http://weiner.house.gov/news_display.asp...

Weiner just lived up to his name by withdrawing his amendment, which would have substituted single-payer for the House bill favored by Democratic leaders. That coward sickens me right now even more than Obama, Pelosi, Emanuel, Hoyer, and Reid put together.

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.

This from Susie's blog stuck in my mind:

Mo on 15 Oct 2009 at 6:54 am

I blame the collapse of health care reform in the 90s with the Brittney/Christina/N’Sync/etc. wave of music a few years later. Day jobs that artists generally take stopped paying for health insurance, and parents stopped supporting their twenty-somethings trying for a creative career. Probably is also a big chunk of the reason for the collapse of the indie film scene in the US.

I know we take now that lack of support for anything non-MBA for granted, and the era of grunge soon turned into another bubble. But the early 90s were different.

So I guess I hit a nerve with my food fight post, or rather, several of them. I think it's worth breaking down some of the comments and sub-discussions into a longer series. One topic that seemed to bring out the very Correntian best in folks: how we define "obese."

Reader Jeff W points us to this helpful link from the CDC, in which they have determined that there have been "noticeable increases" in the number of overweight or obese people in this country. Reader Aeryl questions the methodology with this link. Other comments in that thread had other definitions and methods to measure the size and number of "healthy" bodies.

I'm a long way from my scientific research days, but I'll say that generally, I think obesity is both a "nature" and a "nurture" issue. On the Nature side: I fully recognize that the FSM has been kind to people in my family; we're generally tall and thin with only a modicum of exercise effort and don't tend to "overweight"-edness until quite late in life, if at all. I doubt I could find the link for it now, but I recall reading a fascinating report about a group of indigenous people from South America, recently relocated from their ancestral lands to a reservation. Apparently, in a single generation they went from thin and fit to outrageously overweight. The report's conclusion was that they had evolved to live on a fat-poor diet for thousands of years before being relocated and fed "government cheese" instead of their previous natural, "jungle food" diet, and as a result their bodies were incredibly efficient in terms of fat storage. "Too" efficient when fed a more modern diet, and thus their current obesity.

I'm tossing out those two examples and asking for your thoughts, because before we can make policy progress on the "nurture" argument, it's important to correctly frame the "nature" part.

How do you define "fat" and "obese?" How should government, for the purposes of health and food policy? How important is identifying obesity as a public health "problem?" Then there are questions about how Big Industry (Fashion, Food, the Exercise-Industrial Complex, etc) define "fat." Definitions generated by the discourse of the Patriarchy play a role as well.

And once again, consider this an open thread for recipes, especially those good for people who want to reduce or change their body's shape. Warning: I will delete comments that are inappropriately insensitive to people who don't conform to mainstream body shape standards. Consider this is a safe space for people of all body shapes to contribute.

Really, I am just going to STFU.

Because one must not annoy one's health insurance company, nor must one annoy one's current employer, who may in fact be demanding twice as much work for no more pay, because one is bound to one's job as serfs were once bound to the land, but we won't really want to talk about it because the lives of oneself and one's loved ones may depend on one's ability to STFU.

And even though, more and more, one is encountering denial of medicines and services, in an apparent attempt to "cut costs" -- or perhaps "increase profits"? one must not talk about that.

Even though fiddling around with meds can sometimes, um, down the road, cause those who had previously been stable to, um, you know de-stabilize? Resulting in repeated, you know, hospitalizations? Which are actually more costly?

But -- I'd better watch what I say.

Then, I'll watch what you say.

Insisting on "Medicare Equality"? "Medicare for All"?

STFU.

*Obligatory Sarah Palin Disclaimer: I did not want the women to be elected VP. She was horridly unqualified(like our current Pres), and proposed truly odious policies. That stance however does not mean I will tolerate blatant sexist trashing of her.

Sarah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret—nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant. She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn’t have to worry about anything.

So sayeth Levi Johnston, Sarah Palin's erstwhile future son-in-law. This above anecdote, related by Johnston in this month's Vanity Fair, may or may not be true*.

Go read.

Wampum

What we got is PTSD -- post-tempest summer disorder -- the "malaise" the corporate hacks hung on the Carter administration after his "Crisis of Confidence" speech of July 15, 1979. Malaise which will measure with skepticism each claim by the administration that it has the fix for the economy, that hope is more rational than management of failure, that we are not, fundamentally, simply managing the impoverishment of most of the world, dinosaurs convinced of both the possibility of evolution and the certainty of extinction.

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:

Alternative currency organization Fourth Corner Exchange is planning to expand worldwide. A move which I expect will make alternative currency exponentially more useful.

President Francis Ayley:

"We are putting together a 'Community Coordinator' package that will have
all the necessary info on how to start a local chapter of the 'Life
Dollar Community', which is what we are calling ourselves now. I am
selling this as 'Democratic Money', as opposed to Bank Issued Money,
which is economic slavery. If an individual, group or local community
want to take back their economic power from the banks, this is how to do

 Read more…

An ordinance that requires that banks and mortgage companies be required to keep up their properties just like every other property owner? What a novel idea:

FARMINGTON, Mich. (AP) — Farmington officials have given notice to mortgage lenders that foreclose on homes: Maintain the properties or face fines.

Farmington has amended its nuisance ordinance to require banks and brokers that own abandoned homes to keep them up. The community of 10,400 is about 15 miles west-northwest of Detroit.

City Manager Vincent Pastue says Farmington has about 50 homes in foreclosure, and about 40 percent of them are abandoned.

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In one of these freakonomical perverse results, apparently right-wing memes about socialism have been overused and are hence rebounding against them. Via Yglesias:

Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better. Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided.

So I was planning to write a long, witty song-and-dance about a theme to which I've occasionally alluded lately: the importance of globalization in this bailout crisis. But then I decided I'd spare the words and write it out as a few easy and very approximate steps.

Brad DeLong is one of the few liberal(ish) economists willing to stick his neck out and spend his personal credibility as a blogger and academic economist on the bailout plan. For him, apparently, there are only two options: paying off the bankers works, and we are able to dig ourselves out of a Depression, or the Depression falls into apocalypse. However, apparently he's willing to stake his reputation on the former hypothesis:

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So, okay, I've been paying attention to Kings on the slim chance that NBC can program an imaginative drama instead of reality shows. Since it has Ian McShane, it has its interesting bits, but this week it turned the corner from mildly amusing and lyrical Biblical allegory into media critique.

Unemployment, suspect subprime lending, business failures and medical disasters cause way too many families to lose their homes. Losing homes and failing to pay mortgage installments on time will push such families' credit rating over the edge into the abyss of of new world outcasts.

The credit rating companies are feelingness automatons who follow the rules/laws to the letter. They make no distinction between the hard working and the bums, between this depression's victims and run of the mill irresponsible individuals.

Brad DeLong has a condensed FAQ of the Geithnerist POV on the bailouts. Naturally, to read it as intended, you have to make the first assumption is that it (the bailout) is being done under good faith.

Q: What is the Geithner Plan?

A: The Geithner Plan is a trillion-dollar operation by which the U.S. acts as the world's largest hedge fund investor, committing its money to funds to buy up risky and distressed but probably fundamentally undervalued assets and, as patient capital, holding them either until maturity or until markets recover so that risk discounts are normal and it can sell them off--in either case at an immense profit.

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As I'm viewing the details of the Big Shitpile unfold (here, here, here, and here, just on the front page of Corrente; make sure to follow some of the comment's links) I see the makings of heroic tale of strength, courage and hopeychanginess developing

You know, I'm beginning to lose track of how many different ways Versailles is screwing us. The latest is another round of the government conspiring with Wall Street to try to hide the size of the big shitpile by paying more for assets than they are worth.

Via Yves Smith:

From Andy Lees at UBS (hat tip reader Scott, boldface his):

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Terrell Owens has a lot going for him at 35. He's fit, handsome, articulate, and he can be charming. He'd make, in fact, a great politician if he should decide to retire from the NFL.

He can also be the biggest crybaby in pro football. That's NOT what the Cowboys cut him for, though -- the team needs somebody they can count on to run the pass routes and hold onto the football once it's in hand.

Former Cowboys quarterback Drew Bledsoe told more than one person that dealing with Owens’ antics wasn’t the problem. Not knowing where Owens was going to be on a pass route was the problem.

Like I said, he'd make a great politician.

Has Grover Norquist succeeded?

The nation is at an economic tipping point. Its weakened and getting weaker. So much so that a supposedly liberal President feels the need to speak repeatedly of "entitlement reform" which, to anyone paying attention, means services to the bottom 80% on the income ladder.

A follow up: Can a well intentioned "fool" (in the ignorant use of the word) lead to as much calamity given dire circumstances as an ill intentioned Grover Norquist type?

What do you know about ... cupcakes? Athenae, over at First Draft, was posting on chocolates with chili and pumpkin -- and of course they're pricey, too. In the spirit of something decadent but not budget-busting, I went hunting for recipes, and I found this recipe on the Web. I'm getting over a killer bout with ... something gastrointestinal, and ugly. Has anybody here ever tried something exotic, translated into cupcakes?

For some reason, Lambert thinks I have something to say about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because a long time ago I thought it would be fun to needle the PUMAs about their odd predilection to absorb and repeat bad theories on the so-called mortgage meltdown (and, no an econ PhD does not automatically raise my estimation of your credibility---my current project is needling Canadian economics profess

It seems NY AG Andrew Como has written a letter to the head of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep, Barney Frank (D-Mass) about his concern that Merril Lynch changed their bonus payment schedule so that the bailout package would foot the bill.