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For me, travel is all about serendipity. Coconut shell drinks, museums, and dinners on sunset patios don’t excite me much. Not that there’s anything wrong with those things. They’re all things I do on the road. But, for me, the real charm of travel lies in the way that it opens me up to new experiences. The spirit of adventure that I feel on the road, and the absurd situations I put myself in, are the things I love most about traveling.
I’ve noticed that when I travel I behave differently than at home because I’m searching for serendipity. Here are three things that you can do to your chances of pleasant surprises on the road and examples of the mini-adventures they’ve resulted in for me.
Walk
A lot of people take taxis when they travel because they’re on vacation and want to relax. The problem with transportation is that it insulates you from your surroundings. Walking connects you with a place at ground level and increases your chances of stumbling upon a unique experience.
Once, while walking down the street with my girlfriend in Taiwan, a Taiwanese man ran out of a shop told us he saw a ghost following her. He was a traditional healer, and he took us to his shop where he exorcised the ghost through ritual chants and gesticulations (and all for free). It was one of the richest cultural experiences that I’ve ever had and had we taken a cab we would have missed out on it.
Say Yes
The unknown makes people uncomfortable so, when given an unusual offer, many people automatically refuse it. But, by making a conscious effort to say yes, we open ourselves to unexpected felicity.
Once, when eating breakfast at a small outdoor aboriginal restaurant in the mountains of Taiwan, the owner, a motherly woman, asked me if I wanted to try some, “san bei guan niu”. I didn’t know what that was, but I agreed. On her way back to the kitchen she picked up an enormous snail off the ground. Through the open door I watched her wash it, slice it, chop it, and fry it, and bring it to me, blackened, on a plate with garlic and wild onions. It was rubbery, salty, and absolutely delicious.
Of course, this strategy carries the risk of disappointment, such as that I experienced when, in Spain I, was served a bowl the cow stomach soup that looked, and tasted, like, well, a cow’s stomach. But hey, that’s part of the adventure, right?
Trust Yourself
It’s good to put yourself in difficult situations once in a while. It’s exciting, it builds confidence, and your experience is all the more memorable because you earned it. This strategy has resulted in my fondest travel memories.
Once, my girlfriend and I were on the island of Bohol in the Philippines. Flipping through our guidebook we discovered that we could swim with whale sharks on the next island over, Leyte. Unfortunately, the friend we were with had to leave two days later and I needed to visit a doctor on Cebu the next morning. There would be little time to travel to Leyte and back because the ferry was several hours away by bus. I quickly formulated a plan that, although allowing for little sleep, would have our friend back several hours before her bus departed for the airport. She declined and told us that we, and the plan, were crazy.
We left immediately and took a ferry to Cebu, where I saw the doctor first thing in the morning. Then we caught an overnight ferry to Leyte, which arrived at 4 am. With almost no sleep, we took a motorcycle taxi an hour down the road to the scuba resort from the guidebook. We slept on the beach in front of the resort until 7am, when we went to the resort’s dive center. Did they have room? We were in luck; a couple had canceled their reservations. That afternoon we swam in a shimmering aqua-green inlet beside a whale shark the size of a Cadillac. When the boat returned to the resort we jumped in a motorcycle taxi back to the port, slept a few hours, and caught a ferry to Bohol at dawn. We arrived at noon and boarded the first bus back to the beach where our friend was preparing to leave. When we arrived she still had a few hours to spare, which was ample time for us to relish the look of regret on her face as we told her about our adventure.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Campaign cash — we’re drowning in a flood of it. As Katrina vanden Heuvel noted yesterday on GRITtv, this is on track to be a $5 billion election–and it’s not over.
We used to have words for spending like that on politicians: bribery. Remember all that quaint anti-colonial talk about “Independence”? As Zephyr Teachout commented in a meeting I was part of, hosted by the Coffee Party, those founding fathers were all about independence from corruption and prosecuting bribery. Remember the phrase “anti-Trust”?
Now it seems the most we can hope for is “transparency.” Well, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index is out now, and it’s pretty transparent: The U.S. has dropped in the world rankings to 22nd, below Chile and just above Uruguay. “The world’s most peaceful countries score the best” reports The UK Guardian — places like Denmark and New Zealand — hmm. Maybe there’s a connection. (You’ll be relieved to know we’re above Somalia.)
Just think how far we’ve come. Once tea partiers fought corporate power. Now they live off it. Once corruption and bribery were the Axis of Evil. Today they’re Supreme Court-confirmed law. It’s trust-busting that the courts can’t stand.
In this election, poor people will vote on rich candidates covered by even richer corporate media. Bloated on a diet of billions of dollars of anonymous campaign ads, money media are nothing but happy. What would Tom Paine say?
He might say what Zephyr Teachout said. “What our country needs is less corruption and more good old fashioned bribery.”
At least then we could prosecute the thieves of our democracy.
The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Support us by signing up for our podcast, and follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.

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I’ve often daydreamed about what an alien civilization would think about Earth if they were ever to come visit, given our fractured ethnic, political, and economic planet, the epidemic violence, our ecological ignorance and mismanagement, the miserable way so many people live in poverty and misery, and our global failure to eradicate basic diseases such as cholera that simply require safe water and sanitation systems available to everyone reading this column.
Indeed, as Calvin says to Hobbes in Bill Watterson’s classic cartoon, “Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
One of these global failures was the failure to acknowledge a formal human right to water. There is a formal international human right to life, to human health, to an adequate standard of living, to adequate food, and more. But until a few weeks ago, there was no formal human right to water.
There is now. On September 24th, the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva adopted a binding resolution that
This declaration was a long time coming. The planet’s bedrock political and civil human rights laws were put in place over 60 years ago. The United States played a leading role in formulating and supporting those laws, in line with our democratic principles, our commitment to rights, and our national character. And while there are occasional controversies over definitions, and occasional government policies that ignored or flouted these principles and rights, the US continues to be a leading voice for these rights.
Conversely, the United States has not played a leading role in, and indeed has often been in opposition to, extending human rights law into the area of social, economic, and cultural rights, even though major international covenants covering these rights were passed by the UN in the 1960s. And the US has never supported a human right to water. Until now.
More than a decade ago, I wrote a journal article on the human right to water that stated:
And in subsequent years, discussions and negotiations expanded at the UN, in national governments, in international water meetings, and in academia about the justification for such a right and the responsibilities and duties that would accompany it. The negotiations over this right dragged on and on, with the US and a few other countries consistently opposed to extending human rights law to water. The long discussions finally ended with a General Assembly resolution in July, followed by the UN’s Human Rights Council formal resolution in late September, and on September 30th, the US government (somewhat grumpily, I think, if you read their whole statement) affirmed its agreement with these resolutions. In their statement explaining their vote in favor, the US said:
“The United States is proud to take the significant step of joining consensus on this important resolution regarding the right to safe drinking water and sanitation, which is to be progressively realized. The United States remains deeply committed to finding solutions to the world’s water challenges. Safe drinking water and sanitation are essential to the rights of all people to an adequate standard of living, and to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.”
This is a first step, not a last step. Will finally acknowledging a human right to water and sanitation solve the world’s water and sanitation problems? No.
But here are four reasons why it is a good idea:
Acknowledging such a right will encourage the international community and individual governments to renew their efforts to meet basic human needs for water for their populations.
By acknowledging such a right, pressures to translate that right into specific national and international legal obligations and responsibilities are much more likely to occur.
This clear declaration will help maintain a spotlight of attention on the deplorable state of water management in many parts of the world.
Finally, explicitly acknowledging a human right to water can help set specific priorities for water policy, which is often fragmented, uncoordinated, and focused on providing more water for some people, rather than some water for all people.
And there’s a fifth reason: it’s just the right thing to do.
What’s needed now is to develop appropriate tools and mechanisms to achieve progressively the full realization of these rights, including appropriate legislation, comprehensive plans and strategies for the water sector, and financial approaches. As the UN has noted, the right to water also requires full transparency of the planning and implementation process in the provision of safe drinking water and sanitation and the active, free and meaningful participation of the concerned local communities and relevant stakeholders, including vulnerable and marginalized groups. And it is time to acknowledge that even here in the richest country of the world, there are people without access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation, and to work harder to meet those needs as soon as possible.
In the end, I do not think that finally meeting basic needs for water and sanitation will occur just because there is finally a clear acceptance of a legal human right to water and rules for what governments must do to progressively realize those rights. But it is certain to help accelerate the day when safe water and sanitation are available for all. Whether anyone out there is watching or not.
Peter Gleick (cross posted from SFGate’s City Brights)

This Blogger’s Books from
Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water
by Peter H. Gleick

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Let me finish tonight with something about the candidates now sweating out this last week.
There is nothing like it, I suppose: Having your whole person out there for public inspection.
If you run for office — especially in these times, you’re pretty much completely exposed. People get to decide what they think of you in toto: your personality, how you come across, what you’ve done in public office, what you might do. It’s like what author Tom Wolfe wrote in Bonfire of the Vanities. It’s like being a human arcade that people can walk through pointing up at different features of yours, seeing and saying whatever they like, commenting out loud on whatever about you they “don’t” like, leaving their fingerprints, the harsh memory of rejection, all over you.
What is it that drives men and women to do this? To submit themselves to this manhandling, this being treated like an unwanted pair of gloves, fingered with, tossed back again — and again — like they were some “item” on some display counter in Filene’s Basement.
Why would anyone want to be treated like this?
Yet every two or four years men, and increasingly women, line up to take the abuse, sometimes paying huge bags of their own money for the privilege.
And the simple fact is we need these people — need them there on the ballot, need some of them as our leaders.
Why? Because democracy, at least as we practice it, is not some exercise where people join together and as a community and pick leaders. It’s altogether different. It’s a process of would-be leaders picking themselves, getting out there where people can attack them, out there where their names and reputations can be spat upon — or worse.
I say all this because I know enough of the world to know that other countries don’t have such luck. They could use these politicians, these people who trust democracy enough to take their chances with it. They don’t have people like Bill Clinton, and all those lesser political lights. They don’t have people who have the stuff to pull people together, who know how to sell themselves, to build coalitions, to make themselves into leaders. Why else do you think nation-building is so hard? It’s because it’s hard to find natural democratic leaders except in those countries like ours where people can grow up knowing they have a shot at being one.
So get out there and vote for the best of them, and don’t begrudge all the other would-be politicians because the worst countries are places where they don’t have them.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

As the creator of “The Twilight Zone ” television series of the late 1950s and ’60s, Rod Serling wrote several stories about the human experience of being pressured to conform to so-called societal norms. Two of the episodes from that series are particularly relevant today because they deal with the problems of being different in a world that professes tolerance yet stresses conformity.
In 2010, we would like to believe that being different is good and wholesome, that we should and would somehow celebrate our differences. But we’re as narrow-minded and as intolerant today as the characters in those episodes of over 40 years ago. Not much has changed, and that is tragic.
In one “Twilight Zone” classic, “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” a young girl in a futuristic world rails against being pressured by her family and friends to look and think just like everyone else. The powers-that-be in society have created a strange coming-of-age process called the “Transformation.” To facilitate the process, there are specific models of both the ideal male and female forms from which people can choose. You go through the transformation and you become the aforementioned ideal individual.
Though the young woman makes a valid point about liking who she is and the way she looks, at the end of the episode she gives in to the pressure and has the “Transformation.” She ends up looking, as well as thinking, like everyone else in her society.
In “Eye of the Beholder,” which was written by Serling himself, a woman willingly has plastic surgery procedure after procedure in order to conform to the ideal of beauty by which she is surrounded. Each surgery is a failure. Before her last surgery she is told that if she cannot be made to look like the rest of society, she will be banished to a ghetto where “people like her” are made to live.
What we find out at the end of the story when her bandages are removed is that she is a stunningly beautiful woman. Seeing this, we believe that the last surgery was a phenomenal success, but we’re wrong. The “normal ideal” she is trying to achieve is to look like the human pig-faced creatures around her. Her own beauty is considered repulsive. Rod Serling wrote this as a great modern morality play on the value of individuality and the dangers of wanting to conform to one ideal of beauty.
The desire to have the perfect image is one way that we try to conform to what society says is normal. One would think that plastic surgery (which is still major surgery, make no mistake about that) has become as commonplace today as having your teeth cleaned. Diets galore and “nutritional” cleanses are available to help us fit the size that society says we should be. What we do to our bodies borders on torture, starvation and mutilation simply to fit in.
There is something very dangerous about total conformity. We don’t celebrate who we already are because, according to statistics, we want to be like everyone else!
Conformity doesn’t only concern our bodies and faces; it is also present in our life choices. Our society is not tolerant of the person who chooses a lifestyle that is not considered the norm. During the past month the news was filled with the tragic story of how being different cost one young man his life. He was gay, and because of his life choice he endured savage and public humiliation at the hands of his roommate’s sick idea of a joke. The “joke” led the young man to commit suicide.
Society, whoever and whatever it is, is forever scrutinizing us and unforgiving of differences. Individuality comes in many different forms, shapes, sizes, and choices. To be intolerant of one person’s differences is to be intolerant of anything with which we don’t agree or readily understand. That’s not only sad but extremely dangerous.
The criteria for obesity shouldn’t be measured by someone who weighs 15 pounds more than another person, a sexual preference shouldn’t make you an easy target for someone else’s rage, and being different shouldn’t make you strange or suspect. The worst societies thrived on communal conformity because it was a simple form of mind control. You were made to feel that there was something wrong with you if you didn’t think, look like, or act the same as others.
Conformity, real conformity, has a price. You lose something priceless and precious when you are forced to be like everyone else. The plain fact is this: We’re not like everyone else; we’re as individual as our fingerprints. Acceptance of being different and of the differences of others enhances life; intolerance diminishes it.
Being different is being happy with who and what we are and want to be. That’s our right and the right of all people. It is conformity that is sad.
To read more from Kristen Houghton, peruse her articles at Kristen Houghton.com and visit her Keys to Happiness blog. Also, take a look inside her book, “And Then I’ll Be Happy!” You may email her at
kch@kristenhoughton.com.
Copyright 2010 Kristen Houghton

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Washington D.C. residents, listen up: You all may know it’s true, but now you have the evidence to prove it. D.C. is a black hole for bad drivers — they get sucked in and can never leave. Last month, Allstate published its sixth annual national Best Drivers Report. Guess what? D.C. is dead last. That’s right, number 193. In case my friends in Baltimore are snickering, you are number 192. So unless you live in or plan a move to Ft. Collins, CO or Chattanooga, TN, numbers 1 and 2, respectively, I suggest you check your insurance deductible and stay alert.
Just to add on another accolade, how about the recent study by a company called INRIX, which found that D.C. has the fourth worst traffic congestion in the nation. INRIX collects and sells traffic data around the country, so they probably have a pretty good picture of what’s moving and what’s all jammed up. Bottom line is that if you get in your car in D.C. (or one of our other major cities for that matter), you have a much better than average chance of sitting in traffic and getting into an accident. To add insult to injury, Telework Exchange research finds that Americans spend more time in traffic than on vacation. Boy that sounds like fun, sign me up.
Well, there is another idea. How about if we spent less time driving? After all, it’s National Work and Family Month. Lets all spend time doing something that is more important. Getting off the road is good for the environment, good for our wallets, and may keep us out of the emergency room and the body shop. Here’s the magic word in it all…telework. Teleworkers spend less time in their cars and for those of us in major metropolitan areas that may keep our car and human bodies in better shape.
Speaking of better shape, I have been on a little fitness kick this summer. Well, it started last year when I saw myself in a video (that’s me about 40 seconds in, closest to the screen) and asked a colleague, “who is that fat guy sitting next you?” Oh no, it was me. Well, I started eating less (gee, my doctor was right; it is arithmetic – calories in/calories out). That got me part way to my goal, but exercise is a big part of getting fit, so I started doing something I hate, but can do almost anywhere — running. When I started, I couldn’t make it a quarter mile without stopping, out of breath. Today, I run about 20-25 miles a week. Now, I don’t run fast and I probably won’t ever run a marathon, but I do run almost that far in a week.
So why am I talking about this? My built-in excuse for not exercising was always, I don’t have time or I don’t have my stuff to work out, or [insert your favorite excuse here]. Now that I work at home, I have no excuse. I have my workout stuff, I have my shower and all my clothes right here, and I even have the time I used to spend getting to and from work. The other day, I went for a run about 5:00 in the evening. I started out from my house and headed up the hill along a major commute route near my house. The cars were backed up almost half a mile and as I ran alongside, I could see the frustration and defeat in the faces of everyone one of those commuters (I told you I run slow). And these were the people who left early. So instead of sitting in my car getting frustrated and stressed out (or in an accident), I was doing something healthy and stress relieving. This is the part of the telework value proposition that is hard to quantify, but is very real. If you are a teleworker, you know it. If you are a manager contemplating telework as a productivity tool, remember, stressed out employees are not as productive and tend to make more mistakes. Some food for thought as you are sitting in traffic this evening.
If you want to continue the dialogue on telework, write to me at jsawislak@teleworkexchange.com or visit my blog at TeleWorkExchange.com.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon analyst best known for leaking key memos about the Vietnam War 40 years ago, led a packed forum at London’s Frontline Club last night to discuss the fallout over the non-profit group’s disclosure of approximately 400,000 US Army files documenting the Iraq War. While the two men predictably levelled forceful criticism at the Pentagon, their main target for most of the evening was actually the New York Times.
Assange fumed openly about John Burns and Ravi Somaiya’s expose from this past Sunday’s Times that characterized the WikiLeaks mastermind as increasingly paranoid, erratic, and dangerously egotistical. “It’s a smear piece, and more tabloid behavior by the Times,” Assange said of the article. “Is it that only journalists with bad character work for the Times?” he added, before quickly shifting gears to argue that that the paper is beholden to the US military-industrial complex and, as a result, too often confuses a false sense of balance with accuracy. WikiLeaks, Assange maintained, is free from the political constraints that tie the hands of a mainstream media organization like the Times, and so does not have to make editorial concessions to the Pentagon that could compromise its accuracy.
For Assange, the Times’s allegedly compromised sense of accuracy clearly extends to the “terrible” article by Burns and Somaiya that seeks to analyze – though, he would say impugn – his character and motives. “Mr. Assange has come a long way from an unsettled childhood in Australia as a self-acknowledged social misfit who narrowly avoided prison after being convicted on 25 charges of computer hacking in 1995,” reads the beginning of one damning passage.
Assange has acknowledged, and even accepted, that he has become part of the story he was trying to tell. “There is a market demand for information about us, that’s not surprising,” he said, seeming to acknowledge the level of secrecy in which the WikiLeaks operation is shrouded. But then he quickly returned to the Sunday Times article. “And, into that vacuum,” he said, referring to the limited information about him and his organization available in the public domain, “steps people who make that up.”
“And if you make stuff up about dissidents and lone heroes whose going to stop you?” Assange said. “You don’t need to fact check when writing about that,” he added, before turning the microphone over to Ellsberg.
Ellsberg, a source for the Burns and Somaiya article, was unequivocal in his support of Assange and what he sees as his mission to expose the dirty underbelly of a “lying” Pentagon (and, one could assume, of the Times).
Ellsberg is, of course, most famous for having distributed the so-called Pentagon Papers to the Times in 1971–and he did not miss an opportunity to join Assange in ridiculing the news organization. Going off on one of many tangents, he chided the paper for failing to support him when he was being prosecuted for treason by the US government, and for their policy of not revealing sources even after a source has outed himself. “Everyone knew it was me; I was being prosecuted!” Ellsberg joked.
The Times, of course, as it did with the Pentagon Papers, has proved to be an instrumental and influential outlet for WikiLeaks, bolstering the group’s leaked documents – including this most recent batch of Iraq War Logs – with both context and a broad readership.
While Assange did not deny this, he suggested that the Times had pursued a political agenda in the way it had reported on war documents provided by WikiLeaks. In the case of the Afghan War Diaries, Assange noted that the two other news organizations that were leaked the reports, Der Spiegel and the Guardian, led with stories about Task Force 373, a Nato special forces unit charged with hunting down and killing senior Taliban officials. The Times, meanwhile, initially focused on those documents pertaining to Pakistan’s involvement in Afghan conflict.
This did not stop WikiLeaks from using the Times for its most recent dispatch of war memos. Though, Assange was again disappointed in the way the paper reported on the material. He argued that the Times’s coverage of the Iraq documents centered on the sections that highlighted Iran’s funding of Iraqi militias, rather than the revelation that thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties had gone unreported. (For the record, on October 22 the paper published an articled entitled “Leaked Report Details Iran’s Aid for Iraqi Militias,” as well as one called “A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in Iraq.”) Assange did not comment on whether he would work with the news organization when circulating other leaked documents down the road, but rather emphasized that WikiLeaks would try to work with “broader coalitions” comprised of mainstream media, non-profit organizations, and human rights groups.
More to the point, as a result of the barrage of media attention directed at him and WikiLeaks since the release of the Afghan War Diaries in June, Assange may no longer need a news organization like the Times to help him get his message out.
In danger of being prosecuted by the US government under the Espionage Act, Assange is a man “on the run,” as Burns and Somaiya noted on Sunday. But unlike most fugitives, he has a giant megaphone–and he’s not afraid to use it. “It’s always a privilege to speak and have people listen,” Assange said in response to a question about how he has been affected by criticism in the media.
“In so far as these attacks have given more of an audience, that’s a good thing,” he added.

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A few weeks back, I wrote a post on the politics of organized labor – a post that was fundamentally about how political power is wielded through both both the carrot of reward and the stick of punishment. Same thing for the converse: If you only use the carrot – or worse, if you hand over the carrot without something in return – you incinerate whatever political power you have, as politicians will know they never have to do anything you ask.
This is not some great revelation – it’s about as rudimentary a political principle as there is. Which is why it’s truly stunning to see that some top professional labor leaders in Washington – ie. people paid lots of hard-earned union dues to engineer political strategy for labor union members – either A) don’t seem to understand this idea, or B) refuse to understand it out of a corrupt willingness to sell out labor union members on behalf of personal partisan affinities and/or personal loyalty to cronies inside the Establishment Democratic Party.
We saw this here in Colorado when the AFL-CIO responded to Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet’s opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act – ie. labor’s top legislative priority – by loyally restating its lockstep support for Bennet and then by preposterously insisting that EFCA was suddenly a “non-issue” for labor union members.* We also saw it with AFSCME president Gerry McEntee compliantly endorsing Rahm Emanuel for Chicago Mayor, despite Emanuel consistently laying waste to organized labor’s basic agenda. This was the same McEntee who previously declared himself “the sheriff of the incumbent-protection program” for the Democratic Party and promised to lead the fight against any progressive groups trying to run primaries against anti-labor Democrats. Now, we see even more of this ignorance/corruption from labor leaders – and in even more shockingly ignorant/corrupt terms.
In an article headlined “Labor holds nose, backs former foes,” Politico reports that “Labor’s big threat to punish misbehaving Democrats has largely evaporated in the heat of the midterms, as unions now scramble to rescue incumbents they once pilloried.” In this, the message to all Democratic politicians now and in the future is clear: Labor may talk about using the stick, but it won’t actually follow those threats up with action come election time. Which, of course, tells all Democratic politicians that they won’t pay a price for opposing labor’s agenda…which, of course, effectively encourages Democratic politicians to oppose labor’s agenda on behalf of corporate interests. This is, in short, labor saying “Thank you sir, may I have another?” to anti-labor Democratic politicians.
Is this political ignorance/naivete by labor leaders? Or is it deliberate corruption, whereby labor leaders are selling out their members so as to preserve their personal connections to their D.C. Democratic Party friends? It’s hard to say, but my guess is that it’s a little of both. I say that because this statement from one AFSCME leader is so idiotic – so truly incoherent – that I can’t tell:
This statement is confusing from an analytical standpoint because it’s difficult to tell whether it exhibits innocent (and a shockingly huge amount of) stupidity or whether its stupidity is so intense that it simply can’t be genuine and instead is just an unconvincing public excuse for deliberate corruption.
Honestly, I can’t really tell, but what I do know is that the statement makes absolutely no sense. Think about it: Labor leaders are saying that “once you get back into session” they’ll be able to “move people on votes” – even though they’ve spent the election telling most Democratic politicians that they don’t have to move their votes in order to get labor’s support. Indeed, if “moving people on votes” is predicated on those people, in part, fearing electoral retribution from labor, and if labor hasn’t exacted any retribution at all, why would those politicians ever move on votes at the request of labor in the next congressional session or any other?
They wouldn’t, which is why I say, again, this statement is perhaps the single stupidest – or single most unconvincing – rationale for sacrificing movement agenda to party that I’ve ever seen. Labor leaders in D.C. would have us believe that they don’t have to answer their own legendary “which side are you on?” question. They would have us believe that they can simultaneously serve two masters – The Democratic Party and their own members who pay those labor leaders’ salaries. With many good, pro-labor Democrats they can certainly do this – but they cannot when it comes to clearly anti-labor Democrats. And when those labor leaders back those any and all Democratic politicians regardless of those politicians’ record on labor issues, they are unduly prioritizing partisanship over the interests of the very union members who pay their salaries.
When you want to know how labor can spend so much money supporting Democratic politicians and have so little influence over those Democratic politicians, remember this statement.
Sure, labor gets outspent by corporations and that’s a huge part of the problem. And let’s be clear – I’m not suggesting labor unions actively back anti-labor Republicans over Democrats. But make no mistake about it: When labor leaders in Washington aggressively back anti-labor Democrats (rather than, say, sitting out those elections) and/or refuse to follow up their own threats with action, those labor leaders are destructively undermining the political agenda of their rank-and-file membership. That’s a true tragedy for those of us pro-labor progressives who understand that a vibrant – and honest – labor movement is essential to the progressive movement as a whole.
* On this specific issue, I’ll be interviewing Colorado AFL-CIO chief Mike Cerbo at 9:20am Colorado time (11:20 ET) on my AM760 show on Wednesday (10/27). It should be an interesting discussion, and I promise I will demand some answers. Tune in at http://sirota.am760.net.

This Blogger’s Books from
The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington
by David Sirota
Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government–And How We Take It Back
by David Sirota

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

On November 2nd, voters will head to the polls in what has arguably been the most contentious midterm election campaign in more than a decade. Despite reluctance on the part of some Democrats to campaign on health-related issues, one area presents a fresh window of fiscal and political opportunity to help address the challenges facing our nation’s health care system: managing and preventing chronic disease by providing quality-based services to millions of seniors and disabled persons in the privacy of their own homes.
Consider the following: the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that a typical four-day hospital visit costs more than $20,000. By comparison, a typical three-visit week from a home health-care provider costs significantly less. As the United States recovers from the worst economic recession in decades, we cannot underestimate the extensive savings achieved through in-home health services. Currently, 49 percent of Americans with chronic illnesses are responsible for 75 percent of U.S. health care costs. In-home health care is playing a critical role in bringing these costs down.
The results are both indisputable and real: Diabetics receiving their insulin on a coordinated schedule; Hypertension patients regularly having their blood pressure checked; Heart disease patients getting the medication they need to stay out of costly hospital or nursing home settings. Effective management of chronic disease can reduce hospitalizations and readmissions, clinic and emergency room visits resulting in lower health care spending.
In July, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a proposed rule that would result in nearly $20 billion in funding cuts for home health services at a time when America’s seniors and disabled need them most. This is on top of $40 billion in home health care cuts as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The cuts are based on a presumption that new coding rules resulted in “up-coding” and higher Medicare payments. However, home health spending since 2000 is lower than CBO spending projections prior to the adoption of the new prospective payment system. Additionally, the proposed rule implements ACA provisions requiring a face-to-face encounter between patients and physicians. While most agree with this basic premise, CMS’ proposal (as written) could restrict access to care in many rural areas and place an unnecessary burden on physicians.
To help shift the U.S. from an unsustainable path of hospital-based care to providing essential services in the home, it’s critical that CMS reconsider this proposed action.
First, coordinated, home-based care is an important tool for addressing out-of-control health care costs. Between 1996 and 2006, more than three quarters of a million Americans who would have otherwise died remained living thanks to breakthroughs in cancer treatment, many of which are now administered in the home. Each one percent reduction in cancer mortality produces about $500 billion in increased GDP for the economy over a decade (it is estimated that a cure for cancer would be worth $3 trillion to our nation’s economy). A ten percent reduction in diabetes-related hospital costs could save just about $100 billion for Medicare within a decade.
Second, in an era of fierce partisanship, home-based health care is an issue that has the potential to unite Democrats and Republicans. According to a recent poll by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, three-fourths of likely voters oppose the CMS proposal that would cut nearly $20 billion over the next decade. Additionally, voters do not want to turn to Medicare to reduce the deficit. When provided with arguments for and against the cuts–the former focusing on deficit reduction–opposition does not wane.
Third, it’s important that we recognize and reward what’s already working within Medicare. From 1993 to 2007, in large part due to Medicare-funded services, employment in home health care grew an average of 5.4 percent annually. Since the beginning of the recession, America’s health care sector has consistently added jobs while others have shed them.
“Informal” caregivers are also providing invaluable home-based care. In 2007, the estimated economic value of unpaid contributions was approximately $375 billion nationally, up from an estimated $350 billion the previous year.
As policymakers prepare to shift to a post-election mindset, nowhere is there a better opportunity to drive down costs, create jobs and ensure the well being of millions of Americans. While it’s clear that health reform will be under scrutiny in the next Congress, the one notion that Democrats and Republicans can all rally behind is that quality, innovative and cost-effective health care begins in the home.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The chairman of British Airways has attacked some airport security checks and has called for the UK to stop “kowtowing” to US security demands.
Practices such as forcing people to take off their shoes, and checking laptops separately, should be abandoned, Martin Broughton said.
He also criticised the increased checks that the US imposes on passengers arriving on international flights.

Convicted militant Omar Khadr was proud of having killed a US soldier with a grenade, a military tribunal has heard.
Khadr, who pleaded guilty at Guantanamo Bay to terror charges on Monday, also told his US interrogators where to find bombs he had planted in Afghanistan.
The revelations came during the sentencing phase of his tribunal.
The Canadian is the fifth Guantanamo inmate to be convicted. Caught in 2002 aged 15, he reportedly may face up to eight years in jail under a plea deal.

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It is hard to know what social change taking place today will be the most significant in the long term. It is probably foolish to speculate on the lists of candidates for serious consideration, but raising one issue to the fore now might well affect the outcome in the next century: Women. It took almost a hundred years for women in the United States, and many other nations around the world, to get the vote once they started organizing in the 18th century. It is likely that — even with models of women in the public sphere firmly in place, even with formal promise by most nations and international organizations of note — it will take many years to change the conditions that most women live under most of the time. And the status of women is directly linked to the strength of their families and communities.
One of the simplest steps in this new age of democracy is getting women to vote. It doesn’t necessarily take millions everywhere when electoral districts that are relatively evenly divided can be won by only a few votes. Even though all women don’t share the same views, they do share many, and when they are enough of the vote, candidates will compete for their support. When women vote they also encourage the few women who have braved that path before them and been elected to office, and remind political parties of their interests and their influence.
Many factors can intervene in getting voters to the poll in any given election, but generally speaking, the less-well educated, the less-comfortable in speaking out, and the less familiar individuals are with the mechanics of casting a vote they are, the less likely they are to participate in an election. This is true for both men and women, but women are far more likely to fall into those categories. Learning how to vote — and something about the issues and the candidates in any given election — is much easier than changing one’s status. While it is not the ideal of a fair representation in elected office, it is a lesson that would pay great dividends.
I am not advocating rushing the unwilling or the uneducated to the poll, but most political issues are not rocket science, and most adults can understand the basic choices to be made if given an opportunity to hear the pros and cons of the issues. Women, particularly, will not vote if they don’t feel “qualified” to make a choice.
Much of this came home to me recently, when I attended a conference sponsored by an NGO (ELS Independent Research Center) and the League of Women Voters of the United States in Azerbaijan, an ancient Eurasian land bordered by the Caspian Sea, Iran, Armenia, Georgia and Russia. In modern times, it was a Soviet state with a strong memory of its two and a half years as a democracy after World War I. It carries the best of the Soviet experience moving forward in its commitment to secular government (it is a majority Shia Muslim nation with a mix of Sunnis, Christian, Jews — some of whom go back 2,500 years — and Zoroastrians). It has a legal commitment to equality for women. As one of oldest oil and gas producing countries in the world, it also has resources. It exists in a dangerous part of the world, but has strong ties to the West and is closely allied to Turkey, the United States and even Israel.
The purpose of the conference was to promote community-level education of women on public issues and their increased participation in voting. It was held in Ganja City, near an uneasy Armenian border, a five hour drive from the capital city Baku. Most of the participants came from the Ganja region, which bears a closer resemblance to old Russia (if not more ancient times when it was a stop on the Silk Road), than Baku which looks more and more like a Western city where the ancient past is not quite so visible. Transportation in the country is improving, but there did not seem to be much travel between regions either way.
The conference brought together representatives from NGOs, academia, and a number of people — men and women — representing the Executive Authority as well as local and municipal governments. The purpose of the meeting — to raise the issue of women’s participation in elections — was not initially shared by all attendees. Some feared that increasing the women’s would decrease the influence of men, but appreciation for the significance of the need to create conditions for equal participation grew substantially over the weekend, in part, I would like to think, after hearing about the history of women’s suffrage in the United States when early fears of the terrible things women might do if they had the vote faded quickly.
The communiqu from the conference called for women to get involved in parliamentary elections at all levels as observers and poll workers, as well as encouraging women to work in campaigns and – of course — to run for public office. Raising expectations that they can achieve equality is an important step, but before it can be taken by more than a few exceptionally strong candidates, experience suggests that there is a need to build self-confidence of women for whom the public sphere is foreign territory and overcome the fear of voting.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The following is the fourth part of a five part article installment. To read Part I, click here. For Part II, click here. For Part III, click here.
If Rousseff does prove to be a strong leader, it is not inconceivable that the government can at least get a grip on some of these grave problems. If that is the case, then it begs the question of what role Brazil might seek on the world stage. Traditionally, Brazilian politicians have not emphasized foreign policy during their campaigns, preferring instead to dwell on domestic concerns. Indeed, as I watched the presidential debate in Rio, I was struck by the utter lack of discussion about foreign affairs.
On the other hand, outgoing President Lula has pushed a much more aggressive foreign policy agenda than his predecessors. While he has maintained friendly ties to the U.S., Lula has also courted the support of leftists Hugo Chvez as well as the Castro brothers in Cuba [for a more detailed discussion of these intricate foreign policy questions, see my previous article here]. Presumably, Rousseff will continue Lula’s orientation which augurs well for regional stability and South American political and economic integration proceeding along progressive lines.
Don’t expect Rousseff to rock the boat, however: when I asked Congressman Eduardo Cardoso of the Rousseff campaign to explain his boss’ position on U.S. bases in Colombia, which represent a provocation for neighboring Venezuela, he replied categorically “there won’t be a change in Lula’s foreign policy. We have an excellent relationship with the U.S. Don’t expect any radical change.” Such a response is perverse, however, if Rousseff seeks to live up to Brazil’s stated goal of pushing a pacifistic foreign policy. Both Colombia and Venezuela lie on Brazil’s natural borders. What better place for Brazil to act as an international arbiter than within its own backyard?
In Brazil, one hears much reverence for the so-called “elite” diplomats at Itamaraty, the nation’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Yet in recent years, these diplomats have pursued a perverse and erratic foreign policy as Lula has sought to establish warm ties with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. To be sure, Brazil may claim that its shuttle diplomacy was instrumental in averting a major Middle Eastern war between the U.S. and Iran. In a novel move, the Brazilian urged Western countries to drop their threats of punishment over Iran’s nuclear program and negotiate a just solution.
Even more surprisingly, Lula led an effort to head off more United Nations sanctions against the Islamic Republic by helping to negotiate a deal allowing Iran to send parts of its stockpile of enriched uranium abroad for additional processing. Yet Lula has gone much farther than that, proclaiming his “friendship” and “affection” for Ahmadinejad, a man who has denied the Holocaust. What is more, the Brazilian president has held discussions with Iran on how the two countries might boost trade and collaborate in key areas such as biotechnology and agriculture. More significantly perhaps, Ahmadinejad hopes to extend cooperation on nuclear technology so as to generate electricity. In the final analysis, however, Lula gained little from such controversial maneuvers save suspicion from Washington and animosity from human rights campaigners who decry Iran’s practice of stoning women to death for adultery.
It is difficult to imagine how Rousseff, herself a woman, could in good conscience continue Lula’s policy toward Iran. A more sensible way for Brazil to challenge the U.S. would be for the South American giant to play an assertive role in Latin American affairs, for example in Colombia and Venezuela and even elsewhere. Rousseff would be foolish not to take advantage of Brazil’s greatest asset on the world stage: Lula himself. Provided she is not afraid of being overshadowed politically, Rousseff could send her former boss abroad to negotiate thorny international problems, much as recent U.S. presidents have called on Bill Clinton to act as an international envoy. Perhaps, Lula could be an effective intermediary between the United States and Cuba, or the Brazilian could work to achieve greater democratic freedoms in Central America for instance.
Nikolas Kozloff is the author of No Rain in the Amazon: How South America’s Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet (Palgrave, 2010) and Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave, 2008). Visit his website, www.nikolaskozloff.com

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The pros say she is finished as House Speaker, but it’s never been wise to bet against her. Perhaps it is gallows humor, but in the final days of an election that could be Nancy Pelosi’s undoing the first female Speaker demonstrates characteristic spunk in the face of a GOP media assault on her image:
People say to me, ‘Well, it helps them raise money.’ It helps me raise money, too. I view this as the highest compliment that they want to take me down.
– House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Congress.org)
Craig blogs daily for CQ Roll Call

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Listen Up, Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President to Know and Do
by Helen Thomas, Craig Crawford
The Politics of Life: 25 Rules for Survival in a Brutal and Manipulative World
by Craig Crawford

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Washington, DC is a company town all right. It has one industry — the government — and everything derives from that. People go there to see the government and said government’s tributes to itself, nothing else. Sure there are restaurants and museums. Sure there are three major universities, and some pretty nice parks, but aside from the Universities, all are either run by the government or by private interests to maintain it.
A bar frequented by bureaucrats and journalists helps maintain the government as much as the official office buildings. While it would be wrong to say the entire District of Columbia is a tourist trap, few would want to go see the southeast Quadrant, the area called the National Mall most certainly is. In an earlier installment of this series, someone complained that The Statue of Liberty was a “tourist attraction” not a “tourist trap.” Well, consider this:
Take a look at the Lincoln memorial. Walk up those famous stairs and when you are on the same level as the base of the statue, go right. There you will find a souvenir shop. That’s right, built right into the edifice.
Remember, Jesus tried to start a riot about something like that.
It wasn’t always like that. A century ago, the mall had only one major memorial, that to George Washington, and a much smaller Smithsonian institution. Today, we’ve got something for every war we ever fought, and then some. The Mall is beginning to run out of room, what with the Dwight Eisenhower and Martin Luther King memorials due to begin construction soon and at least a dozen others in the works.
Most of the ones that are already there aren’t the least bit objectionable, but do they each deserve a souvenir stand? No. The problem is that special interests have gotten a hold of them and for the most part made them worse. Look at the Vietnam memorial for example: Maya Lin’s original design was perfect. It was simple, stark, and moving. It honored those who served and died in the war, but not the war itself. It was totally complete and did it’s job perfectly. And as such, it stood as is for a number of years, and then a veteran’s group demanded to be included, and two groups of sculptures were added cluttering up the space. Not to disrespect those brave people who served and demanded to be honored there, but they pretty much ruined the serenity and the artistic unity of the space. It looks a bit cluttered, and the souvenir shed nearby doesn’t help all that much either.
Another example is the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial, which has FDR depicted in a way that would have horrified him. Pride is considered a deadly sin for a reason.
With the John Stewart rally less than a week away, going all the way to DC without strolling around and seeing some of these monuments would be a tragedy. There are too many memorials to see than can be done in a day, but most are essential. Most also have souvenir stands. This makes them tourist traps.

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The US and Iraq should investigate claims of abuse contained in files published on the Wikileaks website, the UN's rights chief says.
Navi Pillay said the files suggested US forces had continued to hand detainees to Iraqi authorities despite evidence that they had been tortured.
Meanwhile, the UN's adviser on torture, Manfred Novak, called for a wider inquiry to include alleged US abuses.

I think I speak for a lot of Americans when I say that I cannot wait for the midterm elections to be over so we can stop talking about them, speculating about them, arguing about them, but most of all — so we can stop being subjected to terrible political ads.
Recently our political ads have sort of begun to resemble the first few rounds of American Idol, where for every Jennifer Hudson or Fantasia there are a thousand William Hungs. I’m not exactly sure when it happened but somewhere along the way our election year ads moved from groundbreaking to so crummy that they wouldn’t make the cut on America’s Funniest Home Videos, or maybe they would — unintentionally.
Consider Christine O’Donnell, the Delaware Senate candidate, saying, without a trace of irony, “I’m not a witch.” (Click here to watch the ad in its entirety.)
When I first heard about the ad I thought, “Good for her! Taking on her critics with a tongue in cheek nod to one of their biggest criticisms.” Then I actually saw the ad, and realized, not a trace of tongue in cheek. Nope. The woman is seriously telling voters she’s not a witch with the same conviction most candidates say, “I won’t raise your taxes.” Call me crazy but if you’re having to start from a place of convincing voters you don’t practice witchcraft, you might as well also tell them you’re not an alien, murderer or voodoo priestess while you’re at it. This may not be Salem 1692, but today’s voter still draws the line when it comes to certain things, and a candidate who may be tempted to wiggle their nose to make opponents disappear is one of them. And telling a voter not to worry! “I am not a witch” ranks right up there with O.J. saying, “I am desperately searching for the real killers.” It’s not exactly comforting. Although I guess O’Donnell could cut a follow-up ad that says, “If I were really a witch don’t you think I would have done something about my opponent’s double-digit lead this close to election day?”
Then again maybe she’s waiting until Halloween to pull out all of the stops.
But believe it or not O’Donnell’s ad wasn’t even the worst of the bunch. There’s the famous — or rather infamous — demon sheep ad from Carly Fiorina. I would try to explain it to you but that would involve me pretending that it makes sense, so instead here’s a link. All I could think while watching this ad is of the childhood fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Here’s Fiorina, a candidate who has millions of dollars to burn. (And burn it her political consultants did; actually holding a bonfire of hundred dollar bills might have been a more practical use of her dollars.) This ad is the political consulting equivalent of malpractice, so much so that I was tempted to send Fiorina a t-shirt that read, “I spent a fortune on a political ad and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” Now there are those who would point out that the ad must have done some good. After all Fiorina did win her primary. But I would argue that Fiorina won despite this ad — not because of it. She actually probably would have increased her victory margin had she simply spent the dough buying a few hundred wool sweaters for voters instead. It was that bad (or should I say baahhhd. Okay, apologies for the lame sheep humor.)
Then there was the candidate who thought that depicting Nancy Pelosi as the witch from the Wizard of Oz was a good idea. You know because we women love it when men call women witches.
There’s the candidate who flirted with gay stereotypes with his image of Barney Frank.
And who can forget this little ditty from the Weinstein campaign, which I would like to recommend be used in interrogation rooms across the country. Because after hearing this song on a continuous loop, any criminal would talk just to make it stop.
Now I know I’m going to sound like one of those old fogies, reminiscing about how “you kids just don’t know good music today. Back in my day…” But as I noted on yesterday’s Dylan Ratigan Show, political ads used to be better, seriously. In election years past there’s always been one or two ads that are game changers that you know will be taught in political science classes for years to come.
Think President Johnson’s “Daisy” ad, so effective it only needed to be aired once, or the first President Bush’s ad featuring convicted felon Willie Horton, which you can view here. It is still considered one of the most racially inflammatory ads in history but without question one of the most effective and memorable. Then there’s the infamous “Hands” ad run by the Jesse Helms campaign which crafted illusions that affirmative action was as big a threat to America in the early nineties as terrorism is to America today. (Click here to view.) And then there’s Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” ad that has become the prototype for feel good advertising.
Hillary Clinton’s “3am” ad during the 2008 presidential primary certainly belongs on this list as a soon to be classic, but “I am not a Witch,” Demon Sheep and dancing Barney Frank — not so much.
But in watching today’s ads I am reminded of a Hollywood director (forgive me for not recalling which one) who in an interview recalled how excited many of them were in the 1980′s at the prospect of video cameras making it possible for a poor, unknown talent out of Nebraska or somewhere, to be discovered as the next Martin Scorsese overnight. But he noted that of course all these years later that’s not really what’s happened. Instead we have thousands of people thinking that a ten-minute video of their toddler going to the bathroom while their cat does a dance and their dog chases its tail is potential Oscar material.
The same appears to hold true for the political ad world. It’s a lot easier to cut political ads these days and to distribute them to a mass audience. But as my mother often says, “Just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should.”
So I for one can’t wait for November 2nd to come and go — and for many these ads to go with it.
(P.S. Feel free to nominate your suggestions for this year’s best and worst ads in the comments below.)
This post originally appeared on TheLoop21.com for which Goff is a Political Blogger.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

“Always do right.
This will gratify some people, and astound the rest.”
-Mark Twain
With Election Day fast approaching there is more and more noise on the campaign trail that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act should be repealed or tweaked in some way, but little clarity on specifics.
Public opinion polls have been all over place as to whether or not repeal is a fringe sentiment or if it is a majority or somewhere in between. An analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation in mid-October has found numbers ranging from 26 to 51 percent of American favoring repeal. The wide gap is attributed by Kaiser to something Twain would certainly appreciate–the wording of the questions.
Kaiser also said recent polling suggests that for at least some Americans, a vote for repeal means a vote to eliminate certain provisions of the health reform law while also keeping many of its benefits, rather than representing a desire to overturn the law completely.
Please let me share some of the reasons why any potential changes would need to be done thoughtfully and with great care.
Patients with chronic disease account for 75 percent of U.S. health spending and the numbers are higher in entitlement programs. Eighty-three percent of every dollar in Medicaid is spent on chronic disease and 99 percent in Medicare.
The doubling of obesity since 1987 alone accounts for nearly a third of the overall rise in health care spending. The top seven chronic conditions cost the U.S. $1.3 trillion each year.
We are on an unsustainable track.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act provides significant opportunity to change course, not only in health care spending but also in our lifestyles.
Mark Twain famously said, “The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d druther not.” Twain was pointing out a sentiment felt by many Americans at the time, and unfortunately, is shared by many today. We need that to change.
A new study by Brookings researcher Ross Hammond estimates that the total costs of obesity in the U.S. may exceed $215 billion annually. A similar study from the NBER by Cawley and Meyerhoefer places the annual costs at closer to $170 Billion.
By focusing on improving individual health we can rein in health care costs. Addressing these needs is imperative to preserving our economic competitiveness and streamlining our health care system.
It’s time to finally do something about obesity; to finally do something about chronic disease; to finally get our economic and physical health back on track. We can save billions of dollars in health care spending by reducing the prevalence of both smoking and excess weight. We can also do a better job of coordinating care for Medicare and other patients with high rates of chronic disease.
The Medicare program alone will spend $250 Billion over the next decade on potentially preventable readmissions alone. Adopting community health teams that provide transitional care can cut these rates in half.
The following provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act focus on improving health in America through chronic disease prevention and management:
Enhancing Medicare coverage through a biennial health risk assessment and wellness visit to create a personalized prevention plan;
Reducing patient financial barriers by removing cost-sharing for recommended preventive services and providing incentives for choosing healthy lifestyles;
Improving care coordination by managing care transitions and facilitating Medicaid medical home options for patients with chronic conditions;
Strengthening the quality of care by adopting policies linking payments to improved health outcomes and calling for the development of a national quality strategy;
Translating knowledge into action by creating a new federal effort for comparative effectiveness research to improve care quality;
A $15 Billion investment in a new prevention and public health trust fund. Proceeds from the fund are designed to invest in evidence-based prevention initiatives.
These fundamental improvements to our health care delivery system are vital and must be safeguarded.
No part of the health reform debate had more bipartisan support than efforts to combat chronic disease. Hopefully that support will not be eroded in Congress by loud talk on the campaign trail.
By holding true to its commitment to take real steps forward in the fight against chronic disease, Congress could gratify some and astound the rest.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

For about 7 years during most of October, farmer Don Wachlin, of Schlichting Century Farm in Sherwood, Oregon, draws scores of kids (of all ages) who delight in firing their grapefruit size pumpkins at the old bus. As you will see in the video, it’s not so easy to hit the stationary target, but for those who are lucky enough (or from their own perspective — skilled enough) to knock out a window, the prize is $5.
Originally posted on Cooking Up a Story.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Oh G-d no. Not another Bible codes book. And this one launched in a full page ad in the New York Times highlighting how in May 2008 Oprah Winfrey sent a Bible code to Barack Obama that he would become President.
Surely I, as an orthodox Jew, ought to applaud a book that proves that the Torah has encoded prophecy, thereby proving its authenticity. But aside from the question of whether President Obama is G-d’s anointed, I have serious objections to the Bible codes.
First, there is the fact that you can take nearly any lengthy book, put it through a computer, and pull out prophecy. Professor Brendan McKay of Australian National University found 13 predicted assassinations of public figures encoded in Moby Dick, including several presidents and prime ministers. McKay also found an encoded phrase in Moby Dick that predicted “Drosnin (the author of the codes series) will be murdered by Eli Rips (the Israeli scholar who first discovered the codes) in Athens.” Other scholars found results that were as statistically impressive as Rips in a Hebrew copy of War and Peace.
Next, associated with the codes there is the usual apocalyptic bunkum that has so tarnished religion. The codes apparently predicted an atomic Holocaust in 1986 and, if that didn’t happen, that the world would end again in 2006. (It’s worth noting my cardinal rule about the difference between a real religion and a cult: religion teaches you to revere life while a cult teaches you to fear death). The codes predicted a world war in the year 2000 and that Israel would be destroyed in a global cataclysm (let’s hope Ahmadinejad isn’t reading the book). The book further predicted a comet would strike earth and obliterate much of it in 2006.
What makes an even greater mockery of the codes is that the Torah today is somewhat imprecise in that some of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet can be replaced by vowels and we are not certain whether the vowel, or the letter itself, should be in certain passages. Insert a few of these missing letters and the codes become gibberish.
But none of this has stopped a few Jewish outreach organizations, most notably Aish HaTorah, from employing the codes as a principal tool by which to attract young Jews to their tradition. Little do they realize that Christian missionaries are now putting the New Testament through computers to demonstrate, through their own codes, that Jesus is the foretold Messiah.
But my personal objection to the codes is something else entirely and has to do with the rise of Judaism as magic and Rabbis as soothsayers. Over the past twenty years we have witnessed a slew of mostly fraudulent Cabbalists and questionable mystics running around the world and telling gullible Jews their future. Many are Rabbis who even claim illustrious pedigrees. The majority employ a classic ‘cold reading’ — where without even realizing it, you end up supplying the information to the ‘seer’ who can really only see your wallet — and are about as capable of telling the future as I am of playing in the NBA.
You receive a private audience with these much sought-after Rabbis and they immediately wish you a speedy recovery for your ailing back. They tell you they know you’re having tension with one of your children and that your dead mother has forgiven you for the time you forgot her birthday. They offer sop and comfort, but ask them anything truly useful, like when will the next bomb go off in Jerusalem so as to save innocents from dying — and they stealthily change the subject. But that hasn’t stopped wealthy, educated, and sophisticated Jews all over America from lining up around the block to line these charlatans pockets and get business and personal advice.
We are living in an age that desperately needs religion. Modernity is only a blessing so long as its technological advances are governed by values. Wealth in the West has ended poverty but has brought in its wake soullessness and materialism. Putting the professional before the personal has lead to the decimation of romantic relationships and the neglect family and children.
This is why the Bible is more relevant than ever before. Western men and women need to read of a wealthy nobleman named Abraham who personally sat outside his tent to welcome wayfarers. Politicians who eviscerate each other in attack ads need to read of Moses who brought Pharaoh to his knees yet remained ‘the most humble man who walked the earth.’ Brothers and sisters who haven’t spoken in years need to read of Joseph who became the most powerful man alive but forgave his siblings their attempt at fratricide. Men who cheat on their wives must read of King David who engaged in the most severe penance after his affair with Bathsheba.
But religion as pious sorcery threatens to undermine its moral dimension. The Bible codes and mystical, magical Judaism tell us it’s not the inspirational guidance and wisdom for life which makes the Bible special, but it’s hidden numerology and nascent predictions. You turn to the Bible not to learn how to be close to G-d but to predict the next property surge.
So let me be clear. I couldn’t give a damn if the Bible can predict the next president and I don’t need the Torah to forewarn me that I’m about to become nuclear melba toast. Rather, I turn to Judaism to discover the values by which I should lead my life and maximize my human potential. I seek not to discern the future but master the here-and-now. Religion is a road map not to some underlying codes hidden in the Bible but my underlying G-dly nature that sits beneath my ambition, selfishness, and egocentrism and strives to come out.
If you want a vulgar forgery of faith there are any number of religious charlatans who, for a couple of bucks, are ready to read your palm. But if you’re an adult then you’re ready for religion as something that attunes you to G-d and humanity’s needs rather than focusing exclusively on your own.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi,” is founder of This World: The Values Network which seeks to use universal Jewish values to heal America. His newest book is Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life” (Basic Books). Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

This Blogger’s Books from
Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy
by Shmuley Boteach
The Blessing of Enough: Rejecting Material Greed, Embracing Spiritual Hunger
by Shmuley Boteach

Follow Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/RabbiShmuley

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Over the next 7 days, last-minute campaigning will separate winners from losers. Candidates and volunteers must have a solid grasp on how to get out the vote (GOTV). To convince people to exercise our right to vote, you must flex your organizing muscle. Take the Campaign Boot Camp GOTV Quiz and make sure you’re in top shape to succeed.
30 QUESTIONS: GOTV BOOT CAMP QUIZ
(excerpted from Campaign Boot Camp: Basic Training for Future Leaders http://www.pelosibootcamp.com)
Identify your call to service
1. Does your campaign reflect your service mission?
2. Are you fulfilling your campaign promises?
3. Did you commit the necessary time, energy, resources, and reputation?
4. If not, what can you change in the final days?
5. How is the candidate’s family life? Is everyone still on board?
6. Does the campaign reflect the vision, ideas, and values of its call to service?
Know your community
7. Has the campaign visited every possible neighborhood?
8. Do you have the most up to date demographics and voter registration data?
9. Have you identified your winning number and can you reach that goal?
Build your leadership teams
10. Do you have the people in place to succeed?
11. Did candidates give 100% & hire people who work well together? Can you do or add more?
12. How has the kitchen cabinet handled surprises and setbacks?
13. Are the house meeting hosts building the volunteer corps?
14. Did the finance council raise $ needed to implement the campaign plan?
15. Is the election protection team in contact with hotlines like the DNC’s 800-311-VOTE?
Define your message
16. Is your message getting out there?
17. How have allies and attacks affected people’s perceptions of the campaign?
18. Anything you need to change here?
Connect with people
19. Have you reached the people where they live?
20. Any debate positives to broadcast or gaffes to overcome?
21. What is your online presence?
22. Who are best validators? Are they available in the next seven days to help?
Raise the money
23. Did people come through?
24. Did the money calls get made?
25. Are there people you can still pull in to fund the last push?
26. Should you add more fund-raising at house meetings or call time?
27. What is your adjusted plan– what is real, not what you hoped to raise?
Mobilize to win
28. Have you recruited enough of a volunteer corps to your cause?
29. Where can you conduct more house meetings?
30. What networks might you tap for support to achieve victory on Election Day?
Be honest in your assessment — candidates should adjust to lock in a winner; as ambassadors for the campaign, volunteers should know the answers to these questions before hitting the phones and doors. Campaign teams, now is not the time to be defensive — any good idea that adds votes adds value. Good luck!

Follow Christine Pelosi on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/sfpelosi

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Why do you think they run on a platform of economic destruction? The Republicans goal is to bankrupt America, period. What better way to have to cut Entitlements, which is their true goal? Considering George Bush just revealed that his biggest regret was not privatizing Social Security, it’s not like the Republicans disdain for our social safety net is a big secret. To many Republicans, Americas “failures” are actually successes. The destruction of our economy is actually a huge success, bleeding out two wars, the Bush Prescription Drug bill and two massive tax cuts for the wealthy, all unpaid for and billed to the next generation and administration. How better to bankrupt the New Deal than with disastrous economic policies combined with two expensive wars and a host of unfunded mandates?
The Republican “Party of No” strategy has turned some public opinion in their favor, at least with a large evidently amnestic demographic of people who didn’t care one bit about deficits and debt under Bush but suddenly found righteous anger once Obama took office. The strategy holds that if the economy doesn’t rebound, people would be more likely to vote against the incumbent party as a protest vote. And with no platform to run on, the Republicans can only try to position themselves as a somehow fresh choice and hope the voters have a serious degree of memory loss about their last time in charge. And by the way, who thought Nancy Reagan would be such a huge influence on the Republican Party? ‘Just Say No’ indeed.
Obstructionist as they are, obstinate as they act, it is all part of the true platform: The Party of Failure. They failed at government in the 1980′s and they failed at government in the 2000′s and now they are doing their best to make Obama fail so they can call him a failure, get voted back in to office on a wave of “anti-incumbent” anger and then get back to what they do best: keep failing. Republican strategist Grover Norquist famously said “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Republicans couldn’t reduce the size of government by fiat so they did the next best thing: write more checks than the account holds, max out all the credit cards and leave it to the next president to have to make those unfortunate but necessary cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, or privatize Social Security and sink that big pool of protected Government greenbacks into the Casino on Wall Street. You can almost hear the wolves on Wall Street licking their chops and sharpening their knives at the thought of it.
If the Tea Partiers think they’re the party of “less government,” wait until they see what they would get after another Republican-dominated period of governance. I always wonder when the moment will come when people realize that they have been voting against their own self-interest? Is it when the anti-health-care-reform people get sick and get dropped from their insurance (which can’t happen now, thank you President Obama and the Democrats)? Is it when they need the Police or Fire Department but due to budget cuts there aren’t enough to handle every emergency? Or when their Medicare payments get cut and their Social Security goes belly up on the stock market? I keep waiting for them to suddenly realize that the Fox-guided message that delivers their narrative is being directed by corporate interests and that they are angry pawns in an elaborate game that ultimately will not benefit them at all. Just like the Religious Right in the last century, they are being used for others political gains. Getting Tea Party people elected as Republicans will not help; just look at Scott Brown, who votes pretty much in lockstep with the corporate-owned Republicans. It’s Republicorp, and it’s there to see if you don’t have your tinted goggles on. Or should I say tainted goggles.
If the Republicans can keep Obama from succeeding, they might get another shot at Failure with a capital F. Perhaps they can call it Failure, Inc., because it is big business to keep our government from regulating big business and to keep our congress bought and sold. So when does the Party of No get correctly branded as the Party of Failure? And do they really need a shot at failing again? If you’re one of the people thinking of sitting this election out because you don’t think Obama has done enough in the last 20 months, consider what Republicorp will do if they take power and know that not casting a vote against them is as good as casting a vote for them. Unless, of course, you are rooting for more failure and the bankrupting of America. Time to wake up and smell what the Right and their corporate masters are really cooking.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

“Best of” lists are usually based on subjective points. When choosing our 10 best and worst states to retire, we went with the objective. Earlier this week, MoneyRates.com published a list of the 10 worst states for retirement. This list was based on a combination of quantifiable factors including:
Economics (factoring in cost of living, unemployment, and average state and local tax burden)
Climate
Crime rate
Life expectancy
Now, the good news. MoneyRates.com has compiled a list of the 10 best states for retirement. You’ll find the MoneyRates.com list is not all geared to one set of priorities — it isn’t, for example, a list of 10 warm-weather states — but instead should have something for everybody.
Some of the choices might surprise you, but when you look over the criteria, you can decide which states have the most appealing characteristics for your tastes.
Then join the discussion on the best and worst states for retirement on the MoneyRates.com blog.
The original article can be found at MoneyRates.com:
10 Best States for Retirement
PHOTOS:
No. 10: Idaho
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Economic factors: Cost of living is 92 percent of the national average, unemployment is at 8.8 percent, and the average state and local tax burden is 10.1 percent.
Climate: Average monthly temperatures range from 23.6 degrees in January to 66.24 degrees in July.
Crime rate: 43rd in the nation in violent crime, 45th in property crime.
Life expectancy: 77.9 years
Reason for high rank: With its low crime rates, this is a great state if you are concerned about security, and the cost of living is cheap as well. Just watch out for the climate and the tax burden — both can be a little rough.
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Data sources: ACCRA Cost of Living Index, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Tax Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, MSNBC, the U.S. Census Bureau, Bloomberg Businessweek

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com