“Shame on you, Barack Obama,” Clinton said angrily when talking to reporters
after a rally in a technical college gym here. “It is time you ran a campaign
consistent with your messages in public. That’s what I expect from you,” she
said, calling on Obama to repudiate and stop the mailings, which she waved
demonstratively.

Worth reading. The story he mentions, instead of the distracting innuendo that was the implied focus of Thursday's NYT article, would have been a useful summary of the kind of professional - not sex for influence - relationships McCain has had with lobbyists post-Keating Five, a summary voters deserve to know in judging for themselves whether McCain's ethics are ethical enough to be president.

What That McCain Article Didn’t Say
By CLARK HOYT

The pity of it is that, without the sex [the questionable part of Thursday's story], The Times was on to a good story. McCain, who was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 for exercising “poor judgment” by intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a corrupt savings and loan executive, recast himself as a crusader against special interests and the corrupting influence of money in politics. Yet he has continued to maintain complex relationships with lobbyists like Iseman, at whose request he wrote to the [FCC] to urge a speed-up on a decision affecting one of her clients.

Much of that story has been reported over the years, but it was still worth pulling together to help voters in 2008 better understand the John McCain who might be their next president.

Mr. McCain appeared motivated less by the usual ideas about good governance than by a more visceral disapproval of the gifts, meals and money that influence seekers shower on lawmakers, Mr. Feingold said. “It had to do with his sense of honor,” he said. “He saw this stuff as cheating.”

Supporters of the free market often forget that we don't just have a capitalist system; we have a democratic capitalist system. Democracy is what gives those on the short end of market outcomes a chance to talk back and, sometimes, to alter unjust market decisions. Paul Wellstone understood that. A big-hearted communitarian, Wellstone, I suspect, would be perfectly happy to lend Clinton and Obama all the good lines they want to use.

Clinton, 92: "The hits that I took in this election are nothing compared to the hits the people of this state and this country have been taking for a long time."

Hillary Clinton, tonight: "You know, the hits I’ve taken in life are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country."

"The wolf population in the Northern Rockies has far exceeded its recovery goal and continues to expand its size and range. States, tribes, conservation groups, federal agencies and citizens of both regions can be proud of their roles in this remarkable conservation success story," said Scarlett, noting that there are currently more than 1,500 wolves and at least 100 breeding pairs in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.

Service-approved state management plans will provide a secure future for the wolf population once Endangered Species Act protections are removed and the states assume full management of wolf populations within their borders. The northern Rocky Mountain DPS includes all of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, as well as the eastern one-third of Washington and Oregon, and a small part of north-central Utah.

"If you want to call it significant undercounting, I guess that's a euphemism for fraud," he said.

Labels: Caffertyeque, Media, primaries

The Poverty Syndrome
Posted by Michael Klozotsky on February 19, 2008

Hospitals know them as the sizable and growing self-pay population. Many well heeled Americans refer to them as deadbeats, hangers-on, or freeloaders. Some collection agencies see them as a potential source of revenue. “They” might be identified as uninsured Americans, but that is largely a symptom of an underlying affliction.

They are America’s poor.

According to Dr. Otis Brawly, Chief Medical Officer for the American Cancer Society, in today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Insurance versus non-insurance is a great marker for people who are socially deprived or poor.”

The findings of a major ACS study released today show that cancer patients with private insurance are much less likely to be diagnosed with late-stage cancers than those who lack insurance. The broad study of 3.5 million patients with 12 common types of cancer also found that many of those advanced-stage diseases could have been discovered by appropriate early screening methods.

The notion that insured patients statistically seek care earlier, have access to more care, and ultimately live longer than uninsured patients is perhaps not earth shattering. But it highlights a false dichotomy in the rhetoric that surrounds the U.S. healthcare crisis.

Uninsured Americans, many of whom are poor—or the American poor, many of whom are uninsured—not only lack insurance. In most instances they lack basic heath information, reliable and convenient modes of transportation, and jobs that afford them the benefit of leave time to visit a doctor’s office. Circumstances like these that impede adequate medical care are conditions of poverty often ignored in an “insured v. uninsured” assessment of healthcare in America. Thus, Dr. Brawly notes, “While giving people insurance would improve things, it will not improve everything.”

If that weren’t enough, findings recently presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” In short: poverty affects biology. The result is that the poor stay poor.

Now reinsert the corollary absence of health insurance for this population and the grim cycles repeat themselves.

In this election year, Americans are talking about things that matter to them. The economy and healthcare are high on voters’ lists of priorities, and politicians have been quick to fall in step with their supporters’ concerns.

But eloquent proposals for universal health coverage and quick tax rebates aren’t going to solve poverty in America. The question is—can will we ever solve “the economy” and “healthcare” without first addressing poverty?

Arctic temperatures and ice-covered sidewalks certainly did not keep people from the polls yesterday — they came in masses, said College Democrats Chair Oliver Kiefer.

“I’m pretty sure my whole floor has come through,” said Witte Hall resident Abrianna Barca, a UW freshman and member of the College Democrats.

Barca was stationed at the Gordon Commons polling place as a poll watcher. Sitting next to the voter registration tables, Barca said she was there to make sure every student was able to vote and if one was turned away to figure out why. Her presence had nothing to do with supporting Democrats, she said.

“It is so important for students to vote because we are coming into the age where politics will really affect our lives,” she added.

The College Democrats stationed poll watchers at every ward around the city where students vote.

Labels: 2008, Badger Herald

Labels: 2008, primaries

Labels: 2008, primaries

• Women: Obama 51%, Clinton 49%
• Change vs. experience, 52% to 24%.
• Just 17% are first time voters
  
• Families with income under 50,000: Obama 51%, Clinton 49%
• Independents: Obama 63%, Clinton 34%
• Seniors: Clinton 60%, Obama 39%
• Top quality - experience: Clinton 95%, Obama 5%
• Union households: Clinton 50%, Obama 49%

The movement toward more popular government should be promoted through legislation in each State which will permit the expression of the preference of the electors for national candidates at presidential primaries.

We direct that the National Committee incorporate in the call for the next nominating convention a requirement that all expressions of preference for Presidential candidates shall be given and the selection of delegates and alternates made through a primary election conducted by the party organization in each State where such expression and election are not provided for by State law. Committeemen who are hereafter to constitute the membership of the Democratic National Committee, and whose election is not provided for by law, shall be chosen in each State at such primary elections, and the service and authority of committeemen, however chosen, shall begin immediately upon the receipt of their credentials, respectively.

Labels: 2008, demographics, polls, primaries

“This is the first reported acute asthma death associated with work-related ETS,” said Kenneth Rosenman, an MSU professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. “Recent studies of air quality and asthma among bar and restaurant workers before and after smoking bans support this association.”

In 2006, the surgeon general’s report concluded that ETS causes coronary heart disease, lung cancer and premature death. But at that time there was little hard evidence linking ETS to the exacerbation of asthma in adults.

However, Rosenman and colleagues believe this case provides plenty of evidence to link secondhand smoke to this death.

...

“As a consumer, I don’t have to go into that bar,” he said. “But is it a safe environment for the employees? We have federal laws that say employers have to provide a safe and healthy workplace. This was clearly not a safe and healthy workplace for this employee.

“This death dramatizes the need to enact legal protections for workers in the hospitality industry from secondhand smoke.”

In the United States, 23 states have already banned smoking in restaurants and bars.

...

Studies of restaurants and bars in Boston, New York City, San Francisco and Washington D.C. all show business up since they banned smoking.

...

Labels: healthcare

Kosovar Albanians wave U.S. and Albanian flags on the Albanian side of the ethnically divided town of Kosovska Mitrovica to celebrate the upcoming independence of Kosovo, Sunday, Feb. 17, 2008. (AP Photo/Bela Szandelszky)

Kosovo's 10 Serbian MPs boycotted the assembly session in protest at the declaration.

Correspondents say the potential for trouble between Kosovo's Serbs and ethnic Albanians is enormous.

Serbia's Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica blamed the US which he said was "ready to violate the international order for its own military interests".

"Kosovo is Serbia," Mr Kostunica said, repeating a well-known nationalist Serb saying.

Serbia's PM denounced the US for helping create a "false state". Serbia's ally, Russia, called for an urgent UN Security Council meeting. [Serbia and Russia will not recognize Kosovo as an independent nation.]

Recognition by a number of EU states, including the UK and other major countries, will come on Monday after a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, says the BBC's Paul Reynolds.

The US is also expected to announce its recognition on Monday.

Three EU states - Cyprus, Romania and Slovakia - have told other EU governments that they will not recognise Kosovo, says our correspondent.

Russia's foreign ministry has indicated that Western recognition of an independent Kosovo could have implications for the Georgian breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Ethnic breakdown of the new state: