Monday Musings: March 21. 2011

Rep. Dennis Kucinich says that the air strikes in Libya could be ‘an impeachable offense’? Kucinich needs to take a deep breath. Along with a lot of other folks who see the bombing of Gaddafi’s forces as the beginning of the end of the world as we know it.

This isn’t to say that I don’t agree, on certain levels, with the shared concern over our role in assisting Libyan rebel forces as part of an honest U.N. sanctioned, multi-national effort. We’ve experienced the tragic legacy of mission creep. In fact, I wonder if it is too little too late.  I do think everybody who knew Gaddafi best - the Arab League particularly - could have gauged Gaddafi’s desperate response more accurately and earlier.

It’s easy to say that we shouldn’t be engaging in a third ‘front’ of Middle Eastern conflict and war in light of the realities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. But that train has left the station. Let’s pose a hypothetical here: What if there wasn’t Iraq and Afghanistan? Would helping the Libyan rebels be raising similar levels of concern in Washington - vis a vis Presidential powers according to the Constitution? Somehow, I don’t think so, particularly in light of the very real challenges facing the country right here and now.

Ultimately, there should be an open debate on the floor of Congress before we commit to any further action in Libya. But to start throwing the ‘impeachable offense’ bomb around - perhaps only serving to further hobble a marginally effective president during an especially critical time in our history - isn’t responsible either.

Hey, Dennis! Turn it down a notch, and offer us a course that will get it straightened out and back on track.

“At a time when other news organizations are cutting back and the voices of pundits are drowning out fact-based reporting and thoughtful analysis, NPR and public radio stations are delivering in-depth news and information respectfully and with civility. It would be a tragedy for America to lose this national treasure,” said Joyce Slocum, Interim CEO.

Ain’t that the truth! I know we don’t like those seemingly interminable fund drives, but here’s the way we deal with them. We put an automatic monthly donation to NPR (KUNR) in the online monthly payables at our Credit Union. You can also set up a monthly/quarterly payment on your credit card here. A modest amount, every month, and then we ignore the fund raisers. But we do this knowing that we have it covered - because it’s even more important now than ever before. If we all give a little, it will work.

A true democracy runs on the availability of factual, unbiased information - like the kind of thing you can’t/don’t get from the networks. This cut in federal funding could be disasterous to low population states like Nevada, and their public broadcasting media outlets, where it’s estimated that less than 10 percent of viewers/listeners actually contribute.  If you care about ensuring the continuing operation of stations like NPR, then even $5 a month is better than nothing at all.

Set it up now. Save your democracy via NPR.

The other day, after reading about the Reno Aces baseball team revenue shortfall ( they’ve asked the City of Reno for ‘financing alternatives’) , I sent a brief email to one well versed in local government, just to see what she thought:

“I wanted to write: “Are you out of your fucking minds?” but thought that would not sound ladylike in mixed company.”

Uh, that’s pretty clear. It seems like the City of Reno is in a deep, deep fiscal hole. That hole is filling with water. In fact, it sounds like the City of Reno could be in a predicament dire enough to warrant intervention by the State of Nevada. The Nevada Department of Taxation could, in essence, take over management of the City of Reno just as it did of White Pine County a few years back.

The City of Reno has been robbing from Peter to save Paul, playing a shell game with various funds, to make things look acceptable in the short term … but like all similar schemes, it’s not sustainable. Eventually the house of cards caves in. All it takes is a gasp! totally unforeseen! gasp! recession! We can’t do even the simplest things - fund pensions, medical benefit obligations, get the homeless off the streets, build bus route shelters - yet notice how there’s always more money out there for ‘redevelopment’.

At the risk of being branded a ‘nay sayer’, I’m going to suggest that ‘redevelopment’ schemes need to be held to the bright light of audit. Do they really produce the results they claim they can - if the taxpayers will just pony up a bit more here, and a bit more there.

Rather like a Ponzi scheme. Or since we live in Nevada, you can liken it to “Betting on the Come”. I’m just one little woman, but it sounds rather like convincing yourself you need a fancy new car to boost your professional self-esteem, while not factoring in the boring, un-sexy issues of house mortgage and property taxes.

I hope you will forgive me if every time I hear ‘redevelopment’ I have a mental picture of fat cats taking care of their swell new and shiny friends - while the boring old citizens go begging for the basics.

We went to breakfast this morning with some of our more self-satisfied “I’ve got mine” retired crowd. I thought that my head was going to explode, and that Ron might lose it and blurt out the obvious, after one friend said the following (I paraphrase):

“There’s no point to it. Life, I mean. All you do is get up, eat and shit. Do it all over again tomorrow. What’s the point?”

This from a guy with two relatively new Porsche Carrera’s in the oversized garage, who is bound next week for Germany - just to see a car show. The entire last month was in Australia - again. A sweet retirement from the Air Force/California Air Guard/the airline, great wife. Good health. Grown successful kids. Nice digs. Lifetime membership at the airline ’ sky club’. No worries. Doesn’t read the newspaper because “it’s too negative”. Thinks he pays way too many taxes - and keeps us supplied with bogus un-fact-checked scary forwarded rightwing emails.

Life just sucks, doesn’t it? He gives me the greasy fucking heartburn. At least our other friend sitting there - who could buy and sell all of us - had the good sense and common decency to keep his mouth shut.

Something neat happened yesterday. We got a whole flock of Red-Winged Blackbirds at the backyard bird feeders. They are usually over on the east side of Highway 395 in the wetlands of the Damonte Ranch area. I don’t understand what brought them in, but I was glad of it. I really enjoy their calls.

 

The new resident of one of my birdhouses seems to be wondering wassup?

I was actually headed out the door when I saw the blackbirds - dropping my armload of warm cookies to pick up the camera (parked ever ready on the counter next to the window). 

Keeping rolls of homemade, whole grain, cookie dough in the freezer is just the perfect solution to the last minute “what do I bring to the party?” We were headed out to two events yesterday, and slicing off frozen cookie dough is so fast, simple and fuss free … I don’t know why I didn’t think of it a long time ago.

Well, it looks like Spring weather might be delayed on account of weather this week, as one system after another rolls through. I hope I get one more shot - this time with camera in hand - to roam around and get some photos of the last gasp of winter.

In the meantime, stay tuned. I’ll always have something to say about … something.

-maven

Help keep public television and radio the voice of your democracy!

I simply can’t believe my ears. Cutting the entire federal funding for PBS/NPR? Are they fucking nuts? These networks are the voice of our democracy - not beholden to unleashed corporate influence.

Go to 170 Million today and get the whole story - and take action!

Two shows to catch: Guns on NPR, supermarkets on CNBC

On NPR’s Fresh Air this afternoon:

The History and Browing Influence of the NRA

4:00 p.m. locally on KUNR. Check local times and listings.

The shootings in Tucson reopened a debate on one of the most contentious issues in American politics: gun control.

Political scientist Robert Spitzer says that, in the wake of the Tucson shootings, improving record-keeping to block sales to the mentally ill stands the best chance of moving forward — but we’re unlikely to see any other gun laws tighten.

“Similar events in the past have changed the calculus of how the government has responded to gun violence, but the political atmospherics of the first decade of the 20th century very much run against the idea that there will be any significant change in federal or state gun laws as a result of the Tucson shooting,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, “even though there are some clear public policy changes [concerning gun control] that could be made that have or will be introduced into Congress soon and that most people seem to agree with.”

Spitzer, the author of the book The Politics of Gun Control, has written extensively about the history of the NRA, historical and current interpretations of the Second Amendment and the history of gun control laws.

Read more here ….

On CNBC, Tyler Mathisen has this piece that is so important to the weekly bottom line for our familes …

Supermarkets Wage War for Your Dollars

9:00 p.m. local time on cable. Check listings.

In every aisle of every supermarket, it’s the commercial equivalent of war.

The competition for the $1.5 billion a day Americans spend on groceries is cutthroat, with the battle playing out on the shelves in front of you. The stakes are so high because the profit margins are so low — 1.5 to 2 percent is typical.

In a typical supermarket, nearly 50,000 products fight for your attention: all those bottles, cans and boxes raising the same battle cry — “take me” — without saying a single word.

Every day, at virtually every one of the nation’s more than 35,000 stores, merchants employ a dizzying array of high- and low-tech tools in their struggle to grab a bigger share of the $500 billion spent every year at U.S. supermarkets.

When you enter a store today, you’re being watched, trailed, and analyzed, in ways you’d never imagine. From heat maps tracking which aisles you walk down, to video monitoring, to the loyalty card on your key chain, supermarkets use every method they can to learn as much as they can about you.

To wind up in your cart, every product has to communicate the right message.

Read more here …

Dollars for Docs? Has BigPharma been paying off your doctor?

This investigative effort is a joint project of ProPublica and NPR to shed some light on doctors who’ve been at the trough too long, and perhaps sacrificed their integrity for compensation from BigPharma.

This collaboration also includes The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, PBS Nightly Business Report and Consumer Reports.

Read more about it:

by Tom Detzel

ProPublica, Oct. 18, 2010, 9:54 p.m.

Drug companies have long kept the names of their speakers—and how much they pay them—secret. But seven companies have begun posting doctors’ names and compensation on their web sites, some as the result of legal settlements with the federal government.

ProPublica took these disclosures, totaling $257.8 million to about 17,700 providers, and assembled them into a single, comprehensive database that allows patients to search for their physician.

It was not easy. The firms constructed their sites in a way that made it near impossible to analyze or, in some cases, even download their data. And each firm disclosed its data differently. Some, for example, simply included speaking. Others also detailed consulting. Sometimes, the value of business travel and meals were listed, too.

ProPublica is committed to updating the database as additional companies release their payment data. The health care reform law, signed in March, mandates that all drug companies report such data to the federal government beginning in 2013. That information will be posted on a government web site.

Several things to bear in mind about the data:

• Only the seven companies that have disclosed payments on their web sites are included. (They are AstraZeneca, Cephalon, GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Merck and Pfizer.) Their combined prescription drug sales amounted to 36 percent of the $300 billion U.S. market in 2009. Though a substantial share, more than 70 drug companies operate in the U.S. As such, the data may not be wholly representative of the industry.
• The data is from payments made in 2009 and 2010. But not all companies reported payments for every quarter during that period.
• Although most of the money went to physicians, other practitioners, including nurses and pharmacists, also are included.
• Practitioner names and addresses are listed as the companies released them and may vary. For instance, some companies include a middle initial, and others do not. Some companies list different cities for the same individual. This may happen because professionals may have practices in multiple locations or because they provided different addresses for payments to the companies.
• Many providers have similar names, so check addresses and verify with your provider before concluding he or she is listed.
• As noted above, the companies’ reports cover different periods and include payments for different services. Some companies include payments only to speakers, while others include consultants and advisers, as well as meals and business travel. (Details are included on each company’s page [1].)
• A physician on the list may be getting money from other companies that have yet to disclose payments. A physician who is not listed could be receiving payments from one or more of those companies.
• Eli Lilly has in some cases used different middle initials for the same individual.

If you are a practitioner and believe you should not be in this database, or if you are a patient with concerns, contact us at ornstein.weber@propublica.org [2].

Thoughts from a morning walk

It’s getting warmish out there, so I cut the walk off short this morning. Got to get going earlier.

I love my walks, since I tune in to NPR stations around the country on the old iPhone, listening to Minnesota, Vermont and San Francisco today. You can really get a nice wideangle view of what the country is thinking and talking about on a local and national level. Be sure to download the NPR app, if you have an iPhone.

Having lost a signal at one point, I stopped under a shady tree to find another. I heard somebody speak, and it was a man standing in his open garage, smoking a cigarette. He was worried that I might be a census taker. I reassured him that I wasn’t a census taker, was essentially harmless in that I was looking for a new radio station on my transistor radio, and that the census ended, uh, some time back.

I was listening to some economists on Talk of the Nation, broadcast out of Vermont Public Radio,

Click to read more ...

Our media, our free press: Is it failing? What can you do?

When was the last time you heard a really big story covered on the mainstream nightly news - that hadn’t already been covered, better, sooner on NPR? I think we could count them on one hand, waking up to NPR every morning, hearing the real news - all the news - and then wondering how the big networks can miss so much.

When we read the ever shrinking Reno newspaper, the Gazette-Journal, we’re also amazed at how many things in the community aren’t covered, or are covered inadaquately.

Radio? What now passes for radio in America is shameful. It’s a sound machine made of right-wing propagandists and ideologues, the like of Howard Stern and host of wannabes, and programmed second tier pop music.

Internet? America has some of the slowest broadband in the world. So much for being the technological leader.

Comcast is on a juggernaut course to slurp up the rest of what remains of broadcast and internet - dooming any hope of maintaining internet neutrality.

Two of the best, albeit nascent publications, The Nation magazine and Reader Supported News are struggling.

Meanwhile, the media and internet in America is owned by fewer and fewer companies, as the entire thing continues to consolidate. There is less diversity. There is less freedom of opinion and expression. The messages are distorted, real information is in short supply.

Click to read more ...

Enough of Senate 'Holds', Time to Move Forward

Driving to the printer, to pick up some proofs on new brochures for work today, I was listening to the segment on NPR about the number of Obama appointees that are being blocked from doing their job by ‘holds’ in the Senate.

As you’ll read, ‘holds’ are a cheesy little way of gumming up the works, behind the scenes, anonymously. If this isn’t the official definition of ‘chicken shit’ then nothing is. This can be done away with, like it’s bad traveling companion, the filibuster, but it’s doubtful that it can happen with this Senate - without a LOT of public outrage and insistence.

Listen to the complete story by clicking here.

Here’s what NPR has to say about it all:

“The “hold” is an informal Senate custom that allows any lawmaker to block action on any bill or nomination at any time for any reason. It is essentially a threatened filibuster. Party leaders can try to move ahead anyway, but they generally honor holds out of tradition and courtesy. A president can overcome holds on nominations by making short-term appointments while Congress is away on recess. This spring, President Obama, facing 77 such holds, made more than a dozen recess appointments. By comparison, at the same point during the George W. Bush administration, senators had placed holds on only five nominations. As of May 5, senators had holds on 87 executive and judicial nominations, most of them anonymous. Four lawmakers have gone public and attached their names to the nominees they are blocking. Democrats say they have no current holds on nominations.”

And here is the thoroughly ridiculous number of appointees that are the objects of ‘holds’ - just one more thing that needs changing in the Senate (aside from all the obstructionist Republicans there):

Click to read more ...

Health care 'mandates' a must for reform to work

The Right would have you believe that ‘mandates’ are just the most horrible thing since Joe Stalin when it comes to insurance. The fact that most of us are required to carry homeowners insurance to obtain a mortgage (that’s the lender calling the shots, not the government) or car insurance (that’s the state, but I don’t hear too many folks complaining that they got hit by an uninsured motorist) seems to escape them.

Mandates are what government does. The government insists that things be done according to rules that are debated and then mutually agreed upon.

Would you really want market forces to decide whether or not the meat you buy in the supermarket was safe? Get rid of government interference and mandates on clean drinking water?

If you are totally against mandates then to fly without a parachute on a lot of things that have kept you and your family safe and healthy.

Click to read more ...

Friday Fish Wrap: March 5, 2010

For all those nay-sayers here in Northern Nevada trying to peddle the nonsense that Harry Reid can’t bring home the bacon - jobs, now - here’s just another way of saying ‘balderdash’:

Senators Reid and Ensign have announced that $5 million of funding would be coming to the Reno-Tahoe International Airport for needed upgrades to the airports ramp. The idea is to keep this airport viable for tourist and business traffic well into the future. All said, this means some 200 well paying construction type jobs, in addition to supplies and materials purchased from local business.

Furthermore, for those who hate everything about the federal government: Here’s a news flash - that money comes from the Department of Transportation. Another one of those nasty federal agencies.

Let’s just say that the likes of Sue Lowdan is right when she claims that private enterprise can handle it all.

Click to read more ...

Coverage that doesn't 'cut it': Under-insured Americans

Let’s get real, folks. The current model of for-profit health insurance isn’t working for far too large a segment of hardworking Americans. No American citizen should be burdened with 45% - that’s right, 45% of their income go for medical bills.

These are your next door neighbors, and the ‘decent’ people who are working really hard - three jobs to provide just the basics… nothing fancy.

You may fear some theoretical ‘slippery slope to socialism’, but I fear families like this being destroyed long before that dive to ‘euro socialism’ ever came to pass. This is what’s happening right now!

Listen to this great feature from this mornings NPR Morning Edition:

Stacks of Medical Bills Afflict the Underinsured by Richard Knox -

Click to read more ...

Specifics: What does the health care reform mean for you?

NPR, doing yeoman’s duty in keeping the health care debate real, has a wonderfu interactive site, where you simply plug in what your status is, and the facts - with pluses and minuses - come up for your consideration.

Click to read more ...

Take your clan tartan and ...

Just the other day, while cruising up South Virginia Street here in lovely Reno, Nevada, I was tuned in to National Public Radio as usual. Being in the afternoon, I was listening to the BBC World Report, and they were going on about the 2009 “Come Home to Scotland” celebration to be held this year.

Click to read more ...

Bacevitch Interview from todays' NPR Fresh Air

Ron and I sat transfixed in the parking lot of our weekly Yoga class. It was just another NPR (National Public Radio) ‘moment’, when you just can’t leave the car because the interview is just that compelling. Terri Gross, the host of Fresh Air,  was interviewing retired Army Colonel, Andrew Bacevich about his book “The Limits of Power: The end of American exceptionalism”.

  Bacevich rejects the notion that the United States possesses a unique tradition of ‘liberation’.

Fresh Air from WHYY, September 11, 2008 · Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University and a retired Army colonel, discusses his new book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.

He argues that pragmatic realism has always been the core of American foreign policy, and current politicians would do well to remember that.

I would encourage everyone to listen to this interview by just clicking on the link below , which will take you to the page, then click on the red speaker icon and sit back. The interview is 39 minutes in length. Let me know what you think:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94505191

The Best Show On National Public Radio: "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me"

If you haven’t been listening in on Saturday mornings to the only (that I know of) good ole timey Quiz Show that is both literate and darn funny, then you are missing out. If you aren’t listening because “everybody knows NPR is a bunch of liberals” then you aren’t from this planet. P.J. O’Rourke is not, last time I read one of his books, a raving liberal (whatever that means).

Now you do have to have been paying attention during the week to play along in the privacy of your own home or automobile. The content is based around current events … mostly the really silly ones.

With talents like Paula Poundstone, Mo Rocca and others as guest commentators/contestants/wisecrackers it’s simply just a rollicking good bit of fun. Hey, you can even call and be on the show as a contestant … the prize being Carl Kasell’s amazing radio voice on your answering machine. I did say this was silly, right?

So check out your local NPR listings ( you can go to the NPR website and do this easily) and get prepared to laught it up.