Today I’m proud to bring you a guest post from Barbara O’Brien. Who is she? Well, Barbara O’Brien is a popular blogging advocate and left-wing blogger who writes the blog Mahablog. O’Brien’s book Blogging America Political Discourse in a Digital Nation discusses the changes blogging has made in America’s political culture, and the left-right debate. O’Brien is a strong advocate of blogging as a means of giving the public power in the media, as well as opposing the Iraq War. She has a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. O’Brien also writes and edits the Buddhism topic at About.com.

Many Americans assume the new health care reform act will benefit mostly the poor and uninsured and hurt everyone else, according to polls. As Matt Yglesias wrote, “Basically, people see this as a bill that will take resources from people who have health insurance and give it to people who don’t have health insurance.” Those who still oppose the reform say that people ought to pay for their own health care.

We all believe in the virtues of hard work and self-reliance, but these days it’s a fantasy to think that anyone but the mega-wealthy will not, sooner or later, depend on help from others to pay medical bills. And that’s true no matter how hard you work, how much you love America, or how diligently you take care of yourself. The cost of medical care has so skyrocketed that breaking an arm or leg could cost as much as a new car. And if you get cancer or heart disease — which can happen even to people who live healthy lifestyles — forget about it. The disease will not only clean you out; it will leave a whopping debt for your survivors to pay.

And the truth is, we all pay for other peoples’ health care whether we know it or not. When people can’t pay their medical bills, the cost of their health care gets added to everyone else’s bills and insurance premiums. When poor people use emergency rooms as a doctor of last resort, their care is not “free.” You pay for it.

Another common fantasy about medical care is that the “free market” provides incentives for medical companies to develop innovative new drugs and treatments for disease without government subsidy. It’s true that private enterprise is very good at developing profitable health care products. But not all medical care can be made profitable.

For years, the U.S. government has been funding medical research that the big private companies don’t want to do because there is too much cost for the potential profit. This is especially true for diseases that are rare and expensive to treat. An example of a recent advance made possible by government grants include new guidelines for malignant pleural mesothelioma treatment developed by MD Anderson Cancer Center researchers. Another is a blood screening test for mesothelioma developed by thoracic surgeon Dr. Robert Taub. The health reform act provides for more dollars for such research, from which even many of the tea party protesters will benefit.

The biggest fantasy of all was that people who had insurance didn’t have to worry about health care costs. But the fact is that in recent years millions of Americans have been bankrupted by medical costs, and three-quarters of the medically bankrupt had health insurance. And yes, insurance companies even dumped hard-working, law-abiding patriots. But the health care reform act will put an end to that, and now America’s hard-working, law-abiding patriots are more financially secure, whether they like it or not.

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Tags: Barbara O'Brien, Guest post, Health care
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This guest post comes from Shane over at In Case You Missed It

As in David Nutt, (former) chairman of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) in the UK, has been fired for doing his job. Isn’t it great to know that we haven’t made any progress since Galileo was forced to renounce his work and writings concerning the theories of Nicolaus Copernicus, who had suggested that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of the universe almost 400 years ago? Somehow this case seems even more totalitarian. A scientist, whose job is to give advice on drug law, has lost his job for giving the advice he was hired to give because it doesn’t fit in with the government’s get tough on drugs sales pitch to the deluded public. Yes, it’s not only America where you have to blow the populist trumpet hoping that the semi-literate masses will vote for you come election day, the UK it seems is every bit as bad.

It’s even worse knowing that things weren’t always so bad for the Labour Party and the UK. In fact it was only 2004 when the government actually listened to the advice given to them by their drug experts and downgraded cannabis from a Class B to C (the UK uses a system where A is the most harmful illegal drug and C the least). Since the reclassification didn’t result in an upswing of smokers and in fact saved an estimated 199,000 police hours, this action had its predictable reaction – the tabloid press hard sell along the lines of “drugs are bad, how can you be doing this to our children? Will someone please think of the children!” – this time mostly revolving around a scare story involving new and improved skunk weed which was so potent it caused psychosis. Enter a new British PM losing popularity by the day who is easily influenced by the polling numbers and suddenly you had the leader of a nation saying things like, “I think people know my view about cannabis and particularly about this lethal version of it, skunk.” Before you know it, the UK found itself back where it started, busting 72-year-old milkmen for delivering weed to old ladies as the government re-upgraded cannabis to Class B in January earlier this year. Of course this move came despite a report at the time from the ACMD recommending that cannabis remain a Class C drug.

So, what do you do when you are a scientist whose job it is to help formulate drug policy by providing unbiased scientific evidence only to see your work ignored? You try to draw attention to your cause, attempting to influence public opinion with facts and evidence; much to the dismay of the British government, David Nutt has been quite good at this. He was head of the team who devised a radical new system for classifying drugs – one based on harm to individuals and society instead of old-wives tales. Ultimately, it was this stance that forced Nutt’s resignation as he once again tried to remind people that drugs such as alcohol and tobacco are more harmful than LSD, ecstasy or cannabis. Additionally, he released a paper pointing out that ecstasy, a Class A drug, is in fact more benign activity than equestrianism. This latter report earned him a rebuke from his boss in the government, Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary at the time.

The influence of the tabloid press in Britain is something I don’t claim to understand very well. I picture it as having a British version of the Fox News effect in the US, an important tool in ensuring that the semi-literate view the world through a haze of confusion. In the correspondence between Nutt and Home Secretary Alan Johnson, the man responsible for demanding Nutt’s resignation, Johnson practically admitted that misinforming the public is part of the plan. Johnson’s letter to Nutt stated, “I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to advise me as chair of the ACMD.” Huh? Really? If ministers care so little for independent scientific advice, maybe they should save public money by sacking the entire group of experts and instead appoint a committee of tabloid editors. After all, rags like the Daily Mail are onside with the firing, publishing an article comparing Agassi smoking crystal meth to the ‘nutty’ Professor Nutt. Why do they love that term drug tsar so much?

The pandering of the current Home Secretary to the tabloid press is another sad example of the disconnect between public policy and facts. Alan Johnson and his government now face a mass revolt from the official drug advisory board. As resignations begin to come in, one has to wonder if this is actually what the government wants. Nasty facts get in the way, especially when your nation is facing an epidemic of addiction to legal prescription drugs – there are over 1.5 million over-the-counter addicts in the UK today. Who knows, maybe it’s a Scientology plot? Far be it for me to suggest that simply legalizing cannabis would be some kind of panacea but it would be nice if government policy, in all areas, were determined by facts instead of fear. Reefer Madness, here we go again.

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Tags: David Nutt, Guest post, Marijuana, War on Drugs
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Today’s post comes from Matt Oxley over at RagingRev. Go visit his site and subscribe to his feed or I will hunt you down and read every book written by Stephine Meyers outloud.

I don’t normally get into politics on my own blog, and when I do I tend to do so fairly gently despite my passion for politics. I also avoid cursing on my blog because some of my readers are offended by it and I hate to run anyone off over a few F bombs….So I use a bit of self control there. The other day though, I was looking through my normal plethora of nerdy tech blogs and I stumbled upon something that pissed me off so greatly I nearly set my computer on fire right then and there.

Prepare for a mixture of geek rage and ranting.

The United States Army is migrating EVERY GODDAMN COMPUTER in their arsenal to Microsoft Windows Vista…..that’s right…over 700,000 fucking computers will be moving from Windows XP….a solid, well tested, and WORKING operating system to the limp dicked equivalent of Windows Millennium Edition (Microsoft’s preceding nightmare).

Why do I give a fuck?

1: The claim is that Vista is more secure….I won’t even justify that statement by saying that Vista is the most exploited operating system in the world right now, even though XP is far more popular…how do I know? I work on computers for a living and I refuse to support Vista or sell it to my customers…Windows XP, Windows 7, or Linux…that’s what you get goddammit.

2: Performance: If the US Army is anything like other government bureaucratic shit holes I may or may not have done work for, their newest computers are at least a year old….perpetually, because that’s how long all the goddamn paperwork takes to buy and install one. Vista barely works on the most expensive hardware, and even though I am sure the US Government pays the highest price for their DELL contracted computers they won’t be able to perform anything near what they would have on XP.

3: SHIT FUCKING TONS OF MONEY….lots of it….I can’t find a real number that is reliable on how much this is costing the taxpayers, but my guess, if the Federal government is getting discounts on Vista Business edition and paying 100$ per license the licenses alone will cost over 80 million dollars, plus billions in extra man hours, extra kilowatt hours required to run the higher spec systems and to keep the processors running lame ass gadgets on the sidebar 24/7, and billions more in loss from crashes….this thing is gonna cost a shit ton.

4:Windows 7 – It’s stable, It’s Fast as hell, It works on old hardware better than XP, it doesn’t have driver problems, and you can actually install an old printer on the goddamn thing (try that in Vista), and it runs a linuxy kernel and….get this, it will cost the same as Vista and it’s coming out by the end of the fucking year!

Whoever approved this bullshit should start slitting their wrists now….seriously, down the street — not across the road, better yet, go for the jugular. This is the most retarded thing I have ever heard of and you want to make it happen by December 31st???? What the hell is your problem?

So, to every IT guy that has anything to do with the US Army and their Vista implementation, I implore you to walk off the job, right fucking now…just don’t go in…quit…on principal….just leave.

If this goes through the Terrorists have won. Do it for your country.

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Tags: Guest post, Microsoft, Microsoft Vista, US Army, We're fucked
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Today’s post comes from Zirgar over at Zirgar’s Fresh New Brain Squeezin’s.  Go check out his site.  If you don’t then I will hunt you down and force you to watch every episode of Gray’s Anatomy.

On a recent edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews guest Michelle Malkin in an effort to lower the bar for conservative outrageousness reinforced her reputation by actually eating a live bat during a commercial.  According to Chris Matthews, “We had just gone to break when Michelle reached into her purse, pulled out a small squeaking bat, threw it up in the air and snagged the poor animal with her long sticky prehensile reptilian tongue.”

When asked to explain this cold-blooded behavior, Malkin simply stated, “I was hungry.  I had a bat, so I ate it.  End of story.  What’s the big deal?”  When told that this wasn’t the usual behavior exhibited by political pundits, Ms. Malkin reportedly said, “Oh, right.  Like conservatives are the only ones who eat snacks.  Typical!  Looks like another smear campaign to make me look bad.  I can see the headlines now, ‘Michelle Malkin Eats Too Much, Getting Fat’.  I bet you never berate Michelle Obama for eating between meals, you liberal ass.”  Enraged she stormed off of the set.

According to one source, at that point, Matthews was overheard saying, “Bat goes in, bat shit comes out.  God, I fucking hate that stinky, drippy skunt.”  Amen, Chris.  Amen, buddy.

On a side note, it’s believed that upon hearing about the amount of attention Malkin garnered with the bat eating incident that Glenn Beck began looking for a way to insert several ICBM missiles into his vagina for his appearance on Donahue later that week.

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Tags: Chris Mathews, Guest post, Michelle Malkin
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Who’s that sexy man?  Why that’s Robert Barr.  He runs the website Blabrmouth. It’s a political website that brings you political commentary without the shitty spin. I like that, it’s refreshing. So if you don’t check out the site and subscribe to the feed or you checked out the site but didn’t like it, you can go fuck yourself with a 13 inch brown, rubber dick.

Terrorists are likely to use a weapon of mass destruction somewhere in the world in the next five years, a blue-ribbon panel assembled by Congress has concluded. They are more likely to use a biological weapon than a nuclear one — and the results could be devastating, the chairman of the commission told CNN.

If you didn’t click over and read the rest of the story don’t bother. It tells you nothing. Somehow a top secret report that was presented to Congress for their eyes only found its way into the hands of the good people over at CNN and all it said was there was “likely to be an attack by 2013.” Now, I didn’t want to make this a rant because I would have loved for CNN to pick this up, but what the fuck guys?

I am not sure which one worries me more; that a blue-ribbon panel concluded after months of exhaustive research and millions of dollars spent on bribes, kickbacks, and lap dances that there would be an attack somewhere in the world or that a state secret document wound up in CNN’s lap that easily. I mean do Congress and CNN go to the same fucking Kinko’s or something?

Of course there is going to be an attack!

Somewhere in this world is going to be the epicenter for one of the most fearsome events man has ever put upon man and this is the intel Obama is walking in on? This is what your tax dollars are buying you? We should all be pissed beyond belief.

That a nuclear or biological weapon is going to be utilized goes without saying. Why don’t we have a “top ten” list of places? Shouldn’t there be massive amounts of flu vaccine in production if one of the threats is the flu strain that took out 40 million people 100 years ago? And if the government is making a vaccine wouldn’t it be a good idea to prep the country or would you rather wait until we have the scene from Monty Python where they walk the streets telling people to bring out their dead? Man I can’t wait for Inauguration day!

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Tags: Barack Obama, Biological warfare, Blabrmouth, CNN, Congress, Guest post, Monty Python, Robert Barr, Terrorism, Warfare and Conflict, Weapon of mass destruction
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