Telegraph:

Pupils in England will be given classes in sex and relationships from the age of five under Government plans to cut teenage pregnancies.

Children will learn about parts of the body, the facts of life and puberty in primary school. At secondary school, they will be taught about pregnancy, contraception, HIV and homosexual relationships, it was disclosed.

Morning-after pills available to one third of pupils All mothers and fathers will be able to keep children out on moral and religious grounds but will lose the right of withdraw when they turn 15. The ruling will affect 600,000 pupils a year.

Susie Madrak at C&L suggests you do the math:

Via CBS:

If you've been diagnosed "probable" or "presumed" 2009 H1N1 or "swine flu" in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn’t have H1N1 flu.

In fact, you probably didn’t have flu at all. That's according to state-by-state test results obtained in a three-month-long CBS News investigation.

[...]The results reveal a pattern that surprised a number of health care professionals we consulted. The vast majority of cases were negative for H1N1 as well as seasonal flu, despite the fact that many states were specifically testing patients deemed to be most likely to have H1N1 flu, based on symptoms and risk factors, such as travel to Mexico.

SoBe is at it again, with another powerhouse common sense post. Be sure to check out the graph, although I suspect most of you have seen its like before. And this is not exactly unexpected, and I bet we'll see more of it:

Even more alarmingly, Putnam County, TN, is in such dire straights it has considered doing away with county primary elections:

COOKEVILLE, Tenn. -- Putnam County is looking at the prospect of eliminating primary elections in hopes of saving $60,000.

On Monday night, the county commission voted 14 to 9 to ask the county parties to forgo primary elections and select candidates through private caucuses.

Primary elections are historically low-turnout, but nonetheless canceling an election for fiscal reasons sends off alarm bells with me. You tea party folks yammering about your loss of freedoms might want to consider what it means to cancel an election because the county doesn’t have the funds to stage it.

Who needs safe school buses, elections, or health care for the elderly, right? Those things are not as important as making sure large corporations don't pay any taxes and the wealthy pay even fewer.

Via Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi explains Obama's Nobel Peace Prize by providing some very insightful commentary about who is - and isn't - eligible for Nobel Peace Prizes and why:

Melissa McEwan provides an important overview. It isn't just our political system that's broken, although it would be naive to believe that our political and economic systems aren't affected by our culture.

and Texas, which has the most uninsured residents in the country, has kids eight times more likely to go without than Massachusetts.

Those who lack health insurance now are far more likely to live in states that usually vote Republican — the states whose senators and representatives are least likely to support a law to extend coverage.

That would seem to indicate that Republican constituents are the ones who would most benefit from passage of universal health insurance coverage. But an analysis of Congressional districts within those states indicates that those without health insurance are much more likely to live in strongly Democratic Congressional districts. Many of those contain large minority populations with relatively low incomes.

In the Congressional debate now going on, Democrats have generally supported plans aimed at assuring that all Americans have some sort of insurance, while nearly all Republicans have opposed the Democratic bills, raising concerns ranging from cost to worries that providing better health coverage for those who now lack it would diminish coverage for those who have it.

The accompanying graphic divides the states into red states — states that both voted for Senator John McCain in the last presidential election and are represented by two Republican senators — and blue states, which have two Democratic senators and voted for President Obama. The purple states are the ones that split their ballots in the presidential and Senate elections.

Lest you think this is our idea, take a look at what the Texas Observer has to say about health care (and

Just wanted to give a little link love to my grrl Southern Beale, who has been turning out some increasingly stellar material lately. She also suffers the internet's most annoying trolls, so if you're inclined to stop by and show her some support she'd appreciate it. I really enjoyed this rant:

Congress is asking how we can reform the business of healthcare to better serve people. That’s the wrong question. I’d rather ask how we can keep people healthy and get affordable healthcare to everyone at those inevitable times when we are not. Business may play a role in that but it shouldn’t be the overriding focus.

The business of healthcare should serve people. That it doesn’t is a failing of the modern capitalist religion, in which people are viewed as “consumers” first, human beings second (if at all). We’ve had this drilled into our psyche so thoroughly that we blithely accept such terms as “American consumers,” not recognizing the pejorative it so clearly is. Because when humans are reduced to mere “consumers,” their value is in their purchasing power. They are nothing more than wallets, checkbooks, bank accounts. Even, ominously, “credit scores.”

This leaves a whole bunch of people out of the equation (namely, the poor), and creates a social inequity in which the wealthy are deemed of greater value to society than the rest. Just look at the rhetoric from conservatives, who routinely disparage the poor as drains on society (Nashville’s own Phil Valentine recently referred to the poor as ”greedy grumblers” who are “sucking up the tax dollars of hard-working Americans by the trillions.”)

It’s dehumanizing, yes, but also entirely inevitable under a system that sees only wallets, not people.

Some breakthrough work on the impact hedge funds have had on the real economy was posted this evening on DailyKos by vets74: 1,000 Companies Attacked -> 1,200,000 Jobs Destroyed. 

These attacks combine corrupt MSM lie campaigns with market dumps of "naked shorts" and counterfeit "phantom stock."

. . . . Statistical sampling and employment data for the largest 1,000 attacked companies show they suffered 1,200,000 extra/excess layoffs.

Throw on a macroeconomic multiplier effect...  this gets past 3,000,000 jobs dropped overall.

and damn if I don't wish he was my Representative. Mine put out a puling little written statement about health care reform asking for more bi-partisanship and swearing never to vote for a government-run program.

Not an economist of any stripe, me, and nor do I play one on the 'Netz, radio or TV.

But this graphic says a lot. (Stolen from a link via Atrios.)

Atrios, who is an economist, had this to say this morning, by the way:

Bad

It's fine that economists all agree that output is what matter, and that when we talk about the recession turning around we're talking about GDP growth going from negative to positive, but all the happy talk really obscures the fact that 9.7% unemployment is really really horrible and no one is predicting that unemployment will turn around any time soon.

-Atrios 09:11

And we know that the real unemployment -- that is, the figure which includes the discouraged workers and those who are underemployed rather than completely adrift, was closer to 16% before this report came out.

So....

My next question is, why aren't more states doing what Tennessee did with their stimulus money, and bringing back a version of the WPA?

At least the econoblogs are covering this stuff. Go read Baseline Scenario, and then read Zero Hedge. Lots of linky goodness plus keen charts there, but this sentence caught my eye:

A drill down of disposable net income (after tax) and net worth, demonstrates why any discussion of "generic" consumers should be much more properly phrased as an observation of the "Wealthy" and "Everyone else".

Sounds like a recipe for a populist outbreak to me.

Some alphabet soup definitions

National Health Expenditure, or NHE. This is everything a country spends on health: care [doctors, hospitals, drugs, etc], research, infrastructure, public health.

Personal Health Care, or PHC. This is just the amount that's spent on health care: fees for doctors, hospitals, labs, clinics, etc and purchases of prescription drugs and medical equipment [like wheelchairs].

CMS is the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and it's part of HHS, Health and Human Services.

OECD is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, comprising 30 countries in the [more or less] developed world.

The same lobbying and PR firms:

The similarities between the campaign against mitigating the consequences of climate change and the campaign against health insurance reform go far beyond the use of distortion and fiction. The parallels are everywhere.

For example, those with vested (monied) interests in the status quo are turning to the same lobbying and public relations outfits to carry out the campaigns.

Hrynshyn concludes:

Rahm Emanuel's inspired more rants in the last 48 hours in the left blogosphere than anything since the "shoulder flick" in the primariez. Here's a recommended response to this corporatist powermonger.

Hat tip to Firedoglake and Jane Hamsher. Now, I'm an outlier. I don't give a damn for the "public option" 'cause it's gobbledygook (what's often derided as "technobabble" when, for instance, writers talk about Star Trek, Stargate, Farscape, etc.) -- it's an amorphous "details to be announced" solution we'll have foisted on us by a committee. What I want is Medicare for Everybody. Now. (Even the old folks get behind this once you put it that way:   Read more…

Via Bridget Crawford at Feminist Law Professors:

Feminist Law Prof Darren Rosenblum has posted to SSRN his article, “Feminizing Capital: A Corporate Imperative.” Here’s the abstract:

If you haven't seen this yet, brilliant parody of the WaPo's Clinton beer video (h/t Shakesville):

Regarding Lambert's previous post regarding the arithmetic of insurance reneging and cancellation (rescission). Yves is right, it's important, it needs to be exposed, and the obfuscation of the math needs to be stripped away. Whenever you see percentages used in an argument, you need to be very clear about what percentage of what is being talked about. In this case, insurance "exec" Don Hamm says:

"Rescission is rare. It affects less than one-half of one percent of people we cover. Yet, it is one of many protections supporting the affordability and viability of individual health insurance in the United States under our current system*."

When you see percentages of percentages (of further more percentages) BEWARE!

Yves links to Taunter on a July 28 post I should have linked to long ago. It's wonderful to have a lucid explanation of how the numbers work (which is one thing most econoblogs are very, very good at):

via the Global Sociology blog, there is a remarkable profile in The New Statesman of Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, which is well worth reading for a little inspiration*.

Derbyshire writes:

My knowledge of statistics is founded on the notion that there are lies, damned lies, and then statistics. But ... then there's history. And I'm a sucker for pretty pictures. So when I read that Brad DeLong is saying the recovery has already started -- and it's jobless, and that Wal-Mart's been cited, yet again, for not living up to workers' rights agreements, and I remember that, y'know, downsizing's been going on since Clinton was in the White House and offshoring isn't any less dangerous than stock panics, I start to wonder. . Now, given that source is about as GOP friendly as can be (witness this titbit on the health-care reform mess), what does that mean about this? And can this be tied into it somehow?

Is there any truth to Okun's law? How come this time is different? Does this recession really date back to 2001, virtually unbroken?
I would argue that, yeah, it does,

... but it can sure take the sting out of being unhappy."

SocProf writes about the concept of the No-Fault Society (term due to Marc Jacobs) and connects it to our current, er, dilemma.

The no-fault society is characterized by three structural conditions:

1. Constrictive individualism: deregulation is detrimental to business community focus (the S&L turned away from community developments to go for juicier investments) and fosters greater individualism. Financial instruments are created to feed the demand of these individual economic actors (and S&L was before the major impact of retirement and pension funds and 401ks).

I know we've seen The Big Picture visualize a trillion dollars, but here's another version in video form. From Mint:

To keep up to date on the bailout fuckery, check out ProPublica.

Hat tip to bringiton

.

As LA Times Money blogger Michael Hiltzik says:

There's plenty to investigate. The roots of the economic and financial crisis can be found in the commercial banking, investment banking, mortgage trading, credit and derivatives industries.
Two key questions: Will Angelides and the rest of the panel hire investigators smart enough to ferret out the modern-day Mitchells? And will the panel be willing to preside over a Pecora-style bloodletting?

From the Wall Street Journal: Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have named Phil Angelides to chair the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

Modeled on the Pecora Commission of the 1930s, this is an effort to figure out what happened to the US economy.
Other members of the commission are Brooksley E. Born, Bob Graham and Bill Thomas.

_{Graham, official portrait}

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today announced six appointments to the 10-member Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, established by Congress to examine the domestic and global causes of the financial crisis. “The American people deserve nothing less than a full explanation of why so many people lost their homes, their life’s savings, and their hard-earned pensions,” said Pelosi.

“As President Obama has said on several occasions, sunlight is the best disinfectant,” said Reid. “The American people are entitled to a thorough examination of what went wrong. ”

Here's a *CLUE* for you, Harry and Nancy: what went wrong is *YOU* *FAILED* to uphold the law -- specifically, the regulations that, for more than 50 years, kept the economy from collapsing in the wake of unremitting greed run amok. The original Pecora Commission figured out for FDR that greed and chicanery on Wall Street caused the crash of 1929. Hence we got the Glass-Steagall Act. From the days of Reagan, an Aggie economics professor named Phil Gramm and the Republicans fought hard to overturn those regulations until the failure of Lehman Brothers made clear to all of us -- even such economic naifs as Reid and Pelosi -- that the NOW NOW NOW NOW mentality, the profits-first, people-be-damned ideology is designed to fail.

It fails 'cause it's reckless. It fails 'cause it's feckless. It fails 'cause it puts profits first and consequences in the "nevermind" category.

On your watch, Nancy and Harry, Glass-Steagall, which governed Wall Street with an eye to sound practices, went away. FAILURE after FAILURE followed, like dominoes tipped into each other in a line. The only persons surprised by this must have been ... you, Harry and Nancy!

Gramm and company brought us the unregulated free market environment in which it became chic to underwrite bad loans with imaginary values and approve loans for borrowers who had no income, no assets, and no collateral to stake on the success of their borrowing. Of course, the Main$tream Media said, nobody could have anticipated anything could go wrong -- except, Brooksley Born did, back when Bill Clinton was considering her for Attorney General (Janet Reno got the post, and Born was appointed to the CTFC), in the 1990s (!!!!!).