For you regular visitors to this blog, I want to acknowledge that I have been so busy with the council campaign that I have been terribly slack in posting here. Soon. Soon.

The push is on for health care reform and the push-back has been launched by insurance companies and the profiteers that run most of America’s health care system. We need to contact our congressional reps and DEMAND a better plan. And we need to spread the word that all those “socialist” countries out there with single payer plans are getting better care, for less money, with better outcomes for more people. Here’s one article.

Debunking Canadian health care myths

By Rhonda Hackett

As a Canadian living in the United States for the past 17 years, I am frequently asked by Americans and Canadians alike to declare one health care system as the better one.

Often I’ll avoid answering, regardless of the questioner’s nationality. To choose one or the other system usually translates into a heated discussion of each one’s merits, pitfalls, and an intense recitation of commonly cited statistical comparisons of the two systems.

Because if the only way we compared the two systems was with statistics, there is a clear victor. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to dispute the fact that Canada spends less money on health care to get better outcomes.

To read more click here.

Obamas to Plant Vegetable Garden at White House
By MARIAN BURROS
Published: March 19, 2009 [The New York Times]

WASHINGTON — Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of the South Lawn on Friday to plant a vegetable garden, the first at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets — the president does not like them — but arugula will make the cut.

Click here for the rest …

Is Obamanomics Conservative or Revolutionary?
(by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich)

There are two ways to see Obamanomics.

The first, much preferred by the White House, is as a set of initiatives so modest as to hardly merit a raised eyebrow. Yes, steps must be taken to deal with the current economic crisis. But assuming the economy recovers next year, Obama’s budget projects that government spending by the end of the decade will drop to around 22.5 percent of GDP, which is about where it was under Reagan.

To read more, click heree

Here’s a link to a must-see Bill Moyers interview.

I pulled this from Scrutiny Hooligan’s. Please write the Guv.

Cliffside: Forget the Feds. Only Bev can save us now.
By Doug Gibson

A while back, we heard some good news about Cliffside, the coal-fired Duke Energy plant in Rutherford County that’s about to undergo a major expansion. Federal District Court Judge Lacy Thornburg ruled that Duke Energy had to install the best available technology to reduce the plant’s mercury emissions – and that the EPA needed to sign off on whether they had done so. Great!

And then, a couple of weeks ago, we got what could only be described as bad news:

Duke Energy’s newest coal-fired power plant at Cliffside will be one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the state when built. However, the state Division of Air Quality recently agreed with Duke’s proposed reclassification of Cliffside’s mercury emission from a “major” to a “minor” source of this toxic pollution.

For several years Duke has agreed that its new 800mw Cliffside unit would be a “major” source of air pollution . . . Duke Energy now claims that same 800mw unit will emit only 25 tons of hazardous air pollutants per year – without making any actual changes to the plant.

In other words, a state-level agency makes the decision on whether the Cliffside plant is even subject to the law on which Judge Thornburg based his ruling. And that agency has come down on the side of Duke Energy – allowing the company to weasel out of installing the best possible pollution controls.

So – the first thing you should know is that the North Carolina Conservation Network is asking people to e-mail Governor Perdue. They want her to tell the Division of Air Quality to classify Cliffside as a “major” source of pollution. She’s the governor, she can do that. So. Go. Now.

Justice after Bush:
Prosecuting an outlaw administration
(From Harper’s magazine, December 2008)
By Scott Horton
I. The Crimes

Americans may wish to avoid what is necessary. We may believe that concerns about presidential lawbreaking are naive. That all presidents commit crimes. We may pretend that George W. Bush and his senior officers could not have committed crimes significantly worse than those of their predecessors. We may fear what it would mean to acknowledge such crimes, much less to punish them. But avoiding this task, simply “moving on,” is not possible.

This administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself.

To read more, click here.

We devote a lot of time and money to teaching youngsters how to use technology that will be outdated by the time they graduate from high school. Yet kids seem to learn to use the very latest technology on their own, without schools participating at all. (iPod, cell phone, wii, etc.) We’re wasting a good chunk of the limited funds our society is willing to pay for education on hardware that will be shortly be irrelevant. We should invest that money in more teachers, not more machines.