I am no expert on healthcare, and nor do I play one on TV. But unlike the summer's theatrical extravaganzas staged in "town hall" terms, there's good information headed to Congress, and I know good information when I see it. So does Bill Moyers.

She's written a previous book not about medicine but about money.

Paul Krugman praises Maggie Mahar's work in The New York Times:

ES&S To Buy Diebold, Blackbox Voting To Sue

Diebold/Premier Election Systems is being purchased by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). According to a Black Box Voting source within the companies, there will be a conference call among key people at the companies within the next couple hours. An ES&S/Diebold-Premier acquisition would consolidate most US voting under one privately held manufacturer.

Can we get serious about election integrity already?

"Analyzing Strange Volume on the NYSE"

The wise trader and investor who does not possess a colocated server sitting three feet from the backbone network that runs up and down the NYSE would be well-advised to stay away from this modern version of Three-Card Monte.

NOTE Via Yves.

Just idly musing here, and picking up on Greenwald's idea that the whole "public option" (or "plan" -- they still haven't decided!) is a distraction from the real game:

My thought is that, being outsiders, we need some sort of testable model -- OK, a "narrative" -- for where the administration is going here. Nothing fancy, but I'm not really having an "Aha" moment with the idea that the administration was going to sell out "public option" in a "compromise." I mean, to unterbussen, that was always a given, right? Standard operating procedure (FISA; TARP).

Just hmmm...

Young Ezra on the health care Disruptors:

What we're seeing here is not merely distrust in the House health-care reform bill. It's distrust in the political system. A healthy relationship does not require an explicit detailing of the "institutional checks" that will prevent one partner from beating or killing the other. In a healthy relationship, such madness is simply unthinkable. If it was not unthinkable, then no number of institutional checks could repair that relationship. Similarly, the relationship between the protesters and the government is not healthy. The protesters believe the government capable of madness. There is no evidence for that claim....

Alrighty, then.

I almost always agree with the fabulous Avedon and I certainly agree with her here that none of the rightwing crazy is new (a point she notes Bob Somerby also makes). But, IMO, it goes back much further than the 1990s or, hell even the 1970s. This goes back 300 or 400 years to before we were a nation and a bunch of rich white folks found themselves badly outnumbered by enslaved Africans and poor, white servants, who had much more in common with each other than they had with the rich white people who exploited them.* The only way to deal with the situation and ensure the rich stayed rich and everyone else stayed poor was to enact a series of authoritarian measures and inject a heavy dose of racism. Sound familiar?

We heard rumors that speculators were having an effect on the price of oil in the spring and summer of 2008, when it went over $140 a barrel and gas began to cost as much as $4 a gallon across the USA. We were assured that such things weren't really true: the Bush Commodity Futures Trading Commission wouldn't let it be! Turns out ... the assurances were false and the rumors dead-on. the assurances were false and the rumors dead-on -- and there's no mechanism in place to stop it happening again.

Note that Taibbi’s hardly the first person to say that the money from the housing bubble moved to form the commodities bubble, which remember, not only sent gas prices skyrocketing but helped cause dangerous food disruptions around the world.

He is one of the first prominent journalists I’ve seen to report that the massive oil spike had little or nothing to do with supply and demand for the physical product. I’d like to see some more reporting on that. If he turns out to be right, the financial press is going to have an awful lot of explaining to do.

It seems clear the CFTC report will lend credence to Taibbi’s assertion that Wall Street and Goldman Sachs (an Audit funder) caused the oil spike, which he says wouldn’t have happened if trading were limited to those who had physical control of the oil, excluding those betting with derivatives.

The Columbia Journalism Review has more, including the warning that the bubble machine's not been turned off yet.

It's not just Steve Benen who's noticed. It's caught Paul Krugman's eye.

Our New Medical Judges?
By David S. Broder
Sunday, July 26, 2009

An Illinois resident needed surgery. The insurance company preauthorized the treatment. The surgery went well. The insurer then denied the claim, three times.
Tell me again how bureaucrats aren't getting between Americans and their doctors??

I know, I know, I know. Passe, declasse, all that stuff. Old hat, old news, not what we want to discuss here today.
But, dammit, we still have a REPORTER fighting the SUITS over the bias and the deference to it that helped w/Cheney wreck the country.

Give 'em hell, Daniel.

I'm sure you all recall the early days of the NSA Hoovering up all domestic data warrantless wiretapping scandal, when they referred to it as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and assured us that they were only targeting Al-Qaeda operatives.

Naturally, this turned out to be a lie enhanced duplicity technique, because it turns out they were spying on all of us everyday American citizens. Nobody was off the target list, and we were all potential Al-Qaeda operatives.

Now, there's a big hubbub about some sketchy CIA assassination ring, apparently answering to Cheney himself. Nobody's willing to talk about the nitty-gritty details, but it's enough to have even Nancy "off the table" Pelosi spooked or pissed off enough to start publicly discussing how fucked-up it was, whatever "it" was.

The public justification for this shadowy, super-classified, apparently reprehensible death squad?

They were only targeting Al-Qaeda operatives.

Yeah, okay, I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit. Does anyone seriously doubt that what we'll eventually learn is that they formed a group to assassinate American citizens in the National Interest? Consider this, via TPM:

Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, told TPMmuckraker that because we've been in a state of war against al Qaeda since just after September 11, there would have been no need for a secret CIA program that received special legal authorization...

As for what the program did involve, Cannistraro suggested that it involved Americans as targets, and that it went beyond surveillance, but declined to elaborate. He added that, though Cheney may have directly ordered the CIA to keep Congress in the dark, the veep wasn't acting alone. "The approval was from the president," said Cannistraro.

Hmm, I wonder...

Remember that UK bioweapons expert who supposedly killed himself five months after the war started? Remember how the FBI couldn't figure out who mailed anthrax? Go read. It's possible none of the things the Bush administration said about the war -- including why they started it -- were remotely close to true.

You need to see the whole tape, but the killer comes with about 12 seconds to go.

If you want real health care available to everybody in the US, do not -- I repeat, DO NOT -- let the Senate, Congress, and President think what he says in answer to this question is acceptable. Call. Write. March. Congress is on break -- find your local critter at a barbecue or a town meeting or some other innocuous occasion, and buttonhole the sucker. You want single payer? Make it ABSOLUTELY UNMISTAKABLY CLEAR -- NOTHING LESS WILL DO. OR YOU WILL TAKE AWAY THEIR JOBS.   Read more…

Yves calls the Taibbi piece -- lambert blushes modestly -- the must-read of the day; do read the whole thing. Felix Salmon over at Reuters quotes the "head flak" at GS:

Taibbi’s article is a compilation of just about every conspiracy theory ever dreamed up about Goldman Sachs, but what real substance is there to support the theories?

 Read more…

and who is now in deep doodoo. Per Wired article posted at Truthout.

An NSA intelligence analyst was apparently investigated after accessing Clinton's personal correspondence in the database, the paper [NYTimes] reports, though it didn't say how many of Clinton's e-mails were captured or when the interception occurred.

[Warning: Virus detected when I clicked through to the NYTimes article; has happened other times going to the Times site.]

The database, codenamed Pinwale, allows NSA analysts to search through and read large volumes of e-mail messages, including correspondence to and from Americans. Pinwale is likely the end point for data sucked from internet backbones into NSA-run surveillance rooms at AT&T facilities around the country.

Yahoo has a video, but I prefer the BBC version of the story (even over Reuters) as it gives more detail. Mrs. Clinton was injured in a fall Wednesday.

She is expected to resume her regular schedule shortly, but must undergo surgery. (Ms. Sotomayor's ankle, Ms. Clinton's elbow ... what is going on???)

Way better news from Cape Canaveral than we might have had, this morning.

Endeavour didn't launch as scheduled -- and yes, that's a good thing.

Challenger launched in bad weather.

Columbia never arrived home.

Another shuttle mission ending as those two did would give the people who hate the space program all the incentive they need to shut it down, finally and fatally.

I told y'all several months ago that the US Airways pilot who landed his plane safely in the Hudson after a birdstrike disabled his engines was an Air Force vet. I didn't realize until today that, like Dwight David Eisenhower, he's from a little town in North Texas.

Not something I do often. But tonight in light of the attacks by David Brooks on NPR (he called her dishonorable, parroting Newt Gingrich), I need to repeat something.

What Pelosi knew and when she knew it is a distraction. She wasn't President. She wasn't Vice President. She wasn't SecState. She wasn't SecDef. She didn't create the policy that led to "enemy combatants" and "detainees" and "enhanced interrogation techniques." Could / should she have done more to protest? Probably. Could/should she have tried harder to stop it once she found out about it? Definitely.

But she wasn't the one who set it into motion.
Nancy Pelosi didn't give the orders for pouring water into the faces of bound men.
Nancy Pelosi didn't give the orders for hanging prisoners, depriving them of sleep, beating their joints, shoving them into cells for years without access to counsel or setting trial dates. Nancy Pelosi wasn't in charge.

I don't know. But the idea has been around for awhile:

As privacy concerns have assumed center stage, the many compelling advantages of the UHI [Universal Health Identifier] including aspects of a UHI that will promote privacy are getting lost in the debate. A unique identifier would allow for more rapid and accurate identification and integration of the proper patient records, so patients can receive safer and higher quality health care. Every aspect of health care from making sure the right person gets the right blood transfusion to making sure the right insurance company pays for care requires accurate identification of individuals. A unique identifier is desirable because the identifier used today is a person's name. Since names are not unique we have to collect additional information to identify an individual such as birth date, gender, SSN, and mother's maiden name. As more information is collected error rates increase. It is currently estimated that there is an error rate of 5 to 8 percent in identifying patients. In addition, the information many people have an opportunity to see personally identifiable information. Replacing a name with an identifier could reduce errors and provide greater privacy protection.

A UHI can improve confidentiality, by providing accurate identification without unnecessarily disclosing a patient's identity. For example, it can eliminate the need to use names on many claims forms and clinical records. It can replace the multiple pieces of identifying information (e.g., name, birth date, gender, SSN) about a patient that today must accompany clinical and financial information to ensure positive identification.

OK, so now all my medical records are stored by my UHI, instead of my name (or would be, if I hadn't dropped out of the health care system because I have no insurance). But how do they connect my number with me? The only answer I can see -- and certainly the answer that many corporations would like to see -- is a (putatively) tamper-proof equivalent of a Real ID card, that has my UHI on it (as opposed to the tatoo UHI, the the subcutaneous implant. Ha ha only serious).

So....

You may have heard of Hueco Tanks. Hueco Tanks is one of Texas' newest State Parks -- and among its most famous, having been profiled in a number of magazines including Southern Living. Climbing magazine online has this quote and image:

In the 1980s, Hueco Tanks earned an international reputation as a top rock-climbing spot, especially during mild winter months. In addition, a growing number of school groups from El Paso and throughout West Texas find the park to be an outstanding outdoor classroom.

Because of graffiti and other past damage to some of Hueco Tanks’ invaluable archeological treasures and its fragile desert ecosystem, park users’ access to the park has been limited in recent years in accordance with a public use plan. Park visitors must watch a 20-minute TPWD video that explains the history of Hueco Tanks, the importance of conserving its natural and cultural resources, and defines the park’s self-guided and guided-only areas.

The site used to be one of the world's most popular, and remains among the premier, destinations for rock climbers. These days -- as people often do, in previous years

people abused Hueco Tanks -- the fragile desert watering place with its connections to the past has tighter access controls, and some of them come from the climbers themselves:

Nobody's talking about it in the news. Polo's not exactly a commonplace, I suppose, anymore than cowhorse contests are.

Something about this story just seems way too wrong to me, though.

The horses suffered pulmonary edema, which means fluid accumulated in their lungs, and cardiogenic shock, (Palm Beach Equine Club veterinarian Dr. Scott) Swerdlin said. They had elevated temperatures and were disoriented but felt no pain.

That's a quote from the LA Times' piece, and it's simple unadulterated bullfeathers. Pulmonary edema induces cardiogenic shock because the lungs overfill and squeeze the heart so hard it can't function. The sensation this induces is NOT painless.

Interesting times:

(TPM link)

So, as far as I can tell, Rep. Jane Harman [D-Ca] was conspiring with the Israelis to drop some spy charges in exchange for some lobbying on her behalf, and Alberto Gonzales had an NSA warrantless wiretap™ (wait for it) on her phone and overheard the deal.

In exchange for not investigating, Gonzales asked her to attack the NYT's exposé on (wait for it) NSA warrantless wiretapping. The one she had personally requested be held back until before after the 2004 election (Department of With Democrats Like These, anyone?)

And so she goes free, although the Israelis didn't get her that committee chair she wanted in the first place.

One has to wonder just how much dirt Hoover Gonzales and Rove had on everyone in Washington, and more importantly, how many other favors they blackmailed out of people. And it certainly explains some of those bizarre, neo-Maoist ritual apologies.

On the importance of taking current events and nascent winger movements more seriously:

COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho – The Aryan Nations has returned to northern Idaho with what it is calling a "world headquarters" and a recruitment campaign.

Coeur d'Alene resident Jerald O'Brien, who has a large swastika tattoo on his scalp, is one of the leaders of the white supremacist group and said he expects membership to grow because of the election of President Barack Obama.

He told The Spokesman-Review newspaper that the president is the "greatest recruiting tool ever."