Michael Moore: The current proposals can’t fix health care

Michael Moore gives 13 reasons why the current proposals don't get to the heart of the problem. His conclusion:

We may be slow learners, but the rest of the industrial world has figured it out: Universal, single-payer or national health care systems. That's the reason why all those other countries cover everyone, have better patient outcomes, cause no one to declare bankruptcy or lose their homes because of medical bills, and spend less than half per capita on health care than we do. We could do it too, by reducing the starting age for Medicare from 65 to 0. There's still time to act.

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The need to really look at the evidence in Iran.

Amidst new reports that Iran has not been forthcoming about its nuclear program, Glenn Greenwald urges that we do what the Chinese are doing, as reported by the NYT:

The Chinese, one administration official said, were more skeptical [of recent reports], and said they wanted to look at the intelligence, and to see what international inspectors said when they investigated.

What Greenwald is suggesting is common sense. He might need to repeat his advice endlessly, though, because we live in a country where the gold standard for the news media is hyped up conflict and because we are a country that doesn't seem to "get" common sense anymore.

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The Fed on the hot seat

Here's a video of Rep. Alan Grayson interrogating the Federal Reserve's General Counsel Scott Alvarez. The topic is the Fed's alleged independence. It's good theater, I will look for more of the same. It's about time that we show some public snarkishness toward the Fed, given its chronic failure to make its operations transparent. A world-class audit of the Fed is long overdue.

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Newsy.com: where multiple media perspectives are featured

Newsy.com is a website with a nice twist. The site chooses individual stories and then examines them from the perspectives of various news organizations and websites. I've watched a few of newsy.com's featured stories, and I find this approach promising. By featuring a story from the perspectives of multiple news organizations, newsy.com is, in effect, telling us news about news-makers (in addition to telling us the news). Here's an excerpt from Newsy.com's about page: Newsy.com takes a step back to show how the world's news organizations are reporting a story - providing an unprecedented global and macro point of view. You'll find CNN right next to Al Jazeera, the BBC right next to ABC. Newsy.com also covers major newspapers, news magazines as well as top blogs from around the world. Here's a recent Newsy.com story that asks the question whether FOX News went over the line by promoting a demonstration. Here's another recent story discussing the new Wikipedia policy that allows only Wikipedia in-house editors to edit articles about living people.

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Womens Rights in the 21st Century

I found a fascinating post on one of the blogs I regularly read: Weekend Diversion: An Amazing Group of Women. It is mostly about the Asgarda women of the Ukraine, a small group of (mostly young) women working for the rights of women in an environment plagued with sex trafficking and other abuses of women, Eastern Europe. There is also a video of Loudon Wainwright singing "Daughter". Well worth clicking over to hear the song and see pictures of essentially a modern tribe of Amazons. Meanwhile, I wondered if the United States is the only nation in which there are so many groups of women actively protesting against rights for women. Like Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, who worked diligently to persuade women to vote against the Equal Rights Amendment, and continue to agitate to prevent any laws from passing that explicitly give women protections already enjoyed by men. Pro Life groups are also essentially anti-women's rights, and largely manned by women. It is basically a matter of whether the government or a women may legally decide who or what may live within her body and what may be expelled. Men already have this protection, granted by their reproductively deficient bodies allowing them to claim any foreign internal organism as a hostile alien.

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