In this video, Canadian physicians and nurses describe the real Canadian healthcare system to Americans (not the cartoon Canadian health care portrayed some American media and public discourse).
American viewers, accustomed to American bombast, hyperbolic rhetoric, rants, and apocalyptic jeremiads will have to adjust their TV sets accordingly in order to view the modest understatements of [...]
He’s big. He’s obnoxious. He’s Barney.
No, I’m not talking about the PBS children’s TV icon who sings, “I love you, you love me, we’re just one big family.”
I’m talking about the congressman from Massachusetts, Barney Frank, who, when confronted by a anti-healthcare-reform right-wingnut at a Dartmouth town hall meeting, gave better than he got.
The healthcare [...]
So much for Sarah Palin’s fictive “death panels” (though I would like to convene one in order to put her out of our misery).
As reported by the Associated Press, a study funded by the National Cancer Institute and published in the respected Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), in which 322 terminally ill patients [...]
Thank God the US Conference of Catholic Bishops are on watch looking out for your physical and spiritual health. Its Committee on Doctrine, chaired by William Lori, bishop of Bridgeport, CT, has published “Guidelines for Evaluating for Evaluating Reiki as an Alternative Therapy.”
Reiki (an alternative touch therapy used in many hospitals as a complement to [...]
According to press reports in the Hartford (CT) Courant , The Stamford Advocate, and on line in the Huffington Post, the Stamford (CT) Marriott Hotel and Spa is defending itself from a negligence suit (brought by a woman who was raped in the hotel garage while the rapist pointed a gun at her two children) by [...]
Two quotes included in a recent Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker (“Cocksure: Banks, battles, and the psychology of overconfidence”) disclose the cluttered psychosexual landscape of Jimmy Cayne, former CEO of Bear Stearns, a firm that was sued (unsuccessfully) by an investor for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty.
According to the cocksure Cayne:
Their lead [...]
Here is the health-care reform agenda of Republican politicians and the right-wingnuts (pundits and conspiracy theorist deadenders) who constitute the aptly-named Republican “base”:
Defeat Obama.
That’s it. It’s just that simple.
No innovative health policy. No creative health proposal. Just a political calculation: Defeat Obama on this big one, and he becomes a lame duck. Then try to make [...]
As widely reported in the news media, the preeminent scholar of African-American studies, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a public intellectual known to a large American audience for his PBS programs on Africa and on African-American genealogy, was arrested at his home in Cambridge, MA, after he allegedly yelled at police who had come [...]
For two decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been warning the Pentagon about the presence of military personnal associated with organized hate groups enlisted in the services. Apparently the Pentagon is more concerned about presence of gay and lesbian people in the service, however, since the FBI reports that the neo-Nazi presence has grown.
As [...]
The summer solstice has come and gone here in Connecticut, with no observable change in the weather–the same chill and damp as all spring.
The same cannot be said elsewhere in the US, where the solstice seems to have marked the beginning of the Republican adultery season.
First, Senator John Ensign, Republican from Nevada, disclosed his marital [...]
Douglas J. Amy, professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College had a problem: An established scholar with three scholarly books on his curriculum vitae, Amy decided that he had another book to write but one that would reach a wide general audience. However, when he wrote the book, he found no trade press (which would [...]
Like most boys, my second objects of infatuation and attachment (after my parents) were cars.
Growing up in the 1950s and 60s, my friends and I could tell the nuances of styling changes from one year to the next (which baffled my fifth-grade teacher, Miss Keefe), and could even recognize the make of an auto by [...]
The New York Times reports today Obama Is on the Spot as Rulings Aid Gay Partners: “Just seven weeks into office, President Obama is being forced to confront one of the most sensitive social and political issues of the day: whether the government must provide health insurance benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.”
Every presidential [...]
In a caustic New York Times op-ed entitled “Three Blind Mice” columnist Charles M. Blow characterizes the new Republican dictatorship troika of Limbaugh, Steele, and Jindal as an “axis of drivel.”
Blow blogs at By the Numbers.
Sphere: Related Content
According to a report in today’s Hartford (Connecticut) Courant (where the Connecticut Supreme Court has recently ruled in favor of same-sex marriages so the General Assembly is putting together the legal framework):
Church: Florists Should Be Allowed To Say No To Gay Weddings
By DANIELA ALTIMARI | The Hartford Courant
March 7, 2009
Concerned that the state’s new same-sex [...]
It wasn’t enough that the Right wing, generously funded by the Mormon Church, succeeded in passing a constitutional amendment in California ending same-sex marriage. Now Ken Starr, Bill Clinton’s old nemesis, and the Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund have filed legal briefs defending the constitutionality of Prop 8 and seeking to nullify the marriages of [...]
Those tax-cut ‘hos of the Republican Party–do you remember them, Incurious George’s lap dancers–are shocked, shocked to find deficit spending in the the Obama and Dem economic stimulus package.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, shown here with the affluent white men who frequently constitute his posse . . .
and John Boehner, shown here with Ohio troops [...]
Want to find out who contributed in support of California’s Proposition 8, the constitutional amendment that removed same-sex marriage in the Golden State, and want to find out how much they contributed? You can!
Visit EightMaps!
Then you gotta figure out, what’s contractor David Zuniga’s problem? Or Gary Shepherd Masonry? Or Marina Landscape? Or Jonathan Starr (doesn’t [...]
After dropping off my holiday visitor at the airport, I undertook an expedition to post-holiday shopping in Buckland Hills, CT, where exhausted consumer tribes had assembled in the annual Gathering of the Nation of Shoppers.
Banana Republic features clothes with “modern fit”; I suspect I am suited for “early-modern fit.”
Anthropologie (a women’s clothing and gift store [...]
David Brooks (columnist for the New York Times) has announced his “Sidney Awards” for “long-form journalism and thought,” an antidote to the mental McNuggets of blogs and sound bites. His picks include:
”In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” by Professor X, Atlantic Monthly, June 2008
Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. [...]
News reports and editorialists have pointed to many indicators of our parlous economy, but news today chilled me.
NPR journalist Ketzel Levine, along with 64 other NPR employees has been laid off, according to an article in the New York Times. Levine has worked with NPR for over 30 years, the Times reports. She has had [...]
The Republican Party didn’t get it in the 2008 elections, so there’s no reason to expect that the Grand Old Clueless would get now even when the inauguration of Barck Obama is only weeks away.
The New York Times reports:
. . . a candidate for party chairman from Tennessee, Chip Saltsman, distributed [as his holiday greeting] [...]
Another Obama pastoral kerfuffle.
This time involving a pastor on the Evangelical Right. Obama’s inaugural invocational invitation of Rick Warren (he of megachurch fame and The Purpose Driven Life franchise), a vigorous opponent of queer marriage rights in California.
Queer activists in a uproar. Let’s hope that this is something more than the mouse that roared or [...]
Was interviewed tonight by Emily Corwin on “The Thought Spot” (WHUS 91.7). Go visit her ‘blog at http://www.thethoughtspot.org/
On election day 2008, millions of Californians voted to change the state constitution to take away a basic civil liberty from other citizens: to join in marriage with the partner of one’s choice.
You can either cry or laugh.
Enough with the tears. Here’s Prop 8 — The Musical.
See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die
Conceived [...]
