ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

Let me start by pointing out something serious health economists have known all along: on general principles, universal health insurance should be eminently affordable.

After all, every other advanced country offers universal coverage, while spending much less on health care than we do. For example, the French health care system covers everyone, offers excellent care and costs barely more than half as much per person as our system.

And even if we didn't have this international evidence to reassure us, a look at the U.S. numbers makes it clear that insuring the uninsured shouldn't cost all that much, for two reasons.

First, the uninsured are disproportionately young adults, whose medical costs tend to be relatively low. The big spending is mainly on the elderly, who are already covered by Medicare.

Second, even now the uninsured receive a considerable (though inadequate) amount of "uncompensated" care, whose costs are passed on to the rest of the population. So the net cost of giving the uninsured explicit coverage is substantially less than it might seem.

Now, about those specifics: The HELP plan achieves near-universal coverage through a combination of regulation and subsidies. Insurance companies would be required to offer the same coverage to everyone, regardless of medical history; on the other side, everyone except the poor and near-poor would be obliged to buy insurance, with the aid of subsidies that would limit premiums as a share of income.

Sarah Palin talks like a beauty pagent queen.

She says a lot of words in order to look all intelligent and stuff in order to fill out the time a person of normal IQ would take to answer the question...

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she thought she was pulling of a cunning stunt with her announcement.

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she thought she was pulling of a cunning stunt with her announcement.


stunning.

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I'm disappointed. I thought all that beauty pageant stage walking Palin did would have better prepared her for this epic fail.

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Yeah, maybe Carrie Prejean can co-host with Sarah. They seem like they have a lot in common.

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Let's put it this way.

Sarah Palin is probably a sexual object in the sense of most porn starlets.

Good sex (there is no other kind) but you want her out of your bed before the cock crows, because the thought of having to make small talk with her over breakfast repulses you no end.

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Palin's not hot. She's actually pretty dick deflating, in an ignorant-stupid-moralistic way. Sorry, but she's a typical 40 - something GOP woman that thinks with that push-up bra, tummy tuck panty hose, and makeup from hell that she still has it.

she doesn't.

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She has 6 pounds of cake on her face, is unbelievably stupid, arrogant, and mean, and probably smells pretty bad.

Yeah - a real doll.

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"She has 6 pounds of cake on her face, is unbelievably stupid, arrogant, and mean, and probably smells pretty bad.

Yeah - a real doll."


Guys pay extra for all that.

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so Palin found a clever way to piss off the MSM in a big way before the long week-end

man, waht a bitch!

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she gets on national tv and rambles for 20 minutes...but don't talk about her

And do we get a great shot of her tits? NO!!!!!

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I could've straightened her out with a good, hard spanking, but Cindy wouldn't let me.

Now look what's happened . . .
John McCain |

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I cannot listen to her for more than five minutes.

That voice would curdle milk.

BESIDES the moronic shit that comes out of her mouth.

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That voice just drives me up the wall. I cannot stand her.

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"i think reading it will be more fun. especially when atrios, digby, c/t, etc start anylizing it."


Well, that will definitely be fun, but her body language, squeaky voice, and nervous delivery add something that can't be quantified in words.

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UPDATE: Palin changed her mind again. She's quitting, again.

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TOP STORY: Palin changed her mind a third time. She's staying. For now.

Praise Jeebus!

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No one should be surprised Sarah didn't serve her full term.

She didn't go full term with Trigg either.

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Child services should remove those children from the "care" of their obviously insane mother. She's on par with that woman who gave birth into a toilet.

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I felt a lot of pity for her family today. Why did they have to there when she rambled on and on, for so long? Can't she do something by herself?

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So you need a disabled infant more than a disabled infant needs you? WTF?

That poor baby sure has his work cut for himself, propping up that damn bawling woman. I wonder if Angelina Jolie is up for a rescue mission.

I mean...seriously. It's disturbing.

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Word is that Sarah has developed a fascination for fashionable clothes since the election and she is driving the Palin household towards bankruptcy. Todd has insisted that she peddle her ass to the highest bidder or get out.

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palin's pregnant with levi's love child.

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I hope she can become a spokesperson for drilling in ANWR now, and helping this country become independent of foreign oil.

She should pose naked on a drilling rig.

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Taking bets how long before Palin poses for Playboy......

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Maybe she's pregnant again

Possible names:

Twig, Swig, Swag, Cog, Bunk, Tweet

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Does this mean she'll finally go away???

I am so sick of Drama Queen Barbie.

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Th asshole is going to be a constant reminder of what you can do with NO qualifications

Goodbye you whore.

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The Supreme Court heard five environmental law cases in the term that ended Monday, and environmental groups lost every time. It was, said Richard J. Lazarus, a director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University Law Center, "the worst term ever" for environmental interests.

The court allowed Navy exercises using sonar that threatened whales off California. It limited the liability of companies partly responsible for toxic spills. It made it harder to challenge Forest Service regulations and easier to dump mining waste into an Alaskan lake. And it allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to use cost-benefit analysis to decide how much marine life may be killed by cooling structures at power plants.

Business groups expressed measured satisfaction with the decisions.

"The court does seem to be bringing more common sense back to environmental law," Robin S. Conrad, a lawyer with the United States Chamber of Commerce, said at a recent news briefing.

If he had been alone she might have approached him directly, but he was not. And for reasons Kamala did not fully understand, the presence of a woman by his side made her uneasy. It probably wouldn't have if the woman had been decked out in a stylish riding gown, trailing silk skirts sidesaddle over the flanks of her mount. Such a woman Kamala would simply disdain and dismiss, a mere traveling accessory to the one who really mattered. But no, this woman was clearly a comrade-at-arms in every sense of the word. And that bothered her.

Why?
You are jealous, she thought.
What a bizarre thought! Jealous of a morati [mortal]?
Jealous of how he accepts her.

The woman was dressed in a man's garb, but not in any manner that kept her true sex hidden. She had not flirted with the men outside the meetinghouse as a normal woman might have done, but Kamala was willing to bet that the other Guardians were not unaware of the difference between them, or its sexual potential. Yet they all kept a respectful distance, of their own accord. Sometimes one or the other would make a joking comment about her effect on them all, but even then they were laughing with her, not at her.

True acceptance.

It burned her to see it. Why? Because they accepted a warrior woman for what she truly was, not for some role that she must play in order to win men's favor? Because she did not have to pretend to be something less than a woman to win a respected place among them?

If the Magisters had half so much tolerance, Kamala thought bitterly, things might be very different for her now. And at night, in her fitful dreaming, she imagined what that might have been like for her. To be part of their brotherhood without the need to deny her sex. Simply accepted.

She kept her distance.

Who really knows what's behind Sarah Palin's decision to resign as Governor of Alaska? Certainly not the fact she wants to avoid becoming a lame duck governor for the good of Alaska.

Popular theories being floated include:

· she is gearing up to run for president in 2012

· there is a big scandal set to hit her office in coming days and she is getting out in advance

· she has accepted a well-paying job in the private sector- perhaps as a TV commentator

· she was tired of all the negative press

· she might be pregnant (This classic from CNN's Rick Sanchez).

Here’s another theory: Sarah Palin simply opted out.

Opting out is a loaded concept. The mainstream media often paint opting out as a decision made by women to quit work and live out some kind of warm and fuzzy stay-at-home-mother retro-fantasy. Occasionally, we hear about the women who seem to have opted out but in reality were forced out of the workplace due to a lack of work/life flexibility options and/or hostile working environments. Rarely do we read about the women who leave the corporate world because, quite simply, they think corporate America sucks.

I've interviewed a lot of women who have "opted out" of the corporate world. Many of these women don’t stop working –often they start their own businesses. While almost all of them cite flexibility as a big bonus, motherhood is not the only reason they leave. Their reasons are personal and vary greatly. They leave because they climb high enough on the ladder to get a view of the top and they don't like what they see. Because they can't align their personal values with their company's business objectives. Because they don’t respect their coworkers. Because they don’t like who they are becoming. Because they aren't passionate about their work. Because they have the strength and self-confidence to swap a big paycheck and status for a life more in tune with their own beliefs. Because they aren't passionate about what they are doing. Because they choose to place their own well-being ahead of anything else.

We know the personal is political and ultimately we need to address these issues collectively. After all, studies continue to show that women leaders are good for business. There is risk in women opting out.

Will I be surprised if there is more to the Palin story? No. But what if there isn't? What if, in this case, the political is personal? What if there's nothing else to the story and Sarah Palin simply quit?

President Barack Obama said today that he still favors a "robust" federal policy protecting health-care workers who have moral objections to performing some procedures even though he plans to roll back a Bush administration rule that expanded such protection.

Speaking to eight religion reporters at the White House before his first meeting with Pope Benedict XVI next Friday, Obama sought to reassure Catholic health-care workers that they would not be forced to perform abortions and other procedures that violate the Church's teachings. Obama said he is a "believer in conscience clauses" and supports a new policy that would "certainly not be weaker" than the rules in place before the expansion late in President George W. Bush's administration.

F words: feminism, (life in her) forties and
sometimes family. Her work has been published in The Boston Globe Magazine, The Atlanta Journal Constitution and The Glass Hammer where she covers women and the workplace.

While Michelle Obama was meeting with doctors and patients at the Upper Cardozo Health Center, nearly two dozen journalists stood behind a white rope in a small room upstairs, most finally growing so tired during the hour-long wait that they sat on the floor.

Finally the first lady emerged, read a short speech about releasing federal stimulus money for community health clinics -- including $2.5 million for the Northwest Washington center -- and greeted a handpicked audience with handshakes and hugs. Then she turned and left, and the press pool quietly filed out.

Rachel Swarns of the New York Times and The Washington Post's Robin Givhan were among those herded behind the rope Monday. They and the other main beat reporters -- Newsweek's Allison Samuels, Darlene Superville of the Associated Press and Politico's Nia-Malika Henderson -- have something in common: They are all African American women.

Perhaps this gives them a richer cultural understanding of Obama as a trailblazer. Indeed, most write with enthusiasm, in some cases even admiration, about the first lady as a long-awaited role model for black women.

Whether racial and gender identification produces a gauzier, more favorable portrayal of Obama is perhaps too early to judge. After all, no one raises questions when an Irish American male reporter covers a pol named Murphy. And with her carefully crafted focus on her children, affordable fashion and such reduced-fat apple pie issues as healthy eating, Obama has done little to warrant sharp criticism.

Such developments can foster a mixture of tokenism and opportunity. When Jesse Jackson made his first White House run in 1984, a number of black political reporters got their first crack at a presidential campaign. The assignment was a sideshow -- Jackson had no serious chance of winning -- but also boosted the careers of his chroniclers.

The day before the inauguration, Henderson wrote in Politico that "to fashionistas, she's Michelle O, the new Jackie. . . . Post-feminists see Michelle Obama as one of their own, the having-it-all Harvard-educated lawyer. . . . African American women say she'll upend age-old stereotypes of the angry black woman who can't find a good man, or keep him when she does."

In her proclamation, Kern also blames people outside of Wall Street and Washington for the national recession.

The proclamation states: "Whereas, we believe our economic woes are consequences of our greater national moral crisis; and Whereas, this nation has become a world leader in promoting abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse ,and many other forms of debauchery."

The Vatican is quietly conducting two sweeping investigations of American nuns, a development that has startled and dismayed nuns who fear they are the targets of a doctrinal inquisition.

Nuns were the often-unsung workers who helped build the Roman Catholic Church in this country, planting schools and hospitals and keeping parishes humming. But for the last three decades, their numbers have been declining — to 60,000 today from 180,000 in 1965.

While some nuns say they are grateful that the Vatican is finally paying attention to their dwindling communities, many fear that the real motivation is to reel in American nuns who have reinterpreted their calling for the modern world.

The second investigation of nuns is a doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella organization that claims 1,500 members from about 95 percent of women's religious orders. This investigation was ordered by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is headed by an American, Cardinal William Levada.

Cardinal Levada sent a letter to the Leadership Conference saying an investigation was warranted because it appeared that the organization had done little since it was warned eight years ago that it had failed to "promote" the church's teachings on three issues: the male-only priesthood, homosexuality and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church as the means to salvation.

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Mr. Briggs said of the various investigations: "For some in the leadership circles in Rome and elsewhere, it's a piece of unfinished business. It's an effort to bring about a re-establishment of a very traditional, very conservative set of standards for what convent life is supposed to be."

The list of states -- Democratic and Republican, old economy and new -- is sufficiently diverse to dispel any notion that the fiscal crisis of the states is disproportionately the problem of one party or one region. It is, rather, hard-wired into the American system of governance, wherein virtually all the states have required themselves to produce balanced budgets even during depressions -- which means they must slash services and lay off workers even though such actions actually deepen the downturn.

But California is a special case simply because it's so big. Closing California's budget gap entirely through cutbacks in programs, as Schwarzenegger and the Republicans in the legislature propose, will deepen not only the state's recession but also the nation's. Fully 1 in 4 of the nation's underwater mortgages, for instance, are on California homes, and the effects of the governor's proposed cuts -- which UCLA's Anderson School of Business estimates will cause 60,000 state employees to lose their jobs -- will be to create a new wave of foreclosures and toxic assets on the banks' books. California accounts for 12 percent of the nation's gross domestic product and a disproportionate share of the federal government's revenues (and for every dollar that Californians pay to the feds, they get just 80 cents back in services).

Right-wing ideologues see the crisis as an opportunity to shrink government regardless of the consequences. Schwarzenegger is proposing to end welfare, not just as we know it but altogether, and to throw 1 million children off the rolls of the state's healthy families program. But the consequences of closing the deficit simply through cutbacks will be felt by more than the poor. Already reeling from $15 billion in cutbacks that the state put through in February, many school districts, including that of Los Angeles, have canceled summer school this year. Scholarships that enable students of modest means to attend California's fabled university system have been slashed. Most of the state's parks may have to be closed as well.

Communities also can help, Gluckman says. By helping women such as Williams get good prenatal care and nutrition, for example, communities can reduce the number of fetuses who are malnourished and born small, Gluckman says. Babies who are born at normal weight are more likely to maintain that healthy weight.

Because half of pregnancies are unplanned, women need to learn about nutrition — and maintain healthy diets — long before they conceive, Gluckman says.

"We have got to give far greater focus to mothers, the women who are likely to become mothers and to the care of newborn children than we have in the past," Gluckman says.

A pregnant woman's diet tells a fetus a lot about its future environment, including how much food will be available after birth, Jones says.

A baby conceived during a famine, for example, might learn to be "thrifty," hoarding every calorie and packing on fat rather than muscle, even at the expense of developing vital organs, such as the kidneys, liver and brain. Because of a lack of calories, the baby also may be born small.

In a famine, those early adjustments and predictions about the future could mean the difference between survival and starvation, Jones says.

But babies may run into trouble if the world doesn't match their predictions, Jones says.

A baby who has learned to hoard calories, for example, may grow up to be fat or diabetic once he or she finally gets enough to eat, Jones says. Doctors believe this occurs not just with babies whose mothers are starving, but with those who are malnourished because of a mother's medical problems, poor nutrition or exposure to tobacco smoke, which damages the placenta.

It's well known, Taylor says, that women who smoke are more likely to have low-birth-weight babies, who are in some ways "starved" for nutrients in the womb. Babies born too small are at risk for many immediate problems, such as underdeveloped lungs and bleeding in the brain.

If they survive, these youngsters also face long-term risks.

Studies show that small babies who gain weight rapidly in infancy or childhood — a sign that bodies are already making the most of every calorie — also have higher rates of adult heart disease and diabetes, Jones says.

Specialized X-rays have shown babies of young mothers with poor diets in India, for example, are born with extra belly fat, even though they seem to be a normal weight. Once these babies start getting an adequate diet, they are likely to put on weight, Gluckman says.

For the second study, Ms. Sands sent identical scripts to artistic directors and literary managers around the country. The only difference was that half named a man as the writer (for example, Michael Walker), while half named a woman (i.e., Mary Walker). It turned out that Mary's scripts received significantly worse ratings in terms of quality, economic prospects and audience response than Michael's. The biggest surprise? "These results are driven exclusively by the responses of female artistic directors and literary managers," Ms. Sands said.

Amid the gasps from the audience, an incredulous voice called out, "Say that again?"

Ms. Sands put it another way: "Men rate men and women playwrights exactly the same."

Ms. Sands was reluctant to explain the responses in terms of discrimination, suggesting instead that artistic directors who are women perhaps possess a greater awareness of the barriers female playwrights face.

When more than 160 playwrights and producers, most of them female, filed into a Midtown Manhattan theater Monday night, they expected to hear some concrete evidence that women who are authors have a tougher time getting their work staged than men.

And they did. But they also heard that women who are artistic directors and literary managers are the ones to blame.

Female playwrights, long aware that they're produced less frequently than their male counterparts, may now have someone to blame: female artistic directors.

Are you referring to mynameisdan? If so, go reread his post, because he's exactly right. The evidence from this study showed that women, not men, were discriminating against women, which is the opposite of what the researcher expected to find, so she "charitably" theorized--apparently on the basis of no evidence at all--that this must be caused by male discrimination somewhere else. Why? What possible reason is there for this theory other than that the researcher has a bias that only men, and never women, can be responsible for sexism?

Hate men much, GeorgiaProg?

On aggregate, male respondents assign nearly identical ratings to a script irrespective of the gender of the pen-name. Female respondents, however, assign markedly lower ratings to a script when that script bears a female pen-name. The lower ratings assigned by female respondents to purportedly female-written scripts may be attributable to heightened awareness among female respondents of the barriers faced by female playwrights.

Female respondents believe a script written by women will be perceived by the theater community to be of lower overall quality... However, female respondents do not report personally believing that a script with a female pen-name is of lower quality. Specifically, female respondents assign lower ratings for Likable and Prize when a script has a female pen-name; these questions ask generally if the characters are likable and how likely it is that the playwright will win a prize. In the more personal rating measuring the extent to which the respondent herself deems the play to be an example of artistic exceptionalism, in contrast, female respondents assign a given script the same rating irrespective of the playwright's gender.