring our troops home.

There won’t be a Victory-Afghanistan day that we will all be able to look back on thirty years from now. We live in a different world that includes a different kind of war and a different kind of victory. But the path to that 21st century victory is on the table right now. A steadfast commitment from the United States will ultimately help the Afghan people to pursue a better future for themselves and bolster our security by denying safe haven to terrorists and extremists.

Can President Obama persuade China not to be so dependent on growth, particularly trade-dependent growth? Likening Beijing’s obsession with growth to a Chinese version of the ‘Berlin Wall,’ Feng Mengyun of China’s state-run Global Geographic Times expresses his hope that President Obama can do something to talk the Beijing leadership into turning over a new leaf.

With some surprising criticism of the regime, Feng Mengyun writes for the Global Geographic Times in part:

“Prior to thirty years ago, the old Chinese model caused tremendous suffering. But an even graver sin would have been to stick with the system that caused such suffering.

“While [Chinese] exports stand at $1.7 trillion, domestic sales are only $860 billion. China’s trade deficit with the U.S. is $300 billion. This seems like a huge trade surplus, not to mention a contradiction. More difficult to fathom is how much foreign exports are responsible for China’s rise. Today, even with 20 percent of the world’s doors closed to trade, China unceasingly opposes trade protection and domestic unemployment is rising by the million. Is China capable of dealing with this?

“The unpredictable issue is China itself. Because rising growth has become China’s ‘Berlin Wall.’

“Obama’s ‘mutually beneficial’ thinking has already received widespread support in liberal countries, which is why the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize went to the first Black U.S. president. Since he arranged to visit China before going to Norway to collect his Prize, I hope while visiting China, Obama declares: ‘Mr. Hu Jintao, tear down this wall!’

By Feng Mengyun [???]

Translated by Jimmy Chow

November 16, 2009

People’s Republic of China – Global Geographic Times – Original Article (China)

U.S. President Barack Obama, “Ambassador of Peace,” has finally set foot in Beijing. Ahead of his visit, North Korea fired missiles, there was a sea battle between North and South Korea, and Somali pirates took 28 Chinese sailors hostage. What do these events tell Chinese who their enemies and friends are!

READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.

Both columns keyed off his testimony yesterday before a House panel. I saw clips of that encounter and got some pretty clear insights about the way our Treasury Secretary thinks. They convinced me the man must go.

What made this so obvious was Geithner’s response to a query from one of the House panel’s Republican members. This congressman pointed to the 10.2 percent unemployment rate and asked the Secretary if that didn’t incline him to quit. Geithner proceeded to blow his cool.

He railed that a Republican had no business saying something like this given the record of the eight years Bush and company were messing up the economy, and went on to say that by any measure things are better now than when he (and the Obama Administration generally) came into office.

Was he right that he and Obama inherited a horrid mess from the Bush years? Of course. And without in any way seeking to minimize the extent of the economic foul ups in those years, it could also be said that the eight years under Clinton and his own Treasury Secretary, another Goldman Sachs alum, Robert Rubin, featured the so-called “American Consensus” that added mightily to the mess Geithner and the rest of the Obama economic team inherited. Reagan’s policies were another big factor here, and you could even credibly track the beast back to President Johnson’s guns-and-butter spending.

None of this history, however, amounts to a good excuse of the bungling of Geithner during the almost full year he has helped shape economic policies. Beyond this, to suggest, as Geithner did, that his own culpability for economic matters only began when Obama came into office is not just disingenuous but outright deceitful. He was head of the New York Fed for five of the Bush years during which his predecessor at Treasury, Hank Paulson, was doing his own bungling. Geithner is almost as guilty as Paulson and Bernanke at the Fed for the awful economic nostrums of Bush. Blaming the pre-Obama policies of the Bush team without noting that he was joined with this team at the hip in order to deflect blame from himself doesn’t pass the smell test.

The other part of Geithner’s defensive railing yesterday was even more striking. He actually used the term “by any measure things have improved” to describe what his work at Treasury hath wrought for our present economy. “By any measure.” Think of that. Think of what it means. Because what it means is that the measures he is using to gauge economic improvement are measures that benefit banks and Wall Street.

Yes, bank books have improved because of his policies. Yes, Wall Street has surged back. Yes, the investing community is doing very well again — at least the top tier of that community. By every one of the measures that might make a banker or Goldman Sachs manager happy his work has most certainly improved things.

But his “by any measure” does not include employment. Foreclosures. The economic angst and anguish of most Americans not part of the financial gang.

Tim Geithner isn’t a bad man. Nor was Hank Paulson. Not was Robert Rubin. They are simply, by virtue of who they are, what they’ve always done, who they associate with, part of a community that thinks Main Street exists to service the needs and perks of Wall Street, rather than vice-versa.

Tim Geithner is out of economic touch with most Americans. We need a bigger man with a bigger view for his job. I’d suggest Paul Volcker.

center>http://www.wallstreetpoet.com ]]> http://themoderatevoice.com/53583/geithner-must-go/feed/ 5 http://themoderatevoice.com/53583/geithner-must-go/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/themoderatevoice/~3/9CLIYXmtaVM/ http://themoderatevoice.com/53580/new-zealand-poised-to-enter-space-race-with-atea-1-rocket/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:19:36 +0000 JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief http://themoderatevoice.com/?p=53580 A sign of the times: New Zealand is now poised to become the latest country to enter the space rase, 3News reports:

New Zealand is about to enter the space race with a private venture which aims to cash in on the market for scientific research.

A Kiwi company has not only built its own rocket, but designed the fuel to blast it 120km straight up.

In a bunker in Parnell, Auckland, ATEA-1 is preparing to rise to the occasion.

The six-metre rocket will see New Zealand become the 13th member of the space club and acknowledged as a leader in technology.

From an island off the Coromandel Peninsula next week, the ATEA-1 will be launched with a small, 2kg payload of scientific equipment.

Space begins at 100km up, and ATEA-1 should reach 120km, stay there for three minutes and then parachute down into the sea for payload recovery, a total flight time of 45 minutes.

“In the northern hemisphere there has been a tremendous amount of research done with these sorts of rockets,” says project engineer Peter Beck.

TVNZ adds:

Three Auckland men will create history by being the first Kiwis to send something into space from New Zealand.

Company Rocket Lab is planning the first ever launch into space from New Zealand soil on November 30 from the Corromandel.

Rocket Lab director Peter Beck says the event changes the status of the country.

“Once we successfully reach space, at that point New Zealand is essentially a space nation, which it currently is not.”

Beck, 32, is the originial rocket man. He built a rocket bike when he was a teenager and has spent the last 15 years making things that shoot into space.

The nose of this rocket will reach 900 degrees celcius as it travels to an altitude of 120 kilometres into the atmosphere and falls back to the Pacific Ocean. The rocket, Manu Karere or bird messenger, will spend about half an hour in space.

Rocket Lab is a business venture to get people to pay to send things into space.

Stuff.co.nz gives details on the rocket:

Called Manu Korere – which translates as bird messenger – the rocket was designed by private company Rocket Lab, headed by former crown research scientist Peter Beck, 32.

At six metres long and 150mm in diameter the rocket is designed for scientific sub-orbital ’sounding’ missions.

It will travel to an altitude of 120 kilometres – space starts at 100 kilometres – then return to earth in a sub-orbital ballistic curve, to be recovered from a splashdown at sea.

It can carry a payload of just two kilograms, but that is more than enough for modern miniaturised scientific instruments, says Mr Beck.

Rocket Lab hopes to grab a slice of the lucrative space market, selling access to its rocket to send science equipment into space, testing things like climate change.

The rocket – officially an Atea-1 model – is almost entirely constructed from lightweight carbon fibre composites. Components such as the rocket nozzle and combustion chamber are all manufactured from Rocket Lab- developed composite materials which are a fraction of the weight of traditional metal components.

The rocket generates the equivalent of 3200 horsepower from a rocket engine weighing just 13kg.

Space…the final frontier…is getting more populated and used in ways that won’t only benefit science, but business here on earth..

OF RELATED INTEREST:
Timeline of first orbital launches by country
The Country with the Most Successful Space Rocket Launch
Which Country Has Launched the Most Rockets Into Space?

Senator Evan Bayh (D-Indiana), writing in CNN, says he plans to oppose raising the debt ceiling what the issue comes up for a vote next month. He’s unwilling to raise this ceiling, he writes, unless “Congress adopts a credible process to balance our books and eliminate the red ink” — and he wants to form a “debt commission” to start the process.

A debt commission will force members of Congress to take — or reject — a single gulp of politically difficult medicine to treat the fiscal problems that are ailing our country. Those who choose not to take that medicine would be forced to explain to their constituents why a $12 trillion national debt doesn’t make them queasy.

Unfortunately, members of Congress won’t have to explain anything to their constituents. Partisans and liberals are already taking virtual pens to paper to attack him:

There are, however, some issues to consider. For example, it was none other than Evan Bayh who recently voted to “reform” the estate tax, cutting taxes for the extraordinarily rich, at a cost of $750 billion over the next decade. To pay for it, he recommended … nothing. The costs would simply all be added to the deficit. Given this, I hope he’ll forgive my skepticism about his credibility on the subject of fiscal responsibility.

And just like that, Bayh’s entire suggestion is chucked out the window. Steve Benen goes on with the usual spiel about how its really more the Republicans fault anyway — an increasingly tired excuse, from my perspective, for the lack of fiscal discipline by The Powers That Be.

Now, I’m just an average non-economist, but here’s how I see this: It does not matter who did what in the past.

Long-term deficits drive up interest rates for consumers, raise prices of goods and services, and weaken our country’s financial competitiveness and security.

The bigger our deficits, the fewer resources we have to make critical investments in energy, education, health care and tax relief for small businesses and middle-class families.

The bigger our deficits, the more we must borrow from foreign creditors like China, allowing governments with competing interests to influence our economic and trade policies in ways that run counter to our national interest.

Elementary school tactics like finger-pointing do nothing to forestall these problems, and partisan sniping merely increases the unproductive polarization. Yet people are indulging themselves at every opportunity — no doubt because it makes great red meat to feed the ongoing frenzy.

And, of course, it’s much easier to point and blame than fix problems.

Listen: I don’t care anymore that George W. Bush cooked the Iraq War funding books. I don’t care anymore which party enabled the Fannie Mae cluster and pushed funding for mortgages people couldn’t afford. I don’t care anymore whether there was a “D” or an “R” trailing behind anybody’s name… whether it was last month, or last year, or during my grandfathers’ days.

We’re in the midst of a massive national belt-tightening — a process both necessary and long-overdue. From the citizen who borrowed against tomorrow because s/he “had to have” that wide-screen television, to the lawmaker who “had to bring home the bacon”, we’ve been the very epitome of excess borrowing and consumerism. It’s brought us right to our knees, and we’re going to stay there until our leaders find some fortitude.

Folks are going to have to suck it up and do without a pet project or cause for while — no matter how worthy or near-and-dear it may be.

I’m sorry about that, but this utter failure to control our spending is eventually going to crash all those projects anyway — and if the people currently in charge are unable to get past their own ideological childishness, then I want them out of there, donkey or elephant.

Period.

Cathleen Rogers, the Democratic Elections Commissioner in Hamilton County stated that they discovered a problem with their voting machines the week prior to the election and that the “virus” was fixed by a Technical Support representative from Dominion, the manufacturer. The Dominion/Sequoia Voting Systems representative “reprogrammed” their machines in time for them to use in the Nov. 3rd Special Election. None of the machines (from the same manufacturer) used in the other counties within the 23rd district were looked at nor were they recertified after the “reprogramming” that occurred in Hamilton County.

This, of course, is setting tongues a’wagging across the blogosphere, even though the full hand count of the affected precincts, along with the mandatory 3% sample hand count in the rest of the areas and the nearly complete absentee ballot count still shows the race to be out of Doug Hoffman’s reach, though closer than initially reported. In fact, the New York State Board of Elections already conducted a review of the somewhat dubious new machines and found that they performed in a “very successful fashion.”

Still, some such as our friend Sammy at Yid with Lid are asking if this doesn’t taint the results of the entire affair. There should be questions being raised here, but not about shadowy conspiracies to put the wrong candidate in office. The Help America Vote Act was a great idea, and it’s accomplished some admirable things in various parts of the country, but in other areas its reach was too wide. We’ve been using lever machines to vote in New York for as long as I can remember,and you know what? We’ve had one of the lowest rates of “disputed” elections in the nation. They’re old, yes, but they work like champions.

The problem is, they sit fairly high off the ground and the machines are big, so even fully able but shorter voters can have trouble reaching the top levers. (In our precinct they still employ the high tech solution of having a plastic milk crate in the booth for vertically challenged voters to stand on.) And they do provide a challenge to people in wheelchairs. So some areas are now moving to these computerized machines, leading to the situation described above. One of our silly state legislators asked last year, “Couldn’t we just cut the legs off of one of them at each polling station and put it closer to the ground?” Such horse and buggy thinking was, of course, laughed off the floor.

We could not, however, leave the specter of scandal at a few malfunctioning machines, and as Sammy points out, Doug Hoffman has decided to blame ACORN (who else?) for his loss.

Doug Hoffman, the Conservative candidate in this election says that he was forced to concede after having been given erroneous election results on Nov. 3rd, in particular from Oswego County. Oswego County’s election night results were off by over 1,000 votes. Hoffman claims that the “chaos” on which Oswego County chairs blame the errors and “inspectors who read numbers incorrectly when phoning in results… sounds like a tactic right from the ACORN playbook.”

This, of course, has the usual collection of whack-a-doos running around like their hair’s on fire and their pants are catching. What better way to explain the loss than a combination of the sinister forces of ACORN and the evil labor unions “mischief?” Strangely enough, when I checked ACORN’s web site for a list of their many offices in NY23, the only one in New York I could find was in Brooklyn. Suspecting some sort of error on the web site, I called down there to get the addresses of their North Country Centers for Electoral Corruption. The confused woman who answered the phone had apparently never heard of Watertown and asked if I needed directions on which bus to take to get to 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn. I hung up at that point.

And really… doesn’t ACORN tend to congregate in the big urban centers? Do you really think they have a lot of outreach efforts in places like Inlet in Hamilton County? (During the fall and winter their burgeoning population of 400 drops to around 150 as the summer vacationers leave town.) Let’s be clear here… ACORN has a ton of problems and I’m glad that Congress is cutting off their funding until if/when they can get their act together. But we’re talking Big Pine Country here. Most of these people still think of acorns as things that fall from trees and get loaded into slingshots by kids.

But I suppose all of this was inevitable. It’s become a mainstay of American politics for the losers to question the validity of any close elections. This is a way to undermine the legitimacy of the winner in the eyes of the public and we’ve been seeing it more and more since 2000. Even the election of Barack Obama, who finally won one of the fist fairly clear victories with an electoral majority since before Bill Clinton’s time, is now being claimed to have been stolen by ACORN and others by more than half of registered Republicans.

We’ll eventually get a final (and hopefully clean) count of all the votes in NY23 when the state election board certifies it. Of course, by then the popular legends will drown out any facts and figures and Bill Owens’ (likely very short) term in office will have this story as an asterisk on it in the history books.

With high official unemployment and unofficial under-employment and uncounted unemployed rates of 10.2% and 18% respectively, we have to create many new jobs – and fast. Tax cuts only help those individuals, households and businesses that have taxable income. Prior history indicates they will not have the desired multiplier effect on the economy when most will be funneled towards paying down massive private debts or into new savings due to overall low consumer confidence and an economy that is still mired in a protracted jobless weak recovery.

OTHER OPTIONS IN ADDITION TO A NIP

The one sector that can use money the fastest and most effectively is small business. Companies under $10 million in gross annual revenues and with fewer than 100 employees historically account for nearly half of our nation’s economic and job growth. They will continue to be the primary engines for our country’s future growth and global competitiveness. Large corporations and public bureaucracies have proven to be some of the slowest and lest effective entities in using public stimulus money. This nation must concentrate on creating new and expanding existing smaller enterprises to get us out of this deep recession.

SBA guaranteed loans are at a standstill because banks across the nation have tightened their lending standards so as to render the minimal SBA loan program to smaller companies essentially non-existent. This dire situation will not ameliorate until the Federal Government directly channels money for grants and loans to small businesses through local SBA development corporations and its many local assistance offices. It must also get retired executives in SCORE to play a greater role in assessing grant and loan applications, and mentoring the recipient small businesses. This possible nationwide program will be discussed in further detail in another of my future TMV postings.

Proposed tax credits to employers to hire more people is an idea just waiting to be abused and buried in massive and confusing paperwork. Counting jobs created or saved by the original March 2009 Stimulus bill has become a silly effort in fantasy accounting. The same would occur with tax credits which are expensive and circuitous means of accomplishing what targeted direct federal spending can do much faster and more efficiently. We need a simple, fast, transparent, and fiscally honest way of generating new jobs.

HOW WOULD NIP WORK

Many unemployed and underemployed people can only develop new skills in different industries by working on the job or by going back to school. Most of them also still need to support families and pay normal living expenses at the same time. The only way we can accomplish this nationwide workforce retraining for the future is through a National Internship Program (NIP) funded directly by the Federal Government. Here’s how it would work.

A public-private national Internet jobs bank would be created for individuals to connect with internships in public entities and private companies locally and across the country. A simple nationwide job form would be used plus all applicants would also be able to attach their resumes. All individuals who sign up for the NIP would have to appear in person to a state employment assistance office to verify their right to work in the U.S. No intern could be judged upon their credit history, age, sex, race, or other impermissible factors. However, current school status and dependent children would have to be factors with respect to their available hours. Criminal backgrounds would only be factors with respect to limiting those interns to certain fields.

On the same Internet NIP clearinghouse, governmental entities and private companies would list all their open internship positions with reasonable prerequisites. They could also scan all submitted applications and resumes of individuals to fill their Internship openings. Every intern would still have to compete for all open positions through personal interviews and their public applications. However the temporary internships would turn more upon their overall backgrounds, personal presentations, and future potential. Internships could be terminated at will by any employer but because all direct financial considerations would be eliminated, employers would tend to avoid terminations based upon economic factors.

PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP

Since there are only 1.4 million people in the Federal civilian workforce, most of the new internship positions would be created at the State, city or local level, or in private industry. The hiring public and private entities would determine what the NIP would pay their interns, ranging from $9 to $14 per hour. The hourly rate would depend upon the required skills, education, and experience for the opening, the particular talents and attributes of the intern, and finally the cost of living and unemployment compensation rate in their states and communities. Employers could also request up to $2,500 from the NIP to assist any intern to relocate to a new city in order to best match individual potential with appropriate internship opportunities. Interns could also be supplied with public transit passes to get to and from employment.

The NIP would provide cost-free workers to all public and private employers who decided they needed the extra help or those that determined they will need additional personnel in the future but currently cannot afford to train them. An intern would work for at least 30 days but not more than 2 years at any location. Interns would work from 20 to 40 hours a week, the work schedule being flexible with the intern’s school and family commitments. Any intern could be hired permanently on a full-time basis at any time by any employer with whom they were placed.

Some interns could work 2 part-time positions, and be assigned to several different public entities and private companies over a 2-year period. Interns would make important networking connections by working instead of receiving unemployment checks and food stamps. Their direct job experiences would greatly enhance their chances of obtaining future meaningful employment after the economy fully recovers. Some other interns might work part-time and start a small business simultaneously that would become their principle livelihood after the nation fully exits this deep recession. Paid interns would have all their student loan payments deferred without incurring interest charges until they were permanently hired.

TOTAL PUBLIC COST

If one million interns were paid between $9 and $14 per hour working full time, the total cost to the Federal Budget would run around $30 billion annually. If 10 million interns were employed under this proposed NIP, the total cost over 2 years would run around $600 billion. Compared to the 2009 Stimulus Bill, the Wall Street Banking Bailouts, the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Proposed Healthcare Reforms, this would be a modest federal expenditure to directly help 10 million people and their families. Furthermore it would directly create new economic activity across the country much faster than any other job or economic stimulus proposals.

Private companies would not be able obtain interns in excess of 10% of their total workforce. Enterprises under $1 million in annual gross revenues could get up to 4 Interns at public expense, possibly with some minimum total payroll being required. All interns would not be able to work at any company or for any of its affiliates if they were employed there anytime during the prior 2 years, nor could they be assigned to most start-up ventures. The principle paperwork for managing this program would be that a supervisor or human resource director at each public and private entity would have to verify the hours worked by each Intern to authorize the weekly payments by NIP.

QUICK, MEASURABLE AND PERMANENT NATIONWIDE BENEFITS

This proposed National Internship Program would be the most effective, efficient, and sensible approach to comprehensively address the serious systemic workforce problems facing this nation. As designed, the private sector would play a major role in determining where many of the interns would be assigned.

The simplicity, efficiency, directness, transparency, and nationwide public-private benefits of a NIP might result in prompt Congressional approval, particularly with the 2010 Midterm elections less than a year away. It could become the largest publicly-funded program that would rapidly reduce unemployment by directly assisting the private sector. It would also precede and compliment many other needed long-term stimulus and infrastructure projects.

Marc Pascal

Which is, of course, not to say that women no longer had abortions. And so it will remain, regardless of what happens with the law. But the same cannot be said about insurance coverage for abortions. In the remainder of his piece, Toobin addresses this point, and the larger issue of this one specific medical procedure that, in varying ways throughout U.S. history, has been treated as if it somehow had nothing to do with health care:

Throughout this long legal history, the one constant has been that women have continued to have abortions. The rate has declined slightly in recent years, but, according to the Guttmacher Institute, thirty-five per cent of all women of reproductive age in America today will have had an abortion by the time they are forty-five. It might be assumed that such a common procedure would be included in a nation’s plan to protect the health of its citizens. In fact, the story of abortion during the past decade has been its separation from other medical services available to women. Abortion, as the academics like to say, is being marginalized.

Toobin then turns his attention to the Stupak amendment, and its implications for abortion coverage for all women, not just poor ones:

A clear understanding of the structure of the health-care proposals currently under consideration shows why the Stupak amendment is such a threat to abortion rights. At the heart of the proposals is the idea of an exchange, where consumers will be able to select among competing insurance plans. Theoretically, the exchange will increase consumer choice, promote competition, and (somewhat more theoretically) lower costs for everyone. If there is a public option, it will be offered through the exchange. At first, many of the people using the exchange will be those who are unable to pay for health insurance on their own. For them, the government will offer a sliding scale of subsidies. It is largely these subsidies which will increase the availability of insurance; estimates of how many people will gain coverage vary, but it may be close to forty million.

Restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion go back to the Hyde amendment, which became law more than thirty years ago; for example, there has long been a ban on abortions under Medicaid or in military hospitals. But the implications of the Stupak amendment are broader, because of the structure of the exchange. To start with, Stupak states that anyone who buys insurance with a government subsidy cannot choose a plan that covers abortion, even if that person receives only a small subsidy, and even if only a tiny portion of the full premium goes for abortion care. And the influence of the amendment reaches beyond the recipients of federal subsidies. Stupak would prohibit the public option from offering any plans that cover abortion. Further, it is expected that each year more Americans will use the exchange, including people who don’t need subsidies, but under the Stupak amendment insurance companies would have no incentive to offer those people coverage for abortion services, since doing so might cost them the business of subsidized customers. Today, most policies cover abortion; in a post-Stupak world, they probably won’t. With a health-care plan that is supposed to increase access and lower costs, the opposite would be true with respect to abortion. And that, of course, is what legislators like Stupak want—to make abortions harder, and more expensive, to obtain. Stupak and his allies were willing to kill the whole bill to get their way; the liberals in the House were not.

Rep. Foxx is only the most recent Republican to push what is at best a distortion of the truth about which political party is responsible for getting civil rights laws like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through Congress. TP’s Matt Corley, author of this piece, debunks the myth once again:

To support the claim that Republicans were actually the architects of civil rights, conservatives often point out that a “higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats supported the civil-rights bill.” But this ignores the “distinct split between Northern and Southern politicians” on the issue. When this is taken into account, the facts show that “in both the North and the South, Democrats supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act at a higher rate than the Republicans.”

The first of those two links in the above paragraph goes to a 2003 post by John Fonte at National Review Online. Here are the money grafs (emphasis is mine):

The civil-rights bill of 1964 was enacted with strong bipartisan and bi-ideological (conservative and liberal) support. But, the credit for the civil-rights victory has gone almost exclusively to liberals and Democrats, particularly to Senator Hubert Humphrey (D, Minn.) in Congress, and to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. However, much of the hard work of advancing the legislation was done by congressional Republicans — conservative stalwarts including Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, Charles Halleck of Indiana, William McCulloch of Ohio, Robert Griffin of Michigan, Robert Taft Jr. of Ohio, Clarence Brown of Ohio, Roman Hruska of Nebraska, and moderates such as Thomas Kuchel of California, Kenneth Keating of New York, and Clark MacGregor of Minnesota. All of these Republicans served as major leaders of the pro-civil-rights coalition either as floor managers or captains for different sections of the bill.

Although the Democrats controlled both houses of the Congress at the time, a much-higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats supported the civil-rights bill. For example, in the House, Republicans voted for civil rights by a margin of 79 percent to 21 percent, 136-35. The Democrats’ margin was 153-91 or 63 percent to 37 percent.

Anything jump out at you about the states these lawmakers come from?

Yeah. That’s right. They are all Northern states.

Now let’s jump over to the second link in that paragraph I quoted from Think Progress. That link goes to a June 1999 piece, originally published in the Washington Times, called “Voting and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” (Emphasis is mine.)

… On the surface it would indeed appear that the Republicans, and not the Democrats as commonly assumed, were the champions of civil rights in the 1960s.

However, a slightly more careful analysis of the Civil Rights Act voting record shows a distinct split between Northern and Southern politicians. Among the southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia), Senate Democrats voted 1-21 against the bill (5%) while Republicans voted 0-1 (0%). In the House, southern Democrats voted 7-87 (7%) while southern Republicans voted 0-10 (0%). Among the remaining states, Democrats voted 145-9 in favor of the bill (94%) while Republicans voted 138-24 for the bill (85%). In both the North and the South, Democrats supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act at a higher rate than the Republicans.

The marriage within the Democratic Party of the northern liberals and the southern Dixiecrats had always been a strange one based more upon a common enemy (the Republican Party) than upon common ideals. In fact, when the 1948 Democratic platform came out strongly in favor of civil rights, delegates from 13 southern states held their own convention shortly after the adjournment of the Democratic National Convention and nominated Strom Thurmond to run for president on their own “States Rights Democrats” ticket.

While Mr. Davis is clearly correct in his assertion that Southern Democrats were staunch foes of civil rights in the 1960s, Southern Republicans, though fewer in number, were equally adamant in their opposition to civil rights legislation.

The modern Democratic Party owes its current character far more to the Northern liberals than to the Dixiecrats. If the old Southern Democrats are to be labeled as racist, then Al Gore and Bill Clinton are Southern Democrats in name only as their defense of civil rights places them solidly among the Northern Democrats and not with the Dixiecrats of old.

In the two decades following the 1960s, the now-notorious “Southern Strategy” begun by Richard Nixon and continued by Ronald Reagan led to an exodus of Southern Democrats to the Republican Party. Those were the Democrats who voted against the emancipating legislation of the civil rights era: the racist, white supremacist Dixiecrat Democrats — not the ones who form the Democratic Party today.

It is widely held that we should welcome diversity and not stoop to such a level anymore. Our society now insists upon political correctness to a fault. We are a nation of people who are walking on eggshells when it comes to how we talk or write about people and things these days. A pox upon us if we offend anyone. We are also way too cautious in how we deal with bonafide threats to our national security.

How many more incidents like the one at Ft. Hood must the American public endure before we get serious about our defense. When citizens take the oath upon enlisting in the military, they swear to protect the country and the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. (I did notice, however, that this particular phrase was missing from the Presidential oath of office during the last inauguration.)

We are dealing with a very different enemy now than we were dealing with during World War II. Our current enemy strives to maximize civilian casualties and uses our diverse societal structure against us. Laugh at Homeland Security if you wish, but it must be taken seriously. Take the massacre at Ft. Hood, for example. The gunman, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, is not only a devout Muslim, he had displayed behavior that raised red flags with his superiors and government officials, yet they failed to act upon this information.

News reports revealed that Hasan had belonged to a radical mosque in Falls Church, VA. According to the Telegraph.co.UK website, the Dar al-Hijrah mosque had also been attended by two of the September 11 highjackers. Also, the FBI knew that Hasan had been in contact with the radical former leader of the mosque, Anwar al-Awlak, whom the Telegraph website identified as an American born Yemeni imam.

In this day and age the American population has Muslims everywhere. Some are in plain sight and openly supportive of Islam and the jihad and others are posing as Mediterranean types or even South Americans. Those just mentioned would be worthy of our hard scrutiny. While it is true that there are many innocents among the American Muslim population, we cannot afford to be less than vigilant just to be politically correct. That Hasan was not only a Psychiatrist but an American army officer in a position of high trust only proves that we must not let our guard down for any reason. However, it does seem quite stupid on our part that we didn’t even bother to profile this killer. All of the signs were there, and they were blatant.

Here again, we are in the political position nationally where we are making serious mistakes with our national security in favor of political correctness. With the profiling tools currently at our disposal we have no one to blame but our own incompetence for overlooking simple facts such as the ones found in the Hasan case. And given what we know about how Islam is preached and what its goal is, we would be foolish not to realize there are people who are serious threats all over the country who are worthy of being placed under the microscope. More to the point, once we have suspects under watch we should know that watching someone to see if they will lead us to al-Qaeda or the Taliban has risks and that those risks need to be tightly managed. At this point it doesn’t matter whether Hasan acted alone or on orders. Thirteen dead and 42 wounded is still 13 dead and 42 wounded.

But rather than play the blame game we should focus on preventing incidents like this one from happening again. We really need to wise up to the fact that our penchant for political correctness and the cries against profiling are creating huge gaping weaknesses in our ability to protect our country from enemies like who we are now at war with. And realizing that war is no game and that we cannot play at it as though it were, we should also consider that there may be very real benefits to changing our rules of engagement for our war against radical Islam.

We should focus on winning and not be as concerned as we are with how we intend to accomplish the victory we need. Sun Tzu once said that the general who is more concerned about his own integrity will lose. America should wake up and realize that we have not won this war. We should also be mindful that pulling out of the Middle East will not necessarily end it. Our troops may be over there–but the enemy is definitely over here. And any refusal to admit this to ourselves is simply naive at best, and dangerous if not fatal at worst.

Major Hasan may have succumbed to the pressure and cracked under stress, but that is unlikely. As a Psychiatrist he should have been above the inability to manage stress to the degree that would result in a shooting spree. He had been in contact with a radical, anti-American Imam. He attended the same mosque as some of the 9-11 highjackers. He was shouting “Allahu Akbar” while remaining calm during a shooting spree that left 13 dead and up to 42 injured. And according to the Telegraph, he stated at the Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., “during an hour-long talk he gave on the Koran in front of dozens of other doctors,” that “infidels should have their throat cut.”

According to the same Telegraph article, published on November 5, “One of Hasan’s neighbors described how on the day of the massacre, about 9am, he gave her a Koran and told her: ‘I’m going to do good work for God’ before leaving for the base.”

According to one civilian police officer who was interviewed, Hasan was “hiding behind a telephone pole and shooting fellow soldiers in the back as they were trying to get away. Many writers in the Media have taken the wrong tack by labeling this a hate crime. What this really was, was an act of war. This attack was clearly carried out with intent. This was no mistake on Hasan’s part, and there was clearly premeditation here. With these pieces of information at hand, it certainly does not look like someone who was simply overcome by stress.

The Ft Hood Massacre was preventable. It was also as much the result of our political correctness as it was Milik Hasan’s radical inclinations.

Now read this poll:

Losing NY-23 candidate Doug Hoffman became the latest in an increasingly long line of conservative politicians to blame his problems on ACORN yesterday despite the complete lack of evidence the organization played any role in his defeat.

The Republican base is with him though. PPP’s newest national survey finds that a 52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately. Clearly the ACORN card really is an effective one to play with the voters who will decide whether Hoffman gets to be the Republican nominee in a possible repeat bid in 2010.

Belief in the ACORN conspiracy theory is even higher among GOP partisans than the birther one, which only 42% of Republicans expressed agreement with on our national survey in September.

The ACORN line has been largely promoted by talk radio hosts, then picked up by politicians — yet another sign of the talk radio political culture at work.

Once upon a time, Republican politicians exploited the far right and conservative talk show hosts who could be counted on to get far right members of the party’s political base to the polls to vote Republican. Now, increasingly, the tail is wagging the dog in terms of some prevalent beliefs, talking points and some matters of party strategy. It’s yet another sign of the GOP’s weakening center, which is also reflects the country’s sagging center in an era of intensifying partisan and ideological polarization — as well as a sign of today’s less assertive elected Republican party leadership.

Some Democrats still charged after 2000 that George W. Bush lost the election. But the party leadership in general didn’t question the legitimacy of the Supreme Court’s election (remember Al Gore’s 2000 concession speech?) and the de-delegitmizing George Bush was not the key opposition theme during his presidency But — as in the case of centrists, independents and moderates — Republicans are not a monolithic block, as this poll shows. This poll seems to represent the Glenn Beck fan portion of the party which will pick up the ball and run with anything that can be used to argue that Obama is not a legitimate President. But here in lies the danger for the GOP.

Writes My DD’s Jonathan Singer:

Overall, the American people roundly reject the notion that ACORN somehow stuffed enough ballots — at least 9,500,000 of them — to somehow steal the election from John McCain and give it to Barack Obama. (This theory also compels the conclusion that ACORN somehow forged every single pre-election poll, including even those from Fox News (.pdf), the trend of which tracked almost exactly with the ultimate election results.) Indeed, Americans say no to this theory by a 62 percent to 26 percent margin — including a 72 percent to 18 percent margin among Independents.

If the Republicans want to continue to live in their own world with their own “facts”, they can certainly go ahead and do that. But it’s not so easy to woo new voters to one’s cause when those being wooed think those doing the wooing have only an attenuated relationship with reality.

Her story represents the stories that I dread will become absolutely the norm and her story represents the stories that other women who are unhappy with the new guideline recommendations about breast cancer screening dread.  That, under the new recommendations, a 30 year old woman will either not perform self-breast examinations which otherwise would give her something with which she could go to a doctor and ask for more screening, or that if she does ignore the new guidelines (which argue against self-examination: “[the task force] discouraged doctors from teaching breast self-examination” – yes, you read that right) and go ahead and do self exams, that when they then go to their doctors and ask for the screening, the doctor will require some ridiculous threshold before he or she will approve or recommend the screening. And that even then, the woman’s insurance won’t cover it since the guidelines say that it’s imperfect and not recommended for women under 50.

That passivity will be approved and routine.  That women will not trust themselves to know their body, that they will not bother because the system does not want to bother – because the system is so concerned about the harm of anxiety and over-biopsying.

I’ve read the guidelines, the reports and the very carefully worded explanations written by people I trust and admire.

But I am trusting my instinct on this and I am telling you – disapproving of self breast-examination and suggesting that women will have to walk in with such a threshold of concern for what they’re feeling about their body absolutely makes me irate at the thought of what a set back this is for women – for humans, for patients – to be in control of their health.

And the utter disregard for the human toll these illnesses take on everyone around the one diagnosed with the breast cancer.

Anxiety sucks. I’ve been there done that for years with shadows on films and MRIs that required additional testing.  And while I have a “family history” we don’t have the gene – and a very small percentage of women do have the gene mutations currently known to be responsible for a very small percentage of breast cancer.  My Gale score isn’t high enough to get me into most clinical trials.

From the New York Times:

While many women do not think a screening test can be harmful, medical experts say the risks are real. A test can trigger unnecessary further tests, like biopsies, that can create extreme anxiety. And mammograms can find cancers that grow so slowly that they never would be noticed in a woman’s lifetime, resulting in unnecessary treatment.

Over all, the report says, the modest benefit of mammograms — reducing the breast cancer death rate by 15 percent — must be weighed against the harms.

Screening in the 40-49 decade results in a 15% reduction in fatalities? I’ll take that over reducing the harm of anxiety and overbiopsying anyday.

A spokeswoman for Ms. Winfrey’s production company, Harpo, confirmed Thursday evening that Ms. Winfrey would make an announcement on her show on Friday. The plans were first reported by WABC, the ABC station in New York City.

“The sun will set on the Oprah show as its 25th season draws to a close on Sept. 9, 2011,” Tim Bennett, the president of Harpo, said in a message to affiliates.

WSJ:

The move is a big blow to the syndicated television market, in which Ms. Winfrey has grown to become a juggernaut. “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which launched in syndication in 1986, attracted 6.6. million viewers for the week ended November 8, according to Nielsen Co.

Local television stations, which use Ms. Winfrey to anchor their daytime hours, could also smart from Ms. Winfrey’s decision. Her show has been one of the few whose ad rates have held steady in the recession, according to one ad buyer.

Chicago Tribune:

Speculation has been rampant [link] that she might choose to leave daytime TV ever since it was announced in January 2008 that she and Discovery Networks planned to partner on a cable network: OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network.

The cable network’s debut, originally set for this year, has been delayed more than once and a launch date is expected to be firmed up by the end of this year for sometime in 2010. The new channel will take the place of what is now Discovery Health, available in 70 million homes from the start.

Reuters:

Winfrey, 55, is considered a major opinion-maker in the United States and this year was No. 45 on Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s most powerful people.

She publicly promoted Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign and her program became a platform this week for Republican 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin to launch her book, “Going Rogue.”

Tweet tweet:

Not only does Oprah now dominate Twitter’s trending topics across multiple terms, which is quite remarkable given the volume of New Moon noise, but Trendrr has alerted us to the fact that Oprah mentions, in just the first hour alone after the news broke, skyrocketed to more than 8,000 tweets.

Tweets per hour Trendrr graph via Mashable, “we expect this to be an ongoing trend through tomorrow’s official announcement.”