Eideard

Braly is head of the real Death Panels
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has called on health insurer WellPoint to stop dropping coverage for patients recently diagnosed with breast cancer, calling the practice “deplorable.”

In a letter dated April 22 to Angela Braly, WellPoint’s chief executive, Sebelius said she was “surprised and disappointed” to learn from a Reuters report that the company has specifically targeted women with breast cancer for aggressive investigation with intent to cancel their policies.

“As you know, the practice described in this article will soon be illegal,” Sebelius wrote. “The Affordable Care Act specifically prohibits insurance companies from rescinding policies, except in cases of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of material fact…”

“WellPoint should not wait to end the unconscionable practice of deliberately working to deny health insurance coverage to women diagnosed with breast cancer,” Sebelius wrote in her letter. “I urge you to immediately cease these practices and abandon your efforts to rescind health insurance coverage from patients who need it most.”

Breast cancer is the second-leading type of cancer among women, has touched millions of families, and will affect one in eight American women during their lifetime, Sebelius wrote.

These are the “leaders” Republicans and their Teabagger flunkies relied on for guidance in their opposition to health care reform.

The crap politicians who support their policies should be assigned to cleaning the toilets in their cells.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Oil appears not to be flowing from a sunken drilling rig and damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico, but hope was dimming as search continued for 11 workers missing in the disaster, said the U.S. Coast Guard.

“As of right now, the spill is not growing,” a U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman said.

A remotely operated unmanned submarine sent down Thursday to inspect the scene found no oil leaking from the sunken Transocean Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and no oil flowing from the well, reducing the risk of a major spill, a spokeswoman said…

But 11 workers remained missing despite an intensive search and it was feared they were unable to escape the blast.

The Transocean Deepwater Horizon sank Thursday after burning since Tuesday following an explosion while trying to temporarily cap a new well drilled for BP 42 miles southeast of Venice, Louisiana.

The blast occurred about 10 p.m. CDT Tuesday as the rig was capping a discovery well pending production, company officials said. Some 115 of the 126 workers on board at the time of the explosion were rescued.

I’m truly glad to see that the blowout protection systems appear to be working.

Folks will still need to get down to the bottom and properly cap the well. No doubt the process will include drilling an ancillary well to access the original production holes.

UPDATE: Capping the well acquires a higher priority now that risers and drill pipe from the wellhead are leaking oil at a rate approximated at 1000 barrels a day.

This is a serious rate – and although the blowout protection system did its job, the drill rig components failed as a result of the explosion and mechanical forces exerted on the drilling system.

Logging in, this morning, from my favorite coffee shop in Santa Fe.

Santa Fe has been my home since the 1980′s – and if you’re wandering around the South Side of Santa Fe, Java Joe’s is the place to drop in for a coffee and a carb and free wifi.

Enough of a commercial, time for me to carry on with my day.

Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress may want to look tough on financial reform in front of voters but that has not stopped them from filling their re-election war chests with plenty of Wall Street cash.

The political action committees of six Wall Street banks spent the first quarter of 2010 giving handsome donations to Republicans and Democrats who are critical to passing legislation that could determine the future of the U.S. financial sector.

The banks — JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs — gave about $106,000 to 12 members of the Senate and House of Representatives who sit either in leadership positions or on the committees that forged the measures.

The sum is 40 percent of the $272,000 that the same institutions donated overall to political campaigns and committees between January and March.

But it is only a tiny fraction of the more than $30 million that has flowed into campaign coffers from the PACs and employees of banks, securities firms and finance companies since the 2010 election cycle began on January 1, 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the non-partisan watchdog that tracks the role of money in U.S. politics…

Wall Street has maintained a long and robust relationship with Washington decision-makers over the years, providing nearly $1 billion in campaign funds since 1990 and millions of dollars more on behind-the-scenes lobbying.

Analysts say big spending in Washington helps explain the evolution of the financial regulatory reform debate in the Senate, from harder-edged Democratic proposals last year to modifications that seem headed for a bipartisan deal with Republicans…

The biggest financial sector beneficiary in the current election cycle is Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York, who has received $1.6 million from securities firms and commercial banks, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Close behind are Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell with $1.5 million and fellow Republican Senator Bob Corker, who broke party ranks to open reform talks with the Democratic chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Christopher Dodd. Corker raised $1.4 million from financial sources.

“Follow the money” never meant as much as it does in American politics. Whether it’s a weekly pay-off to a hometown police chief or six-figure political contributions to world-class congressional thugs, gold always settles to the bottom of the cesspool.

Former U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch has been charged with criminal contempt of Congress…

Longtime POGO fans will recall that Bloch was the head of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), an independent federal agency tasked with protecting whistleblowers from retaliation. POGO and others were highly critical of Bloch for routinely ignoring and dismissing whistleblower complaints, abusing his authority, and turning the agency’s mission on its head by retaliating against his own staff.

The charges filed today allege that Bloch withheld key information from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as it was investigating Bloch’s use of a private tech company to delete files from OSC computers. Investigators suspected he was destroying evidence related to allegations that he had used his office for political purposes and retaliated against career staff. FBI agents raided his offices in May 2008, seizing computers and documents belonging to Bloch and his staff. Bloch was forced to resign from the OSC several months later…

Bloch’s other greatest hits include:

Distributing an internal newsletter in which he instructed his female employees to avoid wearing tight clothes, and advised both men and women to wear “conservative watches”;

Assembling a task force to help create the impression that the OSC was engaged in a multi-faceted investigation of the White House, as Bloch himself was under investigation;

Assigning interns to close out hundreds of whistleblower retaliation complaints; and

Ignoring federal air marshals and countless other whistleblowers who were the victims of retaliation.

Though a group of Republican Party hacks stretching back to Watergate days have already founded a “Scott Bloch Defense Fund” it appears that Bloch is going to plead guilty.

I guess even with the defense fund he couldn’t come up with a Dick Cheney-style army of lawyers.

Bill McKibben says – “Forty years in, we’re losing”.

This weekend, when speakers at Earth Day gatherings across the country hearken back to the first celebration in 1970, they’ll recall great victories: above all, cleaner air and cleaner water for Americans.

But for 20 years now, global warming has been the most important environmental issue — arguably the most important issue the planet has ever faced. And there we can boast an unblemished bipartisan record of accomplishing absolutely nothing.

To mark Earth Day this year, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) were supposed to introduce their long-awaited rewrite of the House’s climate legislation. Now that’s been delayed for at least a few days, which is probably just as well, since, as Graham points out, it’s no longer really an environmental bill…

Worse, the bill might specifically remove the strongest tool the environmentalists won in the wake of Earth Day 1: the Environmental Protection Agency’s right to use the Clean Air Act to bring the fossil fuel industries to heel. Enforcement may be preempted under the new law. Even the right of states to pioneer new legislation, such as California’s landmark global warming bill, apparently could disappear with the new legislation…

That weakness has many sources, including the corrosive power of money in politics (and human beings have never found a greater source of money than fossil fuels). But at least part of the problem lies within environmentalism, which no longer does enough real organizing to build the pressure that could result in real change…

I remember interviewing Pete McCloskey, the California House member recruited by Gaylord Nelson to be the Republican sponsor of the original Earth Day…But just as important was what happened next: “About two weeks after Earth Day,” McCloskey said, “there was an article on the sixth or seventh page of the Washington Star — some of the Earth Day kids had labeled 12 members of Congress the Dirty Dozen and vowed to defeat them. Nobody paid much attention.

On the first Wednesday in June, though, everyone in Washington opened the paper to find that the two Democrats on that list — one a powerful committee chairman, the other a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee — had lost primary fights by fewer than a thousand votes. Within 24 hours, seven of the 10 Republicans on the list had come to me, even though I was despised, being against the war and all. ‘What’s this about water pollution, about air pollution? What can you tell us?’ ” For the next few sessions, anything tinged green passed Congress with ease: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act.

The Golden Rule for American politicians is – “Get re-elected!” Nothing else really matters.

Get up on your hind legs and register folks to vote. Do it as a Green activist. Scare some Democrat or Republican into pretending they have a conscience and an understanding of science beyond Howdy Doody.

I think he hand-delivered the check
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

GM CEO Ed Whitacre announced that GM paid back its bankruptcy bailout loans of $5.4 billion to the US Treasury Department, and $1.1 billion to the Canadian government. This payback is five years ahead of schedule and completes repayment of $7.8 billion in total loans.

The government also paid GM $50 billion in exchange for 60% ownership stake in the company. Whitacre later stated he also believes US taxpayers will be made whole too after GM issues an IPO possibly later this year.

“I think the stock could be worth a lot and the taxpayers could get all their money, plus,” Whitacre told reporters. “I’m an optimistic guy.”

“We are encouraged that GM has repaid its debt well ahead of schedule and confident that the company is on a strong path to viability,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in a statement.

Whitacre made the announcement at a Kansas GM plant where he also announced GM would be putting an additional $120 million investment into the Detroit-Hamtramck plant where the Volt will be built.

Ostensibly, the new money will go into expanding that plant’s production capacity so that GM could use it to build additional Chevrolet Malibus. Though in theory, the increased production capacity could be used to build more Volts if demand is greater than predicted, or more Malibus if its less than expected.

Buried in Whitacre’s discussion was an additional nugget. He appeared to verified previous comments he made to GM-Volt that Volt would roll out early. He specifically stated the car will be released one month early, in October.

Looking forward to real world figures on Volt use/performance. The extended-range concept has grown new supporters since GM adopted it. Notably Honda.

Sleep has long been known to improve performance on memory tests. Now, a new study suggests that an afternoon power nap may boost your ability to process and store information tenfold — but only if you dream while you’re asleep.

“When you dream, your brain is trying to look at connections that you might not think of or notice when [you're] awake,” says the lead author of the study, Robert Stickgold, the director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, Massachusetts. “In the dream…the brain tries to figure out what’s important and what it should keep or dump because it’s of no value…”

“The sleeping brain seems to be processing information on one level, but on a higher level it helps evolve your memory network if the information is relevant or helpful in your life experience,” adds Breus, who is also the author of “Beauty Sleep.”

The study’s findings, which appear in the journal Current Biology, underscore just how important sleep is to our memory and mental function.

RTFA. Methods seem straightforward enough. I look forward to reading the details when available to cheapskate members of the public – like me.

As someone whose sleep apnea is thoroughly moderated by CPAP sleep, I don’t dream except for a few brief moments while rousing in the morning. I hope I’m not screwing up this ancient brain.

Death Panels waiting to deploy – again – on behalf of the Republican Party

President Obama traveled to New York City today, where he pointedly told members of the city’s financial industry to stop fighting reasonable industry reform.

“We will not always see eye to eye,” Mr. Obama said to members of the banking industry in his speech at New York’s Cooper Union, not far from Wall Street. “We will not always agree. But that does not mean we have to choose between two extremes.”

“We do not have to choose between markets that are unfettered by even modest protections against crisis, or markets that are stymied by onerous rules that suppress enterprise and innovation,” he continued. “That’s a false choice…”

But he also lamented that some on Wall Street “forgot that behind every dollar traded or leveraged, there is family looking to buy a house, and pay for an education, open a business, save for retirement.”

“A free market, he said, “was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it…”

The president targeted Republicans, among them Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, who have suggested the legislation is actually going to encourage future taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street.

“That may make for a good sound bite, but it’s not factually accurate. It is not true,” he said, to applause. He said the system as it stands is what led to bailouts.

“A vote for reform is a vote to put a stop to taxpayer-funded bailouts,” he said. “That’s the truth. End of story. And nobody should be fooled in this debate.”

I hope American voters take the time to examine the facts of what is proposed instead of relying on the Party of No to tell them what to believe.

Thanks, Cinaedh, for the pic